Oliveira, Cecília de Salles and João Paulo Pimenta (orgs.). Dicionário da Independência do Brasil. São Paulo: EDUSP, Publicações BBM, 2022. ISBN: 9786557850916.

In Brazil, the bicentenary of independence was celebrated amid high mortality rates from COVID-19 and attacks on public universities, as well as a lot of police and political violence. All of this would be more than enough for the Brazilian intelligentsia to make a somewhat bitter assessment of this ephemeris: after all, what have we achieved in these 200 years as a nation, apart from social inequality, racial violence, and economic dependence?

Outraged by the follies of the present time, in which there is a total lack of criticism of the sources of information, many historians have realized the imperative of placing themselves in the public sphere of qualified debate, submitting the nation’s genesis past to a critical scrutiny of its foundations. This collective movement has resulted in the last two years in a veritable torrent of academic works on the subject of the independence of Portuguese America, including the Dicionário da Independência do Brasil: Historia, memória e historiografia (2022).

Composed of more than 700 entries, the dictionary is the result of a huge collective endeavor, with its idealization and executive and editorial cores located at the University of São Paulo. Participants include 274 university researchers, from Brazil and other American as well as European countries, at different academic stages; university professors, post-doctoral students, doctoral students, etc. Although theoretical-methodological diversity is the predominant tone of the work, it is possible to identify at least three general guidelines that guarantee a sense of the whole: the understanding of independence as a multidimensional theme involving above all politics, but also culture, economy, ways of thinking, and social relations; the broadening of the spatial quadrants of the emancipatory phenomenon, including not only relations between Brazil and Portugal, but also intercolonial dynamics in the South Atlantic; and, finally, an equally broad time line that focuses on the period 1820–1823, but which can go back as far as 1808, with the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro, and forward to 1831, when the accession of Pedro I to the Brazilian throne completes, for many contemporary authors and even today, the emancipatory process in Brazil.

For analytical purposes, it is possible to group the dictionary’s content into at least eight categories: 1) historical entries, which are those dealing with specific events within the space-time spectrum of the Brazilian independence; 2) technical-economic and socio-cultural entries; 3) biographical entries; 4) press entries; 5) institutional entries; 6) geohistorical entries; 7) conceptual entries; and 8) theoretical-methodological entries. The commentay that follows takes into account the most expressive of these categories.

In the introduction, the organizers of the work affirm that, for them, “Independence was built both by canonical and consecrated characters and by many others whose slightest expression should never have been imply their irrelevance, nor the prevalence of some over others.” Retrieving the names of historical actors, but also of independence interpreters, as well as the memory built on them is, in fact, one of the premises of the dictionary, since the 439 biographies presented in it correspond to almost 60% of the total number of entries. This biographical predominance of content has, in our view, merits and problems.

By offering an inventory of so many and varied life stories, from Emperor D. Pedro I to the black military man Pedro da Silva Pedroso, the dictionary becomes a precious research tool for those interested in the Brazilian nineteenth century who, before this publication, had to settle for fragmented biographical data arranged in works such as Galeria dos Brasileiros Ilustres (1861), by Sebastien Auguste Sisson, and Dicionário Bibliográfico Brasileiro (1883), by Augusto Vitorino Sacramento Blake. Needless to say, none of these antiquated books contain information about popular types like Pedroso, being concerned only about members of the bourgeoisie and regional political elites.

Although important socio-ethnic collectivities – such as “Indigenous peoples,” “Gypsies” and “Jews” – are represented in the dictionary, there is a lack of entries that translate socio-economic collectivities – such as “merchants,” “farmers,” “artisans,” etc. – or socio-professional categories – such as “bachelors,” “clerics,” “diplomats,” etc. Otherwise, if not for a perspective that understands the individual agencies in the broader context of the struggle between men, how can we agree with another important premise of the organizers of the work that independence was a revolutionary phenomenon? It is worth mentioning that this criticism is relativized, in part, by entries such as “Slavery and Traffic,” “Tropeirism,” and “Rio de Janeiro’s Court Supply,” which give a more systemic character to the hundreds of slaveholders from Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, etc. who are related in the dictionary.

Regarding the gender issues that pervade the independence of Brazil, both as process and as research field, it is worth noting that almost half of the co-authors of the Dictionary (49%) are women. There is also a relevant entry on this gender category, written by the Brazilian historian Andréa Slemian. However, when one returns to the analysis of biographic category, the numbers are revealing: the very few entries on female characters (14) do not represent even 5% of the total in this category. For a possible second edition of the dictionary, it is therefore urgent to go beyond canonical or elitist names such as Princess Carolina Josefa Leopoldina or Domitila de Castro (Marquise of Santos) and include women like the indigenous Dionísia, active in the region of Baepina, Ceará, and the freedwoman Maria Felipa, who fought Portuguese sailors and set fire to ships in the Recôncavo Bahiano. The same observation applies to female historians who deal with the early nineteenth century in Brazil: it is regrettable that names linked to economic history, such as those of Alice Piffer Canabrava and Eulalia Maria Lahmeyer Lobo, are absent from the dictionary.

Before this review ends, just a few specific comments are made on the other thematic category of the dictionary. With regard to the press entries – which corresponded to 9% of the total content – they are very useful to researchers for the same reasons as the biographies, but none of them question the fiscal, legal, and logistical conditions that facilitated or hindered the circulation of the 67 newspapers and pamphlets listed in the dictionary. How did a newspaper printed in the city of Rio de Janeiro like the Aurora Fluminense reach a village in Minas Gerais? Who were its provincial subscribers and readers? How much did they pay for their subscriptions?

It is known that free postage for newspapers exchanged between publishers was a tradition in liberal Europe and was extended to the colonies in the context of their independence. Furthermore, in 1823, the Brazilian Constituent Assembly determined that their Diário should be sent free to all the municipal councils. Private subscriptions to this newspaper, on the other hand, should have a low value that was sufficient “only to meet the costs of paper and printing.” Reiterated by the 1826 legislature, the free subscription measure was almost extended to all national newspapers but was vetoed by the Emperor D. Pedro I in 1829. It was only in 1831 that Brazilian newspapers, when destined for libraries or public offices, began to circulate free of postage. Finally, in 1836, a fixed tariff of 10 réis was approved for newspapers destined for private subscribers, in what could be considered a precursor to the 1842 Brazilian Postal Reform.

From all these comments, it can be seen that the Dicionário da Independência do Brasil is an open-ended work, not at all finished nor definitive on the subject (although it expresses pretensions to be so), given the complexity of the process it is intended to relate. Its strengths lie in entries such as “Indigenous Wars,” “Street political fights,” “Racial Issues,” and “Teaching History and Brazilian Independence,” which are absent from similar publications on the Brazilian nineteenth century and which resize the field of study in question. It also lacks a greater calibration with what has been discussed in other Brazilian regions, and even in other former Portuguese colonies, especially in Asia, beyond the southeastern circuit of historiographical production. Even so, due to the collective effort taken to weave together the factual, commemorative and historiographical dimensions, this is a remarkable work to be read on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond) in different personal space-time moments – as a work of reference for researchers like me or as a bedside book for readers who, like my great-grandfather, loved reading dictionaries.