Kenneth Maxwell is a retired professor history at Harvard University where he founded the Brazil Studies Programme at the David Rockafeller Center for Latin American Studies. Previously he was a professor of history at Columbia Universtiy where he founded and was director of the Camões Center for the Portuguese Speaking World. He was for fifteen years the David and Nelson Rockafeller Senior Fellow for Inter-American Affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations and the western hemisphere book reviewer of “Foreign Affairs”. He was the program director of the Tinker Foundation. He is the author of several books on eighteenth century Brazil and Portugal including “Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal 1750-1808,” which became a bestseller in Brazil as the “Devassa da Devassa.” This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of his book Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment.