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Comment by rodelrod | Hacker News Reader

“The famed Brazilian coffee owes its existence to Francisco de Mello Palheta, who was sent by the emperor to French Guiana to get coffee seedlings.”

Small nitpick: at this time Brazil was a Portuguese colony and the monarch was called King John V, not an “emperor”. Brazil only got an emperor when it became independent about one century later.

Why did Peter, the son of a Portuguese King ruling over territories spanning 4 continents, decided to call himself an Emperor when ruling over a single (albeit large!) territory? I don’t know, ego?

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Why not, I know folks who call themselves Senior Data Professionals who can't even use Excel.

I once worked with a ‘senior XML developer'

"Engineers" making CRUD apps...

I think calling yourself emperor was all the rage at the time.

Prior to Napoleon and the dissolution of the HRE the Roman Empire was sort of still viewed as single and indivisible, it wasn’t a exactly a generic title (well.. at most there could be two legitimate ones).

But now you had the Emperor of the French, Emperor of Austria, Russia (prior to that), so why not Brazil? Since you’re establishing a new state anyway might as well pick the best available title.

I think there are also some connotations associated with the idea of Empire that implies greater centralization and control.

One thing that's fairly interesting is how the British did not allow their monarch to become an Emperor, because of the traditional liberties associated with English monarchy and parliament.

When Queen Victoria became Empress of India, parliament only consented to her becoming a Queen-Empress, not an Empress-Queen, to emphasize the fact that Britain was still a kingdom.

It was also arguably seen as a more “democratic” office by some. The imperial throne in the HRE or in the eastern empire was always technically non hereditary. Being at its root a republican title in a certain way.

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