The Party of Order - The Conservatives, The State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871

Abstract

At times the reader might want Needell to address the causal power of ideology more directly - given his evident desire to revise analyses of the Empire as ruled by patronage - but the multi-causal narrative he ends up with is a balanced depiction of high politics in the Empire. At points he comes close to demanding that political history be seen from the point of view of elite actors alone and based on the discourses of political officials. [...]at points in the text and especially in his generally valuable endnotes, he is ungenerous in his evaluations of works that are too speculative for his taste or which use documentation that is very different from his sources. Fortunately, The Party of Order's many strengths pull the reader's attention to the overriding contribution of the work: this is a thoughtful study that brings conservative elites to their rightful place in the political history of nineteenth-century Brazil.