A. J. R. Russell-Wood

Anthony John R. Russell-Wood (1940 - August 13, 2010) was a leading historian of colonial Brazil, the Portuguese Empire, and the broader Luso-Brazilian world.

Russell-Wood was born in Wales. He was educated at Rossall School and Oxford University and became a member of the faculty of the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971; at the time of his death, he was the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of History.

His first book, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550-1755 (1968), was an ambitious study covering two centuries of the operation and impact of a key, royally chartered and privately financed social-welfare institution of the Portuguese Empire. It was awarded the 1969 Herbert Eugene Bolton Prize (now the Bolton-Johnson Prize) by the Congress of Latin American Historians.^[1] His second book was a path-breaking work on the Afro-Brazilian experience, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil (1982); it paid particular attention to regional particularities within Brazil and the importance of brotherhood societies in Afro-Brazilian history. World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia, and America, 1415-1808 (1992) explored the Portuguese Empire as the world's first truly global empire, though one often overshadowed in the public imagination by the Spanish Empire; Russell-Wood was intrigued by how the Portuguese made sense of their exposure to the once unimaginable vastness of the world, its people, languages, culture, flora, and fauna.^[2] He died, aged 70, in Baltimore, Maryland.

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