The midterm is an open-book, open-note take-home essay exam. Your essay should be approximately eight pages in length (typed, double-spaced, reasonable font and margins). Do not forget page numbering.
In formulating your answer, you may consult outside reading, classmates, and the professor. However, your written essay must reflect your own ideas, written in your own words.
The midterm is due at the beginning of the lecture period on March 28, 2006.
You are requested to sign, in your own hand, the Honor Pledge on the essay.
1888-1889: Continuity over Change?
In analyzing the historical significance of the events of 1888-1889, historian Emília Viotti da Costa characterizes the abolition of slavery, made definitive on May 13, 1888, as a significant event in course of Brazilian history -- "a stage in the process of the liquidation of Brazil's colonial structures." Viotti da Costa, nevertheless, maintains that "it [abolition] did not, however, mean a definitive break with the past." The "rationalization of production methods," she continued, "the improvement of living standards of rural workers, and the struggle against racial discrimination" remained unfinished historical projects --legacies of the enduring colonial system. [ The Brazilian Empire, p. 171]
Viotti da Costa casts the Proclamation of the Republic in somewhat similar terms -- as a hiccup among larger patterns of continuity over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "1889," wrote da Costa "did not mark a significant break in the Brazilian historical process. The urban middle classes and emerging proletariat were not strong enough to undermine the power of the new rural oligarchies during the First Republic [1889-1930]...November 15 was thus a journée des dupes [figuratively: a day of false hopes] for all the other social groups who had hoped that the republic would represent a break with tradition." [ The Brazilian Empire, p. 233]
Viotti da Costa's pessimism notwithstanding, the abolition of slavery and the Proclamation of the Republic represented significant and new developments in Brazilian history. Over the span of eighteen months, two, centuries-old pillars of Luso-Brazilian society - slavery and the Bragança monarchy--collapsed, never to return. A vast American colony populated by subjects of the Portuguese empire had become transformed into a nation of citizens of an independent republic. Constitutionalism had emerged from an idea to become political practice. Slavery--the former lifeblood of the colonial economy--had been ended, to be replaced by a labor market of free-wage labor. Older forms of social stratification based upon place or birth, race, and birth status became, in theory, illegal. The political class was elective rather than hereditary. The Brazil that D. Pedro II departed in mid-November 1889, was hardly the same as the Brazil first encountered by his grandparents in January 1808.
Based upon a critical reading of the assigned readings, substantiate an argument that engages Viotti da Costa's assertion that the events of 1888-1889 represented continuity over change.
Your essay should establish the basic chronological sequence of events for 1888-1889, and most particularly the events surrounding summary emancipation without compensation and the overthrow of the monarchy. The essay should identify key social actors, important economic developments, and influential cultural trends significant to understanding this brief period. It should engage historiographic debate about the destruction of slavery and the growing weakness of the empire . And, most importantly, the essay should make an argument about the significance of May 13, 1888 and November 15, 1889 within the larger context of historical change in nineteenth-century Brazilian society, from its slave-society, colonial status of 1808 to the free-wage Republic of late 1889.
Needless to say, this midterm requires that you draw heavily upon the assigned readings.
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