Expanding the Boundaries of Imperial Brazil

Nineteenth-century Brazil was a fascinating place. In the aftermath of the wars for independence across the Americas, Brazil alone succeeded in constructing a viable monarchy among the new republics that emerged from the United States south to Argentina. Brazil was a vast territory on paper, but in reality the central government in Rio de Janeiro exerted a loose authority over a series of population clusters from the mouth of the Amazon to Rio Grande do SuI. With the prominent exception of Minas Gerais (the most populous province), all major centers of power and more than 90 percent of all Brazilians were found within a hundred miles of the Atlantic coast. In many ways, the map of Brazil was a fiction that did not become a reality until late in the twentieth century. Even in the coastal provinces, rebellions against the central government were rife, especially before 1850. Prior to the rise of academic history in universities in Brazil, the United States, and Europe, the history of nineteenth-century Brazil was largely written from the center and covered mainly the power centers of the Northeast and Southeast from the perspective of politics, especially high politics. Over the past thirty years, attention has shifted away from the Brazilian En1pire, and 260 Latin Amcrica11 l\cscarch RC'l'icll ' volu111c 37 nU111ber 3

Political science · History of Colonial Brazil

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