This analysis clarifies the role of a monarch in shaping a nation-state. The author’s evidence includes a wide variety of personal and diplomatic correspondence, contemporary periodicals and books, as well as appropriate secondary sources. He has sifted more than a score of Brazilian and European archives, including the imperial family’s private Arquivo Grão Pará (Petrópolis). In the early chapters, the author often cites his Brazil: The Forging of a Nation (1989), our most trustworthy political narrative of the era 1798–1852.
It is a commonplace that a biographer inevitably falls victim to the charms of his subject. Here, the author is no hagiographer; his view of the person and the statesman is balanced and critical. Nonetheless, if the book is to be faulted for bias, it lies in its inevitable preoccupation with Pedro II’s point of view. While it must be said that this is central to the book’s contribution (and...
