Introduction
Why Brazil? An autobiographical fragment*

I have been frequently asked over the years how – from the most unlikely of backgrounds – I became a historian of Brazil and how I came to devote the greater part of my academic career to the promotion and development of Brazilian studies in the UK (and, to a lesser extent, in the US).

I was born in Leeds in the north of England in 1937. I spent my entire childhood in Hunslet, a grim working-class neighbourhood in south Leeds dominated by heavy industry. My paternal grandfather was a steelworker, my maternal grandfather a coalminer. My father was a welder/boilermaker at the Hunslet Engine company, which manufactured steam-powered railway locomotives (some of which were exported to South America, but not, as far as I know, to Brazil). My mother was a housewife and a dinner-lady at Hunslet Moor, the local primary school, which I attended until I was 11. I had a sister, Linda, four years younger. We lived in what was called a back-to-back terrace house with no bathroom and an outside lavatory, in a cobbled street crossed by washing lines.

I failed the entrance exam for Leeds Grammar school and instead went to Cockburn High school, the local secondary modern school (which had in the recent past been a grammar school).¹ I managed to reach the sixth form and had the good fortune to be taught by an outstanding history teacher who persuaded me that I should read history at university. The headmaster suggested that I should try for a scholarship to Cambridge, which would have been a first for the school. I rejected this on the grounds that I was not sufficiently prepared and in any case Cambridge was too ‘posh’ for a working class boy like me. I opted instead to go to London, and applied to University College London (UCL). After being interviewed (unthinkable these days) by a committee of three chaired by Alfred Cobban, the great British historian of the French Revolution, I was offered a place in the department of history. Looking back, this is surprising. At that time only five per cent of 18 year olds went to university. I had attended neither a public school nor a grammar school. My parents were totally supportive, but relatively poor and uneducated. I cannot remember ever seeing a book in the house. For books I went to the Hunslet public library.

University College London had a distinguished department of history: Sir John Neale, Alfred Cobban, Arnaldo Momigliano, Joel Hurstfield, G.W.S. Barrow, F.M.L. Thompson, I.R. Christie, etc. The first-year intake was 30 students and ‘freshers’ were divided into groups of four or five and taught by the senior professors in what were called ‘essay classes’. In my first week I was allocated to R.A. (Robin) Humphreys, who was the only professor of Latin American history in Great Britain, indeed in Europe, I think.² I wrote half a dozen essays for him on Latin American topics, which sadly I cannot recall, during my first term at UCL. And I was sufficiently engaged to take as my ‘optional subject’ in my second year Humphreys’ course ‘The history of Latin America since independence’ and as my ‘special subject’ in the second and third years Humphreys’ course on ‘The Independence of Latin America, 1808–1826’, which required me to learn Spanish and which introduced me to printed primary sources as well as the secondary literature. I was becoming a ‘Latin Americanist’.

I was fortunate to get a first class degree, relatively rare in those days and one of only four in history in the entire federal University of London. As a result I was offered a scholarship to do research for a PhD at UCL. Two potential supervisors approached me: Tom Reddaway, professor of London history, suggested I might like to study the history of the sewers of Marylebone in the 19th century, and Robin Humphreys proposed that I might think about a topic linking the history of Africa with the history of either Cuba or Brazil. It took me ten seconds to decide. I don’t recollect why in the end I chose Africa and Brazil rather than Africa and Cuba. It was 1958. If it had been 1959 I would have undoubtedly chosen Cuba. And my entire career (and my life) would have been completely different.

I was no doubt influenced in my decision by the strong links which had existed between Britain and Brazil in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Travel funds for research outside the UK were extremely rare and it was important to choose a research topic for which there would be adequate British sources available. I finally decided to explore the decisive role played by Britain in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil during the first half of the 19th century. It meant that I would, of course, have to learn Portuguese. I was on my way to becoming a ‘Brazilianist’.

At the end of my second year of research, thanks as in all things to the support of my supervisor Robin Humphreys, I was able to go to Brazil for the first time – for three months (July–September 1960). I travelled by ship, third class, steerage, with Spanish and Portuguese immigrants picked up in Vigo and Lisbon respectively. Fifteen days at sea – a truly horrible experience. But my arrival, past the Sugar Loaf mountain into Guanabara Bay and Rio de Janeiro, the most beautiful city in the world, in its physical setting at least, was unforgettable. On disembarking, the first thing I saw was a banner announcing Jânio vem aí [Here comes Jânio]. I had arrived in the middle of the presidential election campaign which was won in October by Jânio Quadros, the enigmatic and erratic populist former mayor of the city of São Paulo and governor of São Paulo state. His resignation after only seven months in office initiated a period of political crisis which culminated in the military coup of March/April 1964 and the end of Brazil’s post-war Liberal Republic (1946–64).

