The Emergence of a Cosmopolitan Point of View

the Experiencing of the Universal History's History of Portugal

Abstract

In this article we explore the British editorial project of the Universal
History and its reception in the Lusophone world in the late eighteenth
century. Focusing on the changes in the experience of history, we analyze
how this project was designed to attend to the aspirations of an expanding
readership and the rise of different temporal experiences existing in that
world. We argued that these new expectations for a cosmopolitan view
of the historical process couldn’t emerge only from the boundaries of
traditional narratives focused in rhetorical decorum and demands from the
contemporary erudite scholarship in the academies. Lastly, we investigate
how Antônio de Moraes Silva, a Luso-Brazilian man of letters, compiled
and translated the History of Portugal from a French extended edition of
the Universal History. Our main intention was to show how this edition
highlights the impossibility of establishing a uniform and harmonious
representation of the historical process and events in a context of
dissolution of the traditional functions of historical discourse.