By Robbin Laird
The 2025 publications in the Portugal and Brazil Confront the Contemporary World series represent a pivotal consolidation of an ambitious intellectual endeavor, one that repositions Portuguese and Brazilian historical experiences as central rather than peripheral to understanding global modernity.
Three substantial volumes appearing this year demonstrate how historically grounded scholarship can illuminate contemporary global disorder while challenging hierarchies that privilege Anglo-American perspectives. Mentality, Economy, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro by Ernst Pijning, Perspectives on Portuguese History: The 2024 Lectures by Professor Kenneth Maxwell, and Three Cities: The Rebuilding of London, Paris, and Lisbon together construct a portrait of Lusophone worlds as laboratories of modernity and democratic innovation.
Contraband as a Window into Colonial Governance
Ernst Pijning’s Mentality, Economy, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro provides the series with its deepest archival dive into colonial Brazil. Pijning, a professor at Minot State University with a Johns Hopkins doctorate, examines contraband trade not as criminal deviance but as fundamental to understanding imperial governance during Brazil’s emergence as the world’s largest gold and diamond producer.
The book’s provocation is methodological: rather than quantifying smuggled goods, Pijning focuses on “the capacity to control the flow of legal and illegal commerce” as negotiated among foreign diplomats, the Crown, administrators, and merchants. This transforms contraband from fraud against the fisc into a window onto colonial governance, international relations, and social structure.
The Portuguese Crown emerges not as monolithic enforcer but as pragmatic negotiator, selling administrative positions, creating overlapping jurisdictions, and deploying anti-contraband rhetoric while condoning selective violations. Prosecution patterns fluctuated with the Crown’s regulatory capacity, which had largely collapsed by 1808 when the court transferred to Rio.
This analysis resonates through the series by establishing patterns of negotiated illegality, gray zones where formal rules confront practical accommodations, connecting to contemporary debates over globalized flows that evade or redefine state control. By situating contraband within colonial mentality and economy, Pijning underscores that understanding the present requires attention to how formal and informal orders have always coexisted, particularly in peripheral spaces.
The inclusion of Pijning’s scholarship signals the series’ openness to collaborative work extending beyond Maxwell’s research. His eighteenth-century focus aligns with Maxwell’s core specialization, reinforcing the claim that long-duration knowledge of early modern empire provides essential tools for interpreting twenty-first-century disorder.
Maxwell’s 2024 Lectures: Revolution, Reconstruction, and Democratic Memory
Perspectives on Portuguese History represents the most politically engaged 2025 volume. Anchored by three lectures delivered in 2024, at São Paulo, Harvard, and a Lisbon conference marking the Carnation Revolution’s fiftieth anniversary, the book positions Maxwell as both scholar and participant in debates over Portuguese democratic memory, decolonization, and international significance.
The volume’s bilingual architecture embodies the series’ commitment to transatlantic dialogue: each lecture appears in English followed by Portuguese translation, ensuring accessibility to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. This structural choice reflects a deeper intellectual stance. The series rejects assumptions that serious historical work must privilege Anglophone readers, instead treating Portuguese as a language of equal scholarly importance and addressing a genuinely transatlantic public concerned with Lusophone histories and their global implications.
The São Paulo lecture examines the revolution’s international dimensions, arguing that the Estado Novo’s overthrow and Portuguese Africa’s rapid decolonization were not isolated national events but integral to wider reconfiguration of Cold War alignments and North-South relations. Maxwell’s analysis positions 1974 Portugal as a geopolitical hinge connecting European democratic transitions, African liberation movements, and shifting patterns of U.S. and Soviet influence. This framing challenges narratives treating Portuguese decolonization as belated epilogue to mid-century independence movements, instead highlighting how Portugal’s particular trajectory—democratic revolution at home coupled with decolonization abroad—created distinctive conditions for negotiating empire’s end.
The Harvard lecture reprises themes from Maxwell’s work on urban catastrophe and reconstruction, linking Lisbon’s rebuilding after the 1755 earthquake to broader questions about how societies respond to crisis. This lecture anticipates and connects directly to Three Cities, establishing conceptual bridges between volumes and underscoring the series’ insistence that Portugal’s experiences of catastrophe, renewal, and state-driven modernization place it within the mainstream of European modernity rather than at its margins.
