Ideas and Places in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The Luso-Brazillian Reception of John Locke

In recent issues of the AHR (June and December 2007) historians of the Atlantic world debated the “interconnectedness” of the British and Spanish empires with reference to “entangled communities,” “contiguous societies,” and a “hemispheric system.” This paper will address the potential of these concepts for understanding another Atlantic empire, that of the Portuguese, and for the history of ideas in the eighteenth century. Recent historiography has begun to reevaluate what typically was regarded as the Portuguese Empire's isolation from, or marginality within, major cultural and political transformations of the era. Such a revision has addressed both empirical and interpretive problems. Building on evidence of possession of eighteenth-century texts, historians have analyzed the experiences of reading, acquiring and translating books and pamphlets, as well as how ideas contained within these texts were received and disseminated. This inquiry has raised the question of the relationship between ideas and places. While the relevance and resonance of ideas, particularly those associated with the Enlightenment and liberalism, in places different from those the authors of such ideas had experienced has been debated in Brazilian literary and historical criticism, the framework for such debate is the national and the imperial (center/periphery). Do new Atlanticizing concepts of contiguity and hemispheric community provide the basis for a reconsideration of reception and dissemination in the history of ideas, of the relationship between ideas and places? This paper will address these questions by examining the Portuguese reception of John Locke's work. While historians writing on the influence of Locke in Luso-Brazilian political culture have focused on the use of his conceptualization of property, an examination of translation and dissemination suggests that it is Locke's work on education that had the most consequential impact, revealing how understandings of difference and political agency both arose out of and diverged from Atlantic entanglements.