Brasil em projetos: História dos sucessos políticos e planos de melhoramento do reino; Da ilustração portuguesa à Independência do Brasil

Abstract

Brasil em projetos is the first book in the series An Other History of Brazil, published by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas and dedicated to historical syntheses of the “construction of the nation” for a broad audience as it reflects on the bicentenary of Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 (p. 9). Thus, the history of Brazil in projects is itself a project, one that offers a dialogue between the past and the present and fosters “a better understanding of our history” that will strengthen “the fight [to make] a more just and democratic country” (p. 9). This is not a run-of-the-mill gesture to the civics lesson. As Jurandir Malerba explains, between 2016 and 2019 as he was writing the book, Brazilians witnessed a concerted assault on the democracy that they had forged in the late 1980s. Since then the crisis of democracy, of political and civil rights, and of the idea of government dedicated to the common good has only deepened.A prolific historian of nineteenth-century Brazil, Malerba seeks in this volume to trace the “systems, plans, programs, proposals, projects” for Brazil, formulated by political elites, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1820s (p. 27). In doing so he draws extensively on primary sources and lucidly assesses a labyrinthine historiography. No other event in Brazilian history, he observes, has elicited so much writing, debate, and disagreement. Did the conflict amount to an “amicable separation” or encompass more revolutionary change (p. 239)? For Malerba it was a process that bore the marks of successive projects to make Brazil productive and unified but that ultimately consolidated the class interests of landowning, enslaving elites.The seven chapters in part 1 examine elite projects to define the place of Brazil in the Portuguese empire beginning with mid-eighteenth-century reforms of the marquês de Pombal. The instrumental, pragmatic, and statist character of innovation, from education to commercial policy, was the hallmark of an Enlightenment in Portugal that, Malerba argues, betrayed a revolutionary potential. Histories that cast the Luso-Brazilian Enlightenment as “singular because [it was] ‘mitigated,’ ‘applied,’ ‘pragmatic,’ or ‘Iberian,’ ‘despotic,’ ‘Catholic,’ or ‘late’” mistake some “other phenomenon” for an Enlightenment (p. 93). Perhaps. Yet such an assessment depends on an idealized version of the Enlightenment at odds with enlightened commitments to racialized and gendered differences and exclusions that marked even more radical ruptures.The Pombaline period was also a watershed because it laid the groundwork for a lineage of future statesmen and projects determined to realize Brazil's greatness. At the turn of the nineteenth century it was Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho who navigated the turbulent waters of rivalry and war with a vision of a productive American colony tethered to an imperial center in mind. Here Malerba persuasively takes on the lexicon of Brazilian independence, including its prevailing framework: the crisis of the colonial pact. The colonial pact, he explains, was based on metropolitan-defined mechanisms for extracting wealth. Rather than systemic and structural, its crisis stemmed from the immediate financial ramifications of the Napoleonic Wars. Thus the broader context was, in fact, “a crisis that is not a crisis, and a pact that is not a pact” (p. 83). The period was generative nevertheless especially of an elite identity defined by a sense not of being Brazilian but rather of belonging to a class with an increasing understanding of its interests and enemies.The six chapters in part 2 focus on the period of transformation that began with the French invasion of Iberia and the transfer of the Portuguese royal court to Brazil in 1808. The legacy of João VI's reign included the maintenance of the monarchy on both sides of the Atlantic and the creation of important connections between a wealthy local elite in Rio and royal authority. The question to be posed, Malerba insists, is not whether Dom João played a role in instigating a process of independence but rather how he and his advisers shaped relations between elites and the state and how these relations guaranteed that the institution of slavery would endure transatlantic revolutionary and abolitionist challenges.The four chapters in part 3 examine the process of independence through the lens of projects for a new nation-state. Here the dominant figure, a political and intellectual descendant of Souza Coutinho, is José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva. A man of the Old Regime, as Malerba describes him, Andrada e Silva both harbored racialized understandings of Indigenous and African capacities and argued that the slave trade and slavery were incompatible with Brazil's future nationhood. Such a project was too “radical” for powerful landowning enslaving elites who instead forged a new state to preserve social and economic inequalities (p. 306). As Malerba observes in concluding his erudite and engaging survey, dismantling these inequalities, and their successive iterations, requires a new project for Brazil.