I took with me to Brazil a letter of introduction from Robin Humphreys to José Honório Rodrígues, one of Brazil’s leading historians, a former director of the National Library and director of the National Archive at the time. I presented myself at his apartment in Leblon. Four things surprised (and impressed) me: first, the door was opened by a black empregada [female domestic servant]; secondly, she told me o professor was on the beach; thirdly, I found o professor on the beach playing football; fourthly, he immediately invited me to a dinner for prominent politicians and intellectuals at his home that evening. I had entered another world. It was a long way from Hunslet and, for that matter, Bloomsbury. There was a tropical storm during dinner and as I was leaving Jose Honório’s wife Lêda offered me an umbrella. She claimed (and she loved to tell this story) that I replied: ‘I come from the working class in the North of England, my father is a factory worker, and I am a member of the British Labour Party. I don’t use an umbrella’. I can’t believe I really said that.

José Honório was the non-official orientador [supervisor] and intellectual inspiration of the first generation of US brasilianistas, young professors and post-graduate students mainly from the United States researching on the history of Brazil: Stanley Stein was the first, followed by E. Bradford Burns, Thomas Skidmore, John Wirth, Richard Graham, Stuart Schwarz, Robert Levine, Stanley Hilton and many others. I was the only English student.

Under José Honório’s guidance I worked on my thesis in the Biblioteca Nacional, the Arquivo Nacional, the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro and the the Arquivo Histórico do Ministério das Relações Exteriores (Itamaraty). José Honório and Lêda became great friends. They came to regard me as the son they never had. I was a frequent visitor to their cobertura [penthouse apartment] in Rua Paul Redfern, Ipanema – and to José Honório’s library of almost 30,000 books. What I knew about Brazil and Brazilian history I mostly learned from him.³

Exploring Rio de Janeiro for the first time and discovering its history and culture was a great pleasure. I found time to travel to Salvador da Bahia and São Paulo. I spent a weekend in Salvador with the great French photographer and ethnographer Pierre Verger, whom I had met in the British Museum (now British Library) and Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, like me researching on the transatlantic slave trade. He had promised to introduce me to the delights of Salvador and apologised for the fact that ‘two boring French friends’ had turned up and insisted in joining us. We drove to the Hotel da Bahia where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were waiting for us. I went to my first Afro-Brazilian candomblé, a memorable experience, in distinguished company. The French couple were travelling in South America after visiting post-revolutionary Cuba. They hated Brazil, and never returned. It was in São Paulo that I met Alan Pryce-Jones, the outgoing editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who recommended me to his successor as a potential contributor. As a result, for more than a decade I regularly reviewed books on a variety of topics for the TLS.

It was on my return to London in October 1960 that I first met Eric Hobsbawm who became a close personal friend, and a great influence on my life. We were both living in Gordon Mansions, Huntley Street, Bloomsbury, close to the university. I was a graduate student in history at University College and a tutor for the London branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Twenty years older than me, Eric was a reader in history at Birkbeck College. His first book, Primitive Rebels, a study of archaic forms of organised social protest, reform and revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries, had just been published, and the Age of Revolution, the first of his four-volume history of the modern world from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War, was about to be published. What impressed me even more at the time, was that he was the jazz critic for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton). He had recently returned from a visit to revolutionary Cuba, and Latin America became and remained one of his principal areas of interest.⁴ Increasingly it was Brazil that most interested him and on which we had endless conversations over the years until his death in 2012.

There were in 1960–1 no posts in Latin American history in British universities for which a postgraduate student could apply. Inconceivable as it must seem today, I was interviewed for, but failed to land, lectureships in early modern English history at the University of Leicester and sociology at the London School of Economics, and was eventually appointed lecturer in European history, with special reference to Germany and the Soviet Union, at the University of Bristol. In October 1961, aged 24, newly married to Valerie Wood, a journalist who also had a degree from UCL (in economics), I moved to Bristol and happily taught there for the following five academic years. After three years I was allowed to add to my teaching a course on modern Latin American history and when I left I was replaced by a US Latin Americanist.

At Bristol I completed my PhD (which was examined in February 1963), and following the strict instructions laid down by Robin Humphreys for establishing the foundations of a successful academic career I submitted articles to leading academic journals – published in the English Historical Review (1965), Journal of African History (1966) and Journal of Latin American Studies (1969) – and prepared my thesis for publication as my first book: The Abolition of Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the slave trade question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge University Press, 1970).⁵ I was a contributor (on Brazil) to the Guide to Manuscript Sources for the History of Latin America and the Caribbean in the British Isles edited by Peter Walne (work on which began in 1961 but which was only finally published in 1973). I also made a second visit to Brazil for three months in the summer of 1965 – again by ship, but this time second class. I found a very different Brazil, one year after the 1964 military coup. The military dictatorship was to last 21 years (1964–85).

