some would say, they seized the opportunity to construct a narrative of
Brazil's past that would make sense of the present.

The importance of history as a form of nation-building had been
made clear in 1844 in a remarkable essay by a foreigner who knew the
country well. In the previous year the Brazilian Institute of Geography
and History, in, order to promote the study of national history, had spon-
sored a contest on how to write the history of Brazil. ¹ The winner was
Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, a German naturalist and scientist
with considerable experience in Brazil who had previously written on
Brazilian linguistics, botany, and ethnography and had traveled widely in
the country. ² The account of his travels from 1817-20 in the company of
another German scientist, Johann Baptist von Spix, is still read with
profit today for its acute observations on social, and economic conditions. ³
Martius saw no benefit in localized chronicles of unimportant adminis-
trators and their actions. Instead, he suggested that the real history of
Brazil was the mixing of its human elements: Indian, European, and
African. He believed that each group had made a contribution and that
each had a history worthy of study. He believed that: "The history of
Brazil will always be primarily a branch of Portuguese history. However,
if Brazilian history is to be complete and to deserve the name history, it
can never exclude the roles played by the Ethiopian and Indian races."
Here was a forward-looking formula that would wait almost a century
before it was taken up again seriously in the works of Gilberto Freyre and
other scholars of his generation.

But Martius's essay won not because of his novel emphasis on racial
mixing but rather because while it recognized the centrality of the social
and geographical diversity of Brazil it subsumed that diversity within a
project to create an integrated nation and a national history. Brazil had
just passed through a decade of violent provincial rebellions in which the
centripetal forces of regionalism had threatened the monarchy and the
unity of the country. Martius's project was a centralizing one. The object
of his history would be to "spread noble patriotic sentiments" to Brazil's
"politically immature population." While Martius's emphasis on the con-
tributions of three distinct cultures was novel and seemingly radical, he
was at heart a political conservative, very much a supporter of the Brazil-
ian status quo of constitutional monarchy. He wanted a history that
would show the dangers of republicanism, of an unrestrained press, and
of irresponsible free speech about politics. This history would demon-
strate that in a country based on slavery, monarchy was a necessity. The
history of a Brazil entering an age of progress would serve to emphasize

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