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Fr om C onqu e s t t o C ol on y Empire, Wealth, and Difference in Eighteenth-Century Brazil
Kirsten Schultz
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
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Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Copyright © 2023 by Kirsten Schultz. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022945118 isbn 978-0-300-25140-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10
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Con t en t s
Acknowledgments vii Orthography and Measures ix Introduction 1 1. Conquests and Histories: Brazil in the Portuguese Empire 25 2. Reason and Experience: Royal Authority in a Golden Age 56 3. Taxing Gold and Taxing Slaves: American Social Order and Empire 89 4. Colonies and Commerce: Wealth, Difference, and Empire 122 5. Peoples and Colonies: Settlement, Labor, and the Geography of Empire 158 Epilogue 197 List of Abbreviations 207 Notes 209 Bibliography 283 Index 319
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Acknowledgmen ts
I would not have been able to research and write this book without the generous support that I received from an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. I received additional support from the University Research Council and the Office of the Provost at Seton Hall University. I am also indebted to the many archivists and librarians in Brazil, Portugal, and the United States who assisted me in person and from a distance, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Special thanks to Lisa DeLuca and the other librarians at Walsh Library who tracked down all sorts of materials, and to Maria Leal and Nathalia Henrich of the Oliveira Lima Library at Catholic University for helping me to navigate the collection and to better understand the scope and provenience of its treasures. I have worked on this book for more than a decade, and during that time I have incurred many debts to friends and colleagues who have offered encouragement and advice. Barbara Weinstein has been an extraordinarily supportive mentor all along the way. Alejandra Osorio has always been there to share ideas and even some time in Portugal and Brazil. Liam Brockey, Alejandro Cañeque, Karen Gevirtz, Larry Greene, Alejandra Irigoin, Isabel Lustosa, Patrícia Martins Marcos, Vanessa May, Ana Valdez, and Lisa Voigt all lent support to this project and its tangents. James Woodard helped me move forward on the book proposal. Early in the research, John Tutino gave me an opportunity to think about Brazil’s eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in comparative terms and in ways that have also helped me think about the broader scope of this project. I have shared pieces of the research, often in painfully preliminary form, at numerous conferences and workshops; I am thankful to all
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those who listened and asked the incisive questions that helped me further develop the research and clarify its implications. As I was finishing the book manuscript, I received invaluable comments and suggestions on either parts or the whole from friends and colleagues. I thank Pedro Cardim, José Luís Cardoso, Miguel Dantas da Cruz, Rodrigo Dominguez, Iris Kantor, Hal Langfur, Yuko Miki, Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, Fernanda Olival, Allyson Poska, Tatiana Seijas, Sinclair Thomson, and all the wonderfully engaged readers at the New York University Atlantic History Workshop and the Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, as well as in the Department of History at Seton Hall, especially Bill Connell, Sara Fieldston, Anne Giblin Gedacht, Sean Harvey, Nathaniel Knight, Max Matusevich, Vanessa May, Mark Molesky, Dermot Quinn, Golbarg Rekabtalaei, and Laura Wangerin. I am also grateful to the readers of the manuscript for Yale University Press and their productive critiques that guided me to revise and further develop the research presented here. At Yale University Press, Jaya Chatterjee, Eva Skewes, and Mary Pasti provided expert guidance from the proposal forward. Lys Weiss of Post Hoc Academic Publishing Services deserves many thanks for the patient and expert copyediting and indexing of the text. Last but never least, I am eternally grateful to my family for their love and support. To Erick and Julie and the whole California crew and, in New Jersey, Ahmad, Suad, Summer, Sammer, Reem, and Mariam. Sadly, my mother, Nancy Schultz, is not here to see the work complete. Together with my father, John Schultz, she was always a curious and enthusiastic supporter of my travels, relocations, and interests. Nasir, my partner in life, has supported me and the research in so many ways and shared the ups and downs of academic life. Hanan and Adam Abdellatif patiently put up with me working on this book for most of their lives. Most recently, Hanan helped me get the bibliography in order and, as a student of history herself, has been a perceptive interlocutor about research and writing about the past. Adam, with his characteristic acuity, told me what many of us need to hear: “Just finish it.”
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Orthogr aphy and Me asures
Orthographic practices in eighteenth-century Portugal and Brazil varied greatly. Here I have tried to maintain the original orthography and spelling of printed works while using present-day conventions when transcribing and translating manuscripts. With quotation and emphasis, I have tried as well to clearly indicate eighteenth-century terms used to describe the people who lived in Brazil. With regard to measures and units in use in the eighteenth century, while there were some local variations in currency, measures, and weights, the real (plural réis) was the basic unit of currency. A cruzado was equal to 480 réis, and a conto was 1 million réis. An oitava, or an eighth of an ounce, was equal to 0.036 kilogram; a Portuguese arroba was 32 pounds or 14.5 kilograms.
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Introduction
For both distant observers and the men who blazed the trails from Brazil’s Atlantic coast into the hinterland in search of Natives to enslave, the discovery of gold in the mountainous and riverine region north of Rio de Janeiro at the end of the seventeenth century was at once foreseen and fortuitous. “It was always well known,” wrote the Italian Jesuit André João Antonil around the turn of the eighteenth century, “that in Brazil there were iron, gold, and silver mines. But there was always considerable inattention to discovering and exploiting them as well.” Indeed, while traces of mineral deposits, including gold found in the captaincy of São Vicente in the sixteenth century, had conjured up visions of a new Potosí, visions pursued into the next century by itinerant and often clandestine prospectors, a significant mining enterprise eluded the Portuguese in the first centuries of conquest and settlement. Perhaps, Antonil speculated, settlers had been too comfortable living off the fruits of fertile lands and streams to invest in exploring Brazil’s “bowels,” or perhaps “a bent for hunting Indians in the forests distracted them from this less indecent and more useful enterprise.” In any case, the dribs and drabs of alluvial ore that made their way to royal smelting houses did not inspire dissemination of the practical knowledge needed for future success in prospecting. Even men with experience in the hinterland could not tell the difference between treasure and the earth’s less valuable elements. Slave raiders regularly mistook tourmalines for emeralds, and, Antonil recounted, “the mulatto” who was said to have been “the first discoverer” of the most substantial deposits of Brazilian gold did not know that the “steel-colored pebbles” that he scooped out of a stream while with some settlers “to look for Indians” were of the most precious metal of all. “Nor did his companions [to] whom he showed the stones know how to
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recognize and esteem what he had so easily found,” Antonil added. The confusion continued in the village of Taubaté, as the mulatto and his companions sold the ore for a modest sum “without knowing what they sold, and without the buyer knowing what he bought.” Only later, when the stones ended up before the governor in Rio de Janeiro, Artur de Sá, and after they had been more carefully examined, “were they recognized to be the finest gold.”1 The gold was not only the finest; it was also copious. Other discoveries, mostly along the Espinhaço Mountains, quickly followed. Prospectors from São Paulo, northeastern Brazil, and Portugal flooded into the region. Some starved, and some struck it rich. Wealth generated from the extracted ore began to flow not only to miners, but also to smugglers, goldsmiths, slave traders, merchants, and royal coffers. If Brazil had been the monarchy’s “milch cow,” as King João IV (r. 1640–1656) had described it years earlier to the French minister in Portugal, these sizable and unexpected discoveries made American territory even more of a prize.2 Yet, as royal officials in Portugal and Brazil celebrated what seemed like a providential turn of events, especially when viewed alongside the decline of Portuguese commercial networks in Asia, they also recognized that the discoveries raised intricate and pressing questions. How would the Portuguese administer and exploit the new American treasure? How would the Portuguese crown defend a resurgent American empire in an Atlantic world of rivals? How would the crown govern and forge civil, political, and economic order in a distant territory and across a dynamic socioeconomic geography that encompassed Indigenous peoples, Africans, and Europeans, the free and the enslaved, the wealthy and the poor?3 This book examines how royal officials and vassals of the Portuguese monarchy on both sides of the Atlantic understood and reckoned with these transformations and questions, and how, in the process, they redefined the status of Brazil within the empire. Portugal’s sovereignty in America, as royal officials, chroniclers, and settlers affirmed, had been forged in conquests and evangelizations that incorporated new lands and peoples into the monarchy. While the political-cultural legacies of conquest endured, especially as they had been cultivated among settlers, royal officials came to argue that the discovery of gold and subsequent hinterland settlement demanded new approaches to governance and administration. Ensuring that the wealth produced in Brazil flowed into imperial networks of exchange depended not only on the allegiance of European and Europeanized settlers living far from their king, but also on a regulation of socioeconomic relations defined by legal status, ancestry, labor, and wealth that differentiated
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Portuguese America from Portugal. Reinvigorating Portugal’s imperial and commercial power, in other words, meant understanding and defending what made Brazil a colony.
Conquests and Colonies While references to “Brasil Colônia” are recurrent in modern histories of Brazil, it was only in the eighteenth century, as historian Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro observes in his study of the Portuguese monarchy, that royal officials began to refer primarily and consistently to the crown’s American territory as a “colony.” Before then the Portuguese crown’s sovereignty comprised “conquests” and “states” as well as commerce and navigated waterways. João V (r. 1706–1750) was “By the Grace of God, King of Portugal and of the Algarves, of Below and Beyond the Sea in Africa, Lord of Guinea and of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India, etc.” Such a manifold title was but one reflection of an imperial monarchy’s complex and changing constitutional dimensions and the political and administrative discontinuities that attended them.4 In the wake of military incursions into North Africa, the so-called papal donation, and treaties with the Catholic Kings of neighboring Spain, lands claimed in eastern South America in the sixteenth century had become one of several “ultramarine conquests,” places where the Portuguese had negotiated with and warred against coastal Indigenous peoples to establish enclaves of Portuguese authority.5 As settlement proceeded, along with references to “the conquests,” chroniclers and officials traded in diverse and often indefinite terms to designate the monarchy’s new American territory. Writing in the 1570s within a broader debate about the religious and commercial motives for claiming lands beyond Europe, the chronicler Pero de Magalhães Gandavo invoked the “discoverer” Pedro Álvarez Cabral’s naming ceremony in May 1500, as well as Portuguese dedication to the Order of Christ, to defend reference to the “Province of the Holy Cross” against the more “vulgar” “land of Brazil,” so called after the dyewood extracted from the forests of Indigenous coastal lands. At stake, he explained, was a diabolical effort to eradicate the memory of the sacred origins of Portugal’s presence in the New World.6 Royal administrative schemes added to this emerging patchwork of terms used to describe the crown’s American claims within imperial nomenclature. In the 1530s the crown divided the coast and its hinterland into numerous hereditary parcels, which royally appointed “donatory captains” were expected
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to defend, settle, and exploit. In the wake of this arrangement’s notoriously limited success, in 1548 the crown sent Tomé de Sousa as governor of all of the “captaincies and settlements in the lands of Brazil,” intending, as Pedro Puntoni has explained, that his authority would prevail over, but not entirely annul, that of the donatory captains.7 The first governor, together with the royal treasurer and the magistrate who joined him, were to constitute a new administrative structure for incorporating all of Portuguese America into the monarchy. Following the restoration of Portuguese sovereignty from Spanish Habsburg rule (1580–1640), in 1645 the new Braganza king João IV also appealed to the image of American territorial unity when he decreed that the heir to the throne would be known as the “Prince of Brazil.” Yet even though this innovation, as Maria de Fátima Silva Gouvêa observed, invoked “values and notions of governability and vassalage” that distinguished Brazil from other parts of the empire, it did not entail the creation of a principality in administrative terms. As the royal charter made clear, Brazil would be “possess[ed] in title only.”8 References to American territory as a whole were also mitigated by the creation of new administrative frameworks. In 1621, territory in the north was reconfigured as the State of Maranhão, apart from remaining territories of the State of Brazil. While the various seventeenth-century iterations of a Repartição do Sul (Southern District) proved more short-lived, they too reinforced the institutional pluralities through which the crown sought to exercise sovereignty. In practice, as Pedro Cardim and Susana Münch Miranda conclude, the crown’s administrative approach made Portuguese America “an archipelago of settlements [. . .] a situation that favored the jurisdictional autonomy of the various poles of which it was comprised.”9 Within this dynamic imperial lexicon, and alongside pluralistic administrative practice, official and literary references to Brazil as one of several “conquests” scattered across the globe suggested continuities from east to west within the Portuguese monarchy’s extra-European lands. In 1736, as the Gazeta de Lisboa reported, the portfolio of a new “Minister of the Navy and Conquests” included nominations for “Viceroys, Governors, and Captains-General of the States of India, Brazil, Maranhão, the Kingdom of Angola, Islands of Madeira, Açores, Cape Verde and Fortresses of Africa.”10 As “our conquests” had come to encompass an array of political-administrative categories across the monarchy, the notion of conquest itself also expanded. Already in the fledgling African enterprise, the Portuguese recognized that conquest could proceed from both war and what Afonso V (r. 1438–1481) described as “friendly relations and arrangements.”11 Consequently, “the conquests” included any lands where the
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Portuguese had secured a presence, not just those occupied in the wake of military victories. The “conquerors,” therefore, were men who had taken any of the first steps, whether bellicose or diplomatic, toward the consolidation of diverse Portuguese claims to trade and settle.12 In America, as Sebastião da Rocha Pita reminded readers of his Historia da America Portugueza (1730), this path to securing sovereignty had been circuitous. “The King Dom Joaõ III,” he reported of his native Bahia, “gave it to Francisco Pereira Coutinho, who was the first who came to settle after Diogo Álvares Correia, who dwelt there, and Christovão Jacques, who discovered it. Francisco Pereira Coutinho, who had arrived from India with great wealth and resources, and had secured royal favor, forearmed a squadron of ships, in which accompanied by noble people for settlement and by soldiers for defense, he came to conquer the land [. . .].13 “Discovering,” “dwelling,” “conquering”: through these intertwined, rather than discrete and linear, acts the Portuguese had forged Indigenous American land into “the conquest” of Brazil. As officials and chroniclers recognized the multifaceted actions through which a distant, extra-European territory had been incorporated into the monarchy, in practice the ideal of conquest came to frame American appeals to a shared juridical-political culture, whether to overturn an inferior status relative to other territories in the monarchy acquired through inheritance or pact, to transcend geographical distance, or to seek royal grace. Conquerors, settlers, and traders could point to their service in the occupation of American land as a basis for their own authority on the ground and their status before a king with vassals across the globe. The crises of the seventeenth century, especially the Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil and the local fight to restore Portuguese sovereignty there, then afforded new opportunities to assert this status against both conquered peoples and renderings of the residents of American territory as unvaryingly and ignobly dominated by remote European power. “We are not conquered vassals,” members of Salvador’s town council informed the king in 1688. Their loyalty and obedience, and the resources they had expended to defend Brazil against the monarchy’s rivals, commended them to recognition as vassals no different from those in the kingdom of Portugal itself. After all, since 1653, the city of Salvador da Bahia had enjoyed the right to dispatch envoys to meetings of the representative and consultative Portuguese Cortes.14 Yet, as officials, chroniclers, and settlers thus recognized Brazil as one of many conquests forged in war and trade, and thereby incorporated into a pluricontinental monarchy, political practice also distinguished Portuguese
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America from other extra-European territories. What historians have described as an incentive system of military service and rewards, conspicuous in the insignia of military orders and commanderies, privileged tours of duty in Asia and especially in Africa in wars against infidel enemies and, conversely, excluded recognition of actions taken during the initial occupation of the Brazilian coast. Throughout the sixteenth century, Asia and the defense of Portuguese commercial outposts continued to draw nobility into royal service. The crown, in turn, reinforced that enterprise’s prestige, creating the office of the viceroy with broad authority to act locally within the State of India in the name of the king. In Brazil, in contrast, expeditions to punish and enslave Natives who resisted Portuguese settlement did not offer the same promise of distinction, and the crown did not invest in the institutionalization of royal authority and justice to the same degree. As historians have noted, a century passed between the founding of a High Court (Relação) in Goa (1544) and its counterpart in Bahia (1609, 1652), while throughout the seventeenth century the highest ranking representative in Portuguese America remained a governor-general.15 The Portuguese monarchy’s eighteenth-century Atlantic turn, already evident in late seventeenth-century undertakings to claim territory in Rio de la Plata and consolidated by the discovery of vast deposits of gold, renewed scrutiny of American administration and Brazil’s status within the empire. The flow of gold from the Brazilian hinterland and the commerce that the new enterprise sustained suggested to royal officials that America would compensate for what had been lost in Asia to European rivals and local rulers and would serve to renovate the empire as a whole. At the same time, in the first decades of the eighteenth century the initially more lucrative and glorious Asian venture remained a standard that Brazil had not yet met. Although the crown began to refer to men appointed to govern Brazil as viceroys, the new designation was associated with a previous posting of highest rank in India rather than with a new administrative status for American territory. In Lisbon, officials also defended limits to the powers of the crown’s representative in Brazil. In 1714, advising against giving the viceroy of Brazil the power to grant honorific privileges and membership in military orders, the Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino) explained that if the viceroy of India enjoyed this authority, it was “to encourage the noble men of this kingdom to go to that state, so that in wars there they strive to achieve singular and heroic actions.” “The governance of India is totally military and bellicose,” the counselors observed, “and the viceroys are always in campaign, either at sea or on land, contending
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with the kings of Asia and even many times with European nations, which is not the case in Brazil.”16 The juxtaposition of a military enterprise in Asia and its absence in America elided the history of expeditions in the previous century, deployed to end Dutch occupations in Pernambuco and Bahia, to thwart French plans for settlement in Maranhão, and to expand Portuguese sovereignty in Rio de la Plata. The Council did recognize, however, that the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714) energized imperial rivalries, and more specifically foreign designs on Brazil’s mines, and therefore demanded investment in the martial means of securing and defending Portuguese American sovereignty. To begin with, royal counselor António Rodrigues da Costa advised in 1709, the defense of Rio de Janeiro, serving as a port for the mining region, required investments even beyond the Council’s recent provisions for new fortification and an infantry regiment in the city.17 In fact, within months his concerns materialized in clear and vivid form. In 1710, the French corsair Jean-François Duclerc launched an attack on Rio de Janeiro but was rebuffed by local forces. “No one escaped except a fugitive black who had served as a guide,” one pamphlet reported of the Lusophone forces’ triumph. By February 1712, however, letters reached Lisbon with news of a second, successful French assault and occupation of the city in 1711, which ended only after officials in Rio offered a ransom and returned the French prisoners of war taken the previous year.18 Reckoning with the French attacks, officials worried about lasting and damaging effects for both Brazil and the kingdom of Portugal. In response, the crown punished the actions of officials in Rio, stepped up investments in the city’s fortification, and issued orders that mandated stricter supervision of foreign vessels in Brazilian ports.19 Defending American sovereignty, counselors warned, also required addressing broader problems of governance and allegiance. In Pernambuco in the 1710s the crown faced armed challenges to its authority rooted in the social order of settlement and the willingness of a local “nobility” to defend its status against upstart merchants. Such a development was especially alarming, Rodrigues da Costa warned, considering French ambition in America and the possibility that “those vassals” would embrace the “protection of the King of France.” In the mining region, in turn, threats to sovereignty came not only from the possibility that vassals would turn to foreign rulers, but also from a rootlessness that seemed to defy the consolidation of political order itself. The king, Rodrigues da Costa observed, could not rule over people “without law,
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order, and obedience, without fear of magistrates and punishment, without hope of a reward.”20 In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the crown sought to address these challenges, achieve fiscal control, and thwart adventurers, interlopers, and rebels by investing in administrative personnel and by redefining the jurisdictions in which officials served. Then, and again in the 1750s, the crown moved to formally incorporate the remaining donatory captaincies into the State of Brazil. During João V’s reign Portugal’s American sovereignty was cultivated as well in symbolic and spectacular displays of royal power of unprecedented scale. Brazilian rituals of the royal life cycle grew more frequent and more lavish, especially in the mining region, where religious festivals and local rites of political obeisance became “organizing elements of society.” An America settled in order to extract wealth, Rodrigo Monteiro has posited, became the mirror that reflected, in multiple ways, the authority of the Portuguese king in Portugal and beyond.21 Fittingly, in Brazil João V’s funerary rites, the first to be celebrated across the empire, included especially luxuriant displays of local elites’ productive and consumptive capacities, reminders of the wealth and power that had defined his rule, their American sources, and his American vassals’ allegiance.22 Like local invocations of service to the crown, the commemorations of the king’s life and death, and the descriptive accounts subsequently issued, inscribed Portuguese settlements in Brazil into a larger, pluricontinental community of vassals defined by royal authority and tradition. These same celebrations and written accounts, however, could also make known the differences that the eighteenth-century monarchy had come to contain. Writing on behalf of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1709, one censor determined that Rocha Pita’s account of the Bahian funerary commemorations for Pedro II (r. 1668–1706) was “out of date”; in Lisbon even the beginning of the reign of João V had already assuaged his subjects’ grief. As a result, only recalling the distance that separated Lisbon and the “City of Bahia, Metropolis of Portuguese America,” and the difference that distance produced, made the account intelligible.23 Years later, writing of João V’s Bahian funerary honors, one panegyrist similarly reminded readers that the king had ruled over communities and sites of production that were distinguished by geography and history not only from each other but, above all, from those in Europe. The king’s glorious reign, the panegyrist concluded, had been a time when “commerce flourished free of danger, both within the kingdom and its colonies.”24
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The reference to extra-European territories as “colonies” may have called to mind what the Theatine father Rafael Bluteau had summarized just a few decades earlier as a convergence of people, action, and space. A “colony,” Bluteau explained in his authoritative Vocabulario portuguez e latino (1712–28), was the “people who are sent to some newly discovered or conquered land to settle it [povoar],” adding that “the land so settled is also called that.”25 This process of demographic diffusion, chroniclers and royal officials recognized, had defined Iberia itself and remained manifest in cities that had begun as Roman “colonies.”26 As the crown extended its sovereignty beyond Europe, ancient configurations had reemerged. “The paths to conquest,” the sixteenth-century chronicler João de Barros reported, included “sending vassals and natives to live in acquired lands, the kind of settlements the Romans called colonies.”27 A century and a half later one Portuguese pamphleteer observed the similarly interconnected trajectory of settlement and conflict in the more recent past. “The Portuguese arrived at that coast,” José Freire Monterroio Mascarenhas wrote of eastern South America, “their colonies grew prolifically, and enlarging their conquests, they overcame the Tupinambá, the Tupinaés, and the Tapuias.”28 Thus, across a now global empire, colonies were communities of ultramarine vassals, forged as the Portuguese had conquered, displaced, traded with, and Christianized Native peoples in allegiance to the crown.29 By the time João V’s panegyrist looked back on his reign in the colonies, however, contemporary understandings of colonies had also expanded beyond Bluteau’s recapitulation of ancient legacies and acts of conquest, migration, and settlement to include the delineation and defense of distinct social and economic functions within European empires. As Anthony Pagden has observed for Spain, Britain, and France, renewed debates about the sources of wealth and power, based on an ensemble of ideas about money, commerce, population, and the state, later denominated mercantilism, displaced an older defense of universal projects to Christianize as well as attendant preoccupations with honor and “the spirit of conquest.” The administration of empire and, above all, of the imperial commercial economy became a “calculation of benefits” intended to privilege metropolitan interests defined as such.30 Among Portuguese royal officials and vassals, too, the much debated economic dimensions of the eighteenth-century empire became paramount, and Brazil’s “colonial” status was identified with limits on commerce and other productive activities imposed by metropolitan power. American resources, Brazilian-born royal counselor Alexandre de Gusmão argued plainly in 1749, were to yield European, rather than American, wealth.31 “Raw materials should
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be extracted from colonies to be manufactured in the capital,” the polymath António Ribeiro Sanches explained in a mid-eighteenth-century treatise on Portuguese America. “And all the foodstuffs that do not grow in the capital should be planted [in the colonies],” he further clarified, “as well as those that grow in the primary state with difficulty or those that are bought abroad.”32 As a colony, in other words, Portuguese America encompassed socioeconomic communities intended to complement and support, rather than reproduce, metropolitan ways of producing and consuming wealth. Consequently, governance and administration entailed defining how Brazil’s various enterprises— plantations, mines, and markets—were both fundamentally different from the European polity and society that forged them and integrated into networks of exchange defined by European authority and prosperity. Such an understanding of the relationship between Portugal and its American territory could undercut appeals to political and religious incorporation manifest in royal and ecclesiastical festivals and in local elites’ invocations of vassalage and service to the crown in conquest. When, in 1746, Portuguese merchants in Rio de Janeiro complained to the king that the “descendants of the first settlers” had excluded them from the city’s “public offices,” they made their case by pointing to local claims to authority that, they insisted, mistook Brazil for something that it was not. As a consequence, the merchants protested, they were “reduced to a system in which America was a conquest and not a colony.” Defending their demand for access to elected offices, they disparaged a local settler elite whose power depended on summoning from the countryside men “so poor” that in order to buy the clothing required for an appearance in the city, they had sold “the only young black who works to cultivate what sustains their families.” In contrast, the petitioners had the “means” and the knowledge of the “economy with which the people should be administered.”33 The colony of Brazil, the petitioners thus suggested, was a project that followed from, but also ran counter to, legacies of conquest, particularly the granting of exclusive privileges to conquerors and settlers. In the decades that followed, even as American vassals continued to appeal to a transatlantic economy of royal grace and honors, they increasingly recognized this new politics of colonies and the socioeconomic hierarchies that it encompassed. By the 1790s, and as signs of Brazil’s own economic capacities mounted, even those who defended the value of a commerce that produced “rich vassals” in both Europe and America, including the Brazilianborn bishop Azeredo Coutinho, invoked difference, “dependency,” “sacrifice,” “exclusion,” and metaphors of childhood to explain the status of “the colonies
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of Portugal.”34 “The old colonial system,” one of Rio de Janeiro’s chroniclers argued in the wake of the early nineteenth-century Napoleonic invasion of Iberia, had come to be not the complementary outcome, but rather the antithesis, of the monarchy’s incorporative potential in America.35 The shift in political and economic nomenclature and practice surveyed here was not clear-cut. From the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, the Portuguese crown sought to organize the extraction of wealth and to protect and enhance trade to benefit merchants and to fill royal coffers, even as chroniclers celebrated violent “conquests” that extended the crown’s sovereignty and ushered in the Christian mission and “civilization.”36 And within official discourse, “Portugal and its conquests” stood in for the empire until the early nineteenth century.37 Still, increasing references to Brazil as Portugal’s “colony” or to Portugal’s “American colonies,” together with changing notions of what those terms signified, expressed throughout the eighteenth century in correspondence and official communication, political treatises and law, and published pamphlets and chronicles, raise questions about how people living on both sides of the Atlantic understood the project and legitimacy of empire, and the scope and nature of American society and economy, as well as the threats, old and new, to prosperity and power. As this book argues, even as some answers to these questions point to the crown’s failure to fully incorporate American vassals into the imperial monarchy, by the mid-eighteenth century royal policy had come to assume that what would guarantee the monarchy’s and the kingdom of Portugal’s prosperity was not simply the discovery of resources and the claiming of new lands, but also the forging of a particular kind of social order in Portuguese America, one that ensured that resources would be extracted and exchanged within an imperial economy. While this process, debated and contested on both sides of the Atlantic, entailed reproducing metropolitan institutions and cultivating expectations of justice and political allegiance in America, it also meant defining what made society and economy in Brazil different from those of Portugal and defending why those differences needed to be upheld.