In the meantime, as a result of increasing official concern at developments in Latin America in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution and the prevailing ignorance of the region in the UK, the University Grants Committee had established in 1962 a committee under the chairmanship of Sir John Parry to report on the future of Latin American studies in the British universities. The ‘Parry Report’, published early in 1965, recommended the creation of five university institutes or centres of Latin American studies (London, Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool and Glasgow), with a number of ‘named’ posts attached to each. Strictly speaking, I was not appointed to a ‘Parry post’, although this did not prevent me from claiming, like many of my colleagues who were, that I owed my future academic career to Fidel Castro. The Advisory Committee on Latin American Studies at UCL had already endorsed in 1964 a proposal from Robin Humphreys that the College should create a lectureship in Brazilian history.⁶ In order to relieve Robin of some of his duties at UCL when he became (initially part-time) director of the Institute of Latin American Studies (UoL) the university included a lectureship in Latin American history with special reference to Brazil in its submission to the UGC in June 1965. I was offered and accepted the post in October 1965 (without, I should admit, applying for it or being interviewed for it). After some discussion it was felt best to name my post ‘Lecturer in Spanish American and Brazilian History’, but it was clear that my main duty would be to promote the study of Brazilian history. It was the first post dedicated to Brazil in any British university.⁷

I returned to the University of London in April 1966. We lived first in St. Albans, outside London, where my two sons, Ben and Daniel, were born, then Elstree and finally from 1973 to 1979 Canonbury, Islington in north London (coincidentally close to where Robin Humphreys lived for many years). For more than 20 years I taught modern Latin American history, with special reference to Brazil, at UCL as lecturer, reader (from 1974) and finally professor (from 1986). At some stage in the early 1970s I decided to teach a separate course on Brazilian history since 1822. In those days all new courses were vetted by the University of London Board of Studies in History. The course was approved – the first to be offered in a British university. After all, Brazil was the fifth largest country in the world in both territory and population with a rich and distinctive history. However, during my presentation of the new course, Allen Brown, professor of English history at King’s College, who had devoted his entire academic career to the study of the Norman Conquest, was heard to comment: ‘History of Brazil, history of Brazil, next it’ll be the history of Bongo-Bongo Land!’ That’s not something you forget.

At UCL James Cummins, professor of Spanish, was one of my closest friends. And it was through Jim, who spent almost every weekend with him, since his wife, the writer Emily Hahn, lived in New York, that I came to know the great Charles Boxer, former Camões professor of Portuguese at King’s College and pre-eminent historian of Portuguese (and Dutch) overseas expansion in Asia, Africa and, above all, America (Brazil) from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Boxer had a great influence on my decision to focus my own research on Brazil. He once declared that he had never written, and had no intention of ever writing, a word about Brazil after 1800. I replied that I had not written, and had no intention of ever writing, a word about Brazil before 1800.⁸

During my years at UCL I made several visits to Brazil under military rule (1969, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1979, 1982) initially researching for a proposed book on the abolition of slavery in Brazil, a sequel to my book on the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade. In 1979 I was for six months a visiting professor at the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), one of Brazil’s leading social science research centres founded in 1969 as a graduate school of the Universidade Cândido Mendes. IUPERJ gave me my first teaching experience in Brazil and brought me into closer contact with the golden generation of Brazilian political scientists (Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos, Olavo Brasil de Lima Jr, José Murilo de Carvalho, César Guimarães), sociologists (Simon Schwartzman, Renato Boschi) and specialists on Brazil’s international relations (Maria Regina Soares de Lima, Mônica Hirst). At the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC), founded in 1973 as part of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, I met for the first time historians working on contemporary Brazilian history, that is to say, Brazil since 1930 (Celina do Amaral Peixoto, granddaughter of Getúlio Vargas, Aspásia Camargo, Angela Castro Gomes, Alzira Alves de Abreu, Maria Celina Soares d’Araújo, Dulci Chaves Pandolfi – an all-female cast).

