Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution

Abstract

This is not so much a book about pirates or smugglers, or even patriots—although all appear—as it is about national divergence. Intrigued by the different paths taken by the early United States and its largest southern neighbor, Brazil, Tyson Reeder sets out to show what these colonies turned nations had in common and how they differed in the decades on either side of the year 1800. Political and commercial leaders of the fledgling US, Reeder shows, tended to imagine Latin American independence as the creation of sister republics, united in their embrace of free trade and rejection of empire. What a surprise, then, to see Brazil become the seat of the Portuguese empire in 1808, reaffirmed in 1822 as an independent empire, and still ruled by the House of Braganza. Mexico traced a similar, imperial path, and monarchist urges resurged throughout the hemisphere. How could this seeming anomaly be sorted?.Coming on the heels of Caitlin Fitz's much-discussed Our Sister Republics (2016), Reeder's book provides a more fully Latin American counterpoint, or comparison. The narrative is still centered in the early US, but it is deeply comparative in its examination of free trade as a notion that US patriots felt had to be connected to political freedom, or something approaching it. The Portuguese Crown's unexpected opening of Brazilian ports after 1808 seemed anomalous, especially as trade wars blossomed in the Río de la Plata estuary, sparked by British aggression. US traders’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade also entered the mix, as did a US attraction to privateering opportunities as Imperial Brazil countered its southern neighbors, principally the Cisplatine Province, or future Uruguay.Divided into nine chapters in four parts, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots traces the seemingly shared frustrations with monarchy and mercantilism that gave rise to Brazil's so-called Inconfidência Mineira (1789) and Tailor's Revolt (1798), continuing in Pernambuco long after 1808. Reeder provides the backstory, showing how the old British-Portuguese compact was challenged by colonial traders and then by US traders, a story of smuggling centered on the commerce in wheat and Madeira wine. As Portugal shut out US traders in alliance with Britain, the attractions of Brazil shone: providing wheat and enslaved Africans might win them access to cotton, sugar, and other tropical crops, in addition to gold. Reeder then shows how diplomacy and war upset the aims of US free traders, putting their “sister republican” hopes on pause until 1815.Section 3 traces the last cycle of anticipation and disappointment, and here smugglers turn pirates. But first there was a real glimmer of hope again in Pernambuco, a region that was chronically rebellious against Braganza centralism and economically capable of going its own way. It did not break away, however, and Reeder follows the story south to the future Uruguay, where US mercenaries received patents from the rebel José Artigas. US privateers did quite well against Luso-Brazilian shippers, souring US-Portuguese relations until March 1819, when the US Piracy Act rendered this brand of “freedom fighting” a capital crime.Portugal was not satisfied with subsequent prosecutions, but Brazilian independence in 1822 abruptly shifted the focus. Suddenly the US was in the odd position of having to recognize a monarchy, an empire, to the south. As Reeder shows, the US recognized Brazilian independence with surprising gusto given all the republican talk of the previous four decades. Hopes for a “sister republic” dimmed and US traders (many of them Yankees) became Brazil's number-one slave suppliers in defiance of both US and British law: “brothers” in racial despotism. Officially, Brazil came to be regarded by US officials as one of several disappointing neighbors, in part for favoring British commerce and credit. A racist discourse, as Fitz showed, displaced the earlier sense of republican camaraderie.Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots makes a valuable contribution to a new Atlantic or “greater American” historiography, in part by reaching across borders and into multiple archives but also by offering a model for hemispheric comparison. Historians of the US will have a better grasp of Brazil's (and Portugal's) gravity and significance in this era, and historians of Latin America will gain a better sense of US interest in and ambivalence toward Latin America at a time when the young republic's bark was much bigger than its bite. Reeder is to be commended for providing a well-written and convincing “twin-engine” narrative, hardly an easy feat given the complexity of the material covered. The pirate tales are good, too.