Kenneth Maxwell

A study of Brazil during a critical formative period which illuminates the causes of her special historical development within Latin America. Professor Maxwell analyzes the shifting relationships between Portugal, England and Brazil during the second half of the 18th Century. Through his study, Professor Maxwell is concerned with the social, economic and political significance of the events he describes. An important part of this work is a study of the Minas Conspiracy of 1788-89.

This is the first major study in English for over half a century of one of Portugal's most important historical figures, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, marques de Pombal (1699-1782), who is best known today as the key figure in the reconstruction of Lisbon after the devastating earthquake of 1755. Pombal's achievements, however, went far beyond the reconstruction of the capital. An unusually single-minded and ruthless first minister, he was also one of the eighteenth century's most successful "enlightened despots": for example, he reformed the Portuguese system of education, expelled the Jesuits from Portugal, thereby beginning the process leading to their suppression by the pope in 1773, and mounted a formidable challenge to British commercial hegemony in Portugal. Recent renewed interest in the theory of enlightened absolutism has tended to ignore developments in the Iberian peninsula. This book is therefore essential to a full understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of enlightened rulership in a southern European context.

This vividly written book is the first comprehensive assessment of the origins of the present-day democratic regime in Portugal to be placed in a broad international historical context. It is written with the benefit of a long-term vision of Portuguese history, and it emphasizes the significance of Portugal's new European orientation after centuries of global and oceanic preoccupations. After an account of the collapse of the old regime in 1974, the book studies the complex revolutionary period that followed, and the struggle in Europe and Africa to define the future role of Europe's then poorest country. These events also had international repercussions which transformed the balance of forces in southern Africa, following the collapse of Europe's last overseas empire. The consequent actions and reactions of the European powers and the United States are examined, and telling comparisons are also drawn with later developments in Eastern Europe and with the wider collapse of the communist movement.