The book on the abolition of slavery was never written, in part because I became involved in a major academic project which dominated my life for almost 30 years: the Cambridge History of Latin America. In 1973 I was invited to edit a two-volume History of Latin America by Patricia Skinner (now Patricia Williams), a commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press (CUP), who became one of my closest friends. I agreed on the understanding that I would need three volumes, which over time became five, then eight and finally twelve, plus more than a dozen spin-off ‘Student Editions’ (selections of chapters by period, theme, region and country) and translations into Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Despite a good deal of time devoted to the planning of the project I did not in fact begin sustained work on it until 1979 because of family problems (ending in divorce and a painful separation from my two sons). I remember seeing a private note written by the senior editor at CUP, in 1976, I think, saying that he had come to the conclusion that I would never deliver and that the Press should abandon the project – or at least abandon me. However, the first five volumes of the Cambridge History of Latin America were published in 1984–6: volumes I & II Colonial Latin America; volume III Latin America from Independence to 1870, including my own contributions on the Independence of Brazil and (with José Murilo de Carvalho, with whom I have since collaborated on many projects) Brazil from independence to the middle of the 19th century; volumes IV & V Latin America 1870–1930. I was criticised by some of my colleagues, who called themselves historians of Latin America but worked solely on Spanish America, for giving as much space as I did to the history of Brazil (11 chapters in volumes I & II, three in volume III and three in volume V).

It was through the CHLA that I became a friend of Richard Morse, author of Prospero’s Mirror: a study in New World Dialectic, inspired by José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900) and El mirador de Próspero (1913), which was published in Spanish, El espejo de Próspero (1982), and later in Portuguese, O espelho de Próspero: cultura e ideias nas Américas (1988), but never in the original English. Dick Morse was one of the few US historians of Latin America who knew Brazil as well as Spanish America. We had first met in São Paulo in 1972, and in 1974 Dick invited me to stay with him in Rio de Janeiro in his apartment on Avenida Delfim Moreira overlooking the beach in Leblon. He was at the time on leave from Yale serving as the Ford Foundation’s representative in Brazil. Dick and I spent a good part of that summer drinking and discussing the structure of the proposed History, the volumes, the chapters, potential contributors in the United States, the UK, Europe and especially Latin America (although the Oxford historian Raymond Carr, warden of St Antony’s College, had strongly advised me not to sign up any Latin Americans!). For the next 20 years Dick and I corresponded on all aspects of the Cambridge History of Latin America, but particularly on the chapter I persuaded him to write himself – on the history of ideas in Latin America (Spanish America and Brazil) since 1920 for volume IV (which eventually became volume X). ‘The multiverse of Latin American identity, c.1920–c.1970’ is an exceptional chapter of more than 100 pages which no other scholar in North America or Europe could have written.⁹ Dick Morse had a great influence on the way I understood Brazil within the context of Latin America.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, alongside my teaching duties at UCL and the editing of the CHLA I was an active member of the Anglo-Brazilian Society, Chairman of the Bloomsbury Theatre (1977–86) which introduced a number of Brazilian dance and theatre companies to London, and (1980–91) a close associate of Edna Crepaldi in the development of Brazilian Contemporary Arts (BCA) which promoted all aspects of Brazilian culture in London. And from 1980 to 1986 (and again from 1993–7) I was a consultant on Brazil for Oxford Analytica, a global analysis and advisory firm (now think-tank) founded by David Young in 1975. After several years living alone, from 1984 I lived with my partner Felicity Guinness, a widow with four children, first in Kensington and then for more than ten years in Hampstead.

In October 1987, after spending the academic year 1986–7 at the University of California, San Diego and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., again with Brazil my main focus, I took leave from UCL to become (full-time) director of the university’s Institute of Latin American Studies (in succession to John Lynch, who had himself succeeded Robin Humphreys in 1974). For the next five years I was heavily engaged in restructuring the administration and the library, revitalising the programme of research seminars, conferences and publications, and securing the future of the Institute. And during my first two years as director (1987–9) I was also co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Studies, with Victor Bulmer-Thomas. All this slowed down my own research and writing and I was taken back to Latin America in general and away from Brazil in particular. However, in October 1989 I did manage to establish at the Institute a virtual Centre for Contemporary Brazilian Studies to coordinate research on Brazil in social sciences and humanities in the federal University of London and to provide a forum for public discussion of Brazil. And many more Brazilian research fellows and research associates were appointed to the Institute than under the previous administration.¹⁰ With my colleague the sociologist Ian Roxborough at LSE I developed a research project which led to the publication of a jointly edited volume Latin American between the Second World War and the Cold War 1944–1948 (Cambridge, 1992) to which I contributed the chapter on Brazil.¹¹ Two more volumes of the CHLA were published during this period: VII Latin America since 1930: Mexico, Central America, Caribbean (1990) and VIII Spanish South America since 1930 (1991). Also two CHLA ‘Student Editions’ on Brazil: Colonial Brazil (1987) and Brazil: Empire and Republic 1822–1930 (1989).

