An Overview to 18th Century Globalization

I have had the privilege of editing the latest book of Professor Maxwell which is being released at a very propitious time: The 250th anniversary of the American revolution.

Kenneth Maxwell’s 18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil represents a remarkable achievement in transnational intellectual history. The fifth volume in his series “Portugal and Brazil Confront the Contemporary World,” this work traces the extraordinary journey of Benjamin Franklin’s Recueil des Loix Constitutives des Colonies Unies de l’Amérique from the diplomatic salons of Paris to the conspiracy rooms of Minas Gerais, revealing how revolutionary ideas traveled across oceans and transformed in translation. Maxwell  has produced a deeply researched study that illuminates both the mechanics of eighteenth-century information networks and the ways political texts acquire new meanings as they cross cultural boundaries.

The book’s central narrative follows a diplomatic document that became revolutionary propaganda. In 1778, Benjamin Franklin, serving as American commissioner to France, collaborated with the Comte de Vergennes to produce the Recueil, a carefully curated collection of American founding documents translated into French. This was propaganda in service of diplomacy. Franklin needed to convince the French court that the American colonies represented a unified, coherent political entity worthy of military and financial support. The Recueil presented the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and various state constitutions as evidence of an orderly nation-building process, when in fact the reality was considerably messier.

Maxwell demonstrates Franklin’s considerable skill as a political operator. The Recueil subtly reshaped the American revolutionary narrative for French consumption. Translation choices mattered profoundly: Pennsylvania’s “Commonwealth” became “Republic,” future-tense constitutional provisions became past-tense accomplishments, and the overall arrangement suggested central direction from Congress when several states had already adopted constitutions before Congress assumed any coordinating role. Franklin also added extensive footnotes, most notably his “Note d’un Américain,” which portrayed American colonies as moving decisively toward abolition while blaming the British Crown for perpetuating the slave trade. This framing resonated with Enlightenment philosophes while conveniently obscuring more complicated American realities about slavery.

The propaganda succeeded brilliantly in its immediate purpose. Franklin secured the Franco-American alliance that proved decisive in the War of Independence. But Maxwell’s book traces what happened when Franklin’s diplomatic weapon escaped his control. Printed with false imprints (“Philadelphia,” “Switzerland”) that gave it the ambiguous character of semi-clandestine literature, the Recueil proliferated in pirated editions across Europe. When José Álvares Maciel purchased a “Swiss” edition in Birmingham, England, in 1788 and carried it to Minas Gerais, he was extending Franklin’s propaganda operation into an arena Franklin never imagined: the planning sessions of Brazilian colonial elites plotting revolution against Portuguese rule.

The Minas Conspiracy of 1788-1789 forms the book’s second major focus. Maxwell provides rich detail about the conspirators—intellectuals, clerics, military officers, and wealthy mine owners united by debt, tax burdens, and exposure to Enlightenment ideas. Many had studied at the University of Coimbra, where they encountered reformist thinking before Portugal’s educational system tightened under fears of revolutionary contagion. They returned to a captaincy facing economic crisis: gold production had declined dramatically, the Portuguese crown demanded payment of accumulated tax arrears, and the social order depended on a slave majority that made any revolution inherently precarious.

The conspirators encountered American constitutionalism not directly but through Franklin’s edited, translated, rhetorically sharpened version. This mediation mattered profoundly. The prominence given to Pennsylvania’s radical 1776 constitution with Franklin’s own fingerprints on its design, including its unicameral legislature, curtailed executive, frequent elections, and expanded suffrage became the template for the imagined Brazilian republic. The anti-slavery footnote that had helped Franklin reassure French philosophes now helped Brazilian slave owners reconcile their revolutionary rhetoric with the slave society they actually inhabited, offering the promise of eventual reform without requiring immediate action.

Maxwell aptly describes this as “revolution through a broken mirror.” The Recueil turned complex, contested American debates into a clean, exportable script. Brazilian readers, grappling with their own contradictions, read Franklin’s streamlined narrative and saw reflected not American realities but their own aspirations and anxieties. They discussed Pennsylvania’s constitutional provisions extensively, particularly Section 19 of the Pennsylvania Constitution regarding the Supreme Executive Council, with its emphasis on rotation in office to prevent the establishment of an “inconvenient aristocracy.” They debated flags, symbols, and the fate of Portuguese residents in an independent Brazil. The priest Father Carlos Correia wished to eliminate the Portuguese entirely, while Alvarenga Peixoto argued that “sons could not be expected to rise against their fathers.”

The conspiracy’s most visible figure, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier—known as Tiradentes (“tooth-puller”)—emerged as the movement’s most articulate spokesman. He praised Brazil’s natural endowments and predicted that as a republic like “English America,” Brazil could be even greater because it was better endowed by nature. He spoke of establishing manufactories, achieving economic self-sufficiency, and no longer needing to import commodities from abroad. His vision combined republican idealism with economic nationalism, imagining a Brazil that could “live independent of the government of Portugal” and become “the happiest country in the world.”

The conspiracy was betrayed before it could act. Maxwell details the subsequent judicial proceedings with careful attention to what the historical record reveals and conceals. Remarkably, the judicial sentence against Tiradentes and his co-conspirators made no specific mention of the United States as a model, no reference to Thomas Jefferson’s meeting with José Joaquim Maia e Barbalho (one of the conspirators who had approached Jefferson in France), and no mention whatsoever of the Recueil in their deliberations. This silence is itself revealing. Portuguese authorities apparently preferred not to publicize how deeply American revolutionary ideas had penetrated their colonial elites.