The System and the Old Regime Brazil’s colonial status and its impact on Portuguese American and imperial economies and polities have been extensively studied and debated by historians. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, “the old colonial system,” most fully elaborated by Brazilian historian Fernando Novais, served as
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a guiding framework for much historical research on Brazil under Portuguese rule and the crises that led to Brazil’s independence. Building on and refining Caio Prado Jr.’s (1907–1990) sweeping analyses of the structures of the Brazilian and imperial economies and the socioeconomic interests and relations produced within these structures—namely, large-scale agriculture and enslaved labor—Novais’s Portugal e Brasil na crise do antigo sistema colonial (1777–1808) (1979) examined the monopolistic administrative policies that sustained production based on slavery and privileged the interests of metropole over colony, the late eighteenth-century reforms intended to diversify and further integrate the imperial economy, and, finally, the protracted crisis that ultimately dismantled the system. Although in the last quarter of the eighteenth century Portuguese merchants reaped rewards from Brazilian commodities resold in Europe as prices rose due to interruptions in Caribbean production, the old colonial system, Novais argued, could not be reconciled with economic transformations in the Atlantic world brought about by the Industrial Revolution, a commercial and financial infrastructure in Portugal that could not accommodate Brazilian exports, and Portuguese merchants’ inability to supply Brazilian markets with the volume of goods in demand. Among the most salient symptoms of the system’s breakdown was the growth of contraband trade in Brazil’s ports. Brazil’s political independence in 1822 brought the crisis to an end with a rejection of the old colonial system’s monopolies, already dismantled with the opening of Brazil’s ports in 1808, that left intact large-scale export agriculture based on enslaved labor as the basis for Brazil’s continued integration into Atlantic and global capitalist economies.38 Historians followed Novais’s analysis with both quantitative investigations of the commercial economy and qualitative examinations of the sociocultural mediations through which various sectors of Brazilian society experienced the old colonial system. As Novais himself argued in the opening chapter of História da vida privada no Brasil (1997), provisory and precarious aspects of quotidian and private experience in Brazil under Portuguese rule reflected social relations defined by the convergence of aristocratic aspirations and mercantile practices manifest, above all, in the slave market, where the capacity to purchase human beings made settlers senhores (lords).39 In the 1990s, however, economic historians, most notably Valentim Alexandre, Jorge Pedreira, and João Fragoso, challenged Novais’s account of the colonial system and its scope. As Pedreira argued, even as the Portuguese continued to pursue mercantilist policies, the old colonial system was “pervious.” Portuguese imperial commerce was based on northern, central, and southern European shipping
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and finance and included direct trade in certain commodities between northern Europe and Brazil, as well as “inter-colonial exchange” between Africa and the Indian Ocean network, and, above all, in the transatlantic slave trade conducted by traders in Africa and Brazil. In Brazil, as Fragoso’s research showed, trade with Portugal and the slave trade between Brazil and Africa also fueled the development of local and regional economies, commodity production, and a wealthy landed and mercantile elite.40 Rendering the empire’s eighteenthcentury structure as poles (metropole and colony) bound together by metropolitan commercial exclusivity, therefore, cannot account for the complexity of intra- and transimperial exchange, a point elaborated too in Luiz Felipe Alencastro’s history of the commercial, social, and political connections between the slaving ports of eastern South America and Angola.41 As economic historians thus revised understandings of the old colonial system by illuminating its less than systematic effects, social and cultural historians began to argue that the conceptual framework itself obscured as much as it revealed the complexities of Portuguese imperial ideology and practice. As Júnia Ferreira Furtado observes in her study of merchants and commercial culture in Brazil’s mining region, to the extent that metropole and colony are “purely formal concepts,” constructed with reference to opposition and exclusion, they do not necessarily account for the integration of interests, the sharing of “cultural values,” affirmations of allegiance and dissidence, and the production of alterity that concurrently defined the relationship between early modern Portugal and Brazil.42 A collection of essays on “the old regime in the tropics,” edited by Fragoso, Maria de Fatima Gouvêa, and Maria Fernanda Bicalho, has posed a similar challenge to the explanatory potential of the old colonial system. Calling for a new and broad research agenda that would “un-do an interpretation founded on the irreducible economic duality of metropole and colony,” Fragoso, Gouvêa, and Bicalho argue for a reframing of the experiences and effects of wealth and its accumulation that recognizes how social hierarchies and a “logic of power in the old regime” were re-created in Portuguese America.43 The shift from viewing the work of empire primarily through economic relations toward examining Portuguese American society and political culture has entailed a shift as well in understanding how political authority was conceived in the early modern era and, more specifically, recognizing, as Portuguese historian António Manuel Hespanha maintained, that the practice of power was decentralized. The essays in O antigo regime nos trópicos (2001), and much subsequent research, take this decentralized and incorporative logic as
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a point of departure for examining how Portuguese authority was constituted in Brazil at the local level. Building on the work of C. R. Boxer, historians have studied the political culture of town councils, where many of the men who enriched themselves with profits from exports, internal markets, and the slave trade found a venue for the political expression of their interests and enunciation of their status. Such arrangements did not contest the monarchy’s American sovereignty but rather affirmed ties among these men, local representative institutions, and the crown. As Portuguese who went to America took with them expectations of hierarchical social order that materialized in the enslavement of Africans and in conflict with, and subjugation of, Indigenous peoples, the crown rewarded their “conquests and wars waged in the name of the king.” In turn, appointments to offices, honors, and access to resources, settlers and their descendants argued, made them a “nobility of the land.”44 As Fragoso and Gouvêa explain in introducing a subsequent collection of essays, “the logic of the empire stems, then, from the process of fusing conceptions of the corporative and of political pact, based in the monarchy, and guaranteeing as a principle the autonomy of local power.”45 These old-regime incorporations also meant that in Brazil settlement was defined by what Hespanha described as a “social architecture” of “settlers [colonos] of European origin.” While “other political cultures” remained “as subaltern elements, almost without expression, except on the fringes of the colonial world or in moments of grave crisis for the dominant government,” the European old-regime logic of power, embodied in law and institutions, was able to assimilate an unprecedentedly large-scale slave system into the existing social order. “The slave, or even a multitude of slaves,” Hespanha argued, “did not constitute a dissonant element of the community that required a reconfiguration of its design, its theory or its law.” Rather, like other forms of dependency, slavery remained a matter of “domestic governance.”46 Nor should slavery be seen as the “mere means of mercantile capital,” Fragoso and Gouvêa elaborate. Within the old regime, they contend, “relations of reciprocity” took shape “between slaves, people of color and owners, many times in the form of kinship, and especially god parentage,” and within “social hierarchies capable of naturalizing socioeconomic differences, thus constituting the social fabric.”47 Recognizing the nature and intricacy of these relations, according to Hespanha, also exposes the limits of an understanding of “colonial history” as a “totality” defined by “monotonous” submission and of a nomenclature of social order that privileges dichotomy over complexity. “If the colonizers were from the kingdom and the colonized were the settlers [colonos] of European
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origin and mixed [mestiço] offspring,” Hespanha inquired, “where do we situate the natives?”48 Introducing a recent collection of essays on the “governance of others” in the Portuguese empire, Ângela Xavier and Cristina Nogueira da Silva similarly observe that the incorporative potential of early modern political culture in Portugal calls into question the “concept of colonial Brazil” as it has been formulated within “an imperial imaginary of Marxist origins” and the attendant impasse within the vocabulary of extra-European social order. Like Hespanha’s, their description of American society under Portuguese rule begins with colonizing reinois (born in the kingdom of Portugal), but then follows with colonos, the population “of Portuguese origin,” and the colonizados (colonized), the Indigenous. While Hespanha identified the sociopolitical expressions of enslaved Africans “outside the political spaces of settler society: hidden in forests, in a quilombo, in slave quarters, or in a yard,” Xavier and Nogueira da Silva, in contrast, call attention to the broader ramifications of the “specificity” created as many Portuguese settlements displaced and marginalized Indigenous peoples and became wholly dependent on enslaved African labor, producing what later historiography configured as a “society of settlers [colonos] and slaves” rather than “a society of colonizers and colonized.”49 Both schemes, however, place Africans and their American-born descendants, majorities in some settlements, on the periphery of Brazil’s sociopolitical order. To the extent that Africans were incorporated into societies as dependents, they were also differentiated from other dependent settlers by law as well as by European claims about African cultures, religions, and physical appearances. The question of how to reckon with both social relations that elide an ancient dichotomy of colonizer and colonized expressed in geography, and the manifold ways in which the institution of slavery forged and maintained Portuguese sovereignty in America, is also at the core of the critique of the “old regime in the tropics” as a framework for defining Brazil’s status within the empire. Efforts to overturn the historiography of the old colonial system, Laura de Mello e Souza has argued, overlook its contribution to understanding complex political-intellectual transformations, even as the old regime in the tropics and its emphasis on incorporation “privileges a European gaze” and effaces the extent to which slavery shaped the foundations of social and economic relations in ways that diverged from those in Europe. “The specificity of Portuguese America,” Mello e Souza pointedly concludes, “did not reside in the pure and simple assimilation of an old-regime world, but rather in its perverse re-creation.” Large-scale export agriculture based on enslaved labor and
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commercial monopoly emerged not as extensions of an established political and economic order but rather as the structures of a new system that defined the relationship between Portugal and Brazil and shaped royal administration of the territory.50 The extermination of Indigenous peoples, as well as “slavery as a regime of domination,” Pedro Puntoni similarly argues, together with “the constant presence of mercantile interest [. . .] produced a social environment that was unstable and at odds with the rules of the peninsular old regime.”51 In other words, although in Europe the conditions of freedom and slavery had been reckoned with as medieval law, society, and politics yielded to an early modern old regime, when the Portuguese forged an Atlantic empire, European hierarchies and incorporative categories could not entirely accommodate the increasing scale and racialization of enslavement and the new social and cultural geographies of violence and dispossession that sustained both the seaborne and territorial dimensions of that empire. As a result, out of the range of interactions among Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples a new American economic and social order emerged. Debates about the scope of the colonial system and the old regime also turn around divergent assumptions about the relationship between law, and the institutions it upheld, and political and economic relations within early Brazilian societies. The old regime was a “logic of representation and social organization” that was fundamentally open to modification, Hespanha asserted, and this, in turn, allowed for its extension beyond Europe without dramatic permutation. For “the colonizers,” he explained, “metropole and colonies formed a quasi continuum” of political traditions, representations, and forms of communication and exchange. As Hespanha also emphasized, such a description pertains to the society of colonos, settlers with diverse forms of connection to Portugal.52 Critics, in turn, call into question whether the normative aspects of law and institutions can be taken as stand-ins for historically contingent practices and whether, in the context of extermination and large-scale enslavement of Natives and Africans, it makes sense to delineate settler societies to such an extent and apart from a broader range of local social relations.53 Settler campaigns against Indigenous peoples and African expressions of authority, including free communities (quilombos), suggest that what Hespanha called “other norms” did not remain “outside the field of vision” or “outside the political spaces of settler society.”54 With regard to the ideal of old-regime incorporation, although law and custom recognized enslaved Natives and Africans as dependents, the fictions of paternal authority rarely did more than thinly veil a more abject reality
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defined and contained by coercion and violence.55 Manumission, flight, and other forms of resistance, together with enslavers’ responses to these actions, also presented at least momentary alterations in the practice of the European patriarchal household, or “big house,” re-created in Brazil.56 Nor could the incorporative potential of the old regime remain isolated from imperial expansion’s other aims. As Herman Bennett explains, writing on royal and religious authority in seventeenth-century New Spain, the crown and the church at once recognized the domestic authority of slave owners and infringed on that authority as they asserted control over how Africans could experience themselves in American societies. At the same time, the incorporation of enslaved people as domestic dependents, as vassals, and as Christians was aimed to transform and control African bodies and souls, to discipline rather than ameliorate, and, above all, to distance Africans from African societies and the selves and persons they and their ancestors were before they were enslaved.57 As the debates described here indicate, recent histories of early Brazil have regarded the old colonial system and the old regime in the tropics as alternative interpretations of the history of Portuguese authority in and beyond Europe. These same debates, however, also point to the ways that, as explanatory frameworks, the old regime in the tropics and the old colonial system illuminate intertwined expressions of authority and the tensions between incorporation and difference that constituted early modern empires.58 In the conquest of Brazil, settlement served kings who depended on various extra-European sources of wealth and glory. At the same time settlement also quickly came to rely upon the coercive displacement of people cast off from Portugal in empire-wide convict labor schemes and, above all, people removed from American and African lands in intra-American and transatlantic slave trades to be legally, socially, and culturally marked for exploitation in European settlement.59 The exercise of sovereignty required, therefore, what Xavier and Noguiera da Silva describe as the “management of diversity and difference,” an endeavor that, across several centuries, drew upon dynamic, and always contested, notions of legitimacy and political-social order, as well as changing technologies to be deployed in achieving its aims.60 From Conquest to Colony examines ideas about governance, incorporation, social difference, and wealth as they took shape in Portugal and Brazil following the discovery of gold and the European settlement of Brazil’s hinterland and the policies and political practices that these ideas inspired. Many of those who reflected on the status of Brazil in the empire and the exercise of authority in America did so within interconnected circles of intellectual activity and
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officialdom. As we will see, in Salvador da Bahia, the seat of political authority in early eighteenth-century Brazil, American- and European-born officials joined together to deliberate on recent transformations, while in Lisbon a new academy of history entrusted with writing on Portugal and the conquests included among its members men who served the crown in the kingdom, the empire, and other parts of Europe, where they forged social and scholarly connections with local counterparts. While an older historiography described these men as estrangeirados to indicate that their intellectual formation was distinct from, and at odds with, that of the traditional educational establishment in Portugal, the writings and exchanges examined here affirm more recent scholarship about the broader resonance of cosmopolitan networks connecting Portugal and its empire and other parts of Europe. Consequently, debates about the eighteenth-century empire within the royal court, in formal academic venues, print culture, and local political life in Portugal, Asia, and America drew on diverse, and in some cases innovative, claims about authority, wealth, trade, labor, and colonies.61 These debates also reflected upon earlier endeavors to regulate the kingdom’s and the empire’s economies and identified the need for recalibrations. Informed by contemporary deliberations about wealth and commerce, as well as by what Alexandre de Gusmão called “reason and experience,” Portuguese officials sought to reckon with new flows of gold, especially their ramifications for imperial trade and international relations. At the center of debates were Great Britain, its alliance with Portugal during the War of Spanish Succession, and the Methuen Treaty (1703) that ended barriers to importing English manufactures and, in turn, opened English ports to Portuguese wines. Even as the treaty affirmed a break with earlier protectionist policy, in the following decades Gusmão and other officials remained committed to regulating the flow of goods and money within and beyond the empire’s economy. As we will see, Gusmão also argued that implementing new and more “systematic” forms of taxation and exchange at the local level in Brazil would ensure metropolitan prosperity. While extracting wealth from American territory had animated Portuguese settlement since Cabral’s landing in 1500, Gusmão envisioned a more extensive exercise of royal authority over the American economy that would set aside local arrangements when necessary and promote forms of economic, social, and moral production and exchange that reflected Brazil’s status among what he called “colonies of the ultramar.”62 Eighteenth-century claims about the regulation of imperial space and American society, the mercantile and fiscal projects they inspired, and the
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responses they elicited on the ground in Portugal and Brazil were shaped as well by local histories and sociopolitical conditions. Compared with other European states, the decentralized old-regime exercise of political authority and representation in Iberia was, as Regina Grafe has argued, often at odds with the unifying aspects of mercantile policy. Consequently, attempts at reform and new regulation were met with local affirmations of the right to contest innovation that did not respect traditional, contractual forms of local representation.63 In Brazil’s mining region in the mid-eighteenth century, residents renewed challenges to royal policy, denouncing Gusmão’s administrative and tax reforms as an attack on old-regime justice. Consequently, and as in previous decades, implementation was negotiated. Nor did numerous iterations of trading monopoly and monetary and commercial regulations, old and new, inhibit the growth of American elites’ wealth, which, in some places, assumed “spectacular” forms.64 Still, over the course of the eighteenth century, in official and local discourse and practice, visions of Brazil as a colony—a territory with distinct societies that sustained a subordinate function to produce wealth that would circulate beyond its borders—reshaped older imperial projects of expansion and incorporation through conquest and conversion. In this sense, the old regime in the tropics and the old colonial system represent a chronology of empire in which imperial aspirations and practices preceded colonial situations.65 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the crown and the nobility depended on extra-European sources of wealth. As Fragoso and Sampaio explain, even more so than their counterparts in other European monarchies, Portuguese elites obtained “their centrality and wherewithal” in the “periphery.”66 In the eighteenth century, understandings of this predicament were refracted through contemporary claims about wealth and power. On the one hand, within the political culture of the monarchy, as Mello e Souza observes, “gift, grace, or favor tended to be displaced by more pragmatic values,” while the scope of royal authority increased at the expense of conciliar and representative norms.67 On the other hand, royal counselors expressed concern about a balance of trade that also shaped the balance of power among Europe’s empires. To meet the challenge of the American mines and commercial potential, they argued, required not only exercising good government and appealing to the ideal of a continuum of law and tradition, but also reckoning with the manifold and contested consequences of difference within American and European societies and managing, accordingly, production, consumption, and the flow of people and goods within the empire and beyond.
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Authority, Wealth, and Difference From Conquest to Colony draws on the research and insights generated by both the “old regime in the tropics” and the “old colonial system” frameworks and the debates among their practitioners. At the same time, the analysis presented here shifts the focus from the structural and institutional dimensions of conquest and colony toward changing understandings of extra-European sovereignty and the purposes of empire. Rather than a category that structures analysis, the colony of Brazil figures here as a dynamic political-cultural subject forged in transcontinental processes of conquest, settlement, exchange, and representation. As royal officials in Lisbon, Salvador, Minas Gerais, and the Amazon region recognized, assertions of Brazil’s colonial status could be as prescriptive as they were descriptive—points of departure for debate among officials and vassals of the crown about how to regulate difference, exercise authority, and respond to challenges to that authority on the ground in Portuguese America.68 Such an inquiry is shaped by new histories of early modern political and economic thought and practice that have reexamined what has been called a “mercantile system,” in the case of Adam Smith, and mercantilism, in the case of later critics and historians. As historians of the British, French, and Spanish empires have argued, such terms have tended to attribute ideological coherence to ideas and practices that were unstable and pragmatic. Concerns with population, the generation of wealth, and the balance of trade animated the creation of monopolies and other state regulations as well as private interests and free trade. The state was not the only regulatory force, and, as Jacob Soll has observed, the mercantilist/laissez-faire dichotomy was “ambiguous” even in Smith’s work.69 Regarding Spain, historians, like contemporary critics and royal officials, have discerned in its imperial economy either a failure to implement trade and tax policies or an excessive and across-the-board commitment to misguided restrictions that ended in ruin.70 While mercantilist plans for empire were thus neither monolithic nor indiscriminately translated into practice, eighteenth-century officials, reformers, and critics, writing from both sides of the Atlantic, did share recognition of a “jealousy of trade” that “signaled,” as Istvan Hont explained, “that the economy had become political.”71 The ideas and practices that subsequently took shape did so, as Jonathan Eacott has recently observed, in the “economic, political, and intellectual entanglement of early modern empires.”72 In the case of Portugal, it was American treasure and its consequences for commerce that demanded new analyses of wealth and the purposes of empire.
