Commerce and Liberation: Early America, Brazil, and Luso-Atlantic Trade in the Age of Revolution

"Commerce and Liberation: Early America, Brazil, and Luso-Atlantic Trade in the Age of Revolution" contends that arguments linking free trade with republican independence led mid-Atlantic merchants to alter their Luso-Atlantic commercial networks to favor revolutionary regions of Brazil. During the first half of the eighteenth century, due to a series of treaties between London and Lisbon, British Americans constructed close business ties with merchants in Portugal and the Portuguese-Atlantic islands. Throughout the century, they also kept an eye toward the prohibited markets of Brazil. The American Revolution severed the mercantilist ties that had traditionally bound North Americans to Portugal, attenuating the relationship between the Portuguese Empire and the United States. As the age of revolution unfolded, many mid-Atlantic traders felt a keen interest in the developing political economies of restive areas of Brazil such as the Banda Oriental, Pernambuco, and ultimately Rio de Janeiro. By the time Brazil achieved independence from Portugal, it had become the most important entity for mid-Atlantic trade networks in the Luso-Atlantic. Current scholarship on Anglo-American merchants emphasizes their cautious approach to new ventures. This dissertation reveals, however, that traders with ties to the Luso-Atlantic embraced the revolutionary environment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A study of those merchants sheds light on how private commercial expansion weakened imperial powers. Paradoxically, state policies countenanced the development of decentralized commercial networks which eventually undermined state authority.