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 Lucia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves The forgotten in the independence process: a history to be made

Almanack, Guarulhos, n. 25, ef00220, 2020 http://doi.org/10.1590/2236-463325ef00220 the colonial system of the Modern Times, whose model can be sought in the anti-imperialist struggle to decolonize African and Asian countries. In the same perspective, in the early 1970s, other historical studies interpreted independence as the starting point of a long process of rupture, the result of the breakdown of the colonial system and the assembly of the national state. In another line, Maria Odila Silva Dias demonstrated that the political separation did not bring any rupture within her, but paved the way for a reworking of the colonial past that can be explained in terms of the interests of the metropolitan and colonial elites, which gained greater strength with the coming of the Court in 1808. The perspective acquired greater breadth with the innovative work of José Murilo de Carvalho.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, other demands of historiography, which confirmed the long-term permanence of Brazilian social formation, enabled the emergence of a series of studies, both in Brazil and Portugal, and started to seek to insert Independence in the most dynamic of the Old Regime, highlighting the political and cultural factors that provoked dispute for hegemony within the Portuguese-Brazilian empire. Within this more recent perspec- Forum