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Thus, surveying Portugal’s empire in 1715, Rodrigues da Costa outlined the interlocking consequences of unrestricted trade and gold that circulated without “pass[ing] through our hands.” While it made sense that consumers in Brazil sought out the cheapest price for goods “for sustenance and for luxury,” buying from foreigners who made their way to Brazil’s ports to trade goods for both taxed and untaxed gold meant that the crown and Portuguese merchants lost revenue. Worse, he explained, was that, once conditioned to such advantageous exchanges, American consumers would demand freer ports and even seek to separate themselves from “the head of the monarchy” to secure them.73 While for Rodrigues da Costa the solution was to affirm restrictions on trade and on the commercial activities of royal officials in Brazil accused of colluding with foreign traders, later eighteenth-century critics and those entrusted with reform came to see that “the conservation of Brazil” would also require a more ambitious regulation of the production and consumption of wealth, settlement, and American social order.74 As the philosopher Martinho de Mendonça advised, citing William Petty, such “resolutions of state” were to be predicated on “exact calculations,” or a “calculus of vassals” that revealed the population’s needs and productive capacities. “All commerce that invigorates the state and the whole of the sovereign economy, or government of empires,” Mendonça explained, “is founded upon the calculation of repeated experience.”75 At the core such calculations for Portuguese America were settlement and enslavement as practices of governance, and the administration of differences between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples, between free and enslaved people, and between Portugal and Brazil. This book begins by surveying an early eighteenth-century stock-taking of empire in the wake of the discovery of gold and the War of Spanish Succession. Chapter 1 traces debates about empire within new academic venues founded in the 1720s in Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia. On both sides of the Atlantic those who studied the consequences of Asian decline, newly discovered American mineral resources, and imperial rivalry recognized the need to “systematically” cultivate knowledge of Portugal’s ultramarine territories and affirm the legitimacy of Portuguese rule over American territory and conquered peoples. Alongside histories of sociopolitical incorporation into the monarchy, however, Brazilian gold exposed and expanded transformations that challenged legacies of conquest. The chapters that follow trace ideas and practices of governance as they took shape in relation to Portuguese America beginning with the new mining region in the first half of the eighteenth century through the Amazon region and
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commercial coastal enclaves in the decades that followed. At the same time, the chapters also represent particular administrative concerns with American wealth and difference, the consciously colonial projects formulated to address those concerns, and the responses they elicited on the ground in Brazil. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how royal officials and people living under Portuguese rule understood the ways that Brazilian gold recalibrated the modes, purposes, and costs of empire. Chapter 2 recounts how royal officials, including several members of the new academy of history, defined the scope and nature of American empire as they sought to administer the newly settled mining region. In reports and correspondence, written in both Portugal and Brazil, royal officials and others who attended the unfolding settlement of the region complained that the demands of mining had yielded an American society that was incompatible with imperial order. Prospectors and merchants channeled enslaved Africans and goods to miners at the expense of established coastal settlements and, some officials argued, of European authority. In the 1730s, as part of an effort to renew American governance and administration, the crown entrusted Alexandre de Gusmão, serving as João V’s secretary, with devising a new taxation scheme for the mining region, while Martinho de Mendonça was dispatched to implement the reform. Gusmão produced a plan for a new head tax on enslaved people that, he argued, would ensure the integrity of the crown’s ancient right to subterranean resources. On the ground in Minas, as a number of historians have shown, the plan was met with resistance and decried as an attack on royal justice and local authority. For Gusmão and Mendonça, in turn, local responses to the tax and the broader challenges of governance in Brazil affirmed the need to enlarge the scope of royal administration at the expense of traditional incorporative practices. Chapter 3 examines the local social dimensions of Gusmão’s reform, especially the taxation scheme’s relation to the institution of slavery and enslaved people within the mining region. Official correspondence, deliberations among royal counselors, and the records of tax collection and resistance to the reform together reveal slavery as what John Manuel Monteiro described as “a measure of society as a whole.” At the core of the administration of resources and the regulation of difference, slavery constituted an “apparatus of colonial governance,” as Sherwin Bryant has argued for the case of Quito.76 In the case of Gusmão’s head tax plan, implementation depended on both the generation of official knowledge of slave ownership and the crown’s willingness to challenge enslavers’ authority by confiscating and even freeing enslaved laborers as punishment for fraud. As slave owners decried the efforts of enslaved peo-
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ple to exploit the presence of royal authority in the region, Gusmão pointed to mercantile principles to argue that, indeed, while the head tax was intended to increase royal revenue, its implementation would also reshape society based on productivity, even if changes meant setting aside the reproduction of European social order.77 Following the death of João V in 1750, the new king, José I (r. 1750–1777), abolished the head tax. Yet understandings of the political-economic relationship between Portugal and Brazil and of the scope of royal authority that had guided Gusmão’s plan continued to shape official policy. Although mid-century reforms defended by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, José I’s powerful prime minister and later Marquis of Pombal, were intended as a departure from the imperial status quo, they were also part of a longer trajectory of debates about empire, authority, and wealth, as Allan Kuethe and Kenneth Andrien have observed of reformers in Spain and Spanish America. Throughout the eighteenth century Portuguese royal officials recognized that American treasure heightened rivalry and demanded new approaches to colonial governance that would abet the circulation of wealth within the empire in ways that enriched Portugal.78 Chapters 4 and 5 trace how royal officials and the monarchy’s vassals defined and contested the governance and administration of social, cultural, and economic boundaries in Portugal and Brazil in the mid- and late eighteenth century. Chapter 4 examines representations of American consumption and its role in imperial commerce in legislation and in broader debates about the nature and function of colonies. Consumption figured prominently in efforts to regulate expressions of authority and difference that often targeted the enslaved and free people of color in order to reproduce a Europeanized social order. Mid-century sumptuary law, however, generated debate about both commensurability and the extenuating circumstances of non-European spaces. Merchants, free people of color, enslavers, and the enslaved all contested official limits on emulation and the display of social status, and in doing so defined American society and American capacities as distinct from, rather than extensions of, those of Europe. Claims to American difference resonated further in reformist discourse that sought to clarify the productive and consumptive functions of colonies. Chapter 5 examines how royal officials reckoned with the geography of population and labor in the endeavor to settle and defend the Portuguese occupation of American hinterlands and to sustain Brazil as a colony of commerce. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Treaty of Madrid (1750), negotiated by Gusmão, became a point of departure for consolidating
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the boundaries of Portuguese rule in South America and reinvigorating the extraction of American resources and riches. Guided by mercantilist maxims that equated the “propagation” of population with increasing wealth, Carvalho e Melo sought to redefine the status of Native peoples by connecting their violent dispossession to the promotion of intermarriage with European settlers and other ostensibly Europeanizing and wealth-producing exchanges. Settlement and what royal officials described as “the conservation of Brazil” continued to depend as well on enslaved African labor. Accordingly, new laws sought to regulate the slave trade and the mobility and status of Africans and African-descended people within the crown’s territories. The reforms and the responses they elicited on both sides of the Atlantic reinforced the sociopolitical discontinuities between the kingdom of Portugal and the colony of Brazil. From Conquest to Colony concludes with a brief consideration of the connections between understandings of empire and socioeconomic order in Brazil forged in the mid-eighteenth century and the later, and more widely studied, debates about the political economy of the empire that took place in the 1780s and 1790s. Reckoning with the precarity of Portugal’s power in Europe in the context, once again, of war and rivalry, royal counselor Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho surveyed the monarchy’s “political system” to summon postconquest political bonds and interests. Rather than a political-cultural continuum, however, it was variegation that made the empire work. Portugal and its extra-European territories were, Souza Coutinho explained, joined in “a whole comprised of parts so different that separated they could never be as happy.”79 And like his counterparts of the preceding decades, Souza Coutinho assumed that mercantile interests, above all, defined and animated the ties between Portugal, the “common entrepôt,” and Portuguese America. Governing the colony of Brazil meant, therefore, cultivating new knowledge of its resources and renewing scrutiny of socioeconomic production and exchange, while quelling increasingly revolutionary challenges to Portuguese imperial sovereignty, to ensure that American wealth would continue to sustain the monarchy.
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1 • Conquests and Histories Brazil in the Portuguese Empire
In November 1725 the director of the Academia Real da História Portuguesa (Royal Academy of Portuguese History) announced the receipt of a book, “very well written” by the Bahian-born mill owner, gentleman, and colonel Sebastião da Rocha Pita, entitled Historia da America Portugueza, desde o anno de 1500 do seu descobrimento, até o de 1724 (History of Portuguese America from Its Discovery in the Year 1500 to 1724). Just two years earlier the Academia had sanctioned the “commendable and useful” endeavor, already under way when Rocha Pita was elected to its ranks, of writing the history of “such a significant part of the world.” After the manuscript circulated among them for over a year, the Academia’s censors, together with the various civil and religious authorities responsible for the regulation of print in Portugal, approved the manuscript’s publication, to be paid for by Rocha Pita himself, as well as his request to have his status as a provincial member of the Academia recognized on the title page.1 Although royal counselor António Rodrigues da Costa, writing on behalf of the Academia, dismissed the work as “more of an accolade, or panegyric, than history,” commentary in the additional licenses justified publication enthusiastically, at times hyperbolically, and identified both the author and his subject with a discovery worthy of celebration. Rocha Pita, wrote the royal academic and cleric José Barbosa, deserved “the title of a new Columbus” because the book made possible a new discovery of “another new world in the same world already discovered.” “We knew,” he continued, of the first efforts at governing the “gigantic body of that conquest,” of the “apostolic work” that had taken place and, crucially, that its hinterlands “were filled with more gold, and gemstones, than men.” “But,” he added, our understanding “of all of this was so confused that it would not be a great error to affirm that it was the
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same as if we knew nothing.”2 Writing on behalf of the Holy Office, Father Boaventura de São Gião similarly touted the Historia’s contributions with reference to both American natural resources and the problem of knowledge. “The discovery of treasure,” he averred, “matters little if one does not discern its preciousness.”3 Barbosa and São Gião were among many of the intellectual and political elites living within the Portuguese monarchy’s territories who wrote of the early eighteenth century as a new age of discovery and prosperity defined by American treasure. Gold mines in the Brazilian hinterland, royal officials hoped, meant the renovation of an empire battered by local and rival challenges to the Portuguese crown’s extra-European sovereignties. At the same time, reports of new sources of wealth exposed a lack of knowledge about Portuguese America, as Rocha Pita referred to the territory, among those entrusted with defending the monarchy’s authority there and ensuring that its resources flowed into imperial networks of exchange. This chapter surveys late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century transformations within the transoceanic monarchy’s political-economic geography and the attendant and intertwined political and intellectual reckonings, or what Xavier and Županov, writing on Asia, have described as the “interdependence of knowledge and political demands,” among early eighteenth-century royal officials and lettered elites.4 On both sides of the Atlantic, those invested in coming to terms with recent transformations and contemporary challenges recognized, as earlier post-Restoration scholars had as well, that for the empire’s future to be secure, Portugal needed an intellectual renewal to elucidate and guide the renovation of military, diplomatic, and commercial power.5 While, as we will see in later chapters, learned men and royal officials in Portugal and Brazil envisioned such a renewal in political philosophy and political economy, in the early eighteenth century it was in the study of the past, and its academic and institutionalized expression, that they encountered a principal forum for exchange. Narrating, more specifically, the history of the expansion of the monarchy’s sovereignty beyond Europe illuminated how that expansion had been achieved and upheld its legitimacy. Representations of sovereignty as conquista (conquest), both an action and the space that action produced, sustained Portuguese claims to territories, especially those of interest to European rivals, by pointing to the Christian mission and Native defeat. In Brazil, in turn, the history of conquest affirmed the legitimacy of Indigenous dispossession in the past and the present, and upheld local claims to nobility and rewards for having served the crown as it extended its dominion over American lands. Yet, histories of Portuguese America also
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shed light on discontinuities and disruptions across time and the imperial monarchy’s territories. As Portuguese power in Asia waned, the treasure that flowed from Brazil to Portugal promised to bring to fruition the incorporative politics of empire but also tested their limits.
The Atlantic in a Global Empire In the seventeenth century and, as later Portuguese chroniclers often noted, under Spanish Habsburg rule, Portugal’s global network of trading outposts and settlements, which stretched from Macao to São Paulo, was engulfed by the Dutch bid for empire.6 By the 1660s, as the defense of a restored Portuguese sovereignty, led by the newly acclaimed João IV, drew to a victorious close, the Portuguese had lost control of outposts in Kanara, Malabar, Sri Lanka, Hormuz, Muscat, and Malacca to Dutch encroachments and local leaders. Further ground was lost in 1661 when, to secure an alliance against the Dutch in Asia and support for the new Braganza dynasty’s claim against the Spanish, the crown contracted the marriage of João IV’s daughter Catarina to Charles II of England. The dowry included Portuguese recognition of any English claims to formerly Portuguese territories retaken from the Dutch, as well as Tangier and the islands of Bombaím, north of Goa, together with trading privileges and 2 million cruzados.7 Meanwhile, in Africa the Portuguese contended with Dutch attempts to take the fortress at Elmina (Ghana); Dutch failure to do so in 1625 was followed with success in 1637 and the beginning of an enduring Dutch presence on the so-called Gold Coast. Just a few years later, in 1641, the Dutch also captured Luanda and Benguela. The toll of losses in Asia and on the African coast for Portuguese Asian trade mounted. Already in the 1630s—in contrast to the 1580s and 1590s when the carreira da India, the fleets that sailed between Portugal and Goa, comprised as many as fifty-nine ships—fewer than two ships arrived at Lisbon per year, with no significant increase in the following decades.8 Dutch challenges to Portuguese settlements and fortresses in Africa were part of a larger plan executed by the Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621 at the end of a truce with the Spanish Habsburgs, to usurp Portuguese Atlantic commerce, including the lucrative trade in enslaved Africans and the sugar that they cultivated in northeastern Brazil. In 1624 the Dutch briefly occupied the capital city of Salvador da Bahia. The capture of Olinda and Recife in Pernambuco in 1630, in turn, had more lasting effects. The following decade the Dutch extended their control into the surrounding hinterland and,
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under the leadership of Johan Mauritz van Nassau-Siegen, who arrived in 1636, resumed their campaign to displace the Portuguese from northeastern South America.9 A later assault on Salvador in 1638 failed, however, and in 1645, the year after Nassau-Siegen returned to Europe, Lusophone residents of Pernambuco launched a rebellion against Dutch rule. Around the same time, the recapture of Angola in 1648 by Salvador de Sá, with assets and men he had secured in Rio de Janeiro, reinvigorated Portuguese Atlantic trade. As the local mobilization against the Dutch in Pernambuco took shape, the Portuguese crown founded the Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil in 1649, providing a new venue for investment, including from New Christians, with rights to import cod, oil, and wine into Brazil as well as the duty to organize and share in the revenue from more secure transatlantic fleets laden with enslaved Africans and sugar. One of these fleets was instrumental in the definitive expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil in 1654. The crown also turned to Portuguese America to finance both Catarina’s dowry and an indemnity to the Dutch that was part of treaties signed in 1661 and 1669. As Rodrigo Monteiro has noted, royal orders linked these two obligations, summoning officials in Brazil to collect a “donation,” some 140,000 cruzados over the next sixteen years, for “the dowry and peace with Holland.”10 As American resources came to underwrite the defense of the monarchy’s sovereignty in Asia, Africa, and America, Brazil’s economy, and the larger commercial networks of which it was a part, were transformed. By the end of the wars with the Dutch and the Spanish, the English and the French had established sugar plantations in the Caribbean. More sugar in European markets meant a decline in its price, with revenues reaching a low in the 1680s. Even at times when Brazilian trade was on the rise, transatlantic revenues could not compensate entirely for what had been lost in Asia. Nor could new links between Brazil and India via the Cape route, especially the trade in Brazilian tobacco, reverse the trend of declining imperial revenue overall.11 Yet what historians have called an “Atlantic system,” based on the intricately linked commercial economies of Brazil, Africa, and Portugal, and connected to Asian trading networks as well, gained momentum at the end of the seventeenth century. With the foundation of Colônia do Sacramento around Brazil’s southern border in 1680, the pluricontinental Portuguese monarchy hoped to fortify the commercial nexus of Luanda, Rio de Janeiro, and Rio de la Plata. Around the same time, the awe-inspiring potential of Brazilian gold mines also came into view; in one decade they yielded more treasure than those in Spanish America had over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.12
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European war further consolidated Portugal’s Atlantic priorities in the first decades of the eighteenth century. During the War of Spanish Succession, to secure Spanish affirmation of Braganza authority and respect for the existing borders between the kingdom of Portugal and Castile, the Portuguese crown initially supported Philip of Anjou, the Bourbon pretender to the throne; British and Dutch military vessels were barred from Portuguese ports. In 1702, however, Pedro II changed course. The following year Portugal joined the Anglo-Dutch military alliance in support of Habsburg claims and a few months later signed the Methuen Treaty, a commercial agreement that provided preferential tariffs for British goods imported into Portugal in exchange for lower tariffs on Portuguese wine and oil imported into England. While the treaty’s terms and its impact on Portugal’s economy would be subject to debate and critique, particularly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the time it ensured that Portuguese vessels and Portuguese Atlantic ports would remain free from British naval aggression, which had been unmistakably on display in 1702 in the attempted siege of Cadiz and the destruction of the Spanish silver fleet in Vigo Bay.13 Writing from Bahia, Sebastião da Rocha Pita insisted that in pursuing this strategy, the king had acted wisely, justly, and with knowledge that a divinely sanctioned empire was at stake. Yet, the alliance with the British did not mean that Portuguese Atlantic territories remained unscathed.14 The poorly defended port of Rio de Janeiro was attacked twice by French expeditions in 1710 and 1711. And, as the Overseas Council warned in response, imperial commerce and transatlantic flows of gold meant that the repercussions of American vulnerability in Euro-Atlantic wars extended beyond America to the center of Portuguese power. “Virtually the entire preservation of this kingdom,” the counselors concluded in 1712, depended on the security of the mining region’s port.15 By then, however, European leaders had taken steps toward truce, and diplomatic representatives began to gather in the city of Utrecht to negotiate a peace. In a series of agreements intended to forge a new balance of power, the British agreed to recognize the Bourbon Philip as the king of Spain as long as the French and Spanish crowns were not united. Spain was stripped of its Italian territories, while the British claimed Gibraltar. For the Portuguese, the diplomacy at Urecht, as Nuno Monteiro explains, affirmed the Atlantic orientation already evident in the Methuen Treaty. The “conservation of Brazil,” the Count of Tarouca advised, “is more important than our pretensions with respect to Spain.”16 During the negotiations Tarouca and the diplomat Luís da Cunha sought to guarantee the crown’s sovereignty in Brazil by
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Figure 1. Map of eighteenth-century Portuguese America. (Adapted from New Countries, ed. John Tutino, Map 6.1. Copyright 2017, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the publisher.)
securing recognition of Portuguese control of land between the Oyapock and Amazon Rivers on Brazil’s northeastern borders and the return of Colônia do Sacramento, abandoned in 1705 following Spanish attacks on the settlement. As Júnia Furtado has shown, the proceedings at Utrecht also persuaded Da Cunha, a critic of the Methuen Treaty, of the possibility of extending Portugal’s claims in South America beyond the lines of demarcation established in the 1490s. Commissioning maps during his posting in Paris, Da Cunha set in motion a diplomatic endeavor that would culminate in 1750 in the provisions
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of the Treaty of Madrid, which dramatically enlarged Portugal’s American territory to the west (figure 1).17 At the same time, the war and its aftermath underscored the persistent and interrelated challenges of maintaining, and exploiting, sovereignty in Brazil. “In Europe the mines are appraised, and not unjustly, as the richest that have yet to be seen,” Rodrigues da Costa advised the crown in 1709, “and they certainly will awaken the envy and ambition of other nations.” The French attack on Rio, noted above, had confirmed this assessment and made clear that securing the rewards of American treasure would come at a cost.18 In response, within Europe João V invested in diplomacy, at times spectacular in form, to guarantee parity in recognition of the Portuguese monarchy among other Catholic powers.19 In projects for enhanced fortification and coastal fleets, in the appointment of governors with experience in war, and in prohibitions of commerce with foreigners, royal officials sought to defend Brazil from corsairs and other interlopers who used various “pretexts” to trade in American ports, including appeals to local officials to let supposedly unseaworthy ships offload goods in exchange for gold.20 As royal officials, including Rocha Pita’s censors, also recognized, however, endeavors to secure American wealth and maintain American sovereignty demanded greater knowledge of “the gigantic body of that conquest,” of how it had come to be part of the Portuguese monarchy and of the forms of authority that shaped American societies and economies.
Histories of the Conquests In 1720 João V summoned fifty of his most erudite subjects, including many who served in royal offices, to gather as a new Academia Real da História Portuguesa. Such a gesture, as a number of scholars have noted, affirmed the king’s commitment to learning and rewarded a republic of letters that educated men in Portugal had diligently cultivated among themselves and through correspondence and formal associations with various European academies.21 Entrusted with reinvigorating ecclesiastical and dynastic history, and with demonstrating the ties between the relatively new Braganza dynasty, founded in 1640, and a long and sacred line of sovereigns, the Academia’s members resolved to examine the past as a “system.” Because history was like an “edifice,” the Count of Ericeira, Father Manuel de Sousa, and other founding members argued, “one work [. . .] fabricated by many craftsmen” who all worked according to “a design of the whole,” the Academia needed to
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recognize in each part of Portugal’s history “an idea of its totality.” The Academia’s members were also instructed to attend to geography and chronology, “the two eyes of History,” and in the latter case to reconcile significant dates in their own research with the work of the French Jesuit chronologer Denis Pétau (1583–1652). To purge distortion and apocryphal claims from the understanding of the past, academic inquiries were to be guided by reading and citing, sometimes at length, both printed and archival sources, a practice established in ecclesiastical history and legal humanist scholarship with currency across Europe.22 Recourse to “writings most contemporary to the events that they related” was necessary, as royal counselor and academic Alexandre de Gusmão later argued, in order to avert “the risk of fabricating a novella instead of a history.”23 The completed and published works, “memoirs for a history,” divided into books and chapters, were to include dedications to the king, prologues, and indices, and thereby to serve as the basis for a new, comprehensive history of the monarchy.24 What the Portuguese writer and historian Jaime Cortesão described as the Academia’s “political ends” also encompassed Portugal’s “conquests.”25 The Academia’s members, including men of title and rank who served on the Overseas Council and who had experience in royal service in India and Brazil, reiterated recognition of the extension of Portuguese sovereignty beyond Iberia as an exceptional source of glory.26 The Portuguese had “discovered and dominated [. . .] many kingdoms in the three parts of the world,” the Count of Ericeira exulted, before enlarging their empire with “a New World, vanquishing the elements and making inhabitable zones that had been judged deserted, sowing the seeds of the true religion in countries infected by idolatry.”27 Setting out from Europe, as José da Cunha Brochado likewise affirmed, the Portuguese had made “of the ocean a meadow, of navigation a recreation,” while “illuminat[ing] the faith and civil order in the most remote and most uncultivated of nations.”28 As the royal academics also recognized, however, the memory of the unprecedented feats that forged the empire had not resisted what Pedro de Almeida, the third Count of Assumar, described as the “violence of time.” Like many predecessors and rivals, the Portuguese empire was a victim of what Francisco de Sousa called a “tyranny of oblivion” that could not be vanquished by monuments and obelisks or the “people’s most fervent praise.” “Death and time” conspired against “human glory” and the memory of “the heroic actions of the ancient Portuguese.” For Assumar, some solace could be found in the examples of Greece and Rome, empires whose “eternal spirit” transcended their
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physical ruin. Yet, as other academics acknowledged, expressions of their own empire’s spirit were unfortunately meager. While no one could ignore the celebrated chroniclers of the great sixteenth-century Asian “enterprise”—Diogo de Couto, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, and João de Barros, “the Portuguese Livy”—even Barros’s published work was incomplete and, Ericeira explained, increasingly difficult to obtain.29 Furthermore, while the early history of conquest in Asia had at the very least received the attention of royal chroniclers, the more recent history of mid-seventeenth-century war and rivalry there had been left unwritten. “Of all of this time,” the Marquis of Alegrete lamented, “we have so few reports of the things of Asia and most of it is given to us from foreign rather than Portuguese pens.”30 Beyond Asia, the empire’s past was even more obscured. The history of the Portuguese in Africa, royal academics observed, had been only briefly and partially treated, even by the distinguished royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara (d. 1474).31 In contrast to Asia, Manuel Dias de Lima explained, Africa had not inspired writers to tell its tales of “savage bellicosity” because “it lacked the riches and commerce of the Orient.” As Alegrete similarly suggested in the prologue to his history of the Academia, the challenges of travel and climate, and “the barbarity of its inhabitants, so brave and skilled at war,” meant that very few had written of Portugal’s African enterprise.32 Nor was the work of those who had overcome these obstacles sufficiently disseminated. André Álvares de Almada’s “Tratado Breve dos Reynos de Guiné, e Cabo Verde” (Brief Treatise on the Kingdoms of Guinea and Cape Verde; 1594), as the academic and bibliographer Diogo Barbosa Machado noted in 1741, was judged at the time it was written to be “most worthy of the public light,” yet its first print edition appeared only in 1733 and, regrettably, diverged from the original’s “style and order” and erred in identifying the author.33 Turning to Portuguese America, academics encountered a similarly disgraceful lack of comprehensive accounts of its past. Earlier attempts in the 1670s to attend to American history with a new post of chronicler for the State of Brazil had not borne fruit.34 As a consequence there were, Alegrete concluded, but three “authors in print” who had offered accounts of the “discoveries that we made in America, such a considerable and expansive land that it deserved the name New World.” Even the succession of men appointed to govern there in the king’s name, Ericeira noted in 1724, was not well known.35 To recover the lost history of empire, the Academia’s members launched campaigns on several fronts. Bringing back into circulation the existing registry of the past, they argued, was among the most crucial tasks to be performed.
