The Battle for Brazil

“In a refreshing new take on Portuguese Brazil, Suzanne Litrel shows how disadvantaged groups seized opportunities to assert themselves in the long war with the Dutch. Her book not only details the role of Indigenous and Black men but also reveals the impact of women of all backgrounds as strong-willed patriots and valiant combatants.” – Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History
“Suzanne Litrel’s Battle for Brazil offers insight into the inter-Iberian tensions that existed before the Luso–Dutch War, and the strains it placed on Spain and Portugal’s awkwardly interwoven colonial systems and economies in sugar, silver, and slavery. Although her work offers an important and original view of European and colonial war, global early modern empire, and colonial economies, the most groundbreaking aspect of Litrel’s contribution is the immaculately researched analysis of the impact of Dutch occupation on Brazil’s marginalized populations. She succeeds in finding the human voice in the various colonial archives; and with exceptional clarity narrates how Indigenous, Africans and Afro-Brazilians, Jewish and New Christians, and women negotiated and re-negotiated alliances with one, or both, sides involved in the conflict. They challenged the racial, religious, and gender hierarchies entrenched in the Iberian colonial empires. Litrel introduces her reader to an emergent Brazilian people—not Portuguese—who shaped the resistance to, and the expulsion of, the Dutch occupiers. In their decades-long challenge to colonial structures, the author is arguing for a new understanding of the very origin of Brazil.” – Zachary R. Morgan, author of Legacy of the Lash: Race and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy and the Atlantic World
“Portuguese King Sebastian’s legendary demise at the Battle of Alcácer-Quibir in 1578 and the challenges of Spanish rule and Dutch occupation immediately following profoundly shaped the Luso-Brazilian world. Suzanne Litrel confronts the mythologized narratives that sprang out of these critical years, showing how men and women from diverse backgrounds in Portugal, Brazil, and beyond navigated the tempestuous currents of this era—ultimately transcending the very myths that their stories would beget.” – Erik Lars Myrup, author of Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World
“Suzanne Litrel brings the seventeenth-century Atlantic world to life, showing how Brazil’s fate was forged not only by empires but by diverse people whose struggles and alliances changed history. Enriched by original findings from the archives, it is a narrative that stands alongside, and pushes beyond, the classic works of Boxer, Russell-Wood, and Alencastro.” – Ian Read, author of The Hierarchies of Slavery in Santos, Brazil, 1822–1888
“For a long time, historians of colonial Brazil and early modern Portugal downplayed the importance of breaking down the Dutch dominance in northeastern Brazil, seeing it as a failed attempt by European invaders to establish an enclave in South America. Recently, groundbreaking research projects are contesting this perspective, and following that lead, Suzanne Litrel’s Battle for Brazil highlights the extreme challenge, the strategy, and the Portuguese willpower in fighting an Atlantic war on two fronts for its survival as a nation and a worldwide empire. This included maintaining Brazil at all costs. Myriad sources, used with fluid and impressive dexterity and sensibility, from different languages, geographies, and backgrounds, make this work a major contribution to Portuguese, American, Atlantic, and colonial History. The Battle for Brazil shall remain a milestone and a standard work in those fields for many years to come.” – Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez, author of Fiscal Policy in Early Modern Europe: Portugal in Comparative Context and coeditor of Portugal in a European Context: Essays on Taxation and Fiscal Policies in Late Medieval and Early Modern Western Europe, 1100–1700

Suzanne M. Litrel is an independent historian of Brazil and the Portuguese Atlantic world. She has taught at Georgia State University and Kennesaw State University. She is a coauthor of Ten Notable Women of Colonial Latin America and Ten Notable Women of Modern Latin America.

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