When Franklin’s Propaganda Became Brazil’s Revolution: A New Book on 18th Century Globalization
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Kenneth Maxwell’s new book, 18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil, arrives at a perfect moment to reframe how we understand that founding moment.
This is not another account of Philadelphia’s deliberations or Lexington’s first shots.
Instead, Maxwell traces something far more intriguing: how American revolutionary documents, carefully packaged by Benjamin Franklin for French diplomatic consumption, became a revolutionary handbook in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, inspiring conspirators in the mining towns of Minas Gerais who imagined their own republic thousands of miles from Independence Hall.
The book is the fifth volume in Maxwell’s ambitious series, Portugal and Brazil Confront the Contemporary World, which has systematically explored how the Luso-Atlantic world navigated the profound transitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Where earlier volumes examined Portugal’s scientific modernization after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the reforms of the Coimbra university system, and the complex relationship between metropolitan Portugal and its vast Brazilian colony, this new work reveals how Atlantic networks of students, diplomats, books, and ideas created an eighteenth-century globalization that connected American constitutional experiments to Brazilian independence movements in ways that neither Benjamin Franklin nor Thomas Jefferson could have anticipated.
Franklin in Auteuil: Where Diplomacy Met Enlightenment
Writing the foreword from my apartment in Paris’s Auteuil district, I find myself walking the same streets Benjamin Franklin walked regularly between 1776 and 1785. This neighborhood, then a village outside Paris’s putrid streets, was where Franklin sought respite from Versailles’s diplomatic rigors, drawn to the salon of Madame Helvétius, whom he affectionately called “Notre Dame d’Auteuil.” In her garden and drawing rooms, Enlightenment conversation flowed without the starch of court protocol, and Franklin built networks connecting American revolutionary ambitions to French intellectual currents and alliance politics.
What Franklin constructed in these intimate gatherings proved more enduring than personal friendships. Maxwell’s book demonstrates how Franklin, working with French Foreign Minister Vergennes, engineered the Recueil des Loix Constitutives des Colonies Angloises (Collection of Constitutional Laws of the English Colonies), a carefully curated portfolio of American founding documents translated into French. This was propaganda in the service of diplomacy, Franklin needed to convince Versailles that American rebels weren’t dangerous radicals but sophisticated constitutional architects worthy of French military support against Britain.
The Recueil gathered the Declaration of Independence, draft Articles of Confederation, various congressional acts, and critically, the constitutions of several new American states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. But this wasn’t a neutral compilation. Congress appeared to declare independence, confederate the states, and oversee their constitution-making in a neat sequence, when the messy reality was far more complicated—several colonies had drafted constitutions before Congress formally urged them to do so.
Future-tense American experiments became past-tense French faits accomplis. The “Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” was quietly upgraded to “Republic of Pennsylvania.” Franklin added extensive footnotes, including his famous “Note d’un Américain,” which portrayed American colonies as moving decisively toward abolition while blaming the British Crown for perpetuating the slave trade, a framing calculated to resonate with Enlightenment sensibilities while papering over more complicated American realities.
It worked brilliantly. Franklin secured the Franco-American alliance that proved decisive in the War of Independence. But as Maxwell demonstrates with elegant precision, Franklin’s diplomatic weapon became something else once it left his hands.
From Paris to Minas Gerais: Revolution Through a Broken Mirror
The Recueil was printed with false imprints — “Philadelphia,” “Switzerland”— giving it the ambiguous character of semi-clandestine literature. Pirated editions proliferated. When José Álvares Maciel purchased a “Swiss” edition in Birmingham, England and carried it to Minas Gerais in 1788, he was extending Franklin’s propaganda operation into an arena Franklin never imagined: the conspiracy rooms of Brazilian colonial elites plotting revolution against Portuguese rule.
Maxwell’s book reveals that the Minas conspirators didn’t encounter American constitutionalism directly. They met it through Franklin’s edited, translated, rhetorically sharpened version. This mattered profoundly. Pennsylvania’s radical 1776 constitution, with Franklin’s own fingerprints on its design, unicameral legislature, curtailed executive, frequent elections, expanded suffrage—became the template for their imagined Brazilian republic. The anti-slavery footnote that had helped Franklin reassure French philosophes now helped Brazilian slave owners reconcile revolutionary rhetoric with the society they actually lived in, perhaps with modest reforms someday, just as the Americans had promised but not yet delivered.
