Chapter 3 is centered around the appearance in 1798 of twelve handwritten bulletins, known as pasquins, that announced a coming revolution to the people of Bahia. The bulletins denounced Portuguese rule, racism, and unfair wages, among other demands. They were placed in the public squares and markets of the city, and it was this act of encouraging the public to rebel that made the bulletins and their writers seditious. While the writers did speak to all Bahians, they targeted places where soldiers were known to congregate more than others. This chapter thus explores not only the demands of the pasquins but also how the documents were disseminated to the public. While there is little information about how or why most pasquins were found where they were, one bulletin that was found on a market stall brings into sharp focus the daily interactions between soldiers and market women. Studying these relations reveals new ways of thinking about the presence and participation of women in resistance movements.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion of the book and traces how trends set by imperial historians of the nineteenth century framed the Tailors’ conspiracy as dangerous and as an isolated phenomenon while championing the 1789 conspiracy in Minas Gerais as foundational to Brazilian independence. Historians of the twentieth century rightly combated those efforts and fought to establish the conspiracy as equally significant as the plot in Minas Gerais. The book ends with the proposition that historians of the Tailors’ Conspiracy no longer need to do this kind of work. Instead, this book demonstrates the richness that comes from studying the conspiracy in an empire-wide context and in studying it from the vantage point of relations and not simply from the vantage points of ideology and rhetoric.

The introduction describes the principal arguments of the book. The first argument is that the 1798 Tailor’s Conspiracy was defined by the Brazilian High Court as sedition, which was defined as public disloyalty to the monarch. Taking sedition seriously allows us to see how people made public spaces into sites where people strategized and studied revolution together. The second argument presented is that the Tailors’ Conspiracy was not isolated but was rather the coda to three prior resistance movements across the empire: one in India, one in Angola, and one in Brazil. The Tailors’ Conspiracy was thus part of an empire-wide development in which the Portuguese had to contend with groups of revolutionaries who were racially, ethnically, and financially different and who all wanted greater political recognition from the empire. The third argument is that relations between and among people from all ranks of society was the baseline of political action. Differences in rank between conspirators were apparent when men were outlining the goals of the conspiracy. The political culture that sustained them was thus based on relationality, not cohesive demands.

Chapter 6 focuses on the men who were caught in the act of trying to start the intended rebellion. They were all free people of African descent, yet some among them also invited enslaved people to join the rebellion. Thus, relations between enslaved and free people are at the center of this chapter. The ways in which these people talked about freedom and bondage with one another presents a picture in which it is impossible to say that the conspiracy was definitively anti- or pro-slavery. There were some men who took abolition of slavery quite seriously, and there were others who had no interest in the matter whatsoever. Those who fit the latter group were connected to a shadowy group of elite white men who had been planning their own rebellion. Evidence of these white men’s participation in a conspiracy showed up frequently during a significant number of different men’s interrogations. The High Court chose to ignore or dismiss all such claims, clearing the way for them to transform the collective insurgencies of 1798 into a so-called Pardo conspiracy, free from confusion, free from uneven relations, and unconnected to the aims of elite white men.

Chapter 2 is situated in the context of Portugal’s internal conflicts with its colonies. In 1787, a group of so-called Brahmin priests who attributed racism to their lack of clerical promotions planned a revolt against Portuguese authority in Goa. In the Kingdom of Kongo, a rebellion in 1788 by the smaller Kingdom of Musulu spread into Portuguese slave-trading territories in Angola, initiating a war between Portugal and Musulu. Finally, a conspiracy in 1789 to end Portuguese rule in Minas Gerais, Brazil included slaveholders with outstanding debts who were in jeopardy of losing their property, including the people they enslaved. Two things stand out from placing these events together. First, we see more acutely how slavery and the slave trade not only supported the entirety of the Portuguese empire but also constituted its very framework. Second, and relatedly, the 1798 conspiracy in Bahia may have been more explicitly about race and slavery than these other three episodes. But it is, in fact, race and slavery that tied them together, a claim which orients the reader towards thinking about the Tailors’ conspiracy as part of an empire-wide phenomenon in the remaining chapters.