Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss an important political process in South America doing the last two hundred years: border demarcation and its problems between Brazil and the Guiana in the period after Brazilian independence. Border Studies have tried to show how processes that are apparently local and bilateral are related to global interest. When we analyze those negotiations in a conjuncture of global interactions and narratives, we connect diverse perspectives in order to understand how and why those Latin American republics started discussions in the definition of borders. In this paper, I analyze the books Primeira Memória do Brasil (1899) by Barão do Rio Branco (1845-1912) and Direito do Brasil (1903) by Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910) within the perspective of Global History of Empires and Sociology of Biography; it is needless to say that Nabuco and Rio Branco were the most important politicians and intellectuals at the end of Brazil’s second Empire. Firstly, I argue that those processes of border demarcation were related not only to a banal division of land and a political definition of borders but also revealed a strong resolute model of imperial strategies; secondly, I argue that those processes were also related to a deep change in international law from a global perspective.