In 1992, aged 55, after five years as director of ILAS, rather than return to my chair at UCL where I had been undergraduate and graduate student and, after an interval of five years in Bristol, lecturer, reader and professor – and most likely spend the rest of my career there – I took early retirement. It was at this time that Oxford decided to fill its chair of Latin American history (established in 1967) which had been vacant since the early death of Christopher Platt in 1989. I was strongly encouraged (begged even) to apply by my Latin Americanist colleagues in Oxford and by Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, the warden of St Antony’s College, to which college the chair was attached. After much hesitation, I finally did so. The appointments committee unknowingly did me a great favour by offering the post to Alan Knight, a leading historian of Mexico at the University of Essex. (It was a long and bitter meeting which left Dahrendorf in particular extremely angry. He drove from Oxford to London that evening to explain what had happened. But that’s another story.) I could have spent the next 10–15 years teaching Latin American history at Oxford. Instead I accepted an invitation from Friedrich Katz, the distinguished historian of Mexico, to spend a year at the University of Chicago as visiting professor of Latin American history, replacing John Coatsworth, who had moved to Harvard. And it was at a dinner in Chicago in 1993 that Nicholas Baring, a friend of Felicity, whose father had been chairman of Barings bank, indicated that the Baring Foundation was prepared to establish on my behalf a three-year senior research fellowship in Brazilian studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. I had been senior associate member at St Antony’s for many years and had close relations with the college’s Latin American Centre. It was understood that the Baring Fellowship would provide me with the opportunity to plan for the creation of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at St Antony’s independent of the Latin American Centre.

I had long ago come to the conclusion that Brazil had never been an essential part of what was generally considered to be ‘Latin America’ and would never be given the attention it deserved in university institutes and centres of Latin American studies unless it separated itself from the rest of Latin America, that it is to say, the Spanish-speaking republics. ‘Latin American studies’ in US universities were overwhelmingly studies of Spanish America, especially Mexico and Central America. In the UK Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Chile received more attention than Brazil. In most institutes and centres of Latin American studies Brazilian studies were usually to be found, in the words of Walnice Galvão, professor of literature at the University of São Paulo, ‘atrás de uma pequena porta no fim do corridor [behind a small door at the end of the corridor]’. Most ‘Latinamericanists’ did not speak or read Portuguese, knew little of Brazil’s distinctive history and culture, and indeed rarely, if ever, visited Brazil.

The project to establish the Centre for Brazilian Studies in Oxford had the strong and indispensable support of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Brazilian sociologist who had been elected president of Brazil in October 1994 (he was to serve two terms, 1995–2002) and Rubens Barbosa, the Brazilian ambassador in London (1994–99). At St Antony’s College, Ralf Dahrendorf (now Lord Dahrendorf) was on board from the beginning. The Centre was funded for an initial five-year period (and then for a second five-year period) primarily through a partnership between the Brazilian government (Ministry of Foreign Relations, Ministry of Culture), the Brazilian public sector, companies in the Brazilian and British private sectors, the Brazilian non-profit making ‘third sector’ and individual benefactors.

My Baring Fellowship having come to an end, I spent most of the academic year 1996–7 as a guest scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington. It was not until February 1997 that the Hebdomadal Council of Oxford University approved the setting up of the Centre. I was appointed director for a five-year term (and in 2002 re-appointed for a further five years) and took up my appointment in June. The University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies was officially inaugurated by President Cardoso on 3 December 1997 at a luncheon in Buckingham Palace during the president’s state visit to the UK. Those attending included Lord Jenkins, chancellor of the university, Dr Colin Lucas, the university’s new vice-chancellor, Sir Marrack Goulding, the new warden of St Antony’s College, foreign minister Luiz Felipe Lampreia and other Brazilian ministers, ambassador Rubens Barbosa, Eric Hobsbawm and several of the Centre’s founding benefactors, including Joseph Safra (Banco Safra). The Centre began its life in central Oxford in rented rooms above a dentist in Beaumont Street and above the Quaker bookshop in St Giles’. In October 2000 it moved to a house in north Oxford provided by the University: 92 Woodstock Road, close to St Antony’s College. Separated from Felicity Guinness, I lived in an apartment in Wytham Abbey just outside Oxford.

For ten years (1997–2007) the University of Oxford was unique among the great universities of the world in maintaining, independent of its Latin American Centre, a centre of advanced interdisciplinary study dedicated to increasing knowledge and understanding of Brazil, Brazil’s role in the world and Brazilian perspectives on global issues. The Centre in Oxford acquired an international reputation as the leading centre for the study of Brazil outside Brazil.

