Kenneth Maxwell’s new book, 18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil,  demonstrates that the American Revolution did not merely create a new state. It helped catalyze an eighteenth‑century globalization of political ideas, institutions, and expectations that rippled across the Atlantic into Brazil, Europe, and the wider imperial world. This globalization did not occur through abstract philosophy alone, but through very concrete media, books, universities, diplomatic exchanges, commercial networks, and revolutionary conspiracies, that translated the language of liberty into local projects of constitutional change.​

The American revolutionary experience provided not only a model but a practical blueprint for others seeking to overturn colonial rule and build new constitutional orders. In particular, the Recueil des Loix Constitutives des Colonies Angloises, a French collection of American constitutional texts published in 1778 and associated with Benjamin Franklin’s efforts at Versailles, became a portable handbook of revolution whose trajectories illuminate how ideas moved and mutated in transit.​

The Recueil gathered key documents, the Declaration of Independence, a draft of the Articles of Confederation, a census of the colonies, various congressional acts, and the constitutions of several new American states, notably Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Through this compilation, the American Revolution appeared not as a distant event but as a reproducible script: a set of legal architectures, institutional devices, and political arguments that could be selectively appropriated, reinterpreted, or misread by actors far from Philadelphia. The book shows that Brazilian conspirators in Minas Gerais in 1788–89 did precisely this, treating the Recueil as a manual for their own projected republic.​

This dynamic illustrates a crucial feature of eighteenth‑century globalization. Ideas did not flow in a simple center‑periphery pattern, from a supposedly advanced North Atlantic core outward; instead, they circulated through overlapping imperial and commercial networks, were refracted through translation and local politics, and often returned modified to the original sources of inspiration. The American Revolution thus became one node in a wider “Atlantic history of the diffusion of republican, constitutionalist, and anti‑colonial ideas” linking North America, Europe, and Brazil between the 1770s and the early 1790s.​

The book emphasizes that globalization of ideas depends on mediators, individuals and institutions that translate, repackage, and transport concepts across borders. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are central here, not only as American founders but as diplomats whose presence in Paris created a hub where European, American, and Brazilian actors could intersect.​

Franklin’s role in the publication and circulation of the Recueil illustrates how diplomatic strategy and intellectual globalization overlapped. Working with the French foreign minister Vergennes, himself familiar with Lisbon and Portuguese politics, Franklin supported the production of a French‑language volume of American constitutions explicitly designed to persuade French elites of the viability and attractiveness of the American experiment. That same book, in a pirated “Swiss” edition actually produced in France, later turned up in Minas Gerais as a revolutionary vade mecum, demonstrating how propaganda aimed at Versailles could be re‑purposed in Brazilian mining towns.​

Jefferson appears as a different kind of mediator: a figure embedded in the Atlantic diplomatic world who was approached by colonial reformers and conspirators seeking both material support and intellectual legitimation. His clandestine meeting at Nîmes with the Brazilian student José Joaquim Maia e Barbalho, writing under the pseudonym “Vendek”, reveals that Brazilian elites saw the American Revolution as a precedent and sought to enlist the United States as a patron for their own independence project. Jefferson’s cautious response, stressing US commercial interests with Portugal and the limits of American capacity, nonetheless conveyed to Maia and his circle the sense that Brazil’s liberation was conceptually linked to the broader age of revolutions.​

Equally important are the Brazilian students themselves, particularly those educated at Coimbra and Montpellier. The post‑Jesuit reforms at Coimbra, led by Domenico Vandelli and framed by the Pombaline project of scientific modernization, created a generation of Brazilian intellectuals trained in natural science, law, and political economy. Many then moved into French universities and intellectual networks, Montpellier and Bordeaux above all, where they encountered not just Enlightenment thought but the lived realities of Atlantic commerce, including the slave trade and the plantation economies of Saint‑Domingue.​

Figures such as José Álvares Maciel and Domingos Vidal de Barbosa Lage personify this mediating role. Maciel studied natural philosophy at Coimbra, then spent eighteen months in Birmingham, the heart of the Midlands Enlightenment, where he absorbed industrial techniques, met the circles around Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah Wedgwood, and purchased the copy of the Recueil that he later carried back to Minas Gerais. Vidal de Barbosa, educated at Montpellier and Bordeaux, moved in the commercial orbit of French slave‑trading ports that were tightly linked to Brazilian and African networks. Through them, North Atlantic constitutionalism, industrial modernity, and Luso‑Atlantic slavery converged in a single social milieu.​

