JCB Reads: Suzanne Litrel on The Battle for Brazil

Launched during the 2024-5 academic year, JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. These online events are open to anyone who is interested. The link to the Zoom meeting will be published a few days before the event takes place on the individual event page.

Join us on Friday, November 20, 2026 at 12 p.m. EST for a discussion of Suzanne Litrel's new book The Battle for Brazil: Resistance, Renewal, and the War Against the Dutch, 1580–1654.

About the book

“In a refreshing new take on Portuguese Brazil, Suzanne Litrel shows how disadvantaged groups seized opportunities to assert themselves in the long war with the Dutch. Her book not only details the role of Indigenous and Black men but also reveals the impact of women of all backgrounds as strong-willed patriots and valiant combatants.” -- Wim Klooster, author of Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History

“Suzanne Litrel’s Battle for Brazil offers insight into the inter-Iberian tensions that existed before the Luso–Dutch War, and the strains it placed on Spain and Portugal’s awkwardly interwoven colonial systems and economies in sugar, silver, and slavery. Although her work offers an important and original view of European and colonial war, global early modern empire, and colonial economies, the most groundbreaking aspect of Litrel’s contribution is the immaculately researched analysis of the impact of Dutch occupation on Brazil’s marginalized populations. She succeeds in finding the human voice in the various colonial archives; and with exceptional clarity narrates how Indigenous, Africans and Afro-Brazilians, Jewish and New Christians, and women negotiated and re-negotiated alliances with one, or both, sides involved in the conflict. They challenged the racial, religious, and gender hierarchies entrenched in the Iberian colonial empires. Litrel introduces her reader to an emergent Brazilian people—not Portuguese—who shaped the resistance to, and the expulsion of, the Dutch occupiers. In their decades-long challenge to colonial structures, the author is arguing for a new understanding of the very origin of Brazil.” -- Zachary R. Morgan, author of Legacy of the Lash: Race and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy and the Atlantic World

For more information, visit https://suzannelitrel.com/the-battle-for-brazil/.