“Que he o Codigo Civil?”: Knowledge and Practices of Civil Codification in Brazil (1822-1917)

The research project seeks to investigate the history of civil codification in Brazil during the 19th century, focusing on its role in shaping new ways of conceiving and communicating legal knowledge. Traditional studies often frame this history within a triumphalist narrative of modernization and nationalism, tied to private law dogmatics. Similarly, analyses of Latin American codification processes frequently impose European models as universal benchmarks, interpreting diverse realities through binaries like delay-modernization and center-periphery. This project aims to reposition the research problem by shifting the focus from the “why” of the absence of codification in 19th-century Brazil to the “how” of its practice. It aims to investigate the circulation, organization, and dissemination of normative information by understanding the debates on codification as a laboratory for communicative, media, and epistemic practices. In this laboratory, concepts and theories were translated and redefined based on local issues, such as the persistence of slavery and normative spaces such as the household and the Church. The proposal draws on doctrinal sources, parliamentary debates, political documents, the daily press, and iconographic expressions to reconstruct the debate around the changes and continuities in the forms of law in the period ranging from Brazil's Independence to the enactment of the first Civil Code.