The Minas conspiracy of 1789 provides the book’s most vivid case study of how globalized ideas are localized, debated, and transformed. Minas Gerais, described as the “soul” of the Portuguese empire in America due to its gold and diamonds, had by the late eighteenth century a complex social structure in which whites were a minority and free and enslaved people of African descent formed the bulk of the population. Its elite, magistrates, military officers, landowners, clergy, and merchants, lived in a dense world of litigation, patronage, and credit, bound to Lisbon yet increasingly exposed to external intellectual currents.​

The conspirators around Vila Rica (Ouro Preto) constituted what recent historians call a “society of thought.” Men such as Tomás Antônio Gonzaga, Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Canon Luís Vieira, Colonel Inácio de Alvarenga Peixoto, Lieutenant‑Colonel Francisco de Paula Freire de Andrade, and José Álvares Maciel were not marginal radicals but central figures of the local establishment. They owned slaves, commanded militias, administered justice, and speculated in tax farms; they also read Raynal, studied at Coimbra, trafficked in Atlantic news, and debated the American constitutions contained in the Recueil.​

Within this circle, the Recueil served as both source and provocation. The constitution of Pennsylvania, in its French translation, loomed particularly large, not because the conspirators fully understood its context or subsequent revision, but because in that text they perceived a radical redefinition of power: a single‑chamber legislature, strict limits on executive authority, and a strong emphasis on popular sovereignty. The book notes that the Minas conspirators “imagined a Constitutional Republic on the North American model,” taking the Pennsylvania constitution, filtered through Franklin’s propagandistic framing and French misinterpretation—as a template for their own institutional design.​

Crucially, the surviving annotated copy of the Recueil in Ouro Preto’s Museu da Inconfidência allows the historian to watch this process of localization almost in real time. Ink and pencil notes, likely by Gonzaga and perhaps by others, highlight precisely the issues that mattered most in Minas: legal procedure, penal law, trial by peers, property rights, the subordination of the military to civil authority, electoral mechanisms, and the limits of executive power. The annotations around slavery and the role of enslaved people in the projected republic are especially revealing, capturing intense discussion over whether emancipation was feasible or desirable in an economy built on coerced labor.​

The conspirators’ institutional imagination, as reconstructed from these marginalia and from the devassa interrogations, thus emerges as neither a slavish copy of American forms nor an abstract utopianism. It is a pragmatic exercise in constitutional translation: how to graft the perceived strengths of North American republicanism onto the social and economic realities of a slave‑holding mining province under Portuguese fiscal strain. The result is an “imagined Brazilian constitutional republic” that was never realized but powerfully demonstrates how globalized ideas of liberty and representation were recast at the periphery.​

One of the book’s strongest contributions is to show that the globalization of revolutionary ideas in the eighteenth century was deeply constrained by the structures of slavery and racial hierarchy that underpinned Atlantic prosperity. The same men who pored over the Recueil in Minas Gerais were substantial slave owners: Joaquim Silvério dos Reis with over 200 slaves, Alvarenga Peixoto with 132, Cláudio Manuel da Costa with 31, Padre Toledo with 32, and even Tiradentes with a small number of enslaved people. In Minas, as in Virginia, any talk of liberty immediately collided with the material reality of coerced plantation and mining labor.​

The book juxtaposes Jefferson’s and José Bonifácio’s contrasting racial imaginaries to highlight how the American and Brazilian branches of this Atlantic conversation diverged on the question of miscegenation and emancipation. Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia and in his legislative proposals, envisioned a white republic purified of racial mixture and advocated the removal of freed blacks beyond “the reach of mixture.” Bonifácio, by contrast, argued in the 1820s for gradual abolition and racial amalgamation as the foundation of a future Brazilian nation, warning that without confronting slavery Brazil would become a “New China” dominated by a degraded laboring mass.​

Yet in both cases, economic imperatives overwhelmed emancipatory projects. In the early nineteenth century, cotton became “king” in the American South, boosted by Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and the rapid expansion of slave‑powered agriculture into newly opened western lands, while coffee boomed in Brazil’s Paraíba Valley and beyond, drawing in over two million enslaved Africans between 1801 and 1850. The book underscores that slavery in the United States ended only after a bloody civil war in the 1860s, and in Brazil only with the Lei Áurea of 1888, long after the Age of Revolutions.​

