The performance of citizenship

In the later nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for Brazilian liberals to celebrate the influence of British or (as they would probably have said) English political thought. Victorian sages such as Mill, Spencer, Carlyle and Macaulay were regularly cited as part of the project to modernise their nation. Rui Barbosa, the lawyer who helped write the nation’s constitution when it became a republic in 1890, claimed: ‘In the press, in parliament, on the speaker’s platform, England has always been the great teacher for my liberal principles’ (Graham 1968: 269). Joaquim Nabuco, founder of the nation’s Liberal Party, also once declared: ‘I am an English liberal . . . in the Brazilian parliament’ (Graham 1968: 263).