From Colony to Nation: Essays on the Independence of Brazil by A. J. R.

Russell-Wood Review by: Dauril Alden The American Historical Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jun., 1976), pp. 701-702 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1852661 . Accessed: 28/01/2013 07:02
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:02:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Latin America
NICOLAS CHEETHAM. New Spain: The BirthofModern Mexico. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd.; distributed by International Publications Service, Collings Inc., New York. 1974. Pp. 336. $15.00.

701

This work, written by a British scholar and diplomat, is in this reviewer's opinion, the best synthesis of early MNIexican history in English. The author has digested, synthesized, and organized most of the relevant secondary and some primary source material. He is familiar with and makes excellent use of both English- and Spanish-language material. Yet, despite the general excellence and readability of the book, he provides no new material for professional historians interested in the historyof Nlexico. T he work is divided into fiveparts. The sections include pre-Colombian nations, the conquest, the early period of Spanish rule under Cortes, viceregal government,and the attempts of the Spanish governmentand church authorityto bring about a cultural, social, and political integration of the Indian subjects. The weakest chapters are the early ones on pre-Colombian civilization and the conquest. MIuch of this material has been covered in greater detail in other works. Reading Cheetham's book is no substitute for reading Bernal Diaz's account or Robert Padden's study of several years ago. TIhe section on Spanish colonial government and the Spanish attempts at cultural integration contains much material that is otherwise unavailable to the lay reader. The author not only uses the most recent scholarly material to explain this period, but he uses it in a remarkably exciting way. His approach to the Aztec government and that of the Spanish colonial authority is even-handed and scholarly. His general interpretation is obviously influenced by Hanke, Gibson, and Ricard. This is a very welcome and useful edition to the general literature on New Spain. I would recommend it to anyone going to 1Mexico or to anyone with a general interest in Mexican history, colonialism, or the anthropology of indigenous peoples. It would be very helpful for this work to be made available in paperback so that it could be used in general courses on Mlexican and Latin American history.
ALBERT L. MICHAELS

impressive contribution by J. I. Israel scholars have a major contribution in both informationand interpretation. The terms race, class, and politics in the title convey only a partial idea of the book's intricate and intermeshirng topics, which include ecclesiastical hierarchies, the seventeenth century's economic crises, illegal profit-making by viceroys,and many others. With respect to the title the dates 1621-1664 more accurately reflect the book's contents than 161o-1670. Race and class are first analyzed in separate chapters on Indians, Spaniards, and others, with a valuable chapter on some minority groups that have been generally overlooked: Basques, Portuguese, Italians, and Jews. The author then moves to the section on political life,especially the upperlevel political lifeof the viceregal capital. Here the controversies that so frequently disturbed the life of the colony, together with the rumors, threats, scandals, and related incidents, are recounted in detail. Not since H. H. Bancroft-who receives praise as a great" historian-has this kind of material been taken so seriously. But what Israel does that Bancroft failed to do is to impose order and system on a history that has seemed to most students a miscellany of unrelated or superficial squabbles. Conflicts between viceroy and archbishop are shown to have an unexpected continuity over time, with the secular clergy, largely Creole, functioning as the viceroy's opposition. The tumult of 1624, which a generation of historians, following C. L. Guthrie, has attributed to shortages and high prices, is assigned here to political causes. The development of topics in the local NMexicanscene is clarified, wherever possible, by reference to the particular circumstances of the parent country. Thus readers learn, for the first time so far as this reviewer is aware, of the connection between the Portuguese independence movement of 1640 and the rivalry in Mexico between the D)uque de Escalona and Juan de Palafox y N4endoza. T here are many other examples. In recent decades the tendency among historians of Nlexico has been toward social, socioeconomic, or even anthropological interpretations. Israel's is a socio-political interpretation, with emphasis on the political, and its revisionary implications are far-reaching.
CHARLES GIBSON

StateUniversity ofNew York, Buffalo

A.

University ofMichigan

J. R. RUSSELL-WOOD, editor. FromColony toNation: Essays on theIndependence ofBrazil. (The Johns Hopin ColonialMexico, kins Symposia in Comparative History, volume 6.) J. I. ISRAEL. Race, Class and Politics (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New i6io-i67o. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. York: Oxford University Press. 1975. Pp. xiii, 305. 1975. Pp. xi, 267. $12.50. $25.00. Ihe years 1750-1822 were of decisive importance We are gradually learning more about the seven- for Portugal and Brazil, beginning with the asteenth century in Mexican history, and with this cendancy of the strong-minded reformerand fu-

This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:02:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

702

ofBooks Reviews
ian empire after 1822 was to find a satisfactory formula "to accommodate the social tensions created in the late colonial era" (p. 134). In a characteristically graceful and informativepaper Richard M. Morse tells us much about the urban development of Brazil from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century but nothing about the communities' involvement in the imperial crisis of The last essays are concerned with intellectual topics. In his elegantly writtenstudy Manoel Cardozo analyzes the significance of the passing of the Baroque mood in Portugal and seemingly believes that Brazilian independence was hastened by the declining influence of the Church and the nobility and by unwise Luso-Brazilian acceptance of untried liberal dogmas. In an equally well-documented essay E. Bradford Burns assesses the influence of Brazilian urban intellectuals who were leading advocates of change. Well read though they may have been, it is difficult to see from Burns' discussion how such a group helped engineer Brazil's independence. It is unfortunatethat the editor did not indicate major areas of agreement and divergence among his authors or summarize ways by which our knowledge of the causes and consequences of Brazilian independence has been advanced by these essays. It is likewise regretable that the essayists did not examine more closely internal developthe impact upon Brazil of revolutionary movements in Spanish America and in Europe. A useful but not vital volume.
DAURIL ALDEN 1820- 1822.

ture Mlarquis of Pombal and ending with political separation. On the sesquicentenary of Brazilian independence an international symposium of scholars met at Johns Hopkins University to reassess the preconditions and meaning of Brazilian independence. Of the eight papers published here, three have already appeared elsewhere. Ihe stage is set with an overly long, somewhat repetitiveintroduction by A. J. R. Russell-Wood, well-known Brazilianist and organizer of the symposium, who analyzes the nature of "the colonial pact" between Brazilians and the metropolitan regime and provides a detailed survey of the socioeconomic development of late colonial Brazil. Emilia Viotti da Costa examines the breakdown of the colonial pact during the Court's thirteen-year residency in Brazil (1808-1821). As she perceptively demonstrates, Regent and later King John VI was torn between a desire to dismantle long-standing restrictions upon Brazilian economic activities and a need to safeguard traditional Portuguese interests in his nation's most valuable colony. Another Brazilian scholar, Maria Odilia Silva Dias, emphasizes that the independence movement was neither revolutionary nor nationalistic and did not produce a national consensus until mid-century. Stanley E. Hilton attacks the not very widely held "myth" that between i8o8 and 1824 Brazil and the United States shared common ideals and values by demonstrating that the contrary was true. The next pair of essays focus upon social themes. Stuart B. Schwartz contends that after 1750 the social structureof Brazil became increasingly complex, in part because of the growthof an independent peasantry, and that a major task of the Brazil-

mentswithinPortugalbetween 1807 and

1820

or

of Washington University

This content downloaded on Mon, 28 Jan 2013 07:02:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions