Empire of Exceptions: The Making of Modern Brazil
Brazil may be one of the 21st century’s emerging superpowers, but its independence from Portugal was not inevitable, nor was its survival certain.
![A European woman being carried in a sedan chair through Rio de Janeiro, by Paolo Fumagalli, c. 1821. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain. A European woman being carried in a sedan chair through Rio de Janeiro, by Paolo Fumagalli, c. 1821. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.](/sites/default/files/2024-09/brazil_independence_history_today.jpg)
The Age of Revolutions largely bypassed the Portuguese empire. By 1783 Britain’s 13 North American colonies had broken definitively with the mother country; France’s wealthy, sugar-producing stronghold of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) descended into political turmoil in 1791; even Spanish America was engulfed by civil unrest after 1808, the year in which Napoleon’s armies flooded across the Pyrenees and occupied Spain.