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In authorizing on behalf of the Desembargo do Paço (Supreme Court of Royal Justice) the 1740 edition of Notícias de Portugal (1655) by the canon of Évora’s cathedral, Manuel Severim de Faria, António Caetano de Sousa explained that by editing and updating the reformist studies of Portugal and its empire, his fellow academic Father José Barbosa made available once again “a great light” for “all who are curious about our history.”36 Although he was not a member, Bernardo Gomes de Brito invoked the Academia Real and João V’s patronage of its historiographical enterprise in dedicating his two-volume collection of accounts of sixteenth-century shipwrecks, Historia Tragico-Maritima (1735–1736). Together, the “historical fragments” attested to the service of “the crown’s vassals” at sea and summoned the “horror” that those shipwrecked had endured. In reenacting tragedy “in the theater of history,” Father Manuel de Sá argued in his publication license, Brito’s compilation also inscribed the Portuguese imperial experience into a Ciceronian “history in common.”37 At the same time, as was the case with the history of the kingdom of Portugal, the Academia’s members insisted on the need for new accounts of the places that the Portuguese had encountered, conquered, and settled that would reckon with ancient sources and with what had since been learned. After all, the Marquis of Valença observed, those who, out of “reverence for the ancients,” continued to imagine Africa as uninhabitable and full of monsters deserved to be called “ignorant.”38 There were as well, so Manuel Dias de Lima reported, many questions that simply remained unanswered. In his readings on King Manuel I (r. 1495–1521) and a reign that was to a large extent defined by the “discoveries and conquests of Africa, Ethiopia, America, India and other Oriental Provinces,” he had encountered a number of “very serious matters” to subject to “rigorous examination”: twenty-seven questions on topics ranging from the nautical sciences, geology, and weather patterns to the history of the ancient Mediterranean, the spread of Christianity, Saint Thomas’s martyrdom, Prester John, the origins of the Nile, the peopling of America after the Flood, and the beginnings and legitimacy of European empire.39 Anticipating the nature and extent of the research required to address what Dias de Lima called “dissertations [. . .] connected to the history of our conquests,” the Academia’s leadership had, as in the case of ecclesiastical and dynastic histories more generally, outlined a division of academic labor and a method of inquiry for the empire’s history.40 The histories of each Portuguese monarch, the Academia’s “System of History” advised, were to include accounts of the contemporary “political and military state of affairs” in “all of the
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conquests.” These accounts were to start with “Africa, and the islands, beginning with those closest to Portugal and concluding with those most remote.” Thus, like the Portuguese seafarers and soldiers whose feats they described, the histories of the conquests were to radiate out from the European center. The histories’ “geographical order,” however, would diverge from imperial chronology. Rather than following the route of Vasco da Gama, the historical narrative would continue directly to America and then from the Atlantic to India, “making reference to the civil, political and military” affairs of the viceroys and governors as well as to “all that pertained to that dominion and to Portuguese navigation and commerce.”41 Finally, apart from the histories of the conquests embedded within the history of each monarch, the Academia commissioned a distinct ecclesiastical history of the ultramar, assigning to the royal counselor Rodrigues da Costa the task of writing this history in Latin, while the genealogist Father António Caetano de Sousa would do the same “in the Portuguese language.” After Rodrigues da Costa’s death in 1732— hastened, one Lisbon newsletter reported, by “excessive sorrow” over recent losses in India—his place and duties within the Academia were taken up by Alexandre de Gusmão.42 As Gusmão remarked in one of his first reports to the Academia, while he had imagined that, “because the subject of our history in the ultramar encompassed only the last three centuries,” he would easily find the relevant writings and quickly collate information for “his composition,” in fact, the original, archival materials that defined the Academia’s standards were very hard to come by.43 To address this problem and, in effect, construct an imperial archive, the Academia’s members followed the mandate, similar to that for the kingdom of Portugal, to collect manuscripts and records scattered across Portuguese territories. Royal officials and ecclesiastical authorities in Asia, Africa, and America received news of the Academia’s project and a copy of the “Memoria das Noticias” that enlisted them, and men within their jurisdictions, to compile inventories of, and transcribe documents from, local archives to be sent to Lisbon where the Academia’s members could examine them as evidence of the monarchy’s history in its extra-European possessions. As the correspondence between the Academia and royal and ecclesiastical officials reveals, while officials in Asia, Africa, and America faced challenges in complying with these requests—including time constraints, archives lost to war and natural disaster, and the cost of transcribing the documents—they responded with pledges of forthcoming support for what the viceroy of Brazil called the “glory that
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the nation achieves for posterity with this immortal work.”44 The study of this new archive, the Academia’s leadership in turn reported, promised to yield a new history of the “conquests” that attended to the “laws and customs of their peoples,” “their animals, plants and minerals,” “their coasts and hinterlands,” their past “governors’ actions” and, as noted in the case of Asia, “Portuguese navigation and commerce.”45 The “System of History” defined the broader academic program for the history of the conquests in only three brief paragraphs at the end of its ten pages. While such a framework suggested a view of African, Asian, and American history as both subordinate to and separate from that of the kingdom of Portugal, in the complete and partial research reports included in the Academia’s monumental Collecçam dos documentos e memorias and in the historical studies (memorias) that were published in the 1730s and 1740s, accounts of imperial legislation, geography, economy, and leadership were duly integrated into chronological surveys defined by reign. Thus, in recounting the history of mid-sixteenth-century incursions into Africa in the first volume of his Memorias . . . delrey D. Sebastião, for example, Diogo Barbosa Machado began a chapter on Ethiopia with a brief description of its presumed present as well as its biblical past. Reports of the legendary Prester John and of the contemporary religious diversity of the land’s inhabitants—“Christians, Moors, Jews, and Gentiles”—were part of what Machado described as a journey from paganism to Judaism and, in the wake of the tireless zeal of Saint Athanasius, from the “confused message of the Law of Grace” to the “Catholic Faith” and then to Eutychian heresy; a history, in other words, of “beginning, progress and decadence.”46 Here and elsewhere academic forays into the “laws and customs of peoples” in Africa, Asia, and America were brief, without the extended examination of the past found in histories of the kingdom of Portugal. Nor did academics provide a detailed inventory of the natural resources in territories under Portuguese rule. Instead, the Academia’s reports and studies offered a record of Portuguese explorers, soldiers, and missionaries and their actions across the globe, a history of conquest in “the conquests” that recovered the memory of how and by whom the empire had been forged. As the Marquis de Abrantes explained in 1722, invoking Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572), the Academia offered, if not a poetic epic, at least an “elegant narration of our ancestors’ feats, a representation of the theaters in which they were achieved,” where they had overcome “so many diverse nations in both familiar and strange climates to the immortal glory of the Portuguese name.”47
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As the Academia’s members also contended, such an enterprise had been defined by successive Portuguese kings’ commitment to extend both their authority and the Christian faith. “To raise the standards of Christ, to make venerated his Holy Law,” Gusmão affirmed, constituted the Portuguese conquerors’ “first end.” As Brochado explained, this trajectory began in 1139 with a monarchy “erected” upon Afonso Henriques’s victory over “the Mauritanian infidel.”48 Three centuries later, Soares da Silva’s Memorias para a história de Portugal, que comprehendem o governo del rey D. Joaõ o I recounted, led by their king João I (r. 1385–1433), the Portuguese then conquered Ceuta, a city whose antiquity and greatness had been recognized by none other than Saint Augustine. In doing so they had rekindled the dream of a unified Christendom and inaugurated Europe’s expansion to other lands.49 Moving beyond North Africa, Gusmão reported, the Portuguese had set aside profane and bellicose contests for territory and treasure to bring Christianity to “strange Nations,” areas so remote that the Gospel had not yet been heard by the uncivilized peoples who lived there. “Among Europeans, the Portuguese distinguished themselves,” he concluded, in that, unlike other nations, they did not invade “countries more cultured than their own, robbing those who justly governed them of their possession; rather, with unprecedented zeal, they carried the light of the faith and the law to barbarous lands and to savage peoples who did not know or who had disparaged” the sacred message.50 The defense of Portuguese sovereignty in service to the faith, João Couceiro de Abreu e Castro also reminded the Academia in 1723, had been ratified in “bulls that Prince Henrique and the Kings of Portugal solicited from the Popes Nicholas V, Callixtus III, and Alexander VI for our conquests.”51 Yet, as Iris Kantor has argued, the Academia’s members recognized as well that without overturning entirely older political-evangelical justifications for empire, new international juridical frameworks and alliances, forged in the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and affirmed more recently in Utrecht, meant that the Portuguese could not take for granted their rivals’ recognition of the religious consequences of conquest or the exclusive rights and duties established by papal donation.52 In the wake of the Treaty of Utrecht, as Diogo de Mendonça Corte-Real observed of the dispute over Colônia do Sacramento, sovereignty had been defined “according to the agreement of the parties that could be adjusted as they saw fit and by border markers of the dominions of one and the other crown.”53 Nor, as royal officials understood, did earlier treaties necessarily serve the interests of the crown, especially as settlers moved from the coast into the American hinterland. The Academia’s systematic history of the
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conquests thus had to go beyond affirming a divinely sanctioned right of conquest and mission in Africa, Asia, and America. Rather, it was in the record of more than two centuries of de facto domination—manifest in settlement and, above all, in African, Asian, and American rulers’ formal recognition of the authority of the Portuguese king, rendered in “political ceremonies” and “more express and humble clauses”—that the legitimacy of Portugal’s imperial sovereignties came fully into view. As Ericeira assured the Academia’s members in an address at the royal palace in 1729, the king had made of “so many Kings” his “tributaries.”54 History, however, also showed that Portuguese sovereignty had not simply radiated out from the kingdom. “The discovery of India by way of Africa’s coast,” Manuel Dias de Lima reported of his studies of King Manuel, “gave us knowledge of so many seas, capes, islands, regions and empires,” as well as of the “many Oriental riches that since then abounded in this kingdom and would still if we had preserved the two richest emporia of Hormuz and Malacca and the most prosperous Island of Ceylon.”55 The monarchy’s history, in other words, was a history not only of conquest but also, more recently, of the loss of Portuguese dominion that not even celebrations of recent victories in Asia under João V could obscure. Gusmão, and many other academics, attributed this turn of events to negligent Spanish rulers.56 As royal academics also acknowledged, however, if the Habsburgs had left the seventeenth-century empire vulnerable to the Dutch, encroachments by other European powers remained a threat. “The world is so lacking in faith and so dominated by ambition,” advised Rodrigues da Costa in 1732, that future challenges to Portuguese dominion in America, especially from “Europe’s maritime nations,” had to be assumed.57 In this context, academics argued, the contemporary defense of imperial claims also depended on history’s “other eye.”58 Geography, Luís Caetano de Lima explained, illuminated the intersections of politics and place so that “peoples who did not personally visit their sovereign” could “in some way” experience his “presence.”59 Unfortunately, as the mathematician and engineer Manuel de Azevedo Fortes reported in 1721 and 1722, Portugal’s knowledge of geography was as lamentable as its knowledge of the empire’s past. Portugal, he complained, was the only European state “that finds itself without its own charts,” having gone from teaching Europe the world’s geography to “begging” for maps.60 In response, the Academia’s leadership assigned to Fortes and the Jesuit cartographer and mathematician Manuel de Campos the study of “geographical subjects” pertaining to the kingdom and the conquests.61 Luís
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Caetano de Lima also embarked on Historia geografica de todos os estados soberanos da Europa (Geographical History of All the Sovereign States of Europe; 1734), a work that included a detailed historical geography of the Atlantic islands claimed by the Portuguese crown. According to a report he made before the Academia in 1723, his initial plan also included research on the “other colonies of the old and the new world.”62 In the case of Portuguese America, academics reported, the gap in geographical knowledge to be bridged was especially wide. Appearing before the Academia in 1731, Manuel de Campos explained that he could not finish his studies in time to present his map as planned. The study of the Brazilian coastline, he confessed, “cost him no less than three months” and yet it remained “all in white.”63 As Academia members and royal officials also understood, it was not only, or even principally, the South American coastline that demanded extensive study. As prospectors in Brazil pushed farther west in search of gold, “new discoveries made in the hinterlands of that state a few years ago” produced what royal officials described as “doubts and controversies,” especially near borders with Spain’s South American territories.64 Fueling the uncertainty were a series of astronomical observations of longitude, presented in 1720 to the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris by the geographer Guillaume Delisle, that revised the location of the Meridian of Tordesillas, dividing Spain’s and Portugal’s territory in South America at the expense of Portuguese claims. While contemporaries and later historians, including Jaime Cortesão, contested the merits of the new map, Portuguese diplomats and royal officials received news of Delisle’s “dissertation” as an “unjust” challenge to Portuguese sovereignty, especially in the Colônia do Sacramento, and one that demanded a response. Over the next decades, as Júnia Furtado has shown, in pursuit of what he called “observations more modern than those alleged,” the diplomat, and corresponding member of the Academia, Luís da Cunha gathered geographic tracts and established contacts with French cartographers to ensure that the Portuguese would have extensive and exact knowledge of South America.65 In 1729, to address disputes and to shore up defense, the administration of justice, and the “levies of my treasury,” the king also sent to Brazil two Jesuit mathematicians to make “maps of the lands” based on precise astronomical surveys. The defense of Brazil and the treasure it contained, royal officials thus recognized, depended not only on an archive of glorious and legitimate conquest but also on new knowledge of South America’s extent and terrain.66
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Portuguese American Histories Across the Atlantic, in the American capital city of Salvador, the Academia Real inspired a parallel endeavor to affirm and defend the legitimacy of Portuguese imperial sovereignty in the past and the present. In 1724, gathering the learned men of the city and surrounding region, the viceroy of Brazil, Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses (1673–1741), founded the Academia Brasílica dos Esquecidos (Brazilian Academy of the Forgotten). While not all of its members had been entirely “forgotten” by their metropolitan counterparts— two of them, Gonçalo Soares da Franca and Rocha Pita, were among the Academia Real’s supernumeraries appointed in 1722—the Bahian academy provided a new and unprecedented venue for local and transatlantic intellectual exchange. Seven founding members, including the royal judges Caetano de Brito e Figueiredo, Luís Siqueira da Gama, and Inácio Barbosa Machado, the younger brother of royal academics Diogo and José, were joined by an additional twenty-nine core participants with dozens more men affiliated with the academy in one way or another over the course of the following year. Most of the core group were Brazilian-born, and most had been educated at local Jesuit schools. Nine had studied at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, and three had participated in meetings of the Academia dos Anónimos (Academy of the Anonymous) in Lisbon, whose membership overlapped with that of the Academia Real.67 Together, the Esquecidos thus formed part of what Diogo Curto has described as a local social-intellectual circle shaped by a “nobiliarquicecclesiastical” ideal of statutory hierarchy and elite conceptions of fidelity and service to the monarchy.68 Beginning with their first meeting at the viceregal palace in April 1724, the Esquecidos dutifully executed their charge to examine “heroic” and “lyrical” subjects in poetry, oration, and prose in Portuguese, Latin, Spanish, and French. As a number of scholars have observed, the resulting corpus, generated over the course of a year, evinces both a local intellectual sensibility and a self-consciously European erudition.69 Roused by the Academia Real and what one member described as the “effect of such a sovereign impulse,” the Esquecidos also pledged to contribute to the neglected task of “resuscitating” a Portuguese history “that lay buried in the abyss of confusion, uncertainty and imposture.” Their inquiries, they pledged, would adhere to a rigorous documentary standard while enlisting history’s critical potential.70 History, Siqueira da Gama explained, would serve them as “a Greek choir that reveals the reason of things past.”71 The task of generating “studies for Brazilican history,” the
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Esquecidos’ foundational documentation indicates, was divided among four of its leading members. Soares da Franca was to examine Brazil’s ecclesiastical history, Barbosa Machado its military history, Siqueira da Gama its political history, and Brito e Figueiredo its natural history. The presentation of these histories began with the Esquecidos’ first session, suggesting that the new academy provided a forum and official imprimatur for ongoing scholarly work and the broader intellectual milieu in which Rocha Pita wrote his Historia da America Portuguesa, also completed around this time. Although the Academia Real inspired the Esquecidos’ commitment to examine the Brazilian past, their four-part agenda did not adhere to the “systematic” approach to historical inquiry outlined in Lisbon. While Brito de Figueiredo’s natural history and Rocha Pita’s Historia provided at least part of the catalog of natural resources that the Academia Real’s founders had called for, neither the political nor the military history privileged chronology defined by reign or dynastic origins. Moreover, even as Brito e Figueiredo enjoined his fellow Esquecidos to avoid confusing “the academic style with scholastic terms” and to look for the truth in narrative expression rather than in rigor of argument, the Bahian historical inquiries, in contrast to those of the Academia Real, foregrounded formal debate. Rather than narrate a particular event, the Esquecidos presented the results of their studies as “dissertations” dedicated to answering a question concerning the Portuguese conquest and settlement of Brazil in light of ancient and modern sources as well as their own juridical, theological, and philosophical erudition.72 Academics in Bahia did share with their counterparts in Portugal an interest in writing the American past within contemporary understandings of a universal history. As one member of the Esquecidos affirmed in verse, “To give from Brazil in Bahia / a universal History, / is the whole and principal end / of this noble Academy.”73 To cultivate this line of argument, the Esquecidos copiously cited classical authorities, “gentiles” guided “by the light of natural reason,” as Luís Siqueira da Gama described them.74 The Roman god and goddess of war, its title suggested, inspired Inácio Barbosa Machado’s “Exercisios de Marte: nova escolla de Bellona” (Exercises of Mars: New School of Bellona), while for Rocha Pita the universal nature and ancient precedents of Brazil’s history were manifest in Roman Iberian origins that culminated in “our Portuguese America (and principally the province of Bahia) which in the production of ingenious sons can compete with Italy and Greece.”75 The Esquecidos also universalized Brazil’s history by identifying America’s place within Christian history and geography. Siqueira da Gama began his
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study of the political history of Brazil with reference to the Creation and the Flood, while Brito e Figueiredo affirmed that America’s Indigenous inhabitants were part of this ancient history, denouncing the “heretical absurdity” that placed them outside of an Adamic lineage. Rather, he explained, America’s Natives “came from agrestic men” who had passed from Europe or Asia “to these regions.”76 Rocha Pita similarly took the singularity of human origins as a point of departure for his Historia and announced that he was not interested in what he called “weak conjectures” about “the controversy over the origin of the inhabitants that passed to this region.”77 More crucial, he argued, was the question of whether the Apostle Thomas had preached across the territories that eventually would be ruled by Portugal and Spain.78 As he embarked on his mid-sixteenth-century mission in Brazil, the Jesuit Manuel de Nóbrega had been the first to conclude that Saint Thomas had preceded the Jesuits in spreading the Gospel to the Natives there.79 Both Soares da Franca and Rocha Pita upheld this claim, rejecting later challenges to accounts of ancient evangelization. To begin with, they argued, the Americas would not have been excluded from Christ’s call for his Apostles to preach the Gospel “throughout the whole world.” Responding to claims that the Natives’ paganism and barbarity in the present cast doubt on whether their ancestors had, in fact, heard the Gospel preached from “a man with a long beard” named Sumé, Soares da Franca and Rocha Pita pointed to accounts of Saint Thomas’s persecution. When the Apostle left America for Asia, Brazil’s Natives had heard, but not received, the Gospel and so remained mired in dark and diabolical practices until the Old World and the New were brought together once again.80 Like other “miraculous” episodes in the Christian past, Rocha Pita conceded, there were aspects of Saint Thomas’s journey that defied human understanding. Yet, as he and Soares da Franca insisted as well, affirmations of the Apostle’s presence in America, beginning with Nóbrega and later in the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, Pedro de Ribadeneira, and the Jesuit Simão de Vasconcelos, closed the gap by textualizing original, intertwined, and abundant forms of evidence: the physical signs of Saint Thomas’s ancient presence, such as inscriptions and traces of his presence on stone, and the Indigenous oral tradition that revealed the meaning of these enigmatic signs. Borrowing from Vasconcelos’s Noticias curiosas e necessárias das cousas do Brasil (Curious and Necessary Reports on the Things of Brazil; 1668), Soares da Franca explained that “events are also engraved on memories.” Among “nations who had no knowledge of the first principles of reading and writing,” he continued, a collective and socially transmitted memory was the primary reservoir of
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knowledge of the past.81 Considering Indigenous stories of the Flood, Brito e Figueiredo similarly concluded that, regardless of uncertainty and confusion, the “light” of sacred truth had shown through “the crepuscules and shadows of confused, uncertain and dubious communications.”82 Rocha Pita was even more sanguine. Brazil’s Natives had transmitted knowledge of the encounter with Saint Thomas, he judged, “with little corruption.”83 The Esquecidos’ defense of Indigenous knowledge recalls the forging of what Jorge Cañizares and Anna More have described in the case of Spanish America as a “patriotic epistemology” and “creole archive.”84 Indeed, Soares da Franca and Rocha Pita invested more in assigning America a venerable place within the world’s history than in explaining what Saint Thomas’s preaching meant for the future of evangelization in Brazil. As Soares da Franca concluded, the belief that Saint Thomas had passed through America before succumbing to martyrdom in Asia set aside ideas of American difference and inferiority relative to other areas the Portuguese had sought to dominate. “If those of America are gentiles, those from Asia were as well,” he explained, and “if India is great, America is incomparably greater.” At the same time, the Esquecidos pointed to a geography of evangelization that suggested that it was the lens of Portuguese imperial history that clarified the enigma of ancient Christian evangelization. As Soares da Franca observed, invoking Portugal’s itineraries of expansion, “if America is far from Judea, India too, as we know, is not close by.” Imperial history further revealed that expectations of finding abundant physical evidence of ancient evangelization were misguided. “When we dowered Tangier to the English in 1662, after a domination of 190 years,” Soares da Franca explained, the English did not find “signs or evidence of mosques,” just as the Portuguese, were they to reconquer the city from the Alawites who now ruled there, would find even “traces of its churches” to be so thoroughly destroyed as to be “unthinkable.”85 The Esquecidos’ histories, therefore, illuminated Brazil’s place within a long and complex history of victories, and reversals, that unfolded as Christianity had spread across the globe. Saint Thomas, as Rocha Pita recalled, had escaped from certain death at the hands of Natives in Bahia by miraculously transporting himself “upon the waves” to Meliapore, where he was martyred.86 The Esquecidos also integrated Portuguese America’s past into a broader history of Portugal’s imperial wars and conquests. On the one hand, this history was defined by emulation and continuity. As Rocha Pita observed, Tomé de Sousa, the first governor of Brazil, “had served in Africa and Asia,” proving himself to such a degree at war and in “political governance that he was
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left only to do the same for America, theater of his glorious conquest of the gentiles and forging of the republic.”87 Later, as Inácio Barbosa Machado recounted in “Exercisios de Marte,” Governor-General Mem de Sá (d. 1572) had sought “to imitate the Albuquerques, Cunhas, and Castros,” men who had forged the early conquests to the east, and thus led campaigns that ended with the defeat of all those who challenged Portuguese sovereignty, European or Indigenous, ensuring that Portuguese settlement in America would endure.88 The history of war in Portuguese America, Barbosa Machado argued, thus was a history of imperial recurrence: “glorious battles, illustrious defenses, celebrated retreats, and valiant reconnoitering” that made warriors in Brazil “if not as famous as in Asia’s regions, at least worthy of the fame” that the Portuguese “went to acquire in the orient, cradle of the sun.”89 On the other hand, if Portuguese America was the last in a reiterative sequence of claims and conquests, there were also aspects of its early history that defied the practices and ideals forged initially in Africa and Asia. To begin with, the Esquecidos noted, Portugal’s unanticipated access to western Atlantic territory had not resulted from a military campaign. As Barbosa Machado observed of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s famous transatlantic detour, “Portugal did not obtain this vast continent of provinces with the bloodshed that was required to defeat the prideful Orient but rather by way of an imperceptible path,” beyond human understanding, that “Divine Providence forged with a storm.”90 Cabral himself had recognized the incongruity. Although his crew urged him to return directly to Portugal to report the unexpected turn of events, Cabral chose to continue to India instead. “The valiant corporal was not content with success that came by accident or destiny,” Barbosa Machado explained, and so sought in Asia the kind of “occasions for war” in which he could earn “praise for his valor.”91 The years that followed seemed to affirm Cabral’s discernment. The first decades of Portuguese America, according to Barbosa Machado, were so “disgraceful” that, amid the shipwrecks, cannibalism, and other calamities that befell the Portuguese, there were no “memorable deeds that demanded to be remembered.”92 Only in the 1560s, under the leadership of Mem de Sá, and as French interlopers and their Indigenous allies were vanquished, did the “Brazilican War” come to encompass battles and engagements worthy of narration.93 And even in war, the Portuguese quest for glory could be undermined by an American enemy’s savagery. While in Asia, Barbosa Machado averred, the Portuguese fought “barbarians” who “defended themselves not as barbar-
