CIAO DATE: 10/2008
March 2008
Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Before 1807, in Portugal the new liberal ideals had mainly an indirect influence, reflected in the enlightened elite. The wave of a more profound political change came about only in the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the whole Iberian area was involved in the European wide struggle between old regime and the new liberal society and state, that was enhanced by the Napoleonic wars. Between 1807 and 1820, Portugal went through one of the most complex period of its whole History, when the British informal occupation of twelve years, followed the French invasion, short but very destructive. The Crown survived in the hands of the House of Bragança and kept Brazil and the rest of the its colonial territories for over a decade. This makes the Portuguese and Brazilian history of this period somewhat different from that of both Spain and its American colonies. It provides an interesting case for the study of the evolution of three main institutions and political concepts involved in the end of the Old Regime: the Crown, the Empire and the Nation, whose changes during this period are analysed in this paper..
The paper was presented at the conference on The End of the Old Regime in the Iberian World sponsored by the Spanish Studies Program and the Portuguese Studies Program of UC Berkeley on February 8-9, 2008.
Resource link: Crown, Empire and Nation (1807-1834) [PDF] - 151K