A particularly important feature is inclusion of a 1964 essay written a decade before the Carnation Revolution. This earlier piece provides baseline portrait of Portugal under the Estado Novo, offering contemporary readers insight into how the country appeared before dramatic transformation. The essay functions as time capsule, preserving perceptions and judgments formed in real time rather than with hindsight of democratic consolidation. This methodological choice aligns with the series’ broader preference for preserving historical contingency’s texture—how options appeared as they were contested, before outcomes solidified into conventional wisdom.
Carlos Gaspar’s foreword adds crucial context, positioning Maxwell within Portuguese intellectual and political life. Gaspar, senior researcher at IPRI-NOVA and political adviser to three Portuguese presidents, identifies Maxwell as “doyen of historians of the revolution, decolonization and Portuguese democracy,” emphasizing that Maxwell’s scholarship consistently treats Portugal not as minor case study but as privileged site for understanding democratic transitions, decolonization processes, and broader dynamics of late twentieth-century political change. Gaspar’s characterization of the 1974 revolution as “the first democratic revolution of the 20th century” in Europe underscores the volume’s central claim: Portuguese experiences anticipate and illuminate patterns that would later unfold elsewhere, rather than following belatedly in developments centered in London, Paris, or Washington.
The volume’s invocation of E.H. Carr, that “facts without their historian are dead and meaningless”, encapsulates the series’ philosophy. Historical interpretation is not academic exercise detached from contemporary politics but essential process through which events remain alive within public memory and continue shaping political debate. By assembling lectures delivered across three continents to mark commemorative occasions, the book demonstrates how Maxwell functions as public intellectual whose scholarship actively participates in constructing and contesting collective memory of transformative moments.
Three Cities and the Comparative Architecture of Modernity
Three Cities: The Rebuilding of London, Paris, and Lisbon represents the series’ most ambitious comparative project, using urban reconstruction as a lens for understanding European modernity’s political and intellectual foundations. Written by Maxwell and edited by Robbin Laird, the book originated in a Harvard lecture and expanded into a trilingual volume with English, French, and Portuguese versions alongside extensive visual documentation.
The tripartite structure examines London after the 1666 Great Fire, Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake and tsunami, and Paris during Second Empire transformations under Napoleon III and Haussmann. Each case explores how catastrophe created openings for reimagining space, how regimes mobilized resources, and how resulting fabric embodied configurations of state power and social control.
London’s narrative focuses on Wren’s frustrated redesign ambitions. Despite visionary schemes for rational, piazza-based planning modeled on Italian precedents, deeply entrenched property ownership patterns, fiscal constraints of a monarchy preoccupied with Anglo-Dutch wars, and the immediate pressures of rebuilding prevented radical restructuring. The city retained its medieval street pattern while mandated brick-and-stone construction, the building of St. Paul’s Cathedral and scores of new churches, and the rise of institutions like the Royal Society, the Bank of England, and trading companies fundamentally altered London’s fabric and position within an expanding maritime empire. The London case establishes a template: catastrophe as potential opening for transformation, yet constrained by existing power structures and economic realities.
Lisbon provides the clearest example of catastrophe enabling state-directed urbanism. The 1755 earthquake and tsunami, at least three times Krakatoa’s power and the most devastating seismic event in European historical memory, obliterated the royal palace, the Casa da Índia, religious centers, and mercantile waterfront, killing tens of thousands. Under the leadership of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the future Marquês de Pombal, and with technical expertise of Manuel da Maia, Eugénio dos Santos, and Carlos Mardel, central Lisbon was not restored but reinvented: the rigidly gridded Baixa district, anchored by the new Praça do Comércio, used pioneering gaiola timber-cage construction for seismic resilience. Reconstruction debates became sites for larger conflicts between Enlightenment rationalism and traditional religious authority, embodied in clashes between the Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida, who interpreted the earthquake as divine punishment, and physicians like António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, who advocated secular approaches to public health and urban hygiene. Pombal’s Lisbon exemplifies catastrophe enabling comprehensive state-led modernization, with the physical city serving as material expression of Enlightenment principles applied to governance, planning, and social order.