Tiradentes was executed on April 21, 1792, hanged, beheaded, quartered, with parts of his body displayed at various locations and his house in Vila Rica destroyed and the ground salted. His co-conspirators had their death sentences commuted to banishment in a dramatic reading of Queen Maria’s letter of clemency. Tiradentes became a martyr for Brazilian independence, which would not actually arrive until 1822, achieved through a very different process than the conspirators had imagined.

Maxwell brings remarkable scholarly resources to this story. He draws on the Autos da Devassa, the extensive judicial investigation records, on diplomatic correspondence in multiple archives, on the personal libraries of the conspirators, and on his own decades of expertise in Portuguese and Brazilian history. The book includes detailed annotations explaining translation choices, constitutional provisions, and the intellectual networks that connected Enlightenment thinkers across the Atlantic world. His collaboration with scholars including Heloisa Murgel Starling, Junia Ferreira Furtado, and Harvard students who analyzed problems of translation and representation adds depth to the textual analysis.

Several themes emerge from Maxwell’s analysis with particular force.

First is the question of how revolutionary texts function as they travel. Franklin’s Recueil was designed for one purpose, securing French support, but acquired entirely different meanings and uses as it circulated beyond its intended audience. The Brazilian conspirators read it not as propaganda but as a practical constitutional handbook, extracting specific provisions about governmental structure while adapting the anti-slavery rhetoric to their own purposes.

Second is the role of translation in shaping political possibilities. The shift from English “Commonwealth” to French “Republic,” the transformation of future-tense constitutional experiments into past-tense accomplishments, the footnotes that contextualized American decisions for European readers, all these choices created a text that was simultaneously faithful to its sources and profoundly different from them. The Brazilian conspirators encountered American constitutionalism through this translated, mediated version, and their revolution was planned accordingly.

Third is the paradox of slaveholding revolutionaries. Both the American founders and the Brazilian conspirators faced this contradiction, and Franklin’s Recueil helped both groups manage it through strategic ambiguity. The “Note d’un Américain” promised eventual abolition while blaming Britain for slavery’s continuation, offering a narrative that preserved revolutionary credentials without requiring immediate action. Brazilian conspirators, living in a society where slaves outnumbered free people, found this framework useful for their own purposes—revolution could be imagined without confronting the slave system that made revolution dangerous.

Fourth is the question of failed revolutions and their legacies. The Minas Conspiracy failed, Tiradentes died, and Brazilian independence when it came followed a different path, peaceful separation achieved by the Portuguese royal family itself when Dom Pedro I declared independence in 1822. Yet the conspiracy and its martyrs became foundational to Brazilian republican mythology. Maxwell shows how the Recueil and the ideas it carried continued to circulate, shaping political imagination even when immediate revolutionary plans failed.

The book’s strength lies in Maxwell’s ability to move between different scales of analysis, from the specifics of constitutional translation to the broad patterns of Enlightenment circulation, from Franklin’s diplomatic strategy to Tiradentes’ economic nationalism, from salon conversations in Paris to interrogation rooms in Vila Rica. He writes with clarity and precision, making complex intellectual history accessible while never oversimplifying the contradictions and ambiguities his subjects navigated.

18th Century Globalization makes important contributions to several historiographical conversations. For scholars of the American Revolution, it demonstrates how founding documents functioned beyond their immediate context, becoming tools for other revolutionaries with different purposes. For historians of Brazil, it provides detailed analysis of the intellectual origins of the Minas Conspiracy and the ways Atlantic world ideas were adapted to colonial Brazilian circumstances. For students of Enlightenment political thought, it illustrates the practical mechanics of how ideas traveled through diplomatic channels, pirated editions, personal networks, and careful translation.

The book also speaks to contemporary concerns about how political texts circulate and transform in our own globalized information environment. Franklin’s strategic editing and framing of American constitutionalism for foreign audiences has modern parallels in how nations present themselves to international audiences. The ways the Brazilian conspirators read and adapted American constitutional provisions to their own circumstances mirrors how political models travel and transform across cultural contexts today.

Maxwell has produced a work of meticulous scholarship that is also a compelling narrative. The journey of Franklin’s Recueil from Parisian salons to Minas Gerais conspiracy rooms reveals the eighteenth-century Atlantic world as an interconnected space where ideas, texts, and revolutionary aspirations circulated with remarkable speed, transforming in transit but carrying with them the possibility of political change. The tragedy of Tiradentes and the failure of the Minas Conspiracy remind us that revolutionary ideas alone cannot guarantee revolutionary success, but Maxwell’s book demonstrates how those ideas, once released into circulation, acquire lives of their own that their authors could never have predicted.

This is essential reading for anyone interested in the Age of Revolution, the circulation of Enlightenment ideas, or the intellectual foundations of Brazilian independence. Maxwell brings to this project his lifetime of expertise in Portuguese and Brazilian history, combined with sophisticated understanding of how texts function in political contexts. 18th Century Globalization stands as a major contribution to our understanding of how revolutionary ideas traveled across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the complex, sometimes paradoxical ways they were received, adapted, and deployed by colonial subjects imagining their own liberation.

The book ultimately reveals the eighteenth century as genuinely global in its intellectual exchanges, with Franklin’s diplomatic document becoming part of a circulation system that connected Paris, Philadelphia, Birmingham, Lisbon, and the mining towns of interior Brazil.

Maxwell’s careful tracing of this circulation, his attention to what gets gained and lost in translation, and his sympathy for the conspirators who risked everything for an imagined republic make this a work of both scholarly importance and human interest.

The distance from Auteuil’s salons to Minas Gerais may have been vast, but ideas proved capable of bridging it, carrying with them both revolutionary promise and the inevitable distortions that come when one society’s solutions are applied to another’s very different circumstances.

18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil