Republicanism and the State between Brazil and the River Plate

The Rio Grandense Republic rose and fell between 1836 and 1845 in Brazil's southernmost province, Rio Grande do Sul. Its founders, the farroupilhas, first rebelled against taxes and centralization, but they soon turned to separatism and declared the Brazilian Empire a monarchical pariah in a republican continent. Their decade-long attempt to establish an independent state remains Brazil's longest armed conflict, as well as its last separatist uprising. This book is the first anglophone monograph on this short-lived republic since 1972, and it is the first to examine it as an instance of state-building comparable to contemporaneous revolutionary movements. The Rio Grandense Republic thus emerges as a window into the state-building experiments and transnational revolutionary networks that characterized the Age of Revolutions, and it reminds us of the fragility of America's first post-colonial states.