Abstract
This historiographical “tour” essay examines the many meanings that have been ascribed to Pernambuco’s “Peddlers’ War” (1710-1711) in nearly 200 years of historical literature. Looking across generations and intellectual paradigms (Marxist, liberal, Brazilian nationalist, and Pernambucan regionalist), it shows that 1710-1711 has stood for a nativist and perhaps a republican movement against the Portuguese, a fracturing between the mercantile bourgeoisie and planter class, or as a symbol of Pernambuco’s historic rebelliousness in the wake of oppression by outsiders. Focusing primarily on Pernambucan debates, it also examines the seasoned, if brief, reflections on the event by colonial historians beyond Brazil—including an unpublished 1957 US dissertation—that suggests how much the discussion of the events of 1710-1711 has to tell us about shifting currents of intellectual and political life in Pernambuco.
Highlights
Referring to an 1890 legislative decree commemorating Bernardo Vieira de Melo’s declaration of independence, Ferrer vigorously condemned what he called a “legalized lie” about the “cry of freedom” allegedly given on November 10, 1710.27 He argued that no written evidence supported the holding of a secret meeting in Olinda, and even if an insurgent had voiced their support for a república, talk of a “republic” in the early eighteenth century would have referred quite broadly to any form of rule, certainly not the sort of republicanism espoused by learned men of the nineteenth century.[28]
1848-1849) by invoking the myth of a “Pernambuco teimoso,” the captaincy whose native sons fiercely resisted the subjugation of outsiders, be they the Dutch or the Portuguese
The idea of a “Peddlers’ War”—in addition to the abovementioned insurrections— lent itself to various projects of regionalist mythmaking following the proclamation of the Republic in 1889
Summary
Overwhelmingly Portuguese and residents of Recife, and Brazilian-born planters who clustered around (but rarely inhabited) the capital of Olinda.[7] Until the novelist José de Alencar (1829-1877) popularized the idea of a “Peddlers’ War” (Guerra dos Mascates) in a two-volume work of historical fiction, published in 1873 and 1874, the conflict of 1710-1711 had been known by many different names.
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