The Centre for Brazilian Studies appointed several one- and two-year postdoctoral research fellows. And in 2003 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the University Research Development Fund jointly funded a lectureship in Brazilian studies (and fellow of St Cross College) for five years. Some 40 professors, readers, lecturers and research fellows of the University of Oxford (with fellowships in some 20 colleges), engaged in research and graduate teaching and supervision on Brazil in a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences, life and environmental sciences and humanities, were affiliated to the Centre as research associates. The Centre brought to Oxford as visiting research fellows and associates over 100 scholars, intellectuals and policymakers, mainly from Brazil but also from the rest of Europe, the United States and elsewhere in the world, for periods of between two months and one year. The Centre organised over 200 research seminars and over 80 workshops and conferences on Brazil – invariably in comparative, international perspective – which attracted participants from universities and research centres in Brazil and elsewhere. The Centre published several books, research papers and almost 100 working papers.¹²

My primary focus in these years was on the development of the Centre, not least fundraising, but I was able to assist Stephen Graubard, the Editor of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in preparing a special issue on Brazil: The Burden of the Past; The Promise of the Future (vol.129/2, spring 2000);¹³ I produced an extended essay on the British contribution to the study of Brazil;¹⁴ and the Centre published my Brazil in Books by British and Irish Authors (University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2003). Work on the Cambridge History of Latin America had finally come to an end¹⁵ – apart from one volume. Because of my commitment to the Centre for Brazilian Studies CHLA volume IX Brazil since 1930 had never been finished, in the case of my own chapters never even started! The Brazilian economist Marcelo Abreu submitted three substantial chapters on the Brazilian economy (the third with his colleague Rogério Werneck), the Brazilian sociologist Nelson do Valle Silva his chapter on Brazilian society. My own chapters – ‘Politics in Brazil under Vargas 1930–1945’, ‘Politics in Brazil under the Liberal Republic 1945–1964’, (with the Brazilian political scientist Celso Castro), ‘Politics in Brazil under military rule 1964–1985’ and (with the Brazilian political scientist Jairo Nicolau) ‘Politics in Brazil since 1985’ – were completed during three successive summer vacations hiding from the world in the Pousada de Alcobaça in Petrópolis. The Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. IX Brazil since 1930 was published in 2008.

By the beginning of 2007, however, the future of the Centre in Oxford was in doubt. The Foreign Minister in the government of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party) which came to power in January 2003 ended official Brazilian support for the Centre. He believed, it seems, that the Centre was a tucano centre, that is to say, a centre supporting the policies of the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), the party of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, hostile to the PT, and reluctant to invite to Oxford intellectuals of the Left. This was very strange because one of the Centre’s most successful workshops (in February 1999 after the PT’s leader and candidate for president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had suffered a third successive defeat) had been dedicated to the ‘Future of the Left in Brazil’ (or how to avoid a fourth defeat). Not only Lula himself, but several prominent PT politicians and intellectuals, together with a number of leading British, European and Brazilian intellectuals of the Left, had participated in the workshop. Tarso Genro, on the Left of the PT, once claimed that it was the ‘Oxford seminar’ that set the PT on the road to victory in October 2002. I have written elsewhere about how Eric Hobsbawm and I, without illusions, celebrated Lula’s election as president.¹⁶ I had known Lula for many years. I remember how moved he was when I told him that my father had been like him a metalúrgico [metal worker] and like him had lost the little finger of his left hand in an industrial accident. I was a special guest at Lula’s inauguration on 1 January 2003 and at the banquet in Buckingham Palace during his state visit to the UK in March 2006. President Cardoso, I should add, when he came to Oxford to receive an honorary degree in 2002, told me, jokingly (I think), that he himself had always believed that the Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies was a petista Centre – funded by his administration!

In Oxford the vice-chancellor Professor Colin Lucas had been a strong supporter of the Centre from the beginning, but his successor in 2004, John Hood, showed little interest. Sir Marrack Goulding, Darhendorf’s successor as warden of St Antony’s in 1997 (he and I arrived in Oxford together) was never interested. Visiting the Brazil Centre for the first time (after several years), Sir Marrack, who had served as Britain’s first ambassador to Angola and had been for 11 years (1986–1997) Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, observed: ‘Centre for the study of Brazil, it will be a centre for the study of the Pitcairn Islands next!’ Like Bongo-Bongo Land, this is something not easily forgotten or forgiven.

I had secured the promise of funds for a further five years from a benefactor in São Paulo, who had already given generously to Oxford, but the university was now demanding sustainable long-term funding for the Centre. Aged 70, I was due to retire in September 2007, and my only possible successor was unwilling to take on the responsibilities of director. The truth is that, despite its evident success, my colleagues in the Latin American Centre at St Antony’s College never believed in the need for an independent centre dedicated to Brazil. The head of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, who was also acting warden of St Antony’s that year, was persuaded (too easily persuaded) that the Centre could be adequately replaced by a Brazilian studies programme inside the Latin American Centre. It clearly could not, but the University of Oxford made the decision, inexplicable to everyone engaged with Brazil outside Oxford, to close its Centre for Brazilian Studies.

