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Rebellion on the Amazon

Rebellion on the Amazon

Rebellion on the Amazon

The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798–1840
Mark Harris, University of St Andrews, Scotland
November 2010
Available
Hardback
9780521437233
£109.00
GBP
Hardback

    The Brazilian Amazon experienced, in the late 1830s, one of Brazil's largest peasant and urban-poor insurrections, known as the Cabanagem. Uniquely, rebels succeeded in controlling provincial government and town councils for more than a year. In this first book-length study in English, the rebellion is placed in the context of late colonial and early national society and economy. It compares the Cabanagem with contemporaneous Latin American peasant rebellions and challenges to centralized authority in Brazil. Using unpublished documentation, it reveals - contrary to other studies - that insurgents were not seeking revolutionary change or separation from the rest of Brazil. Rather, rebels wanted to promote their vision of a newly independent nation and an end to exploitation by a distant power. The Cabanagem is critical to understanding why the Amazon came to be perceived as a land without history.

    • First book length study in English of the Cabanagem, combining anthropological and historical approaches
    • Makes use of a wide range of archival material in Brazil and Europe
    • Illustrated with contemporary images

    Product details

    November 2010
    Hardback
    9780521437233
    352 pages
    235 × 160 × 26 mm
    0.61kg
    22 b/w illus. 4 maps 7 tables
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: divergent Amazonia
    • 1. Pará in the age of revolution, history, and historiography
    • 2. Life on the river
    • 3. The family and its means in the lower Amazon
    • 4. Some of the origins of peasant rebellion and the agrarian sector
    • 5. Forms of resistance in the late colonial period
    • 6. Independence, liberalism, and changing social and racial relations, 1820–1835
    • 7. The United Brazilian Encampment at Ecuipiranga, 1833–1837
    • 8. 'Vengeance on innocence': the repression and continuing rebellion, 1836–1840
    • Conclusion: the making of the Brazilian Amazon.
      Author
    • Mark Harris , University of St Andrews, Scotland

      Mark Harris is based at the University of St Andrews. He was awarded a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, 1996–1999, and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2004. He is the author of Life on the Amazon: The Anthropology of a Brazilian Peasant Village (2000), editor of Ways of Knowing (2007), and co-editor (with Stephen Nugent) of Some Other Amazonians (2006). He has also taught at the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, and the London School of Economics.