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ians but as soldiers,” in Brazil uncivilized “desperation” and “barbarous hatred” debased war itself.94 Two decades later, and back in Portugal, Barbosa Machado developed even further the striking contrasts and contingencies within the history of Portuguese conquests. Fastos politicos, e militares (1745) integrated the accounts of “Exercisios de Marte” into a sprawling history of the Portuguese empire in the form of a Roman fasti, a calendar of important past events also used in Christian martyrology.95 Although he did not complete the work, the two volumes of days stretching from the first of January to the nineteenth of March showed the long history of conquest in Africa and, above all, in India over the course of almost a thousand pages. Compared to hundreds of entries on Africa and Asia, “America” was the subject of just twenty-five. The briefer history of American war could be understood at least in part, Barbosa Machado explained in “Exercisios de Marte” and in Fastos, to be a result of Portuguese perceptions of the new enterprise. Although by 1532 João III (r. 1521–1557) regarded Brazil’s settlement as serving “the interest and ambition of men,” Barbosa Machado reported, “he encountered the Portuguese more eager to sacrifice their lives in the war in Asia than in the cultivation of the opulent provinces in America.” As he reminded readers, if the lure of Asian riches and glory had led unexpectedly to Brazil’s “discovery,” it had also authorized its neglect. “Although the land revealed its fertility,” Barbosa Machado wrote of Cabral’s expedition, the Portuguese had “forgotten or dissimulated its conquest” and instead regarded Asia as “more fertile ground for the laurels that they would acquire in battles as glorious as they were perilous.”96 In his Historia Rocha Pita reached a similar conclusion about Brazil’s prestige. The demanding enterprises in Africa and Asia, he explained, “did not allow for the diversion of arms and people for the conquest and settlement of Brazil.”97 The anomalous trajectory of Portugal’s conquest and occupation of America did not, however, impugn its legitimacy. Cabral, after all, had ordered a mass and planted “a stone marker from among those he carried with him for such demarcations as a sign of the possession that, on behalf of the Portuguese crown, he took of that new world.” Portugal, Barbosa Machado explained, thus “acquired” Brazil, “the principality of the heirs to the crown,” “in sacred ceremonies and political acts.”98 As the Natives were rendered “obedient,” exceptions, such as the “petulant” Cururupeba, imprisoned by Mem de Sá for scorning Portuguese honor, proved the rule that America’s Indigenous inhabitants had accepted a “temperate Lusitanian domination.”99 Such references
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to European justice and moderation stood in contrast to reports of massacres and entrapments of Indigenous peoples in the hinterland campaigns known as the War of the Barbarians (1651–1704) that had only recently drawn to a close. In place of decades of exterminatory violence that even some royal officials had come to criticize as both futile and beyond the pale, Barbosa Machado’s account made known that the history of Portugal’s American wars, like those in Africa and Asia, affirmed “the justice of our dominion” and “possession by which our crown gloriously occupies these most opulent provinces.”100 The aftermath of this lesser, yet “just,” enterprise to subjugate American Natives was more difficult to discern.101 Within timeworn discourses of Native American simplicity, laziness, docility, savagery, vengeance, superstition, gluttony, and physical difference, the Esquecidos also insisted on the need to refine, and in some cases set aside, previous European judgments on the nature of American peoples.102 Without calling into question monogenesis, ancient evangelization, or the Natives’ status as “rational beasts [feras]”—a status, they noted, defined by European authorities in the wake of the Spanish conquests in Mexico and Peru—they qualified Native rationality and wondered about the extent to which these earlier verdicts applied in Brazil. The Spanish authorities who had judged Indigenous capacities had done so, they argued, based on observations of ways of life that differed greatly from those that had been, and continued to be, witnessed in Brazil.103 “In these barbarians the use of reason was obscured,” Barbosa Machado explained of Brazil’s Natives, such that “among them there was no justice, piety, compassion or other moral virtue.” They lived “as brutes” and “died demented.”104 For Brito e Figueiredo, Indigenous ways of life revealed nothing more than “shadows and rough sketches of human nature.”105 Soares da Franca concurred, observing that, notwithstanding a diversity of languages and cultures that rose to the level of “nations,” their ways of life suggested an exceptionally precipitous fall from grace. “They degenerated into irrationality,” he wrote, “because without a king, without law, and without faith [. . .] they obeyed only a corrupted nature’s impulses.”106 Siqueira da Gama’s conclusion was only slightly less dire. If measured by “less than rigorous standards,” he concluded, Brazil’s Natives had at least a “semblance of politics.”107 Yet, as the Esquecido histories also claimed, despite the limits of Native conditions and capacities, by the end of the sixteenth century a European rule of law and the mission had made strides toward eradicating the effects of Indigenous ferocity and depravity, especially cannibalism. The Jesuits, Rocha Pita reported, had made Natives “leave behind their barbarities,” defended them
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from captivity and other vexations, and cured “the illnesses of both the body and the soul.”108 At the core of this process, Siqueira da Gama explained, was the “reduction,” or dispossession and forced migration, of Indigenous people into the Christian political and social order of new, Portuguese-controlled settlements. These “great settlements” championed by the conqueror Mem de Sá, he argued, were beneficial to the mission and “convenient to the state.” No one could deny that it was easier to preach to resettled Natives than to pursue far-flung tribes. To those who claimed that settling Indigenous peoples on the periphery of Portuguese cities, towns, and plantations undermined the Portuguese presence by bringing together peoples united against “the well-deserved yoke that Portuguese arms had imposed on them,” Siqueira da Gama countered that the new settlements did not gather together all Natives but rather dispersed and divided them and their “forces” in ways that mitigated resistance to Portuguese authority. Missionary supervision within new settlements also meant that knowledge of any “sinister project” could be shared with Portuguese officials and so prevent violent rebellion. In the context of ongoing conquest and dispossession, he argued that, as Natives both in settlements and beyond waged war against each other, new settlements provided a buffer against Portuguese towns and plantations and the more bellicose tribes that remained to be conquered in the future.109 Apart from matters of Portuguese security, Siqueira da Gama affirmed, in resettling Natives the Portuguese had maintained their status as free persons, a status sanctioned by the papacy as well. To claim otherwise, he argued, was to ignore that settlement, even when achieved by force, did not “deprive them of the state of freedom” but rather constituted an organic form of governance. A survey of the philosophical and theological foundations of servitude, as they had been elucidated not only by Aristotle but also by the Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535–1600), showed that to settle Brazil’s Natives in the way the Portuguese had done was to “rule and govern them by naturally enjoining them to take correct actions, just as the father rules over his son, the king his vassal, the husband his wife, and the tutor his pupil.” Moreover, Siqueira da Gama clarified, these were not the kind of relations witnessed between African slaves and their masters. While the Portuguese had assumed “superiority” over Native Americans, “they did not oblige, govern and command them as senhores did to their slaves.” The distinction was sustained, he argued, in a synthesis of passages from the Summa Theologica in which Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) had identified mastership as legitimate when masters curtailed the freedom of their subjects to promote their own and the common good. Siqueira da Gama
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did not elaborate further on the difference between Native settlement and African enslavement. He left out from his citation Aquinas’s observations about dominion and the infliction of pain. Nor did he acknowledge that Molina’s De iustitia et iure (1593–1609) had condemned the Portuguese enslavement of Africans. He largely avoided, as did other Esquecido histories, critical examination of the roles played by “gentiles of Guinea” in conquest and settlement in Portuguese America.110 Later in his “dissertations” on political history Siqueira da Gama returned to the Thomist conception of mastership to defend the intertwined processes of Native transformation and subjugation that missionaries and settlers had pursued. Human rationality, he explained, “depended on the external senses.” From this “physical and scientific truth” it followed that if Natives lived “almost like irrational brutes,” such conditions “were born of the lack of relations with the Portuguese.” “Living among the beasts, they were beastly, and among the brutes they were brutish.” In contrast, Natives “reduced to villages” learned from missionaries how “to exchange” “ferocity for civility, insolence for prudence, barbarity for virtue, rudeness for union.” The disciplinary regime that facilitated such movement across the threshold that separated Natives from the actualization of reason, he added, also ensured that Native Americans would carry settlers’ cargos and provide domestic labor. More important, the formative potential of the social environment meant that, because an “agrestic upbringing, and the crude use of the senses” could lead to the loss of “understanding,” the Natives’ servitude would be an indefinite feature of Portuguese America. Brazil’s Natives remained, he explained, “miserable men” who were not “capable of transacting in the marketplace without being deceived.” They therefore needed someone “to govern them with the authority and faculties of a tutor.”111 Yet, the Esquecidos also recognized, in Portuguese America missionary efforts to bring Natives into the fold of Christianity and European rule had been obstructed by the Portuguese themselves. In their first years on the Brazilian coast, settlers had not so much imposed their cultural and religious practices as adapted to local ways of life. “The Portuguese lived there so estranged from God, and the Indians without memory of the Christians,” Soares da Franca reported, “that they were most distinguished from each other by their skin color, for in customs they were all delivered into all manner of vice without interest in anything else.”112 Beyond sexual depravity, the effects of iniquitous interest had also driven a wedge between the mission and the actions and exchanges that sustained Portuguese occupation and commerce. Although Cabral had
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sanctified the land he discovered, calling it the Land of the Holy Cross, in the years that followed, Barbosa Machado reported, an unrestrained pursuit of wealth had reduced the new possession to a commodity. Reiterating João de Barros’s widely “transcribed” sixteenth-century indictment of the demonically inspired and “vulgar” preference for the name “Brazil,” Barbosa Machado explained that the new name came from wood, harvested from Brazil’s forests, known as pau-brasil, or “brazilwood,” the use of which in Europe to make dyes had “enriched the treasuries of our monarchs.” By embracing the new name, he lamented, “commerce ruined piety.”113 As American settlement proceeded, economic imperatives, bolstered by royal policies, continued to limit the forging of virtuous community. Writing of the foundation in 1677 of the Convent of Santa Clara do Desterro, Rocha Pita affirmed that the base imperatives of empire had undermined a moral social order in Portuguese America. The king’s vassals in Brazil had waited more than a century, he noted, for the institution that offered shelter for women of status without “dowries sufficient enough for them to marry consistent with their birth” as well as for those seeking a chaste and spiritual life. The pious endeavor had been thwarted, he explained, by those who cited “the pretext that Bahia was a conquest and that such a religious state there was inappropriate because it diminished rather than increased propagation.”114 Metropolitan and imperial priorities, the Esquecidos argued, could also diminish more worldly American pursuits. Celebrating a plantation economy that had supplanted a “terrestrial paradise,” Rocha Pita’s Historia also laid bare the limits to local prosperity. Bahia, Rocha Pita explained, was “an emporium of all sorts of riches, and it could be one of all of the grandezas of the world if the interests of the state and the monarchy did not impede the traffic and navigation between [its port] and foreign nations.”115 Such constraints on economic potential were mirrored in other American endeavors. Although the Portuguese had, in many respects, followed in the footsteps of other great empires, Soares da Franca explained, unlike their ancient predecessors, “they had forgotten about letters.”116 Thus, upon assuming his post in Salvador, another Esquecido observed of the academy’s patron, the viceroy encountered an America that was “uncultivated,” especially in the arts to which the academics were dedicated.117 In fact, although the Jesuits had built an educational infrastructure that included libraries and schools where Rocha Pita and other Esquecidos had studied, the Portuguese, in contrast to the Spanish, had not sanctioned the foundation of an American university or a printing press. As Rocha Pita commented in the Historia’s prologue, in turning away from
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reproducing these institutions, the crown had forged a path that led directly to the present predicament. “The widely known Portuguese custom of conquering empires but not improving them,” he explained, “is the reason that even as Brazil has nurtured talents of great eminence, no one has written a history of this region.” As Rocha Pita also noted, the lack of recognition of American intellectual and cultural potential was even more glaring against a backdrop of commodification and imperial commercial growth. In Portugal, he observed tersely, people knew more of Brazil’s riches than of its history.118 Yet, as Rocha Pita and the other Esquecidos frequently declared, they wrote in a new era. Under the Braganza dynasty, Rocha Pita recounted, “the Portuguese hemisphere began to shine,” and the crown recognized America’s place within the monarchy in new ways. In 1646 João IV granted Salvador’s town council “the same privileges” as those of Porto and Lisbon, while a year later he gave to his heir the title of Prince of Brazil. Writing of the latter decree in the Historia, Rocha Pita reported “the widespread praise with which the resolution was greeted in Brazil” for having recognized American potential within a “planetary” empire. A new golden age had taken shape as well in the foundation of the Academia dos Esquecidos. “The viceroy would not permit,” Rocha Pita explained with baroque flourish, “that Brazil lacked such a touchstone for the inestimable gold of its talents, of more carats than those of its mines.”119 Like other “well ordered republics,” Brazil had left behind the “youthful age of idleness so contrary to virtue, and font of all vices,” and embraced “the perspicacity of ingenuity.”120 Moving from “the darkness of ignorance” toward the “lights” of learning, the Esquecidos thus were worthy protagonists in the second “discovery of Brazil.”121 The creation of a “Brazilian Parnassus” and “new literary orb” in America also signaled a larger imperial reconfiguration. João Alv’res Soares described this transformation in his inaugural oration with reference to the Esquecidos’ striking motto: sol oriens in occiduo. The new academy was like a “sun whose prodigious birth transformed the tomb into a cradle” to give a diminished Occident “a new spectacle of life.”122 The paradoxical western sunrise was embodied in the viceroy himself who, the Esquecidos observed in their histories and literary disputations, had served with distinction in India before arriving in Brazil in 1720.123 As it had been in the East where “the sciences” had first appeared, Siqueira da Gama explained, so from the East came the viceroy to “Brazil, a new theater in this new literary conquest.”124 Or, as Brito e Figueiredo wrote in verse composed in the viceroy’s honor, Asia now confronted the reality that America, “sublime” and “sovereign,” “not only does not
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concede your primacy, / but with heroic zeal / does not even accept you as an equal.”125 Even as Goa enjoyed the happiness of having been the first empire, the viceroy’s itinerary had led to Brazil, “the greatest jewel of the Lusitanian empire” and “most precious gem of the Portuguese crown.”126 The Esquecidos’ affirmations of Brazil’s new place within the monarchy conspicuously invoked an economy of royal service and rewards. The king’s vassals in Portuguese America, even Natives, were worthy of royal grace, Portuguese-born Siqueira da Gama affirmed. Their own academic endeavors made these achievements visible, both within their American histories and as manuscript and print artifacts of erudition and fidelity that circulated among Portuguese elites and within the royal court; the title pages of Rocha Pita’s works identified their author as a “Gentleman of Your Majesty’s House” and “Professed Knight” of the prestigious Order of Christ (figure 2).127 As Rocha Pita also made clear within the Historia’s pages, America’s history was replete with evidence of “nobility,” a term that invoked royal service, local social status, military achievement, and wealth, and that had gained increasing currency, as Maria Fernanda Bicalho has argued, in the wake of American participation in wars against the Dutch and the French.128 The list of the “sons of our America” who had served in ecclesiastical and royal offices was so extensive, Rocha Pita explained, that reproducing it in its entirety risked “interrupting” the Historia’s narrative. Readers could turn instead to the end of the book to find such a record.129 The Historia’s narrative did include another extensive inventory, in this case of the commodities that filled the ships that sailed from Bahia’s port to Lisbon and to “Ethiopia’s coast in search of slaves who would serve in the mills, the mines and in agriculture.” American bounty, American service, and American allegiance, Rocha Pita thus affirmed, were intertwined. “The rights on commodities collected in the kingdom’s customs houses,” “the revenue from the gold mines, the monopoly on tobacco in Lisbon, annual and triennial contracts across our America, the tithes, the mint’s seignories, the rights from slaves sought on the coast of Africa, and those that are sent to Minas” provided the royal treasury with “millions.” The king, in turn, “liberally” spent a great part of this wealth, Rocha Pita added, in “our own region,” on salaries and pensions as well as on Brazil’s defense.130 The pride of place evident here may have been what António Rodrigues da Costa had in mind when he judged that the Historia was more a panegyric than a history.131 Yet rather than set America apart from, or above, the monarchy’s other constituent parts, Rocha Pita’s appeal to American treasure,
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Figure 2. Title page of Sebastião da Rocha Pitta, Historia da America Portugueza (1730). (Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library, Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library.)
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service, and status underscored continuities across the empire. “There are families of purity and known nobility across all of Brazil,” he testified. And their stature could not be obscured by settlers who came to America, “as they did to all of the kingdom’s conquests,” as convicts. The “most noble Houses of Portugal” had endured, he insisted, “like branches from the trunks of trees that, once transplanted to this climate, did not degenerate but rather produced even more of the same fruit.”132 Even acts of transplantation that led to crossgeneration did not foreclose on the re-creation of European social order. Recounting the “mythic” sixteenth-century feats of Diogo Álvares Correia, of the “most noble” Portuguese town of Viana, Rocha Pita foregrounded the daughter of a Native leader joined to the shipwrecked Álvares following his capture. Together with Álvares, Paraguaçu, as she is identified in other sources (the Historia does not refer to her Indigenous name), made her way to France and to the court of Catherine de Medici, where she was baptized Catarina and married to Álvares before returning to Bahia. Back in Brazil, her example, Rocha Pita reported, ensured that Natives “subjected themselves to the Portuguese yoke with less repugnance,” while her dreams led to the miraculous discovery of a statue of the Virgin Mary that had survived an earlier shipwreck to be given sanctuary in a new church. Affirming the benefits that followed Portuguese conquest, Rocha Pita’s story of transformation, based on “ancient and authentic manuscripts,” also recognized that the alliance that made possible Portuguese settlement had origins in Álvares’s embrace of Indigenous ways of life.133 Caramuru-assu, as he was called among Paraguaçu’s people, had lived in a “barbarous union.” As Rocha Pita made clear, however, Álvares’s transgressions had not precluded the “many privileges granted by the Kings of Portugal,” nor had they foreclosed on future unions of his numerous children and grandchildren with Portuguese gentlemen that resulted in “powerful houses of great wealth and known nobility that occupied the highest places in the republic.”134 Achieving enduring settlement, in other words, had entailed accommodations, negotiations, and amalgamations that, nevertheless, took European forms and yielded status, and wealth, for Europeans. The Esquecidos’ historical inquiries, both the “dissertations” and Rocha Pita’s Historia, thus shared with the Academia Real’s program a commitment to affirm the legitimacy of Portuguese extra-European sovereignty in the achievement and the effects of conquest and settlement. The Esquecidos’ more extensive examinations of the history of violent conflict and occupation, as well as of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, their perceived capacities or
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lack thereof, and their encounters with missionaries and settlers, cast the American past as apart from the histories of other places under Portuguese rule. Nevertheless, as in Portugal’s territories in Africa and Asia, conquest remained the point of departure for the political and cultural incorporation of lands and peoples into the monarchy. Such a transformation culminated, the Esquecidos also argued, in expressions of allegiance and service to the crown. Finally recognized by royal authority, their own literary and scholarly endeavors further inscribed into the monarchy the residents of Portuguese America. Memorializing “Portuguese fidelity and the love with which this most faithful nation adores its princes,” as Rodrigues da Costa concluded of Rocha Pita’s earlier account of the Bahian funerary honors for Pedro II, they transcended distance and “strange” climates.135 As Rocha Pita’s Historia also revealed, however, Brazil’s most recent past encompassed moments when a cycle of conquest, virtuous and allegiant service, and riches and rewards had broken down, displaced by local conflicts over administration and governance. In 1710 and 1711 in Pernambuco, royal officials faced the challenge of open war between the sugar planters of Olinda and merchants in Recife over status and finances. Around the same time, a revolt erupted as well in Portuguese America’s capital. When, in 1711, the crown had sought to fund naval defense and fortification with a new tax of 10 percent on goods that entered Bahia’s port, a tax on slaves that went to the mining region, and an increase in the price of salt, “the people of Bahia,” led by a man known as “the Maneta [the One-Armed],” Rocha Pita reported, had “barbarously and tumultuously” made their rejection of such measures known, taking to the streets and destroying the property of a wealthy and “arrogant” merchant suspected of having advocated for the measures before the crown.136 While the governor of Brazil negotiated an end to the rebellion, less than two months later he faced another uprising, this one, royal officials judged, born of “barbarous and indiscreet zeal.” Receiving news of the second French attack on Rio de Janeiro, led by a local judge, residents of Salvador had taken to the streets once again to demand that the governor send ships to the rescue and had offered material support for the venture. In Lisbon, reports of the events in Salvador set off debate among royal counselors about punishment and clemency, governance and authority. The king was reminded of the need to defend Brazil and its “renowned riches,” and informed that in implementing the new taxes the governor had failed to enlist the traditional locus of power in the city, the town council, and had neglected to persuade residents “that the kingdom’s resources are so depleted and so bur-
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dened with the weight of the war” that it “was neither possible nor just” that it should bear the cost of Bahia’s fortifications. As royal counselors also argued, the use of force against revolt was necessary and just when the “conservation of that state and its utility to this kingdom” were at stake. His Majesty was not to suffer the disobedience of those whom he sought to protect.137 As we will see in the next chapter, the settlement and production of wealth that followed the discovery of gold further tested the incorporative politics of conquest to which the Esquecidos appealed. In response, royal counselors, including many who had studied the empire’s past from within the Lisbon Academia, began to argue that the maintenance of sovereignty over Brazil’s settlements, commerce, and treasure required not only recourse to historic conquest, service, and rewards, but also new practices of authority and governance.
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2 • Reason and Experience Royal Authority in a Golden Age
Shortly before his death in 1732, António Rodrigues da Costa, a founding member of the Academia Real da História Portuguesa and tireless royal counselor during the War of Spanish Succession, offered the king his final reflections on American defense, administration, and justice. The opening lines of what the writer and historian Jaime Cortesão described as Rodrigues da Costa’s “testament” recapitulated the monarchy’s early eighteenth-century predicament. Rather than guarantee its American sovereignty and global power, new mines, discovered every day, and “such extraordinary and excessive riches” made “the conservation of [Brazil] very doubtful and precarious.” What Rodrigues da Costa described as the dangers to Portuguese America included the designs of rivals. He did not trust diplomatic pledges to respect Portugal’s claims. Treaties were but “papers that the wind carries away,” he warned. There were as well, he further explained, other kinds of dangers, which came from within: “disaffection and hatred” for rulers among those who were ruled. In the case of “the peoples of Brazil” such a disposition sprang from a sense of distance and even isolation from royal justice, evident in corrupt and “injurious” proceedings within American governance. More concretely, he argued, the king’s American vassals were “heavily taxed.” The solution, Rodrigues da Costa counseled, was to allow “discontented and vexed vassals” an “immediate” recourse to the crown to contest their burdens. Conquerors and settlers were very worthy of “esteem and love,” he explained to the king, because they had taken great risks and confronted “struggles and dangers” as they extended “your empire, securing for your crown kingdoms and plenteous commerce in all parts of the world, discovering and conquering a new world with immense treasures.” While attending to worthy American
