Evaldo Cabral de Mello is a historian of the Northeast but he is not a “local” historian in the usual sense. His earlier Olinda restaurada demonstrated a broad knowledge of European historiography and an ability to bring new insights to the Dutch period in the Brazilian Northeast. His subsequent study of Pernambucan agriculture during the empire revealed an understanding of the issues of state intervention and economic growth. Cabral de Mello writes interesting books that move from regional topics to address general historical problems, and this one is no exception. With Rúbio Veio, he again strikes outward from Pernambuco to deal with a more general theme: the impact of the Dutch War (1645-54) on the creation of nativist and ultimately “nationalist” sentiments in Pernambuco and, by extension, in Brazil. The myth that Brazilian self-identity was first formed during the heroic efforts of Brazilians to regain the colony from the Dutch is deeply rooted. This is a book, then, that takes up the theme of the “invention of tradition” within a Brazilian context. It demonstrates the political and ideological uses of history and, at the same time, is also a most scholarly and imaginative study of the classic sources of the Dutch period and a model of historiographical analysis.
The author first presents a careful evaluation of the major sources on the Dutch period, emphasizing those like Frei Manuel Calado and Frei Rafael de Jesus who were best known to the nineteenth-century nationalist authors. He next argues, however, that the political discourse of Pernambucan nativism originated in the seventeenth century, created by an arriviste sugar aristocracy to justify its position and its interests, and that during the war of the Mascates (1710-11) or the Pernambucan movement of 1817 this argument was used for its political content. The idea that the Pernambucan planters had been the most loyal of subjects and, at the cost of their own blood and property, had expelled the Dutch but were then unrewarded and unrecognized by the crown was a position that justified much of the subsequent nationalist feeling.
Cabral de Mello then devotes some chapters to the other myths of the Dutch war: the “ancient” nobility of the sugar planters (many of whom were actually of humble origins); the cooperation of blacks, Indians, and whites in a movement of racial harmony for national ends; the fall of Olinda as God’s punishment; and the reconquest as a miraculous event of saintly intervention against the heretic Hollanders. In each case, he demonstrates the motives and sources of the original chroniclers and then their subsequent use and transformation by nineteenth-century historians. He demonstrates, for example, how Calabar the traitor who betrayed the Luso-Brazilian positions to the Dutch was transformed into an anti-colonialist by later writers, and he explains the process by which Maurits of Nassau came to be seen as an enlightened governor by the descendants of his former enemies. Cabral de Mello is at his best in deflating the myths of the sugar aristocracy. He portrays it as an unstable and insecure class, madly seeking honors, and continually espousing self-serving images of itself that historians have long accepted. Here, and throughout the book, the analysis is subtle and rich in insight. Cabral de Mello has made an important contribution to both the history and historiography of Pernambuco and to an understanding of the intellectual development of Brazilian nationalism.