On retirement from Oxford, I decided to move to Rio de Janeiro to live with my Brazilian partner, Maria Eduarda Marques, a historian of colonial Brazil and of Brazilian art. For the first three years we lived in an apartment near the beach in Ipanema (in Rua Paul Redfern across the street from the building in which Lêda Rodrigues, José Honório’s widow, still lived). We then moved to our current apartment on the 13th floor of a high-rise set in the tropical gardens of a gated community on Avenida Aquarela do Brasil in São Conrado, overlooking Oscar Niemeyer’s famous cylindrical Hotel Nacional (now Gran Melia) and the Atlantic ocean. Five hundred metres to the rear, on the other side of a congested freeway, lies Rocinha, one of Rio’s largest favelas. Occasionally I wake up to the sound of gunfire as rival drug gangs battle each other and the military police. A J.G. Ballard lifestyle, my son Ben calls it.

I continued to spend three months (January–March) each year outside Brazil: from 2008 to 2010 in Washington D.C. as a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute; from 2011 to 2017 in London as a visiting professor at the Brazil Institute, King’s College, where I taught a master’s course on ‘Brazil in regional and global history’. KCL had established a Brazil Institute, alongside its China and India Institutes, in 2010 with the clear intention of replacing the recently closed Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies.

In Rio I had been a member of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro since 1992, and I had been elected a member of the Academia Brasileira de Ciência in 2004. In 2010 I was elected a sócio (one of 20 foreign members – the first English member since Herbert Spencer in 1897) of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, occupying the seat left vacant by the death of the Portuguese novelist José Saramago. For several years I was a visiting researcher at CPDOC/ Fundação Getulio Vargas; I inaugurated the chair in Latin American history at the Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-americana in Foz do Iguaçu; I taught a course at the Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Universidade de São Paulo; and I became increasingly engaged in the activities of CEBRI, the Centro Brasileiro de Relações Internacionais, an independent think-tank in Rio.

In 2010, for the Instituto Moreira Salles, I was the curator of an exhibition of the work of Charles Landseer, the official artist of Sir Charles Stuart’s mission to Brazil in 1825–6 to negotiate on behalf of both Portugal and Britain recognition of the independent Brazilian empire. It was shown at the Institute’s galleries in Rio de Janeiro, Poços de Caldas (Minas Gerais) and São Paulo and at the Centro Cultural de Cascais in Portugal.¹⁷ But for the most part I was reading and writing on topics in Brazilian history and politics which had long been of interest to me: the history of the idea of Latin America and Brazil’s political, cultural and intellectual relations with Spanish America; Britain’s economic and political relations with Brazil during the long 19th century, known in Brazil as o século inglês [the English century]; the Paraguayan War or War of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) against Paraguay (1864–70), the longest and bloodiest inter-state war in the history of Latin America; slavery, abolition and the roots of social and racial inequality and exclusion in Brazil; political exclusion and the long and winding road to Brazil’s current flawed democracy; populism and its manifestations in Brazil; and the failure of the Brazilian Left. The Brazilian abolitionist, journalist, historian and diplomat Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910) became a new and somewhat obsessive interest.¹⁸

The essays in this volume are for the most part based on book chapters and journal articles published (mainly in Portuguese) and public lectures delivered during the ten years since my retirement from the University of Oxford and my decision to live in Brazil – all substantially revised, expanded and rewritten for publication in English. The idea for the volume – to mark my 80th birthday in 2017 – came originally, I think, from my friend Richard Bourne, senior research fellow at the University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies and biographer of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and found support from Professor Anthony Pereira, director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College, who also agreed to write the Preface to the volume, and Professor Linda Newson, director of the University of London Institute of Latin American Studies.

2017 was also the 30th anniversary of my assuming the directorship of the Institute for five years. I am delighted that Professor Newson agreed that this volume of essays on Brazilian history and politics should be published by the Institute of Latin American Studies, at the School of Advanced Study (University of London). And I am grateful to Emily Morrell, Head of Publications at SAS, and her team, especially Jessica Davies Porter, for their work in preparing the essays for publication.

* The somewhat pretentious title of this Introduction is a modest homage to Professor R.A. (Robin) Humphreys (1907–99), who more than anyone was responsible for my becoming a historian of Brazil. His account of how he became a historian of Latin America and the central figure in the development of Latin American studies in the UK is entitled Latin American Studies in Great Britain: An Autobiographical Fragment, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 1978.

