Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821

This text tells the story of the only European empire to relocate its capital to the New World. In 1807, to escape an invading Napoleonic army, the Portuguese Prince Regent and some 10,000 functionaries set sail for Brazil. Following the transfer of the court, Rio de Janeiro, became a tropical Versailles, a seat of European imperial power surrounded by the jungle. With the centre of the Portuguese world in the New World for the following 13 years, an extraordinary inversion of political, economic, and cultural hierarchies that had governed colonial relations for centuries came to pass. The author elucidates the key roles that slavery played in how the transplanted Portuguese court perceived Brazil and how in return Brazilians felt about the court, ultimately drawing the conclusion that a 19th-century European monarchy and a slave society could not co-exist.