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vassals in this way would draw them into a loyal and hence fortified fold, failing to adequately address both external and internal dangers, Rodrigues da Costa ominously concluded, exposed the monarchy to the even greater threat of a union of the two: an alliance between “a rich state” and American vassals interested in casting off “the yoke that oppresses them.”1 Rodrigues da Costa’s advice reflected its author’s well-known erudition and decades of debate that followed the discovery of gold—debates among royal counselors and vassals about the purposes, costs, and governance of American empire. As they contended with early eighteenth-century imperial rivalries and the disordered forces of hinterland settlement, counselors invoked old-regime economies of royal grace and representation as the grounds for enduring sovereignty in America. In the mining region, as in other parts of Brazil, prospectors and settlers also affirmed the incorporation of newly settled hinterlands into the monarchy as they staked out claims; cultivated allegiance to the king in political and religious rites and in institutions of civic life, especially town councils; and petitioned and received rewards for serving the crown by discovering new mines.2 And like Rodrigues da Costa, royal officials and vassals on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that within the process of forging American political-social order, taxation was the most charged form of connection between the king and his subjects. The payment of tribute and royal rights constituted allegiance itself. The “contract between the king and the vassals,” as Antonil explained, meant that “the king governs them, and the subjects sustain him with tribute and incomes.”3 Yet the history of royal rights and royal revenue was also a history of consultation, negotiation, and, as Rodrigues da Costa warned, contestation. Since the thirteenth century, the Portuguese Cortes, the representative body of nobles, clergy, and commoners, enjoyed the duty to consider and consent to the king’s requests for his vassals’ financial support. Although by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Cortes’s authority had waned, across the monarchy’s possessions the legitimacy and practice of governance, including the collection and administration of revenue, continued to rely upon institutions beyond the crown, including town councils that represented local interests in the execution of royal orders.4 As officials reported of the Maneta revolt in Bahia in 1711, the governor’s failure to seek out the town council’s members in order to persuade them of the reasons for new taxes was at least in part what had precipitated the city residents’ unruly response. As the Maneta revolt also made clear, however, in the early eighteenth century the demands of war and rivalry had narrowed the field of encounter and negotiation. The crown, exasperated
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counselors observed, had increased taxes to pay for the “conservation and defense of that state, and there was no other gentler way to take what was needed to maintain the forts, nor did the supplicants indicate one.”5 This chapter surveys the forging of political order and fiscal administration in the mining region in the early eighteenth century and the ways in which the exercise of sovereignty there, crucial to the “conservation” of Brazil as a whole, initially relied upon, but ultimately challenged, a traditional political culture of service and reward, local authority, and continuities between Europe and America that the crown had cultivated in the previous century. As historians of the region, known as Minas Gerais, have shown, rewards for service and the local authority of town councils were at the center of the crown’s efforts to govern the newly settled hinterland.6 Yet, as the scale of American mineral resources and the challenges of defending Brazil came into view, and as royal officials sought to collect more diligently the quinto, or the royal right to onefifth of what was mined, Minas became a site of conflict. Early skirmishes on the ground over access to resources and privileges gave way to protracted conflicts among settlers, town councils, and royal officials over methods for collecting the fifth. In official discourses, the region and its people came to be defined by rebelliousness and even “infernal” disorder that royal officials, especially those who served in the region, perceived as endemic. As Pedro de Almeida, the Count of Assumar, complained to the king in 1718, about a year into his service as governor, local leaders—those “who have assumed authority in this country”—defended “particular interests” and “passions,” and expected that governors would “blindly” take up their cause. Such a disposition, he also explained, took an unacceptable toll on royal revenues.7 Thirty years later, Governor Gomes Freire de Andrada reported, experience only confirmed that a “propensity to not pay the fifth was the original sin of Minas.”8 While Assumar argued that these circumstances demanded the forceful imposition of obedience to royal authority and policy, in the 1730s royal officials enlisted by the crown to shore up American fiscal practice—most notably, the king’s secretary Alexandre de Gusmão and the philosopher Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença—defended a new head tax scheme, known as the capitação, that set aside locally negotiated contributions and enhanced the power of the crown’s representatives in Minas. Prospectors and settlers saw the changes as an encroachment on the exercise of local authority, and they defended that authority with both appeals to royal justice and armed revolt. Gusmão’s plan for reform, Martinho de Mendonça’s implementation, and the responses on the ground thus can be seen as part of a longer history of conflict
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between representative and regulatory ideas and practices within Iberian monarchies.9 Mendonça especially, as we will see, invested in a strenuous defense of an unmediated exercise of royal power. At the same time, the capitação and its implementation expressed and promoted shifting ideas about wealth and the political geography of empire. Invoking “reason and experience,” Gusmão set aside ideas of heroic Christian conquest that the Esquecidos had celebrated and that he himself had defended within the Academia Real. In place of unfolding transformations that yielded transatlantic political continuities, the capitação was to scrutinize Brazil as an “ultramarine colony” and, as a tool of reform, abet the cultivation of a socioeconomic order defined by both allegiance to a distant king and the production of wealth and its flow into transoceanic networks of exchange that sustained the kingdom of Portugal.10
Royal Rights in Minas Portugal’s medieval law codes defined subterranean resources—“argentry, which means veins of gold, or of silver, or any other metal”—as a “royal right.”11 This right, as André Costa has noted, was embedded in a tradition of emphyteutic contract in which part of what was brought forth from a property was to be given to its lord. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, royal counselors affirmed the arrangement’s political and fiscal ramifications within the kingdom’s laws. Later law codes, including the Ordenações Filipinas (1603), in force throughout the following century as well, reiterated that the king “will be paid the fifth on all metals that are extracted after they are smelted and measured,” and provided for specific forms of punishment for those who failed to do so.12 The extension of the fifth to America, in turn, was upheld within original claims of conquest and possession. In the 1530s, as he established donatory captaincies on the eastern South American coast, João III acknowledged the royal right within an enumeration of the captains’ duties and rewards. Were settlers to encounter precious stones, pearls, and metals within the boundaries of their lands, the contract read, “they would pay me the fifth from which would come the captain’s tenth as stipulated in his [letter] of donation.”13 Together with tithes (dízimos reais) levied across the monarchy’s territories on agricultural products, properties, and domestic animals, the fifth thus became part of a transatlantic continuum of royal rights and obligations. As Antonil reiterated at the turn of the eighteenth century, “if someone judges the status of Brazil’s mines to be different because the king’s right of dominion and possession is more direct in the case of the kingdom of Portugal than in the
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conquests of Brazil,” the response was that the kings of Portugal “possessed” Brazil “by the same titles,” recognized time and again by political and religious authorities. “The fifths of gold that are extracted from Brazil’s mines” belonged, therefore, to the Portuguese king.14 To further elucidate the scope of the fifth in America and to bolster royal administration of mining, still of modest scale, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the crown issued the “Regimento das terras mineraes do Brazil” (Statute for the Mineral Lands of Brazil; 1603), followed by an additional regimento, or regulatory statute, in 1618, which took effect mid-century. Both affirmed the royal right to the fifth as well monetary and honorific incentives for “discovering” mines. In the early eighteenth century, as prospectors rushed into the region of the newly discovered deposits of gold, royal officials then sought to integrate the mining enterprise and new settlements into existing frameworks of law and royal administration. Additional statutes outlined more systematically a series of measures, including the creation of new administrative offices and royal supervision of the demarcation of claims, to prevent usurpations from the “poor” and “miserable,” ensure the “the good administration and governance of peoples who work in mines in Brazil’s hinterlands,” and define how royal officials would collect the fifth.15 Throughout the first decade of the eighteenth century, however, the exercise of royal authority in the mining region remained tenuous. A substantial portion of the gold mined, officials suspected, made it out of the region before the fifth was collected. The flow of foodstuffs and goods into the region also evaded royal administration, even as some residents contested the contract for supplying beef to the growing number of mining settlements. The superintendent of the mines, the first official appointed directly by the crown to supervise mining, fled to Rio de Janeiro after less than a year of discordant relations with local leaders.16 Tensions also mounted between those who had been first on the scene, the Paulistas (from São Paulo), and more recent arrivals from northeastern Brazil and Portugal, known as forasteiros (outsiders) and Emboabas, a Tupi reference to reinóis (from the kingdom of Portugal).17 By the end of the decade, thousands of men had been drafted into violent civil conflict. When the Emboabas achieved supremacy in late 1708, they proclaimed as governor of the region Manuel Nunes Viana, a wealthy Portuguese-born merchant and rancher from Bahia who had distinguished himself in wars against Natives and increased his fortune in the mines while cultivating followers with threats of violence and an affinity for the supernatural. “Bullets don’t enter his body, and his blacks are all sorcerers [. . .] and he is able to
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divine everything that happens in everyone’s houses,” the Count of Assumar reported in 1719 of Viana’s deceits.18 In response to the conflict and Viana’s rise, the governor of Rio de Janeiro, António de Albuquerque Coelho de Carvalho, went to the region to restore royal authority and ordered Viana to return to Bahia. While Viana complied, Albuquerque recognized Emboaba ascendance as he met with Viana’s allies and affirmed some of his administrative appointments. For royal officials, as Adriana Romeiro has observed, the insubordinate and, above all, miscegenated Paulistas could not be reconciled with future administrative order.19 To enhance its control over the mines, the crown also created a new administrative unit, the captaincy of São Paulo and Minas Gerais. As its first governor, Albuquerque was instructed to ensure that “people in Minas live in a way that is orderly and subordinate to justice” and to prevent “the diversions away from payment of the fifth.” Among other actions, this meant a more rigorous suppression of the circulation of presumably untaxed gold and attending to the interests of “Paulistas and people from the kingdom” equally because “among those recognized as vassals there should be no difference.” Above all, the king called on Albuquerque to make known to “those vassals” that the new government was not intended “to conquer them,” but rather “to defend them against violence, and maintain peace and justice.” If they lived as “Catholics and obedient to my royal orders and my ministers whom I send to administer justice,” Albuquerque was to advise the miners, “I will reward and honor them as they deserve.”20 The local response to such an overture was apparently robust. “It was a lot of work to accommodate them,” Albuquerque reported of the policy in late 1711, “because they all wanted land granted as they saw fit.”21 Committed to forging allegiance by rewarding service, the crown also asserted its authority over the institutional foundations of local social order. Reports of regular and secular clergy joining the rush and enriching themselves in commerce and with exorbitant fees for services inspired royal orders to keep missionaries out of the region and to closely supervise priests who traveled there. While as early as 1703 the bishop of Rio de Janeiro sent an emissary to found churches, informed of the presence of “friars and clerics of very poor conduct, rebellious, and even complicit in the uprising of those born in Portugal and Paulistas,” in 1711 João V prohibited priests without parish duties from entering Minas. Those who violated this order, reiterated in the 1720s and 1730s, were to be expelled.22 With regard to local leaders who, as Albuquerque’s instructions implied, regarded themselves as conquerors and discoverers, the crown instructed its
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representatives to set aside the use of force. As the Overseas Council advised, recognizing the “fidelity” of the indispensable and well-armed Paulistas, “those who offered up these mines and to whom Your Majesty’s crown is entirely obliged for the wealth that it has today,” bolstered royal authority. To displace “rigor and violence” with “urbane and courtly expressions,” governors were to sanction the foundation of new villages and towns.23 New town councils and other local offices, counselors and officials argued, would bring into the fold of civic order and allegiance the “Paulistas and the most powerful persons in Minas.” The names of many of these settlements, as Rodrigo Monteiro has noted, conspicuously invoked the monarchy itself: “Vila Real de Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Sabará (1711), São João del-Rei (1713), Vila Nova da Rainha e Vila do Principe (1714), São José del-Rei (1718).24 Forged in tandem, royal and local civic authority in the mining region thus became part of a larger imperial political space defined by what Nuno Monteiro has described as a “constellation of powers.”25 Royal counselors in Lisbon, the crown’s representatives in Brazil, and members of town councils in Minas together formed the circuits of communication and debate through which governance and above all the administration of the fifth were defined.26 As officials serving in the region reported, however, institutionalized representation could not always contain encounters between royal and local authorities. In the early 1710s, for example, local leaders challenged a scheme to collect the fifth with a levy of ten oitavas of gold on each bateia (the funnelshaped pan used in alluvial mining)—a form of collection, many observed, that amounted to a head tax on the enslaved. In 1714 Governor Balthasar da Silveira responded by negotiating with the town councils an alternative annual thirty arrobas of gold, collected by taxing enslaved labor and goods as well as enslaved people brought to the region. When the crown learned of the change, it ordered the governor to renege on the deal and reinstate the levy on bateias. Settlers, in turn, made known that they would defend their agreement with force. From Vila Nova da Rainha, Baltasar da Silveira reported, “the people arrived in arms, shouting: Long Live the People.”27 Without locally stationed troops to enforce royal orders, the governor agreed to receive the thirty arrobas as payment of the fifth. With “sadness,” he wrote to the king of the current state of affairs and of the “liberty in which these settlers live, very differently than what is imagined there [in Portugal].” The “disgraceful circumstances of this country were such,” he concluded, “that, even with troops on hand, they would serve no purpose other than increasing Your Majesty’s expenses.” Eventually, the crown recognized the deal.28
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While such negotiation and conflict over fiscal practice meant that, as Júnia Furtado explains, in the first decades of mining the collected fifth never reached a full 20 percent of what was mined, royal officials persisted in imagining and debating ways to increase royal revenue.29 Invariably, newly appointed royal officials were sent to Minas with plans that promised to curtail tax evasion. The Count of Assumar, who replaced Silveira as governor in 1717, arrived in the region and announced both a reduction in the annual contribution to twenty-five arrobas and enhanced royal supervision over the taxation of goods entering and leaving Minas. Far bolder changes to fiscal policy were outlined in a new Lei da Moeda (Law of Currency; 1719) that, according to the king, would reduce the burden on the “poorest” who were expected to contribute to their settlement’s annual payment. Along with shifting the collection of the fifth to new royal smelting houses (casas de fundição), the law prohibited the circulation of gold dust and nuggets (ouro em pó) outside the region. From the date of the law’s publication, residents in “any parts of the State of Brazil” had four months, while those in the “kingdoms and lands [senhorios] of Portugal” had two, to either “consume” or take their gold to a smeltery.30 Together with these new policies, Assumar brought to his posting a marked suspicion of local leadership. Assuming office in São Paulo with a speech on obedience to the sovereign, his early dispatches from Brazil inveighed against the “meager utility” of tedious assemblies (juntas) where men shared “impertinent doubts” and “affected requests” that reflected private pecuniary interests and disrespected the broader intent behind royal orders. With an infantry or cavalry two hundred or three hundred strong, he concluded in 1718, “he could do great service [. . .] increasing revenues and pacifying these peoples.”31 In fact, as Assumar moved toward implementing the smelting-house plan, the crown did dispatch two dragoon companies to Vila do Ribeirão do Carmo, where he had taken up residence. The show of force, however, did not ensure that the new policy would be put into practice as he planned. The people in Minas denounced the reform in “anonymous and seditious papers,” Assumar reported. News of the changes also disorganized the local economy. Creditors sought to collect debt prior to the opening of the smelteries, while some debtors who could not settle their accounts left for the hinterland with their slaves. Royal revenues declined, prices increased, and the slave trade from Rio and Bahia came to a halt.32 Then, in June 1720, with the opening of the smelting houses only a month away, masked men converged in the streets of Vila Rica and invaded the residence of the royal judge. As Lourenço de Almeida, who succeeded Assumar
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as governor and investigated the revolt, reported, some “sent out their blacks together with some whites” and forced men to leave their homes.33 From Vila Rica as many as two thousand men then marched to Ribeirão do Carmo, where they demanded that Assumar rescind the new orders and issue a pardon for their acts. Unable to counter the rebellion with dragoon companies now depleted by illness and detachment, Assumar accepted the demands.34 When the immediate crisis ended, however, Assumar, who had gained extensive military experience in the War of Spanish Succession, regrouped. Shoring up support for his authority in other towns, he investigated the revolt’s leaders: Pascoal da Silva Guimarães, a wealthy Portuguese-born miner and trader, and a Portuguese-born muleteer named Felipe dos Santos.35 Less than a month later, after issuing orders for the arrest of Silva Guimarães and other leaders, including the former governor of Colônia do Sacramento, Sebastião da Veiga Cabral, Assumar led an army of what remained of the dragoons, together with supporters from Vila do Carmo and “their armed slaves numbering 1,500 more or less,” to Vila Rica where they retook the city. Assumar then ordered that the property of Silva Guimarães and his “accomplices” be burned to the ground. Although Felipe dos Santos initially evaded arrest, he was caught outside Vila Rica. Following an ad hoc and, according to some observers, unlawful adjudication, “before all of the people he was hanged and his body parts then placed in many places.”36 Having reestablished his own authority, Assumar then agreed to set aside the new policy of smelting houses. His execution of a Portuguese vassal and the actions taken against Silva Guimarães would be scrutinized in Lisbon, where complaints prompted an investigation. In the meantime, however, Assumar continued to defend the use of force while counseling the crown on further action. Although the revolt had been defeated and the residents’ preferred method of collecting the fifth remained in place, in Vila Rica, he reported, “various seditious papers and pasquinades” circulated “encouraging everyone not to pay the fifths” when they were due.37 The way forward, he concluded, the way to “disabuse the people” of their misguided ideas, was to make royal governance manifest “before their eyes” in both punishment and more routine and encompassing forms of discipline.38 More concretely, Assumar recommended creating a new administrative framework that would divide the captaincy of São Paulo and Minas Gerais in two. Persuaded, the crown recalled Assumar to Lisbon and appointed Lourenço de Almeida as the first governor of the new captaincy of Minas Gerais.39
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As Almeida recognized, in assuming his duties he had to reckon with what settlers regarded as his predecessor’s “exorbitance” and the “general disrespect with which he treated men,” as well as the self-interested ambition of men like Silva Guimarães who wanted to “control these mines.”40 At the same time, he had to contend with the impasse between the crown, which wanted to move forward with plans to build smelting houses, and the town councils, eager enough to maintain the status quo that in 1722 they offered to increase the annual payment to thirty-seven arrobas. Almeida, concerned about the expense of building and operating smelting houses and a policy that left open avenues for smuggling and also burdened many miners with travel across considerable distances to render the fifth, reportedly found the offer appealing. Pressed by the crown, however, he moved forward on royal policy. Early in 1724, he summoned representatives of all the town councils in Minas and informed them that the king had ordered the opening of smelting houses to proceed. Earlier criticisms notwithstanding, the local representatives received the order, according to Almeida, with obedient “zeal,” and a smelting house opened at Vila Rica the following year.41 As had been the case in earlier decades, however, the implementation of new fiscal policy did not end debate on the fifth and royal administration. Throughout the 1720s royal officials in Portugal and Brazil continued to piece together information about new discoveries and reports of smuggling with hopes of identifying a way to prevent gold from leaving the region before it had been taxed. The region’s topography presented many natural barriers to movement to, from, and within the region, including mountains, dense forests, rivers that were not easily navigated, and Native peoples protecting their territories from European predation. Yet the trails over which untaxed gold, as well as goods, enslaved people, and livestock, could travel proliferated, especially in the wake of the discovery of new gold deposits in areas remote from initial settlements. Although to curtail illicit trade and transport, the crown halted the construction of a road to Espírito Santo in 1702, by the 1720s an official transportation infrastructure had grown in tandem with expanding settlement and prospecting. Together with the caminho velho (the old road from São Paulo, a journey of two months) and the shorter currais do sertão from Bahia, the forty-five-day caminho novo to Rio de Janeiro, opened in the early 1720s, connected both taxed and untaxed gold to coastal markets and ports.42 As Paulo Cavalcante observes, unregulated commerce was sustained by smugglers and merchants who offered higher rates for gold ore than what
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could be had at royal foundries.43 New discoveries, José da Cunha Brochado advised from Lisbon in 1718, also multiplied the diversion of gold from royal coffers to ships from England, Holland, and France “full of good and cheap merchandise.” These goods entered American ports because, he claimed, some governors turned a blind eye while others struggled to enforce prohibitions.44 Furthermore, smugglers found in neighboring Spanish American territories a demand for gold in exchange for silver that did not bear the same fiscal burden, while miners’ demand for enslaved African labor meant that untaxed gold flowed through the slave trade and to Lisbon where, in the interests of preserving an important political and economic alliance, the crown tolerated its circulation to settle accounts with British traders.45 As royal officials also recognized, it was impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of royal administration based on observations of social and economic surfaces. Even when the residents of Minas rendered the agreed-upon amount of gold, there remained, officials acknowledged, the question of how much gold had been extracted, in fact, from the Brazilian earth in any given year. How much gold illicitly circulated in Brazil or made its way from the mines to European ports? How large were newly discovered deposits? How many miners lived in the region? And how many of those miners were enslaved? With so many details of the mining economy unknown, the Marquis of Abrantes concluded in 1724, even the most elaborate “calculations” that informed collection and assessment schemes were mere “conjecture.”46 Along with the challenge of knowing the region’s dynamic society, economy, and geography, defining a structure for rendering the fifth was a daunting task, royal officials often remarked, because such a structure had to fathom the depths of human ambition and avarice. No one, it seemed, was invulnerable to what Rodrigues da Costa called a “disorderly greed for gold.”47 Considering that it was not only rootless traders and miners who might disregard the rights of their king, in 1720 the crown prohibited royal officials in Minas from engaging in commercial enterprises; both Baltasar da Silveira and Assumar reportedly left Minas considerably richer than when they arrived. By the end of that decade, however, the crown was reminded once again that fiscal order could be thwarted by those entrusted to uphold it. Within a few years of the discovery of gold, as Charles Boxer recounted in The Golden Age of Brazil, miners who ventured into the less inviting terrain of the Jequitinhonha River found not only gold but also some crystalline stones. The stones were initially collected for mundane use or, one later account reported, “earrings worn by blacks,” but by the 1710s other miners recognized that they were diamonds. By
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1726 Almeida had seen samples and, considering his earlier and lengthy posting in Goa where diamonds were traded, almost certainly knew their worth. Only in 1729, however, did Almeida write to the crown about what he insisted were stones of an unsubstantiated nature.48 As a new wave of miners flooded into the area, the crown rebuked Almeida both for his failure to promptly report the discovery of diamonds and for the inadequate information he provided once he did. Within the royal court counselors began to debate how to collect the fifth on the new and increasingly conspicuous treasure. The “abundance of diamonds is such,” one Lisbon newsletter reported in 1731, “that one no longer speaks of carats but rather of pounds.”49 The following year, having determined that Almeida’s efforts to administer diamond mining were marred by leniency, the crown sent instructions to expel anyone who did not successfully bid for a royal diamond mining grant. Almeida, however, enforced only the restrictions on free Black people’s access to the area and negotiated an annual head tax with the miners who remained.50 Having earlier complained about false reports of unrest in Minas—“fanciful stories”—that reached the royal court, Almeida also sought to draw more miners to gold smelting houses with a reduction of the fifth to 12 percent.51 While the measure initially had its intended effect, the following year royal revenues declined.52 Miners complained of the distances to smelteries, and some, according to officials, resorted to counterfeiting (figure 3). In late 1731 the arrival of the fleet at Lisbon, a newsletter recounted, left courtiers and residents to sort through contradictory information about the amount of treasure that had been mined and smelted and a disappointing cargo. A velvet box sent to the king from Almeida, who would spend the rest of his life contending with rumors of illicit enrichment, contained “stones of such little worth” that the offering was received as an offense.53 What the Lisbon newsletter reported would be a “great change in the governments of the conquests” came in 1732 and 1733 with the appointments of André de Melo e Castro, the Count of Galveias, as the new governor of Minas; the Count of Sarzedas as governor of São Paulo; and Gomes Freire de Andrada as governor of Rio de Janeiro, where the previous governor’s zealous campaigns against fraud had led to intractable conflict with the town council. Rafael Pires Pardinho, as intendant of the diamond mines, was to suspend prospecting in a newly demarcated territory in order to decrease supply and, therefore, increase the price that diamonds could command in international markets.54 At the same time a royal charter prohibited the opening of any new roads and paths to Minas.55 Galveias, once in his new post, implemented an
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Figure 3. Map of counterfeiting operation, “Treslado da Delação que fez Francisco Borges de Carvalho de seu socio Ignacio de Souza de Ferreira, de ter cazas de fundição. E de cunhar moedaz,” ca. 1731. (With permission. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Reservados Códice 6699.)
