Concepts of war and peace in Independence Brazil: approaching the sources

• Grant number: 23/05692-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): July 01, 2023
• Effective date (End): June 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: João Paulo Garrido Pimenta
• Grantee: Davi Perides Roizman
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

One of the most conventional forms of remembering the history of Brazilian Independence conveys that the rupture between Brazil and the Portuguese Empire was fundamentally singular in comparison to the hispanic Independences, because, in contrast to these, that would have transformed the political order in a peaceful and harmonic manner, maintaining social order based on slavery, the monarchy and the territorial unity. Composed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this myth of a non-violent Independence, which, since the 1960s, part of the specialized historiography has been combatting, contributed to the creation of a colective identity according to which Brazil would be, in its supposed national essence, a peaceful country. This research aims to practice initial grounds of historical research having, as a pretext, the creation of conditions for a study of this question; more precisely, of the uses of the concepts relative to war and peace in the process of Brazilian IIndependence.The goal is to map and organize mentions of these concepts in political pamphlets that circulated in Brazil between 1820 and 1823, in which was expressed a significant amount of the public debate opened by the Port Revolution about the political future of the portuguese nation. The research is associated with the problems discussed by the international group "Concepts of Peace in the Revolutionary Atlantic (1780-1848)", that aims to investigate semantic changes of concepts of peace in the so-called Age of Revolutions. The theoretical and methodological basis for this especific Scientific Initiation research lies on the postulates developed by Reinhart Koselleck's History of Concepts, to whom every political and social concept contains multiple meanings, overlapped in different sediments of time, but that can only be fully understood in light of the political and social challenges that they problematized and to which they responded.