Leslie Bethell Essays on History and Politics
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BRAZIL essays on history and politics Leslie Bethell BRAZIL Essays on history and politics Leslie Bethell Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2018 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-908857-61-3 (PDF edition) DOI: 10.14296/618.9781908857613 ISBN: 978-1-908857-54-5 (paperback edition) Institute of Latin American Studies School of Advanced Study University of London Senate House London WC1E 7HU Telephone: 020 7862 8844 Email: [email protected] Web: http://ilas.sas.ac.uk This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free at http://www.humanities-digital-library.org Contents Preface v Anthony Peireira Introduction Why Brazil? An autobiographical fragment 1 I 1. Brazil and Latin America 19 II 2. Britain and Brazil (1808–1914) 57 3. The Paraguayan War (1864–70) 93 4. The decline and fall of slavery in Brazil (1850–88) 113 III 5. The long road to democracy in Brazil 147 6. Populism in Brazil 175 7. The failure of the Left in Brazil 195 Preface eslie Bethell is one of the few great Brazilianists, as foreign scholars of Brazil are called, of his and subsequent generations. Brazilianists engage in scholarship that has breadth and depth; illuminate Brazil as an object ofL study, asking the most important questions that can be asked about the country; and give voice to Brazilian experiences and perspectives. Leslie has done these things during his long career, and he continues to do so, as this collection of his recent essays on Brazilian history and politics demonstrates. When Leslie first arrived in Brazil, he travelled by ship. And that is fitting, because at that time he was immersed in the Atlantic world of the 19th century, doing the research for what was to become his first and perhaps still his most famous book, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). In this work, Leslie shows how the Brazilian slave trade came to be declared illegal in 1826, in the Anglo-Brazilian anti-slave trade treaty. But this was a de jure, not a de facto abolition; it was para inglês ver (for the English to see), as the Brazilians say. Leslie shows why it was impossible to suppress the trade once it had been declared illegal, at least for the first 20 years between 1826 and 1845. And finally, in the last part of the book, he analyses how the trade was finally abolished in the years 1850 and 1851. Leslie is particularly persuasive in showing the combination of domestic and international factors that led the Brazilian government finally to suppress the slave trade – these include Brazil’s international isolation, its fear of a possible war with Argentina in which it would need the benevolent neutrality of Great Britain, and the beginnings of the realisation that European immigration would be the ultimate solution to Brazil’s labour problem. It was large-scale European immigration in the 1880s that made the final abolition of slavery in 1888 politically manageable. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade is the cornerstone of Leslie’s scholarship on Brazil, and the 19th century is probably still the era in which he feels most at home intellectually. He continues to research and publish on the 19th century: see, for example, his several publicationcthe abolitionist and diplomat Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910), including Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009), edited with José Murilo de Carvalho, and most recently Joaquim Nabuco no Mundo (Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, Anthony Pereira, ‘Preface’, in Leslie Bethell, Brazil: Essays on History and Politics (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2018), pp. v–vii. vi BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS 2016). He could have limited his publications to the confines of a particular period, as many historians do. But he did not. Instead, he ventured back into the colonial period, as in his chapters in The Cambridge History of Latin America on literature and intellectual life in colonial Brazil and the independence of Brazil. He also ventured forward in time, writing about politics in Brazil under President Getúlio Vargas from 1930 to 1945 and politics in Brazil under the Liberal Republic of 1945 to 1964 (both of these chapters, again, in The Cambridge History of Latin Americawhich Leslie edited in 12 volumes, 1984–2008). Social scientists are likely to find Leslie’s work on the post-Second World War period especially interesting. Much of his work on that period has been done in partnership with social scientists. For example, with the sociologist Ian Roxborough he produced an important edited volume Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). In the introductory essay, Leslie and his co-editor analyse how a brief period of democratisation after the Second World War in Latin America was quickly followed by a period of repression. They show how domestic class conflict was fused with Cold War politics so that by 1948 the window of democracy was closing almost everywhere in the region, with the United States recognising and supporting military regimes in Peru and Venezuela, the first two of many more military regimes that were to come. In Leslie’s chapters in The Cambridge History on Latin America on Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and from 1985 to 2002, he teamed up with the political scientists Celso Castro and Jairo Nicolau, respectively. And in a provocative and much cited article on Brazil´s intellectual, cultural and political relationship with Spanish America in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Journal of Latin American Studies (2010), he combined his long-standing interests in the history of ideas and international relations. ‘Is Brazil part of Latin America?’, he asks. I will leave it to the reader to discover Leslie’s answer, which is contained in the present volume. By drawing on sociology, political science, international relations, and sometimes economics, Leslie shows us the benefit of combining history with social science. At this point a sceptic might ask if that is really possible. Do historians and social scientists have anything to say to each other? And are there any real affinities at all between them? The stereotypes about each side of this disciplinary divide suggest that they have nothing in common. History tries to rescue the lives and thoughts and beliefs of people who are no longer around from the condescension of posterity, in the words of E.P. Thompson, while social science, with its models, data and statistical manipulations seeks generalisations about human behaviour. Social science is abstract and reaches for conclusions that lack proper names – it is nomothetic, in the jargon of PREFACE vii David and Ruth Collier (Shaping the Political Arena, 2002), while history grounds itself in an understanding of specific times, people and places, and is ideographic. But these stereotypes are misleading. The craft of the historian and the social scientist are not so different. The historian needs to ask interesting questions about his – or her – material. In that sense, history can never be just about the past, because it will reflect the concerns and questions of the present, and some of those questions will come from social science. That is the sense in which I mean that Leslie borrows from social science – the borrowing is not explicit, but sometimes the questions come from social scientific debates. The social scientist, on the other hand, needs to think about the applicability, in time and space, of his – or her – generalisations, and so often engages in analysis in which the work of historians is crucial. The questions that Leslie asks in this book are urgent, compelling questions about one of the largest democracies in the world. And in answering them in the way that he has, Leslie has shown us the relevance of both social science and history to our understanding of the world. In his essay on the independence of Brazil in The Cambridge History of Latin America, Leslie makes an amusing aside. In describing how Brazilians were influenced by liberal ideas in the second half of the 18th century, he writes, ‘despite the efforts of the Board of Censorship in Lisbon more books were imported into Brazil from Europe (and from North America) and found their way to private libraries; some may even have been read’. I am not sure what he was thinking when he wrote that, but I do not think that Leslie should fear that his books will not be read. He has written work that is important, and will remain important, for everyone who cares about Brazil. The present volume of essays is additional evidence of that. Anthony Pereira Director Brazil Institute, King’s College London Introduction Why Brazil? An autobiographical fragment* have been frequently asked over the years how – from the most unlikely of backgrounds – I became a historian of Brazil and how I came to devote the greater part of my academic career to the promotion and development of IBrazilian studies in the UK (and, to a lesser extent, in the US). I was born in Leeds in the north of England in 1937. I spent my entire childhood in Hunslet, a grim working-class neighbourhood in south Leeds dominated by heavy industry. My paternal grandfather was a steelworker, my maternal grandfather a coalminer.