As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Kenneth Maxwell’s new book, 18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil, arrives at a perfect moment to reframe how we understand that founding moment. This is not another account of Philadelphia’s deliberations or Lexington’s first shots. Instead, Maxwell traces something far more […]

Most remarkably, the surviving annotated copy of the Recueil in Ouro Preto’s Museu da Inconfidência allows us to watch this process of localization almost in real time. Ink and pencil notes, likely by Gonzaga, da Costa, Canon Vieira, and possibly others, mark passages on republican government, separation of powers, and colonial autonomy.

These marginalia reveal both sophisticated engagement with constitutional principles and fundamental misunderstandings shaped by translation errors and different political vocabularies. The conspirators didn’t grasp that Pennsylvania’s constitution would be revised within a decade, nor that American federalism emerged from practical compromise rather than theoretical design. Yet these very misreadings were productive, allowing them to imagine possibilities that more accurate understanding might have foreclosed.

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The Brazilian students themselves embodied transnational knowledge circulation. Post-Jesuit reforms at Coimbra, led by Domenico Vandelli and framed by the Pombaline project of scientific modernization following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, created a generation of Brazilian intellectuals trained in natural science, experimental philosophy, law, and political economy. The reforms deliberately sought to modernize Portugal by importing Enlightenment learning, creating an ironic situation where the imperial metropole educated colonial subjects in precisely the ideas that would inspire resistance to empire.

José Álvares Maciel personifies this mediating role with remarkable precision. After studying natural philosophy at Coimbra’s reformed curriculum, he spent eighteen months in Birmingham, the heart of the Midlands Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution where he absorbed industrial techniques, met circles around Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah Wedgwood, and purchased the copy of the Recueil he later carried to Minas Gerais. His notebooks reveal a mind synthesizing industrial chemistry, revolutionary politics, and colonial development into a coherent vision for Brazil’s future. Through individuals like Maciel, North Atlantic constitutionalism, industrial modernity, and Luso-Atlantic slavery converged in a single social milieu.