Benjamin Franklin’s late‑life abolitionism and his 1790 petition to the first US Congress symbolize both the reach and the limits of revolutionary universalism. As president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin asked Congress to remove “this inconsistency from the character of the American people” and to use its powers to restrain the slave trade and promote general emancipation. The hostile response in Congress where southern representatives invoked scripture, property rights, and constitutional constraints shows that even within the United States, the globalization of egalitarian principles was checked by entrenched economic and racial interests. In Brazil, José Bonifácio’s proposals within the 1823–24 Constituent Assembly met a similar fate, leading to his political marginalization and exile.​

The book thereby complicates any simple narrative that American constitutionalism, once exported, automatically produced more just societies abroad. Instead, it reveals an uneven globalization, in which doctrines of rights and representation traveled rapidly and provocatively, but their application to enslaved and non‑white populations remained fiercely contested and often deferred.​

A striking dimension of this story is how thoroughly the Portuguese authorities sought to contain and erase the Minas conspiracy and, with it, the tangible traces of eighteenth‑century ideological globalization. In 1789–90 two secret judicial inquiries (devassas) were conducted in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, followed by a special visiting tribunal (Alçada) sent from Lisbon in 1791 to re‑interrogate the prisoners and finalize sentences. The aim was not just to punish but to prevent knowledge of the conspiracy from spreading, especially at a moment when European attention was fixed on the unfolding French Revolution.​

The visconde de Barbacena, an enlightened figure shaped by the same Coimbra reforms as some conspirators, simultaneously resisted the draconian derrama that had catalyzed the revolt and cooperated in its repression once it was exposed. Tiradentes was executed in exemplary fashion, hanged, quartered, his head displayed in Vila Rica and body parts distributed at key road junctions, while other leaders were imprisoned, exiled to Africa, or confined in Portugal, their property confiscated. The Recueil itself disappeared into archival obscurity, its presence in the conspiracy remembered only in devassa testimonies and a partial early‑twentieth‑century transcription before the Ouro Preto copy was firmly identified and studied in detail.​

This suppression underscores another dimension of globalization: imperial states attempted to firewall their domains against the spread of dangerous precedents. Portugal in the 1780s and 1790s worried not only about American and French influences but about Haiti, where the revolution in Saint‑Domingue would soon transform a French slave colony into an independent Black republic. The book briefly traces those events, stressing how the same Atlantic circuits that carried constitutional blueprints also facilitated the movement of enslaved people, revolutionary rumors, and plantation anxieties.​

Yet despite these efforts at erasure, the Minas project persisted as a memory and eventually as a site of official commemoration. With the publication of the full Autos da Devassa in the late twentieth century, the recovery of the annotated Recueil, and the transformation of Tiradentes into a national martyr, the “imagined republic” of 1789 reentered Brazilian political culture as a foundational, if failed, moment in the country’s long struggle to construct a constitutional order. The book situates this historiographical rediscovery itself as part of a continuing global circulation of ideas, with scholars moving between Brazilian, Portuguese, European, and North American archives and institutions.​

Taken together, the episodes reconstructed in the book show that eighteenth‑century globalization of ideas was less a story of linear diffusion than of ceaseless translation, misrecognition, and adaptation. The American Revolution generated texts and practices that were read in France through the lens of Enlightenment and monarchical rivalry, repackaged in the Recueil under Franklin’s patronage, and then appropriated often via mistranslation by Brazilian conspirators who saw in them both a model of successful colonial revolt and a repertoire of institutional tools.​

These ideas did not arrive in Brazil as pure theory. They arrived in the luggage of students and merchants, in the marginalia of books, in whispered reports of meetings in Nîmes, in discussions in Coimbra lecture halls and Birmingham workshops, and in the calculations of men who balanced republican aspirations against the profits and hierarchies of a slave society. The resulting “globalization” was therefore uneven and partial: constitutionalism, representation, and anti‑colonialism traveled far and fast, but the promise of universal liberty remained compromised by race and labor across the Atlantic world.​

By placing the Minas conspiracy, the Recueil, and the Brazilian students at the center rather than the margins of the story, the book reframes the Age of Revolutions as a genuinely Atlantic and in important respects global phenomenon. It asks readers to see the American Revolution not as a self‑contained national event, but as a catalyst in a wider reconfiguration of empires, economies, and political imagination whose reverberations reached from Versailles to Vila Rica, from Birmingham’s manufactories to Rio’s slave markets, and from the archives of Lisbon and Chicago to contemporary debates over memory and nationhood.

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