The book reconstructs in remarkable detail the “society of thought” that formed in Vila Rica (modern Ouro Preto) around figures like Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, a magistrate and accomplished poet; Cláudio Manuel da Costa, a lawyer and man of letters; Canon Luís Vieira, a wealthy priest; and Colonel Inácio de Alvarenga Peixoto. These weren’t marginal radicals but central figures of the local establishment—they owned slaves, commanded militias, administered justice, and speculated in tax farms. Yet they also read Raynal’s inflammatory Histoire des deux Indes, studied at Coimbra’s reformed faculties, and debated American constitutions with an intensity that would eventually draw royal authorities’ attention.
Most remarkably, the surviving annotated copy of the Recueil in Ouro Preto’s Museu da Inconfidência allows us to watch this process of localization almost in real time. Ink and pencil notes, likely by Gonzaga, da Costa, Canon Vieira, and possibly others, mark passages on republican government, separation of powers, and colonial autonomy. These marginalia reveal both sophisticated engagement with constitutional principles and fundamental misunderstandings shaped by translation errors and different political vocabularies. The conspirators didn’t grasp that Pennsylvania’s constitution would be revised within a decade, nor that American federalism emerged from practical compromise rather than theoretical design. Yet these very misreadings were productive, allowing them to imagine possibilities that more accurate understanding might have foreclosed.
The Mediators: Students, Scientists, and Diplomats
Maxwell emphasizes that this eighteenth-century globalization of ideas depended fundamentally on mediators or individuals who translated, repackaged, and transported concepts across borders. These weren’t neutral conduits but active interpreters who shaped the meaning and reception of revolutionary ideas through their own interests, contexts, and misunderstandings.
Beyond Franklin, Thomas Jefferson emerges as a different kind of mediator. His clandestine 1787 meeting at Nîmes with Brazilian student José Joaquim Maia e Barbalho, writing under the pseudonym Vendek, reveals that Brazilian elites saw the American Revolution as precedent and sought to enlist the United States as patron for their independence project. Jefferson’s cautious response. He offered sympathy but emphasized the limits of American capacity to support foreign revolutions, nonetheless conveyed to Maia’s circle that Brazil’s liberation was conceptually linked to the broader Age of Revolutions sweeping the Atlantic world.
The Brazilian students themselves embodied transnational knowledge circulation. Post-Jesuit reforms at Coimbra, led by Domenico Vandelli and framed by the Pombaline project of scientific modernization following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, created a generation of Brazilian intellectuals trained in natural science, experimental philosophy, law, and political economy. The reforms deliberately sought to modernize Portugal by importing Enlightenment learning, creating an ironic situation where the imperial metropole educated colonial subjects in precisely the ideas that would inspire resistance to empire.
José Álvares Maciel personifies this mediating role with remarkable precision. After studying natural philosophy at Coimbra’s reformed curriculum, he spent eighteen months in Birmingham, the heart of the Midlands Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution where he absorbed industrial techniques, met circles around Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah Wedgwood, and purchased the copy of the Recueil he later carried to Minas Gerais. His notebooks reveal a mind synthesizing industrial chemistry, revolutionary politics, and colonial development into a coherent vision for Brazil’s future. Through individuals like Maciel, North Atlantic constitutionalism, industrial modernity, and Luso-Atlantic slavery converged in a single social milieu.
Globalization’s Limits: The Slavery Contradiction
One of Maxwell’s strongest contributions is his unflinching demonstration that revolutionary ideas’ globalization was deeply constrained by slavery and racial hierarchy structures underpinning Atlantic prosperity. This creates a profound contradiction at the Age of Revolutions’ heart: the same men invoking universal human rights were often substantial beneficiaries of the most systematic denial of those principles.
The Minas conspirators exemplify this with particular clarity. Joaquim Silvério dos Reis, who eventually betrayed the conspiracy to save his financial interests, held over 200 enslaved people; Alvarenga Peixoto owned 132; even Tiradentes, the conspiracy’s most radical figure and eventual martyr, possessed enslaved people. In Minas, as in Virginia, any serious talk of liberty immediately collided with the material reality of coerced plantation and mining labor structuring economic life.
Maxwell juxtaposes Jefferson’s and José Bonifácio’s contrasting racial imaginaries to highlight how American and Brazilian branches of this Atlantic conversation diverged on fundamental questions of miscegenation, emancipation, and national identity. Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, envisioned a white republic purified of racial mixture and advocated colonization schemes whereby freed blacks would be removed beyond whites’ reach. His vision assumed racial difference was so profound that free blacks and whites couldn’t coexist in the same polity without eventual conflict.
Bonifácio, writing in the 1820s during Brazil’s independence debates, argued for gradual abolition and racial amalgamation as foundation of a future Brazilian nation, warning that without confronting slavery Brazil would become a “New China”, his term for a society dominated by a degraded, illiterate laboring mass without hope of social mobility. Yet in both countries, economic imperatives overwhelmed emancipatory projects. Cotton became king in the American South after Eli Whitney’s 1793 cotton gin, while coffee boomed in Brazil’s Paraíba Valley after 1800, drawing over two million enslaved Africans between 1801 and 1850.