additional order to set aside Almeida’s policy for the fifth and raised the contribution to 20 percent. The new governor’s initial reports, however, indicated that residents of the region would not “accommodate” the change and that, in fact, royal revenue from the fifth was in decline. By October, newsletters reported, the king had ordered “many ministers” to deliberate, once again, this time on a new plan for collecting the royal right conceived by his secretary Alexandre de Gusmão.56
Gusmão’s New System More than three decades after the discovery of gold, and after they had debated, negotiated, implemented, and contested various fiscal schemes, local elites and royal officials in Brazil and Portugal concluded that effective administration of the mining region had eluded them. At the same time, the
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region’s population and economy had grown. Laird Bergad estimates that by the late 1730s, when migration to the region began to wane, the population reached 200,000–250,000.57 Evasions of the royal treasury notwithstanding, gold flowed to royal coffers and circulated within and beyond Brazil, invigorating local and imperial economies and commerce. In spite of the external and internal dangers that the discoveries had precipitated, and about which Rodrigues da Costa warned, mining had become an economic linchpin, the “columns,” as one resident of the region would claim a decade later, that upheld not only “all of the State of Brazil” but also “all of the Portuguese monarchy.”58 Gusmão’s task, therefore, was to somehow cut through what by then was a dense thicket of plans and arbítrios (judgments), increasingly, the Count of Ericeira concluded, “born out of dread,” in order to discern what others had not: a method for collecting the fifth that foreclosed on fraud without jeopardizing the production of wealth, the region’s “conservation,” or its residents’ allegiance.59 Gusmão, best known for his later renegotiation of South American boundaries for the Treaty of Madrid (1750), was born in Brazil but left for Portugal in 1710 at the age of fifteen to join his older brother Bartolomé, a Jesuit engaged in aeronautical studies. He went on to study law at Coimbra and the Sorbonne, and served the crown in Paris and Rome. By 1730 he assumed the duties of royal secretary and counselor that drew him into debates about American fiscal order. For Gusmão, a sound response to the fifth’s inefficiencies would have to acknowledge that, as Rodrigues da Costa had argued, “the people” of Brazil faced a proliferation of taxes along “with the blows of a multitude of ministers and the oppressions to which the ingenuous are necessarily exposed.” The solution, Gusmão claimed, guided by “reason and experience,” was simplification. Replacing the numerous taxes on production, commerce, and transport with a capitação, a head tax on enslaved and free Black labor, and the maneio, a tax on what was earned “with one’s own industry” including in retail, while liberating the circulation of gold as local currency, would, he argued, be both “useful” for the crown and a “great relief ” for the people of Minas. A similar scheme could be implemented in the diamond district and, as Gusmão suggested, extended beyond Minas Gerais to the newer mining settlements in Goiás, Cuiabá, Paranapanema, Paranaguá, and Bahia.60 The capitação had recent precedents in taxes in Portugal levied to fund the Wars of Restoration against Spain. As the seventeenth-century Portuguese jurist and bishop Pacheco attested, a “personal tribute,” or “capitação, also known as so much per head,” had been imposed at various times in neighboring
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Castile and Portugal as “a collection, also known as the finta, when levied on persons regardless of their patrimony.”61 The maneio, in turn, at 5 percent represented a modest increase over the 4.5 percent rate in Portugal where, according to Gusmão, “earnings are so inferior” compared with Minas where “ways to get rich abounded.” Gusmão’s plan also resonated in existing legislation that linked the demarcation of mining claims to enslaved labor and in previous bateia schemes in Minas, noted above.62 Thus, Gusmão insisted, the capitação was not a “great invention” but rather “a thing that would occur to anyone, and that had been done in Minas already in other times.”63 Recalling these earlier examples of head tax schemes, the capitação also evinced more innovative notions of taxation and its transformative potential. The plan, Jaime Cortesão suggested, revealed assumptions about governance and fiscal obligation manifest in seventeenth-century French taxation and, above all, in England, where civil conflict bequeathed “the principle of equality in income tax.” Gusmão’s invocation of “good government,” Cortesão also concluded, signaled a commitment to liberty against absolute royal power.64 Yet, while Gusmão, as we will see below, recognized that implementation would have to include consultation with local authority and claimed that the capitação was a “relief,” the new scheme more clearly resonated in seventeenthand eighteenth-century reformist discourses in which taxation, and the increasingly quantitative knowledge of the population upon which it was to be grounded, was conceived as an instrument of increasing, rather than diminishing, state power. Bringing new order to the fiscal disarray in Minas would, as Gusmão and other officials argued, increase the revenue that flowed to the royal treasury and also promote allegiance and productivity. If fiscal regimes were supposed to justly reflect an existing distribution of wealth, Gusmão affirmed, the crown could also use taxation to promote a certain socioeconomic order. Residents of the region, he concluded, would deploy resources more effectively to ensure that they could pay the tax. “It is nothing new,” he also explained in later commentary, “that in a good government each one contributes to provide to the public the same comforts that one wants in private.”65 To defend the new framework for collecting the fifth, Gusmão’s plan offered calculations, including population estimates, that demonstrated how a new and more “systematic” scheme would afford the crown higher and more consistent revenues without increasing, and in some cases even decreasing, the burdens of miners and farmers. Instead of the variable results of negotiations with town councils, conjecture about the volume of gold that had been mined, and the numerous and disparate tolls and taxes on imported goods and
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labor, the plan depended on new knowledge of society in Minas that Gusmão believed could be reasonably obtained: a census of enslaved adults and other productive individuals.66 The capitação’s promise, Gusmão argued, also rested upon its redoubled efforts to eliminate fraud, manifest in, among other features, a carefully choreographed registration process that included the issuance of receipts (bilhetes) to be printed annually in Lisbon, bearing the kinds of ornamentation and royal insignia associated with money.67 Along with an outline of the practice that ensured the integrity of the material evidence of compliance, Gusmão furnished an extensive description of registry and payment procedures in designated towns. The legitimacy of registration and collection was to be ensured by new officials appointed directly by the crown, called intendants, assisted by scribes and treasurers and accompanied by dragoons. At the sites of collection, residents would pass between the tables of various royal officials, submitting and collecting the required certificates duly stamped. Although Gusmão claimed he would consider other procedures, he set the standard as four receipts per minute, or more than two thousand in ten hours of work. This meant, for example, that officials would be able to complete the sixty thousand registrations needed for the comarca (county) of Vila Rica in one month.68 Because earlier schemes to collect the fifth by bateia, or by each enslaved person who worked the mines with one, had reportedly led to the “disappearance” of slaves at the time of registry, Gusmão’s plan instructed officials how to certify that absentees had fled their captivity and how to collect the tax prorated when they were reenslaved. The plan also indicated that the initial registration and collection would be followed by a correição, an audit or secondary inspection, during which intendants would travel throughout their jurisdiction to compare the initial registries with an on-site inspection of enslaved people resident on farms, other settlements, and mining sites. The temptation to evade one’s duty to fully disclose one’s labor force or profits was to be countered with monetary incentives for denunciation offered to officials and anyone else with knowledge of the crime. As punishment for failure to declare ownership, the enslaved person would be freed, and the owner would pay the tax both to the royal treasury and to the scribe in charge of the registry as well as additional fees.69 Over again in the “Project” and subsequent commentary, Gusmão also pointed to the systematic dimensions of the capitação and maneio as evidence of the plan’s justice and as crucial to its potentially unprecedented success. As a whole, the system was assembled and maintained by the universal
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application of its collection scheme, which, as Michael Kwass has observed of the seventeenth-century French capitation, was to signal an end to unjust privilege and burdens disproportionately borne by the many, or those Gusmão called the “innocent,” in favor of the few.70 As Gusmão explained as well, in Minas exceptions, even those that corresponded to salient differences within society such as age, inevitably invited evasion and opened a “breach in the system’s totality, which is the principal foundation of the levy’s integrity.”71 Thus, to avoid an appearance of privilege to which others could aspire, even royal officials were subject to the capitação. Their salaries could be increased to cover the cost, Gusmão suggested, while their public compliance would serve as an example to those they governed.72 Although the maneio did exempt clergy who were not engaged in commercial ventures as well as “white women who were under the power of their husbands or fathers,” the income of all other residents was to be taxed based on a scale that encompassed eleven contributive “classes.” As Gusmão explained, the plan thus assumed and enforced the ideal of settler productivity. Even “vagrants” figured in the maneio at the lowest end of the scale. Men without work or the means to pay the tax, Gusmão tersely remarked, could find “another domicile in Brazil where there is no lack of largesse or ways to live for free.”73 As Gusmão also recognized, if the implementation of a universal fiscal obligation addressed the problem of evasion (that is, the king could be assured that he was collecting more of what belonged to him by right), there remained the problem of large amounts of gold that circulated beyond the control of royal administration and, most troublingly, flowed to foreign merchants. For several decades royal officials had grappled as well with how to promote the flow of commodities, gold, and money, including silver coin, to Portugal while maintaining an adequate supply of currency in Brazil. Accordingly, along with implementing the tax, Gusmão advised, the crown had to demonstrate that selling gold to the crown’s agents in Brazil was a better way of securing wealth than taking it to Lisbon “to find a buyer.” Along with offering more competitive rates of exchange, the crown could use to its advantage the uncertainties of transport and exchange by implementing new standards and practices for letras (bills of exchange). Printed in Lisbon “with all of the precautions” used in printing the matriculation receipts, the bills would be bound and, Gusmão explained, a small part of each page would be snipped off. Only after the pieces were reassembled would they be redeemed. In addition to increasing security, he continued, the timeframe for transactions would be condensed. Rather than a month, just eight days after the holders’ arrival in port a notice posted on the
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door of the mint would announce that those who held bills could receive what they were owed. Those who had not invested in the bills would be left to find buyers and to recognize “that they did wrong in not trusting” the new scheme. In four years, he predicted, with knowledge of the practice more widespread, few would continue to risk bringing gold to Portugal “on their own.”74 Addressing the circulation of taxed and untaxed gold within the slave trade, Gusmão urged the crown to interdict any direct trade between Brazil and the African coast, “ordering that it be done only from Portugal to [Africa] and from there to Brazil from where ships would return to the kingdom.”75 The “inconveniences” of direct trade and the benefits of a slaving company, he noted, were well known. Although an earlier slave trade company had been shortlived, Assumar, writing in 1733, similarly reaffirmed that “the conservation of the conquests” depended on regulating the trade in enslaved Africans, particularly those from the Mina coast, as the Portuguese called the Gold Coast and nearby ports, who were perceived to be of greater potential “for mining work for which the blacks of Angola did not serve.” Without a monopoly, the trade from the area had become a sieve for Brazilian gold.76 Although the capitação circumvented the loss of revenue by collecting the tax up front, a company, Gusmão insisted, would facilitate the collection of taxes on its imports and, above all, ensure that the circulation of gold on the African coast did not end up channeling wealth from Brazil into the hands of foreign traders who pursued their own schemes to better organize the trade.77 Thus, seeking to increase royal revenue with a more efficient collection of the fifth, Gusmão also recognized that gold was, as Costa has described it, “the oil of the crown’s commercial machine” and, accordingly, sought to achieve a more efficient, and less permeable, lubrication of its parts and linkages.78 While maintaining the wealth of the kingdom was paramount, the royal treasury’s capacity, he assumed, depended not on a simple extraction of resources but rather on the integration of Brazilian treasure, in various forms including minted currency, into the kingdom’s and the empire’s economies as well as global networks of exchange.79 Gusmão’s proposal circulated through established channels of consultation, such as the Overseas Council, as well as an ad hoc circle of royal officials in 1733 and 1734. While no one denied the unsatisfactory aspects of the status quo, some challenged the wisdom of such a thorough change in a territory whose residents, mostly “blacks and fugitive mulattos of little conscience,” were known to pursue their interests at the expense of the crown’s. Others inquired about the justice of the tax’s application to all enslaved laborers, regardless of
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whether that labor was deployed in the mines. Gusmão had it wrong, Almeida claimed, when he assumed that the boundaries between the agricultural and mining sectors of the Minas economy were so porous that many enslaved laborers worked regularly in both.80 Assumar, who had seen earlier versions of Gusmão’s plan, argued that the head tax’s amount was excessive, raised questions about the theological grounding for commuting tithes, and warned of an excessive reliance on mining for royal revenues. Because the reform was dramatic and, perhaps, because “past events had wounded his imagination,” Assumar also cautioned that news of the plan should be kept from reaching Minas ahead of its implementation, that those sent to implement the plan should be “capable” men, and that the governor should be invested with authority to modify the scheme in order to thwart a hostile local reaction. While the residents of the region were now more like “docile sheep” than the rebellious lot he had sought to govern, he explained, they were not accustomed to a “methodical examination of their own interests.”81 Viewing the economic consequences on a larger scale, other officials argued that in a region where many owners purchased slaves on credit, paying an annual tax on this labor up front left owners more financially vulnerable to unforeseen events, such as the death or flight of an enslaved laborer.82 Counselors also called into question certain aspects of Gusmão’s calculations, including his figure of seventy thousand for the enslaved population extrapolated from the roll for a tax to fund a royal wedding at the end of the previous decade, and suggested that the crown consider whether the residents of Minas could bear paying the designated amount of ten oitavas without hardship. Others questioned the wisdom of incurring the costs of additional officials and soldiers needed to put the new scheme into practice, as well as the feasibility of completing the correição, considering the distances that separated some settlements and the lack of lodging for officials.83 The question of whether the capitação and maneio were, in fact, new taxes that could not be levied without consultation of the people generated some of the sharpest debate. Proceeding without consulting the town councils, João Alvares da Costa contended, the reform would disavow the political insight of none other than Cardinal Richelieu; “the gold of most use to the monarchy,” he had advised Louis XIII, “was not what vassals gave with their hands but rather what they gave with their hearts.”84 Martinho de Mendonça, in contrast, claimed that, rather than protect a common good embodied by the crown, consultation with local authorities would sow only discord and injustice. “To leave to the town councils of Minas the judgment of how much they would
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contribute to the fifth,” he railed, “was to give cause to the powerful” at the expense of the powerless.85 In response to royal counselors’ commentary, Gusmão, whose royal service had been rewarded with lucrative notarial offices in Vila Rica, reiterated the importance of a universal application of the scheme, defended the empirical basis for his calculations, and dismissed the possibility of widespread excessive hardship among the miners as a result of the reform. The capitação and maneio, which included the revenue from tithes, he reminded critics, constituted a “commutation of ancient tribute” and a new form of collection rather than a new tax. He accepted, however, that certain adjustments could make the reform appear “gentler to the people,” including a reduction in the amount of that tax itself together with the maintenance of contracted tribute. In keeping with the precedents of the previous decades, he agreed that consulting the people of Minas would assist the crown in securing support for the reform’s implementation.86 The king, who as early as October 1733 had expressed support for both the reform and negotiation with local authorities over the amount to be collected, decided to move forward. He dispatched to Minas as royal commissioner Martinho de Mendonça, a member of the Academia Real known for his defense of “the most modern systems” and a record of diplomatic service.87 Mendonça thus shared with Gusmão the benefits of recent royal patronage for innovation and renewal among those who served the crown. As Martinho de Mendonça’s writings suggest, he also shared Gusmão’s commitment to reformist administration and governance guided by reason, experience, and systematic, empirical knowledge of the people to be governed and taxed. For “resolutions of the state” to be “certain,” Mendonça explained in Apontamentos sobre a educação de hum menino nobre (Notes on the Education of a Noble Youth; Lisbon, 1734), citing William Petty and his “political arithmetic,” they needed to be founded upon “exact calculations.”88 Invested with what one Lisbon newsletter reported to be “great powers,” Mendonça was instructed to gather information about the region’s geography, natural resources, and settlements, as well as the “necessity and usage of slaves from the Mina coast.” With copies of Gusmão’s plan, letters, and reports in hand, Mendonça was to prepare for the capitação’s implementation by inspecting the mint in Rio and, based on consultation with “most experienced and trustworthy persons” as well as a review of parish and taxation records, ascertain “to the smallest detail” the number of slaves living in Minas and whether those slaves worked in mining or on farms.89 The governor of
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Minas, the Count of Galveias, Mendonça’s instructions further explained, was to convene a council of local officials who would enjoy “liberty to share their opinions” on the proposed changes in taxation. “With these representatives” Mendonça was to “negotiate in such a way that the people’s desires justify all the resolutions that are taken, and in this way avoid any perturbance or suggestion that would make them less legitimate, and instead motivate them to adhere” to the reform.90 As Mendonça would soon discover, however, in Minas the people’s “desires” had little in common with Gusmão’s plan.
Authority and Representation The careful introduction of Gusmão’s reform began in Rio de Janeiro, where Mendonça’s arrival caused a stir. “The sight of so many in robes of office,” Governor Gomes Freire de Andrada reported, persuaded the city’s residents “that His Majesty had decided to compel the miners by force if they would not otherwise submit to his impositions.” Convinced by the governor to avoid provoking a similar reaction in Minas, Mendonça continued on to Vila Rica with a less conspicuous retinue.91 There, as instructed by the crown, he assisted the governor in convoking a council of local leaders. Once convened, those gathered voted against the reform and argued instead for paying the fifth as 100 arrobas of gold rendered annually. Galveias, openly skeptical of Gusmão’s plan, agreed to recommend the counteroffer to the king who, concerned with the consequences of a different reaction, decided to let it stand.92 Yet, after a reorganization of administrative posts in early 1735 that promoted Galveias to the post of viceroy in Bahia and appointed Gomes Freire de Andrada as governor of Minas, the crown issued instructions to renew plans for the capitação and convene another council.93 In the meantime, in his capacity as royal commissioner, Mendonça launched what one historian has described as a “reign of terror” against the region’s smugglers and counterfeiters; accounts written in the 1740s accused him of torture. By September 1735, a Lisbon newsletter reported, the accused arriving from Brazil had filled the city’s jail. Fears of where and with whom Mendonça’s campaigns would end, officials surmised, began to persuade some opponents of the capitação to reconsider change. When Gomes Freire went to Minas as governor, he secured or, as critics would later contend, extorted local approval of the capitação at a lower per capita amount.94 In the months and then years that followed, “with sound of drums” residents of Minas learned of when and where the collection would take place.
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Figure 4. A mapa from the capitação of 1746. (With permission. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Reservados Códice 6980.)
Dragoons escorted shipments of recordkeeping materials from Rio’s port to Minas. Portuguese-born intendants, several with prior experience in Minas, took up their postings across the region, accompanied by scribes, treasurers, assistants, and dragoons. Twice a year, residents gathered to register their enslaved laborers and pay the per capita tribute. Intendants then organized itineraries through their districts to complete the second inspection of sites and farms for evidence of untaxed slaves. While, as registration got under way, Mendonça complained of a shortage of receipts and of Gusmão’s general mismanagement of the apparatus needed to implement his own instructions, following the procedures enumerated in statutes, officials compiled registries of enslaved laborers and stores, recorded collected amounts, and aggregated this information into mapas, or charts (figure 4).95 Gusmão, as noted above, expected that a thorough implementation of the new systematic approach to fiscal administration would reduce fraud and increase royal revenues and the flow of gold to Portugal. While measuring the volume of Brazilian gold that crossed the Atlantic depends on a notoriously
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fragmented archive, existing records suggest that without a significant increase in the costs of fiscal administration, the amount of gold collected under the capitação did exceed that of the previous arrangement. Royal remittances, including customs and contracts, declined in the first year of the capitação and then began to rise until declining again in the mid-1740s. During the same period, private remittances increased and remained robust.96 Yet, as had been the case with earlier fiscal schemes, even evidence of increased revenues did not set aside debate on Gusmão’s reform. As royal officials in Lisbon and Minas argued throughout the 1730s and 1740s, the capitação’s capacity to generate royal revenue could not be evaluated outside the context of its political effects. In some parts of the region, officials reported, registration and collection required the use of force, incarcerations, and confiscations. When, in 1736, in response to the Spanish attack on the Colônia do Sacramento, Gomes Freire returned to Rio de Janeiro to shore up southern defenses, Mendonça, now serving as interim governor in Minas, reported open opposition to the new tax and his authority. As the miners’ “complaints” about the overpowering “grip” and “asperity” that defined the execution of his duties reached Lisbon, Mendonça also faced armed rebellion against the capitação in the hinterland communities of the São Francisco River.97 Notwithstanding the force that Mendonça deployed to put down the rebellion and the ensuing arrests, by 1737, he despaired, disregard for his authority had reached the point where streets and public squares had become places for uninhibited expressions of disrespect. In Vila do Carmo “even a little mulatto,” Mendonça wrote to Secretary of State António Guedes Pereira, had joined in chants of “Long live the people and death to Martinho de Mendonça.” His relations with local officials, in turn, had deteriorated to the point that he suspected they were trying to poison him.98 Like many officials who preceded him in Minas, Mendonça understood the open defiance of the reform and his authority as a sign of settlers “accustomed to live without any law other than their own wills” and a society ruinously divided between “small folk” and “powerful men” who manipulated them. Without respect for property and without dread of divine or human justice, “the peoples of Minas,” he explained to Gomes Freire in 1736, “often have more fear of phantastic chimeras than of realities.”99 As another official apprised of the rebellion concluded, in such conditions the offenses of “pardos [men of color] and rustic mamelucos [of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry] raised in the hinterland” and ignorant of the grounds for legitimate royal government demanded royal mercy.100 Neither he nor Mendonça, however, made
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the same argument for the rebellion’s alleged leadership. For the “chieftains” “who know no other law than that of force,” and who had commanded the people of the hinterland to defy royal orders, punishment would be exemplary.101 In this endeavor Mendonça, who wrote admiringly of Assumar’s use of violence and of the political uses of fear, apparently excelled. In spite of his reports of being disrespected and the local residents’ complaints of his excesses even before the capitação’s implementation, by late 1736, Gomes Freire approvingly judged, Mendonça “had made known the power of our sovereign” throughout the mining region’s hinterland.102 At the same time, and as had been the case in earlier decades, royal officials seeking to collect the capitação recognized that American fiscal administration was a complex enterprise that depended on more than a population driven into obedience by fear of violence. Forging political order, they argued, also demanded a sustained, and less disruptive, inculcation of obligation.103 Among the most important lessons to be imparted was that the legitimacy of paying tribute to the sovereign was incontestable. After all, judicial official Domingos Álvares Telles Bandeira observed in commentary on the hinterland rebellion against the capitação, Jesus had enjoined his followers to “give to Caesar.” Because the payment of taxes constituted recognition of sovereign authority, Telles Bandeira explained, “not only in these districts but also in those in the rest of Brazil there should be tributes so that the king knows who does not pay them, or who pays them in a way that feels less onerous.”104 Even royal officials critical of the reform argued similarly that the crown could not forbear refusals to pay taxes without abetting the “absurdity” of vassals who “reputed themselves to be children without a father.”105 Yet, as the early decades of royal administration in Minas had shown as well, the forging of vassalage in the collection of tribute required knowledge of local circumstances. Because “republics [were] like the human body,” Telles Bandeira explained, governance presented challenges similar to those of the practice of healing. Both required knowledge of the “nature” of the body and its ailments, as well as patience. In the case of Minas, far from the beating heart of the monarchy, the men of the hinterland had succumbed to a disequilibrium of humors whose symptoms were manifest in the unfounded judgment that they were “their own Lords.” Unfortunately, Telles Bandeira concluded, the “many changes” in medicines, or the various fiscal schemes of the early eighteenth century, had exacerbated rather than cured the disease.106 For Mendonça, in turn, it was spatial rather than corporeal metaphor that illuminated the challenges to peaceful allegiance and fiscal compliance. As he
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suggested in early commentary on Gusmão’s plan, consolidating royal sovereignty and civil order involved not attacking the places where men “mounted castles of resistance” but rather bringing them out of the “caves to which they fled in order to hide.” Earlier revolts in the region, he argued in another report, could be attributed to the rootlessness of prospectors, while settlement, and the defense of property and the cultivation of the land that attended it, yielded obedience. Governance and fiscal administration, therefore, required attending to a range of challenges to social and economic order, including the problem of fugitives, as part of a larger effort to make the people of Minas see that “the yoke of civil subjection is gentler than that of licentious liberty” and assume the “obligations of a vassal.”107 Royal sovereignty and vassalage, Mendonça wrote in 1737, were further bolstered in “the exterior appearance of authority [. . .] the primary foundation that one should cultivate for the government of Minas, so that the people will have great respect for it, and the powerful will obey it with less resentment.”108 Rites of obedience and deference, invoking metropolitan tradition, were especially effective, he noted, even when those traditions were recently invented. Governor António de Albuquerque, he recalled, had introduced the practice of new members of the town council visiting the governor on their first day in office, “a demonstration that appeared necessary to that prudent governor so that peoples so far from their sovereign would not be blinded by ideas of an absolute and independent republic.” That members of Vila Rica’s town council recently had flouted the practice, Mendonça held, only underscored its crucial role in affirming royal representatives’ authority.109 Yet, local expressions of discontent with the capitação also had exposed the limits of a discipline that, Mendonça imagined, would forge vassals out of “criminals and debtors.”110 Even as royal officials planned to displace what they regarded as fleeting and primitive associations with an allegiant civic order, in Minas claims of a right to resist royal policy had not come from outside of, or prior to, political community. Rather, as historians of Minas including Luciano Figueiredo and Adriana Romeiro have shown, those who contested royal policies saw their actions as constitutive of political community itself and embedded within a larger transatlantic political culture defined by claims to rights and justice within the hierarchy of vassals and the king.111 As the capitação reform got under way, residents of Minas who took part in councils, endorsed petitions to the crown, or joined in uprisings in the hinterland invoked this political culture of service and foundational justice in formulaic expressions of discontent with fiscal “oppression.” Although they had “settled at the cost
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of their own blood, continuously defending themselves against heathens,” the “country folk” reminded the crown, they now faced the “risk of losing their lands.”112 To inform the crown of such circumstances, one town council explained, was to exercise the “right to make known their vexation every time they felt themselves aggrieved,” a claim that resonated in Rodrigues da Costa’s advice that royal officials should cultivate recourse to royal grace.113 Indeed, royal officials reported, town councils in Minas had coordinated the expression of this right, responding to a request from Vila do Cayté that “at the same time they all make the same supplication to His Majesty.”114 As a number of similar petitions explained, the town councils were “reminded that when the said tax was created the people retained the right to make known their vexation every time they felt themselves aggrieved.” They were certain, they added, of the king’s piety and manifest “zeal with which as a common father he detested anything that shut the mouths of those who expressed their plaints.”115 Those who appealed to the king to have mercy on their poverty and alleviate the capitação’s devastating burden did not contest the legitimacy of paying tribute. “All of Your Majesty’s vassals in this continent of Minas,” representatives from Sabará declared, “are certain that by divine and natural right we owe you this tribute.”116 “We recognize that by all divine and human right,” the town council of Vila Nova da Rainha similarly attested in 1742, “that tribute is owed to Your Majesty, and this tribute consists of the contribution that the peoples make in recognition of the lordship of their monarch.” “We submit only,” the petitioners continued, that the allocation of the burden was not “proportionate” to what they were able to pay.117 As several town councils also acknowledged, the crown had embarked on reform in response to fraud, especially counterfeiting, and such criminal acts could not go unpunished. Yet the capitação, they charged, penalized the innocent along with the guilty, while its universal application to all residents of Minas disregarded the plight of miners whose claims had run dry.118 While judgments uttered in more private settings went further, suggesting that the new policy made the crown predatory, they too crystallized around justice in fiscal practice. “The mines were discovered, conquered and settled by the people, without aid nor resources from his Majesty,” Domingos de Abreu Lisboa was reported to have said at one gathering, and so it stood to reason that the crown “should be satisfied” with the fifth and what was collected from smelteries and the mint.119 The status of local political authority and representation had been at the center of debate about the capitação since royal counselors’ initial deliberations
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over the plan. Assumar, who had advised that royal officials should be prepared to accommodate certain demands, clarified that such a position did not mean that “the people” were “arbiters.” Rather, the governor was to confer only with “persons of intelligence, zeal and capacity.”120 While Gusmão had agreed that the town councils should play a part in the process of implementation, in 1734, considering the outcome of the first consultation with the town councils that led to the interim scheme based on an annual 100 arrobas, the Overseas Council had cast doubt on the town councils and the role they played in tax collection in favor of treasury officials “due to the unjust and disordered manner with which they apportioned the burden during the time that the fifths were levied by bateias.”121 In response to more recent local protest and denunciation, royal officials, summoned to advise on the petitions, reached similarly ambivalent conclusions about the status of the town councils of Minas. Some recognized that certain aspects of the capitação were punitive, adversely affected many residents, and, one explained, contradicted the fifth’s “preferred and natural order.”122 Other intendants, however, dismissed what amounted to no more than an “extensive and affected narrative of minor complaints” and discerned machinations that served uncommon interest rather than the pursuit of civic duty.123 Advising that parts of the scheme, such as the schedule of payments, could be modified to mitigate its more onerous effects, Gomes Freire de Andrada warned of “discourses uttered by the residents of Brazil” that laid the ground for defrauding, rather than protecting, the royal treasury.124 Martinho de Mendonça, not surprisingly, shared the more pessimistic assessments of local authorities. The town councils, he concluded, recalling a warning issued by Almeida in 1722, had been overrun by “restless vassals” and “declared enemies of service to Your Majesty.” “In Minas positions in the councils are of such minor consideration,” he reported, “that only the unworthy seek them.” The results were displays of insolence at best and at worst disloyal invocations of the “liberty of the people.” Attacks on the reform by Domingos Abreu Lisboa, known for instigating rebellion while Assumar was governor and, more recently, brazenly conspiring to secure a seat on the town council to fend off debt collectors, were not worthy of consideration. Such “propositions,” Mendonça fumed, were “intolerable in a seditious parliamentarian let alone in a Portuguese vassal.”125 As Mendonça joined with other officials in seeking to disqualify local authority in Minas as self-interested and potentially mutinous, he also called into question consultative practice itself. The authority of the sovereign and of his
