This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

This book provides a synthesis of the relationship between Brazil and Canada, or what comprises Canada today, with the objective of uncovering a neglected history. This book covers from the first known exchange of migrants between the two countries in 1828 to 1979 when a political openness in the Brazilian military dictatorship gave rise to a new chapter in the two countries’ relationship. As the first synthetic treatment of this relationship, this book not only aims to build on the limited historiography that exists, but also to open up new interpretive channels that can be further explored in the future. Recommended for scholars of Latin American studies, history, and international relations.

Before the Portuguese Royal Court moved to its South-American colony in 1808, books and periodicals had a very limited circulation there. It was only when Brazilian ports were opened to foreign trade that the book trade began to flourish, and printed matter became more easily available to readers, whether for pleasure, for instruction or for political reasons. This book brings together a collection of original articles on the transnational relations between Brazil and Europe, especially England and France, in the domain of literature and print culture from its early stages to the end of the 1920s. It covers the time when it was forbidden to print in Brazil, and Portugal strictly controlled which books were sent to the colony, through the quick flourishing of a transnational printing industry and book market after 1822, to the shift of hegemony in the printing business from foreign to Brazilian hands at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Sao Paulo.

In nineteenth-century Brazil the power of the courts rivaled that of the central government, bringing to it during its first half century of independence a stability unique in Latin America. Thomas Flory analyzes the Brazilian lower-court system, where the private interests of society and the public interests of the state intersected. Justices of the peace—lay judges elected at the parish level—played a special role in the early years of independence, for the post represented the triumph of Brazilian liberalism’s commitment to localism and decentralization. However, as Flory shows by tracing the social history and performance of parish judges, the institution actually intensified conflict within parishes to the point of destabilizing the local regime and proved to be so independent of national interests that it all but destroyed the state. By the 1840s the powers of the office were passed to state appointees, particularly the district judges. Flory recognizes these professional magistrates as a new elite who served as brokers between the state and the poorly articulated landowner elite, and his account of their rise reveals the mechanisms of state integration. In focusing on the judiciary, Flory has isolated a crucial aspect of Brazil’s early history, one with broad implications for the study of nineteenth-century Latin America as a whole. He combines social, intellectual, and political perspectives—as well as national-level discussion with scrutiny of parish-level implementation—and so makes sense of a complicated, little-studied period. The study clearly shows the progression of Brazilian social thought from a serene liberal faith in the people as a nation to an abiding, very modern distrust of that nation as a threat to the state.

From conquistadores and explorers to Protestants, peasants and priests, eyewitnesses give narrative to the triumphs and tragedies of Latin America's religious development.