070181 KU A Political and Cultural History of Brazil, 1500-1889 (2007W)

The course will give an overview of the political and cultural history of Portuguese America from the discovery to the end of the Brazilian Empire. We will discuss the colonial experience of Portugal in the New World in contrast to the Spanish and British Empires in America, we will have a look at the French and Dutch encounters with Portugal in Brazil, we look at the changes brought about with the discovery of gold and the creation of a Baroque culture, and we are dealing with the independence from Portugal and the creation of a Brazilian Empire in 1822. In this course we will try to investigate how "unique", even "exceptional" the Brazilian case actually was, given the fact that the country received more African slaves than any other part of the Western hemisphere, that it established independence rather smoothly compared to Spanish America, and that the country kept its monarchical regime until 1889, longer than any other independent nation in the Americas.