1 Cockburn High School’s only alumnus of note was Richard Hoggart, who had gone there 20 years earlier. In his classic The Uses of Literacy. Aspects of Working Class Life (1957) and in the first volume of his three-volume autobiography A Local Habitation. Life and Times: 1918–1940 (1988) he vividly describes his childhood in Hunslet where, after the loss of both his parents, he lived with his grandmother from the age of eight until he went, from Cockburn, to the University of Leeds.

2 Robin Humphreys had been appointed assistant lecturer in American history at UCL in 1932 by Hale Bellot, the only professor of American history in the UK at the time, on the understanding that he would eventually be responsible for Latin American history as well as the history of the United States. During the following years he developed an interest in Latin American history but had not begun to teach it when the War intervened. During the War he was responsible for Latin America in the Research Department of the Foreign Office directed by Arnold Toynbee. He began lecturing on Latin American history at UCL, where he was now reader in American History, in 1946. He was appointed to the newly established University of London Chair in Latin American History at UCL in 1948. See Humphreys, Latin American Studies in Great Britain, pp. 4–17.

3 See my homenagem, ‘José Honório Rodrigues (1913–1987): historiógrafo erudito, historiador combatente’, Revista Brasileira (Academia Brasileira de Letras), Fase VIII, Ano III, no. 78, janeiro–março de 2014, pp. 153–70.

4 See L. Bethell (ed.), Viva la Revolucion. Eric Hobsbawm on Latin America (London: Little, Brown, 2016).

5 Translated twice into Portuguese: A Abolição do Tráfico de Escravos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Expressão e Cultura/Editôra Universidade de São Paulo, 1976); A Abolição do Comércio Brasileiro de Escravos (Brasília: Editora do Senado Federal, 2002).

6 John Lynch had been appointed to a lectureship in Hispanic and Latin American history at UCL in 1961. He was promoted to reader in 1964.

7 On the background to the creation of the lectureship in Brazilian history, see Humphreys, Latin American Studies in Great Britain, pp. 25, 36, 38.

8 This turned out to be not strictly true. I did contribute a Note on the literature and intellectual life of colonial Brazil to volume II of the Cambridge History of Latin America (1984).

9 CHLA volume X was published in 1995. See below, n. 15. On my correspondence with Morse about this chapter over a period of 20 years, see my essay ‘Richard Morse e a Cambridge History of Latin America’, in B.H. Domingues and P. Blasenheim (eds.), O Código Morse: ensaios sobre Richard Morse (Belo Horizonte: Editora da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2010), pp. 47–67.

10 See ILAS Annual Reports 1987–1992.

11 Portuguese trans., A América Latina entre a Segunda Guerra Mundial e a Guerra Fria (São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 1996).

12 See CBS Annual Reports 1997–2007, and CBS Ten Year Report 1997–2017.

13 Published in Portuguese translation as L. Bethell (ed.), Brasil: fardo do passado, promessa do futuro. Dez ensaios sobre política e sociedade brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record/ Civilização Brasileira, 2002).

14 ‘A contribuição británico para estudo do Brasil’, in R. Antônio Barbosa, M.C. Eakin and P.R. de Almeida (eds.), O Brasil dos Brasilianistas. Um guia dos estudos sobre o Brasil nos Estados Unidos, 1945–2000 (São Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, 2002), published in English as The British Contribution to the Study of Brazil (University of Oxford Centre for Brazilian Studies, Working paper #37, 2003) and, revised and expanded, in M. Eakin and P.R. de Almeida (eds.), Envisioning Brazil. A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States, 1945– 2003 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

15 CHLA volume VI Part I Economy and Society since 1930 & Part II Politics and Society since 1930 had been published in 1994, volume X Ideas, Culture and Society since 1930 in 1995. And in 1997 the Editora da Universidade de São Paulo (Edusp) began to publish the Cambridge History in Portuguese translation. (Publication in Spanish and Chinese translations was already in progress.)

16 ‘Introduction: Eric and Latin America’, in L. Bethell (ed.), Viva la Revolucion, p. 19.

17 See L. Bethell (ed.), Charles Landseer. Desenhos e Aquarelas de Portugal e do Brasil, 1825– 1826 (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2010).

18 See Editor (with J. Murilo de Carvalho), Joaquim Nabuco e os abolitionistas britânicos: Correspondência 1880–1905 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks and Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2008); Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil. Correspondence 1880–1905 (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009); Editor, J. Nabuco, My Formative Years [first English translation of Minha formação (1900)] (Oxford: Signal Books and Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2012); Editor (with J. M. de Carvalho and C. Sandroni), Joaquim Nabuco: correspondente internacional 1882–1891, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras/São Paulo: Global Editora, 2013); and finally Joaquim Nabuco no mundo: abolicionista, jornalista e diplomata (Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2016).