Paris represents political rather than natural crisis as driver of transformation. The volume treats mid-nineteenth-century Paris as a city perceived in crisis due to congestion, insurrection risk, and infrastructural inadequacy. Napoleon III’s regime, executed through Haussmann’s 1853-1870 prefecture, used boulevards, star-shaped intersections like the Place de l’Étoile, integrated sewer and gas-lighting systems, and standardized building façades to reshape three-quarters of the urban fabric within two decades, synthesizing private capital mobilization, state coercion through expropriation, and aesthetic regulation for both spectacle and social control—facilitating military movement to suppress unrest while projecting imperial grandeur.
The book carefully tracks how reconstruction projects were embedded in larger economic and political contexts: London’s expansion tied to Atlantic trade and early financial capitalism; Lisbon’s renewal funded by Brazilian gold and driven by mercantilist state ambitions; Paris’s boulevards financed through speculative real estate and serving authoritarian consolidation. Physical redesign becomes legible as both cause and consequence of broader transformations in state capacity, economic organization, and social relations.
What marks Three Cities as integral to the series is its repositioning of Lisbon within European comparative frameworks typically defaulting to London-Paris axes, challenging hierarchies treating Portuguese experiences as peripheral. Multilingual presentation reinforces this at the level of form, refusing to privilege any single linguistic perspective. Extensive visual documentation, maps, engravings, photographs, tracks transitions from pre-disaster fabrics to reconstructed landscapes, transforming the book into a multimedia exploration of how cities materialize political visions and preserve historical memory in physical structures. A podcast-style epilogue democratizes engagement with resilience and planning questions, inviting broader audiences to consider relationships between crisis and opportunity.
Consolidating a Transatlantic Intellectual Vision
The three 2025 volumes anchor the series in crucial ways. They establish historical depth from colonial Rio through Enlightenment Lisbon to twentieth-century revolution, creating a chronological arc positioning contemporary disorder as the latest chapter in Luso-Brazilian engagement with modernity’s core dilemmas.
They demonstrate methodological diversity within coherent frameworks: Pijning’s monograph, Maxwell’s lectures, and comparative urban history employ different modes yet converge on shared themes—negotiation of formal and informal orders, productive tension between center and periphery, catastrophe enabling transformation, and circulation of ideas across Atlantic spaces.
The volumes argue for Portuguese-Brazilian centrality rather than marginality. Whether examining colonial contraband management, Pombal’s pioneering urban design, or the 1974 revolution inaugurating European democratic transitions, they position Lusophone histories as sites where global patterns were forged and sometimes anticipated—challenging hierarchies treating Portugal and Brazil as late adopters of models developed elsewhere.
They embody commitment to bilingual production and transatlantic dialogue. Portuguese translations, trilingual presentation, and publications across multiple languages signal refusal to accept English dominance, reflecting that Lusophone worlds constitute autonomous knowledge production sites.
Finally, the books engage public memory and contemporary politics. Perspectives directly addresses Carnation Revolution commemoration. Three Cities connects historical catastrophes to current resilience conversations. Even Pijning’s contraband study speaks to governing globalized flows and legal gray zones. Historical scholarship becomes essential equipment for confronting present challenges rather than antiquarian retreat.
A Series in Formation
With these 2025 publications, Portugal and Brazil Confront the Contemporary World has moved from promising project to realized body of work with clear identity. The volumes establish core commitments: historical depth interpreting the present, peripheral spaces as modernity’s laboratories, attention to negotiation between rules and accommodations, bilingual engagement, and insistence that Lusophone experiences illuminate rather than merely illustrate global patterns.
These books serve as foundational references. Pijning’s study models how archival work reveals governance foundations. Maxwell’s lectures demonstrate engaged public intellectual work bridging rigor and commemoration. Three Cities establishes comparative methods for examining catastrophe, power, and urban design across contexts.
Together, they invite reconsideration of Portugal and Brazil’s position within global narratives.
The series argues through detailed cases and synthetic essays that these “peripheral” Atlantic worlds have been central to making the modern international order, and that understanding how they confront the contemporary world offers crucial insights for all societies navigating tensions between past and present, continuity and rupture, order and disorder.
The 2025 books represent consolidation, establishing foundations and methodological templates for future volumes while demonstrating that Lusophone historical experience, examined with appropriate seriousness, has much to teach about the trajectories shaping our world.
Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
Perspectives on Portuguese History: The 2024 Lectures by Professor Kenneth Maxwell
The Tale of Three Cities: The Rebuilding of London, Paris, and Lisbon