Ken Maxwell’s book on 18th Century Globalization argues that the American Revolution did far more than create a new nation; it ignited an eighteenth‑century globalization of political ideas that linked Philadelphia, Paris, Lisbon, and the mining towns of Minas Gerais in Brazil into a single, contested revolutionary space.
At the center of the narrative is the Recueil des Loix Constitutives des Colonies Angloises, a French collection of American constitutional texts that began life as Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic propaganda tool at Versailles but was later transformed through pirated editions, mistranslation, and creative reading into a revolutionary handbook for Brazilian conspirators in 1789.
Treating the Minas Conspiracy as a serious republican project rather than a provincial footnote, the book shows how Brazilian elites used the Recueil to imagine a Pennsylvania‑style constitutional republic in the heart of the Portuguese empire.
Drawing on the annotated copy of the Recueil preserved at Ouro Preto and on the massive judicial records of the secret devassas, the author reconstructs the intellectual and social world of Minas Gerais as a “society of thought,” where magistrates, priests, poets, militia officers, and students debated North American constitutions alongside Raynal, industrial techniques from Birmingham, and news from Saint‑Domingue. Figures such as Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, José Joaquim Maia, José Álvares Maciel, and Tiradentes appear as mediators in complex transatlantic networks that moved books, people, and rumors faster than imperial authorities could control.
The story reveals how ideas of liberty and self‑government were always translated into French, into Portuguese, into local political idioms and how productive misreadings of American constitutionalism made new futures imaginable at the periphery.
Yet the book insists that this globalization of revolutionary ideals unfolded within, and was ultimately constrained by, slave societies in both the United States and Brazil. By juxtaposing Jefferson’s white republicanism with José Bonifácio’s vision of a racially mixed Brazilian nation, and by detailing the slave‑owning realities of the Minas conspirators, it exposes the profound contradictions between universalist rhetoric and the economic centrality of slavery from Virginia to Minas to the coffee and cotton booms of the nineteenth century.
The suppression and long afterlife of the Minas Conspiracy—its attempted erasure, later archival recovery, and eventual canonization through Tiradentes Day—allow the book to recast the Age of Revolutions as genuinely Atlantic: an uneven, conflict‑ridden globalization in which constitutional blueprints, racial hierarchies, and anti‑colonial dreams moved together across an oceanic world.
18th Century Globalization: The American Revolutionary Ideal Comes to Brazil