Benjamin Franklin’s late-life abolitionism and his 1790 petition to Congress symbolize both the reach and profound limits of revolutionary universalism. As president of the Pennsylvania Society for Abolition of Slavery, Franklin submitted one of the first petitions urging Congress to use constitutional powers to restrain the slave trade and promote general emancipation. The hostile Congressional response, southern representatives invoked scripture, property rights, and constitutional constraints, shows that even within the United States, egalitarian principles’ globalization was checked by entrenched economic and racial interests powerful enough to shape constitutional interpretation. In Brazil, Bonifácio’s proposals within the 1823-24 Constituent Assembly met a similar fate, leading to his political marginalization and eventual exile to France.
Suppression and Memory: The Conspiracy’s Afterlife
Maxwell reconstructs with archival precision how thoroughly Portuguese authorities sought to contain and erase the Minas conspiracy and, with it, tangible traces of eighteenth-century ideological globalization. In 1789-90, two secret judicial inquiries (devassas) were conducted, followed by a special visiting tribunal (Alçada) sent from Lisbon in 1791. The aim wasn’t merely to punish but to prevent knowledge from spreading, especially when European attention was fixed on the unfolding French Revolution.
Tiradentes was executed in exemplary fashion on April 21, 1792, hanged, quartered, his head displayed in Vila Rica’s central square and body parts distributed at key road junctions as warning to others. His fellow conspirators received sentences ranging from life imprisonment in Africa to property confiscation. The Recueil itself disappeared into archival obscurity, its presence in the conspiracy remembered only in devassa testimonies before the Ouro Preto copy was firmly identified and studied in recent decades.
Yet despite erasure efforts, the Minas project persisted as memory and eventually as site of official commemoration and historical debate. With publication of the complete Autos da Devassa in the late twentieth century, recovery and analysis of the annotated Recueil, and transformation of Tiradentes into a republican martyr and national hero, the imagined republic of 1789 re-entered Brazilian political culture as a foundational, if failed, moment in the country’s long struggle to construct a constitutional order free from monarchy and empire. Tiradentes Day, celebrated annually on April 21, represents the ultimate irony: the execution meant to erase revolutionary memory instead created a martyr whose symbolic power grows stronger with time.
Reframing the American Revolution at Its 250th Anniversary
As the United States approaches the Revolution’s 250th anniversary, Maxwell’s book fundamentally reframes that founding moment. The American Revolution wasn’t a self-contained national event but a catalyst in a wider reconfiguration of empires, economies, and political imagination. Its reverberations reached from Versailles to Vila Rica, from Birmingham’s manufactories to Rio’s slave markets, demonstrating that eighteenth-century globalization was less a story of linear diffusion from center to periphery than of ceaseless translation, misrecognition, and creative adaptation across multiple nodes of an interconnected Atlantic world.
These ideas didn’t arrive in Brazil as pure theory floating free from material conditions. They arrived in returning students’ luggage, in books’ marginalia annotated during late-night discussions, in whispered reports of clandestine meetings, in lectures at Coimbra’s reformed faculties and Birmingham’s workshops, and in calculations of men balancing republican aspirations against slave society profits and hierarchies. The resulting globalization was necessarily uneven and partial: constitutionalism, representation, and anti-colonialism traveled far and fast, but universal liberty’s promise remained compromised by race and labor across the entire Atlantic world.
By placing the Minas conspiracy, the Recueil, and Brazilian students at the story’s center rather than margins, Maxwell’s fifth volume in his Portugal and Brazil series asks us to see the Age of Revolutions as a genuinely Atlantic and global phenomenon. Franklin supplied neither rifles nor regiments to Brazilian conspirators: only a book. But that book gave structure and vocabulary to an anti-colonial project he never imagined, demonstrating that eighteenth-century globalization operated through networks of translation, adaptation, and creative misreading that authorities found increasingly difficult to control despite censorship, surveillance, and exemplary punishment.
18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil thus stands as essential reading not only for scholars of Atlantic history but for anyone seeking to understand how political ideas move across borders, how revolution inspires revolution, and how the American founding’s contradictions, its soaring rhetoric of liberty coexisting with slavery’s brutal realities, shaped not just domestic politics but an entire Atlantic world grappling with questions of freedom, representation, and human dignity that remain unresolved today.
18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil
For a podcast discussing the book:
18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil
For our first video highlighting the book:
For our second video highlighting the book:
A Look Back at 18th Century Globalization of Revolutionary Ideals