Regeneração

In November 1807, the royal court of Portugal boarded a fleet under British naval escort and sailed across the Atlantic, leaving the metropolitan homeland as a managed dependency under a foreign general. It was an act of dynastic survival that unravelled an empire.The Regeneration of 1820 tells the full story of the political earthquake that followed - from the commercial catastrophe of the asymmetric British trade treaties to the secret conspiracy of Porto lawyers who organised the Liberal Revolution; from the Constituent Cortes that drafted one of Europe’s most radical constitutions to the counter-revolutionary fury of Queen Carlota Joaquina and Prince Miguel; from the martyrdom of Gomes Freire de Andrade in 1817 to the naval battle at Cape St. Vincent that decided a civil war; and from the Evoramonte Convention that ended the Liberal Wars to the imperfect constitutional order that emerged from a decade of upheaval.Barrett McMahon traces the human lives behind the constitutional provisions - the merchant families ruined by British imports, the military officers radicalised by years of subordination to a foreign commander, the exiles who built a state in waiting in London and Paris, and the soldiers who held Porto for thirteen months against overwhelming odds.A narrative history of the moment Portugal became modern, and of the contradictions that made modernity so difficult to sustain.