ABSTRACT
In 1822, reflecting upon the thirteen years of Dom João’s reign in Brazil, one anonymous critic concluded that the “invasion of the French in Portugal, and the consequent transfer of the Portuguese throne to Brazil, necessarily had to produce a revolution in the political and commercial system of the European and American continents. Whether this revolution was to be fortuitous or fatal for the Portuguese monarchy,” he then explained, “depended entirely on the good or bad regime that the government adopted.” 1 It was not, in other words, the transfer of the court itself but rather what happened in its wake—the ways in which the relocation of the court in Brazil was defined—that shaped the political and economic future of Portuguese on both sides of the Atlantic. More than in the royal family’s departure from Lisbon, it was in the local and transatlantic politics of monarchy and empire in the 1810s that the Portuguese monarch’s vassals saw obstacles to their fortune to be defeated and opportunities for transformation to be seized.