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decrees did not, he argued, depend on repeated affirmations of local consent. “When the sovereign has certainty that a decision is useful to the people,” he wrote of Gusmão’s plan, “consulting them is a mere formality that in some cases may be destructive for those same people.”126 Returning to the question a few years later, Mendonça explained that the practice of consultation had been deleteriously transformed by the seventeenth-century rebellion against Habsburg rule. The mid-seventeenth-century war with the Spanish, he wrote to João V from Minas, was an extraordinary and “calamitous time in which it seemed necessary to strengthen the clear right of the House of Braganza with the acclamation of the people and the suffrage of the Cortes.” In all other times, however, such demands for representation were “offensive to independent royal sovereignty that is incumbent upon the Majesty of the King.”127 Mendonça had offered similar commentary on the scope of royal authority in his Apontamentos. During the Braganza challenge to Spanish rule, he argued there, the dilemmas faced by “our Portuguese magistrates” were “deplorable.” The present moment, however, was different and allowed for setting aside “deceptive sophisms of rebellion” in favor of “obedience to superiors.” Although, led by the Duke of Braganza, the Restoration began in 1640 with conspiracy and violence against a sovereign in a rightful defense of the people against tyranny, it was possible to historicize those acts, and the principles cited to justify them, as extraordinary responses to extraordinary times or as a defense, Mendonça concluded, of “necessary and inevitable revolutions.” In all other circumstances the limits on the king’s power were an aberrant and therefore monstrous exception to hierarchy. “If the supreme head of civil society can be coerced into justifying itself to the parts of the body of the republic,” Mendonça explained, “either these may under some pretext stop obeying, or the subjects will end up being judges of their superior who should be judging them.”128 Consequently, any attempts to justify resistance to the actions of sovereign authority with invocations of injustice, tyranny, and late scholasticism’s misguided “doctrines of the common good” were nothing more than a ruse for fomenting “universal disorder” and the total destruction of “the political body.”129 As a whole, Mendonça’s assertions in his official correspondence and the Apontamentos distilled what historians have described as a protracted politicalcultural shift toward new configurations of royal authority in the eighteenthcentury Portuguese monarchy. The king continued to embody justice and a pact with the people of his lands, but the mechanisms for his consulting them became less institutionalized. While, as Ferrand de Almeida observed, João V’s
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absolutism lacked “an official foundational doctrine,” in practice it took shape in governance that disregarded the representative Cortes. During the War of Spanish Succession, the crown, pledging to preserve historic privileges, appealed to the dire circumstances of war to tax without convoking and consulting the institution.130 After the war, while the fiscal question became less urgent, discussions of the monarchy’s constitutional foundations continued to invoke undivided power. In 1731 those attending a session of the Academia Real da História at the royal palace listened to the magistrate Filipe Maciel deliver a sharp rebuke to an earlier memoria from 1727 in which José Barbosa, discussing debates over royal succession and the incapacity of Afonso VI (d. 1683), had identified the “peoples in Cortes” as “legislators.” Such an account was an error, Maciel argued, tantamount to recognizing “in the peoples a part of [royal] Majesty.” On the contrary, the Portuguese monarchy did not encompass a “division of Majesty” for, as he explained, “after the peoples, following royal law, transferred power to govern them to the monarch, they were left only to obediently serve.”131 As the implementation of the capitação thus exposed persistent tensions between exclusively royal sources of authority and local appeals to rights based on service, it also challenged the global monarchy’s political geography. In the seventeenth century the new Braganza kings had recognized American representation to the Cortes as part of a strategy to consolidate their authority.132 Although João V governing without the Cortes seemed to foreclose on debate about American representation, the implementation of the fiscal reform in Minas, Mendonça argued, nevertheless laid bare the question as another aspect of the Restoration’s legacy that needed to be curtailed. Brazil’s towns did not have a “vote in the Cortes,” he reminded the king in 1736.133 “Nor is there reason to conclude that the town councilmen of Brazil are more correct or make a better case than those whom Your Majesty may hear on these matters [and] who have some experience in those lands,” he elaborated before departing for Minas. “No government,” he insisted, “however much supported by the vote and consent of the people, affords those in the colonies and conquests a vote on public matters.” Not even the once regicidal English Parliament allowed for the formal representation of settlers.134 Commenting on the capitação plan in Lisbon in 1733, counselor Gonçalo Galvão Lacerda concurred and reminded the king of what was at stake for fiscal administration in Minas. Because “the peoples of the conquests do not have a vote in the Cortes,” he explained, “to give them a hearing would be the same as showing them that Your Majesty needs their approval to order the collection, in this way or another, of
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what is rightfully owed to the Royal Treasury.” Such recognition would allow them “to imagine that they are obliged to pay no more than what they want to.”135 Thus, in contrast to Rodrigues da Costa’s advice to cultivate politicalcultural continuities between Portugal and Brazil, Martinho de Mendonça and other royal officials who experienced and scrutinized conditions in Minas and deliberated on fiscal practice there concluded that the future of imperial politics should be defined by political-cultural hierarchies and differences. Instead of bolstering ties between the king and his vassals, representation of the “peoples of the conquests,” they argued, jeopardized the imperial monarchy’s integrity. Setting aside consultation, negotiation, and other exchanges within economies of service and reward, it was in the obedient “payment of tribute” as defined within a distant royal court, Martinho de Mendonça affirmed, that the people of the mining region recognized “the ruler’s supreme lordship.”136
The End of the Capitação At mid-century, as residents continued to complain of the unjust effects of the capitação, the king called upon royal officials to examine, once again, the conditions for American fiscal administration. With Mendonça recalled to Portugal in 1737 following his numerous complaints of illness, Governor Gomes Freire de Andrada, whose jurisdiction now included Minas and Rio de Janeiro, conceded the troubles that the reform had caused, as well as the possibility of modifying the scheme, yet insisted that a head tax was still the best way to thwart fraud. Other officials’ reports rehearsed earlier critiques that the capitação distorted a royal right to subterranean resources into a “personal tribute” and that it did not have the “naturalness” of the smelteries where only those who had mined gold were obliged to pay.137 From Minas came reminders of an economic “decadence” that imperiled “all of Brazil, this kingdom, and all of Europe.”138 As Romero Magalhães argued, apprised of the petitions and reports from the crown’s representatives in Brazil, royal counselors began to assume that a different method of collecting the fifth was in order. That method remained unspecified, however, and more than two years would pass, as courtiers accompanied the illness and then the death of João V in 1750, before the new king José I decreed the end to the capitação and a return to the 1734 interim agreement between residents and the governor. To ensure that the crown received no less than 100 arrobas annually, the decree also provided for a derrama, a collection of any deficit divided among all residents in Minas.139 In
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explaining why he set aside his late father’s “piously intentioned” policy, José I invoked the “oppression” that the “peoples of Minas” had experienced and the “common good of my faithful vassals.” The decree, as Magalhães noted, also restored the town councils’ authority in fiscal administration. The intendancies were retained but, rather than being crown-appointed, the intendant would be a “man of respect” and authority in the local community, nominated by a town council and approved by a royal judge.140 Town councils thus maintained their status as what Maria Fernanda Bicalho has described as a “place and vehicle” for negotiations with the crown for rewards for service.141 An old regime of royal grace and justice, eloquently defended in Rodrigues da Costa’s testament, endured too in royal counselors’ recommendations that “liberty-loving” “Brazilians [brazileiros]” be given honors as part of a process of inculcating love for their sovereign and thereby “accustoming” them to obedience.142 In this sense, while Gusmão lamented that the end of the capitação would mean a return to “disorder, confusion and ruin,” those who defended the change, including Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo at the beginning of his rise to ministerial power, recognized that the reform had neglected the political bonds between the king and his American vassals. Reviewing the conditions for fiscal administration a month before the king issued the decree of 1750, Carvalho e Melo argued that the “conservation of Minas” should be the primary “object” of royal policy for Brazil. In doing so he also turned on its head the claim that the payment of tribute consolidated recognition of royal authority, arguing, as had Rodrigues da Costa, that local responses to onerous tribute made Brazil more vulnerable. The “system of rigor,” Carvalho e Melo therefore recommended, needed to be replaced with a “system of liberty and peace.”143 Yet, in the next decades Brazil’s town councils would have to contend with increasingly powerful governors and viceroys, as well as royal officials’ skepticism about their constancy. As Carvalho e Melo made clear, “freedom” in fiscal practice did not mean that American representation occupied a place of authority within the empire. “We shut the mouths of some of the so-called representatives of these peoples,” he reassured Gomes Freire in 1752 when the Overseas Council dismissed a new round of petitions on the fifth. It was a sound response, he concluded, to the “seditious” tendencies of “a gang of men without a shred of political education.”144 Apart from legalistic questions of American constitutional status, the midcentury scrutiny and debate around the capitação and future fiscal regimes were also marked by shared understandings of the hierarchies and purposes
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of empire. Rather than invoke ideals of conquest, or status, to define royal policy’s aims, counselors reiterated the need to measure the success of governance and administration with reference to imperial prosperity and wealth. Writing against ending his reform, Gusmão decried the “injustice” of the scheme that was to take its place. Yet, he also reminded the crown of the capitação’s broader fiscal and economic objectives: “bringing all of the gold to the kingdom” and unfettering commerce. In contrast, the flawed logic of the new derrama would “incentivize” rather than hinder fraud and therefore decrease the circulation of gold. If those among “the people” who had dutifully paid what they owed could expect to bear the burden if others failed to do the same, he explained, it only made sense that they would recalculate whether it was in their interests to pay the fifth up front.145 Because, the diplomat Tomás da Silva Teles argued more broadly, “Divine Providence” had given the king “the treasures that are found deposited in those lands in order to enrich his treasury, his monarchy and vassals,” those who did not promote “this end, of much utility for the public good,” had no place there.146 American treasure, Gusmão had reiterated in 1749, had to be reckoned with in the context of commerce and rivalry as well. Brazil, he affirmed, was one of the “overseas colonies” from which Portugal secured gold and goods to pay its debts to foreigners.147 Carvalho e Melo, as we will see in later chapters, expressed a similar perception of imperial aims. Compared to Gusmão, he was less concerned with tightening the royal grip on the circulation of Brazilian gold. The wealth that flowed from mining was always “chimerical,” he concluded, citing Montesquieu. Rather, it was commercial potential that “regulated politics” and underwrote the power of kings and peoples.148 Yet, like Gusmão, Carvalho e Melo understood that royal policy should guide America’s distant and “flourishing” settlements to produce, “without damage to the crown, everything that is necessary to sustain the king our lord, as in the State of India.” In this context, it was the instrumentality of rewards for service that mattered most. As Carvalho e Melo explained, the crown needed to promote “the useful and obliging greed of the miners” in such a way that “each day they aspire to greater service and vaster discoveries.” In this way all the monarchy’s “political and economic interests” would be addressed and Brazil, he asserted, would be more secure “and the treasury of this kingdom would be richer, even without collecting a penny of the royal fifth.”149 Critics and proponents of the reform also agreed that royal policies needed to recognize that Brazilian society and economy were different from those of Portugal. On both sides of the debate, counselors invoked those with
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“experience” and “practice in the country” to signal the knowledge upon which their advice was founded. As Assumar explained, advising modifications to Gusmão’s scheme, just as “modern philosophers did not countenance reason without experience in physics,” because the latter could contradict that which appeared to be rational, in governance “practice sometimes contradicted calculations that within the cabinet seemed the most plausible.”150 The counselors in Lisbon who had agreed to the reform, later detractors likewise argued, “lacked experience with that way of life in the sprawling terrain of Minas.”151 Expertise in Portugal’s society and economy, they assumed, did not translate into the knowledge needed to devise American social and economic administration. And, as royal officials recognized, Brazil’s difference, the “way of life” to which officials and petitioners referred, was defined, above all, by slavery. To deploy “reason and experience” in governance and administration in Brazil, as we will see in the next chapter, thus entailed exploiting and in some cases redefining the social and economic relations between settlers and the people they enslaved.
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3 • Taxing Gold and Taxing Slaves American Social Order and Empire
In 1745 in Catas Altas, a small parish in Minas Gerais to the north of Vila Rica, a woman named Teresa appeared before a royal intendant visiting the community to conduct the first capitação, or head tax, registry of the year. She was an African deported from the Mina coast, the record of that encounter indicates, around twenty-five years old. She probably appeared with two others, both men, a thirty-year-old named Luís, also from the Mina coast, and Inácio de Barros, identified only as a “free man of color.” The registry affirmed the relationship among the three and between Barros and the crown. Teresa and Luís were enslaved people, Barros’s property, and therefore he owed the royal treasury a tax on their heads. For Barros the sum may have been onerous, or he may have seen the tax as an illegitimate encroachment on his resources worth trying to evade; one year earlier his delinquency had been noted, next to Teresa’s and Luís’s names, on a list of “slaves denounced” for being untaxed.1 For the crown, however, Barros’s disposition and the small scale of his holdings were irrelevant. His obligation rested upon broad and categorical assumptions about the production of wealth in Minas, where, as royal counselor Alexandre de Gusmão had argued in 1733, possessions were “of a different nature” than in Portugal. In contrast to the “many sorts” of property and incomes in Portugal, Gusmão explained, in Brazil’s mining region goods and assets could “be reduced to two types, those acquired from the labor of blacks” and “those acquired by one’s own industry.”2 His tax plan’s success, Gusmão also insisted, rested upon a replication of these discontinuities between Europe and America. The head tax would be levied primarily on enslaved and Black persons because, in contrast to that of Portugal, the economy of Minas,
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even as it materialized in Barros’s unidentified small-scale endeavors, overwhelmingly depended on their labor. At the same time, Gusmão intended that his reform would do more than reflect, and exploit, the mining region’s economy. As we saw in chapter 2, Gusmão argued that, as a more equitable distribution of fiscal burden, the capitação would curtail fraud and promote a more comprehensive local productivity. Its implementation, in turn, relied upon and bolstered a broad exercise of royal authority in the region at the expense of an incorporative political tradition that had taken form among prospectors and settlers in the early decades of the gold rush. This chapter surveys how Gusmão, other royal counselors, and officials sent to govern the region envisioned a similarly dynamic relationship between fiscal practice and social order, and the taxation scheme’s interactions with the institution of slavery, Africans and African-descended people, and the enslaved. Royal officials, including Gusmão, reckoned with local evasions of the royal right to the quinto, a fifth of what was mined, amid a growing body of claims and debates, among men serving the crown in Brazil and Portugal, about the social ramifications of the gold rush and the relationship between social order and the defense of the crown’s sovereignty. In the early eighteenth century, reports from Minas offered images of American ungovernability, while conflicts on the ground, officials often lamented, tested institutional frameworks and processes for defending royal justice. Social and economic relations, in turn, appeared as both shocking distillations of a single-minded quest to obtain wealth and menacing aberrations of racialized and gendered hierarchies. Gusmão’s plan was not the first to envision the possibility of halting these developments; since receiving news of the gold mines at the turn of the eighteenth century the crown had sought to balance local, religious, and economic interests with regulation and various administrative schemes. The capitação would succeed where these earlier endeavors to promote royal and imperial interests had failed, Gusmão argued, because it was sustained by unprecedented recognition of the connections between diverse sources of social, economic, and fiscal disorder and a newly optimistic appraisal of the crown’s capacity to discipline them.3 Implementing the tax entailed generating new, official knowledge of slave ownership and deploying royal authority against delinquent enslavers in the form of confiscations and even manumissions of enslaved people as punishment for fraud. As owners decried enslaved people’s efforts to exploit the presence of royal officials in the region, Gusmão pointed to mercantile principles to argue that, indeed, while the head tax was
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intended to increase royal revenue above all, it would also reshape social order to promote productivity and the extraction of wealth. As new fiscal practices challenged enslavers’ authority, they preserved and, in some instances, bolstered hierarchies of color. The slave societies of Brazil were not ungovernable, Gusmão concluded, in contrast to several of his contemporaries, but their administration needed to acknowledge, and in some cases redefine, the range of slavery’s social and economic effects that upheld Brazil’s status as a colony.
Labor, Law, and Disorder in the Rush to the Mines The Portuguese crown’s earliest efforts to affirm its right to subterranean treasure in Brazil acknowledged the particular circumstances of mining work there. In contrast to medieval and early modern Portuguese law codes, royal regulations for the monarchy’s territory in America included references to labor, both free and enslaved, as an index of a mining claim’s viability. The 1603 “Regimento das terras mineraes do Brazil” (Regulatory Statute on Mineral Lands in Brazil) recognized three possible labor arrangements in active, or settled (povoada), mining sites. Claimants were to deploy “continuously” two enslaved, or four free, laborers. If the claimant was “poor,” he himself was expected to work “continuously” at the site.4 In the regulatory statute of 1618, in turn, labor acquired an even more explicitly American dimension. Although the statute recognized Indigenous people as potential discoverers of mines, it affirmed that “for the benefit of the said mines, the Indians need to be divided” among those with claims and property. Although the crown and royal officials addressed the need to curtail European settler abuse, Native labor and mining also converged in the so-called bandeira expeditions that went out from São Paulo in the seventeenth century in search of people to enslave illicitly, or “justly” if the pretense of just war held, as well as of any valuable mineral resources. In the wake of discoveries in Minas, the rush of settlers then opened new fronts in the conflict between Europeans and Natives, as the latter fought to preserve dominion over their lands. Throughout the eighteenth century, settlers complained to the crown about Native violence that their prospecting and settlement provoked, and took Native dispossession and servility for granted.5 Following the discovery of major deposits of gold, and as prospecting came to demand labor in amounts that exceeded what the enslaved Native population could supply, discussions of the status of Native peoples in the mines
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gave ground to broader consideration of how to supply labor for, and control migration to, the mining region. By then the rush had amplified the perennial demographic challenges of extending sovereignty beyond Europe—challenges that were especially acute in Portugal, where in the previous century counselors and chroniclers had denounced the empire’s tendency to drain the kingdom’s population. As had been the case with seventeenth-century sugar cultivation in Brazil’s Northeast, settlers came to see African labor as a solution. As miners brought enslaved Africans into the region, the crown affirmed that recognition of a claim would be predicated on the number of slaves that the claimant held, with preference given to those who owned twelve or more. In 1702, the “Regimento dos superintendentes, guarda-mores, e officiaes deputados para as minas de ouro” (Regulatory Statute on Superintendents, HeadGuards, and Deputy Officers for the Gold Mines) also codified the recognition of claims with reference to “the blacks that each one has” (figure 5).6 At the same time, however, chroniclers and officials, royal and local, fretted about the siphoning of enslaved laborers from plantations to the mines. As northeastern planters and settlers contended with the increasing price of slaves, some capitalized by selling them for profit, while others with fewer resources picked up and left for Minas where they tried their own luck. “The fortune of the mines,” Sebastião da Rocha Pita bemoaned, prevailed over the “fate of the mills.”7 Commenting on the new circumstances around the same time, the viceroy, the Count of Sabugosa, further explained that there was no “white man” “who wants to subject himself to the work of overseeing or other tasks [in agriculture] because everyone who comes from the kingdom heads to the mines as soon as they arrive.”8 In other words, no one with a choice would work in the sugar economy as long as the possibility of striking gold remained within reach. As more and more prospectors made their way into the mining region, royal efforts to register and regulate the influx of enslaved Africans became part of the process of demarcating the region’s boundaries. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the crown envisioned a distribution of enslaved labor so that settlers did not lack “the slaves that were needed for the work of the gold mines,” nor would those across “all of the State of Brazil” lack the labor needed on their plantations and mills. Yet the law of 1701, which established that two hundred of the Angola captives disembarking in Rio each year were to be sold to Paulistas, did not resolve local labor crises brought about by either shortages of enslaved laborers or the high prices that slave traders could demand.9 By the end of the decade, the crown ended the limits on bringing slaves into
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Figure 5. “Enslaved men crushing stones for the extraction of diamonds,” Serro Frio (ca. 1770), in Carlos Julião, “Notícia summaria do gentilismo da Asia [. . .] Ditos de figurinhos de brancos e negros dos uzos do Rio Janeiro e Serro do Frio [. . .].” (With permission. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional—Brasil.)
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Minas.10 Prices and flows of enslaved Africans remained points of contention and critique, particularly for plantation owners in the Northeast.11 With the gold rush driving transatlantic and internal forced migrations, by the 1730s African and African-descended enslaved laborers made up between 40 percent and 50 percent of the region’s population.12 As historians of Minas have observed, this large enslaved population featured prominently in administrative diagnoses of local social and political disorder. Officials’ reports of disturbances, violence, criminality, and immorality in Minas invariably attributed some degree of culpability to “blacks.”13 Some officials directed their invectives toward those who fled to recover their freedom. As in other areas of Brazil, in Minas quilombos (free communities) proliferated as the region’s enslaved population grew. As governor, the Count of Assumar, who had personal investments in the local slave trade, conceded that flight and the forging of quilombos were inevitable features of the region because it was impossible to “extract thoughts of, and natural desires for, freedom.” It was widely known, a later report similarly suggested, that in Minas “all blacks,” those who fled and those who stayed, recognized that “it was good to flee.” Even those who met death in flight, enslaved persons had explained, were at least delivered from captivity and able “to rest in peace in their ancestral lands.”14 Although enslavement was integral to the society and economy of Minas, by the 1710s, royal officials also concluded, resistance to enslavement had reached an untenable scale. While some free communities had fewer than a dozen residents, others had hundreds. One of these communities, Governor Baltazar Silveira reported in 1715, had grown to the point that settlers and officials “dreaded that the same that happened in Pernambuco in Palmares would happen in Minas,” a reference to the extensive confederation of communities in the seventeenth-century Northeast that Portuguese forces had taken years to dismantle.15 Writing to the king in 1718 of the lack of Natives to be used in tracking down fugitives and dismantling quilombos, the Count of Assumar similarly railed against the many “black fugitives” who “every day break loose in various places,” stealing gold, food, and other “things of less value in greater quantities.” “I see the black horde here inclined in such a way that we will have something similar to the Palmares of Pernambuco,” he blustered.16 A later defense of his administration, the Discurso histórico e político, echoed this warning of new African sovereignties within the Brazilian hinterland.17 While Almeida, who succeeded Assumar, was less convinced of the magnitude of the threat, in the 1730s the royal commissioner Martinho de Mendonça resusci-
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tated the uncompromising judgment that in Minas “fugitive blacks which are called calhambolas” constituted “the only internal evil to be feared.”18 Having conjured up the specter of Palmares, officials argued that “the conservation or ruin of this country” depended on what Assumar described as the “violent remedies” that would disable “an indomitable rabble.”19 As he had claimed upon assuming his post as governor, lauding the “memorable Portuguese of São Paulo” who aided in the defeat of Palmares, the slaughter of the “rebellious hydras who had risen up against the prince” was an exemplary feat. In Minas, too, he later argued, it would take “all the state’s forces” to vanquish communities beyond, and at odds with, Portuguese control.20 As officials deployed militarized force against quilombos in Minas, however, the violence directed against fugitives more frequently took shape on a smaller, if no less gruesome, scale. Once in the custody of authorities, fugitives were to be branded, with punitive violence escalating with each repeated offense, from dismemberment to capital punishment.21 Along with invoking the threat to Portuguese control of the hinterland, both royal officials and residents defended such actions by summoning images of intimate violence and personal ruin. As one resident of Vila Rica argued in the 1740s, complaints that such punishments were more “barbarous than Catholic” ignored the destructive acts that fugitives committed, including attacks on priests and the kidnapping of “their wives and virgin daughters and damsels.”22 As Assumar also suggested, punitive violence directed against fugitives and enslaved people would have even greater effect in the context of a broad judicial framework that, once publicized, would ostensibly deter flight and other transgressions. In Panama, he reported admiringly, the Spanish king had appointed an official with the “authority to execute blacks and mulattos who deserve such punishment,” while in French Mississippi and Louisiana “special laws” and a “Black Code” sanctioned punishments that terrorized the enslaved and preserved their productivity. To punish those who fled, he explained, authorities “cut off the right leg and replace it with a piece of wood” so that the enslaved could still “serve their masters in some way.”23 The Portuguese crown, however, did not pursue the writing of a legal code for slavery. As Rafael de Bivar Marquese has argued, in Portuguese American territories the more modest trajectory of royal legislation on the “governance of slaves” was marked above all by an interest in curtailing the potential for disorder while upholding the authority, or domestic sovereignty, of enslavers. Royal officials recognized slave owners’ authority “behind closed doors” and
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expected them to enforce this authority just as they expected fathers to enforce their authority over other members of their households. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crown affirmed the paternal aspect of enslavement by mandating that owners provide for the baptism and religious instruction of enslaved people. Sixteenth-century legislation and the Ordenações Filipinas further codified the social dependence of enslaved people by stipulating that “no enslaved captive man or woman, whether white or black, may live in their own house” and providing for punishment for those who took slaves into their own homes and, it was presumed, thus offered a place to hide stolen goods.24 Royal respect for slave owners’ domestic authority did not preclude royal action to address the dereliction of duty or a breach of the mostly unwritten boundaries of paternal power in instances of material deprivation and violence. Especially if violence spilled into public view, enslavers could be judged harshly.25 As John Marquez has shown, enslaved petitioners shaped these responses, deploying an accrued knowledge of Portuguese customary precedent to seek, and in some cases secure, various forms of royal redress, including manumission.26 In the wake of campaigns against Palmares, the crown’s recognition of the need to curb “very poor treatment” and “cruelty” also led to legislation in 1688 that ordered officials “in all general judicial inquiries in this state, to inquire into owners who cruelly punish their slaves and that those who did so should be obligated to sell [the enslaved] to people who treat them well.” Officials were to be prepared to examine any and all denunciations of abuse, the crown announced, “even those made by the same slaves who had been punished.”27 Yet, within days of the 1688 law, a second order sought to tighten the scope of accusation, instructing that officials should take care to prevent “as much as possible that news of this remedy for their immoderate punishment reaches the slaves, so as to avoid that for less than justified causes they can make a case against their owners.”28 A year later, the crown completed its retreat with an additional charter that ordered officials to make known to the enslaved that the earlier legislation no longer prevailed “with some explicit act so that we avoid the perturbances between them and their owners that have already started to occur with the news they had of the orders that we issued in the past.”29 In the first years of the eighteenth century, the broad and tentative royal and religious frameworks for the governance of slaves were reiterated in injunctions that enslavers observe Christian duty, exercise moderation in punishment, and show more respect for enslaved persons’ physical and spiritual needs.30 Like the limited corpus of law on slavery, such directives, including
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those in Jorge Benci’s Economia cristaã no governo dos escravos (Christian Economy in the Governance of Slaves), written in Bahia in 1700 and published in Rome in 1705, and in Antonil’s Cultura e opulência, written in Bahia between 1693 and 1698, affirmed the principle of enslavers’ domestic sovereignty. “Slaves are the feet and hands of the mill owner,” Antonil observed with Aristotelian flourish. As the crown, the clergy, and enslavers agreed, neither the church, nor the monarchy, nor the empire’s economy would be served by laws that dismembered the owner’s body by undermining their power over the enslaved.31 In Minas, however, royal and local officials also complained that another body—the communal body—was already under threat and not only from enslaver cruelty and a lack of regard for souls that, as Benci and Antonil observed, enslaved people throughout Brazil endured. On the one hand, royal officials reported, the lack of judicial personnel in the region meant that invocations of royal justice in defense of either the enslaved or enslavers had limited effect. In Minas, they complained, the result was an “effrontery” among the enslaved, “encouraged” by a manifest failure to prevent “heinous crimes.” The solution, they argued, was to align judicial practice with that of other parts of Brazil where a reduced number of judges could gather to sentence enslaved people for flight and other crimes.32 As Almeida asserted in 1731, the “continuous crimes” that afflicted Minas stemmed from the fact that the perpetrators— “bastards, carijós, mulattos, and blacks”—“had not seen the example of some of them hung, or justice as it is done in the city of Bahia.”33 On the other hand, even swifter adjudication could not restore the social order of enslavement in Minas when it became entangled in the unchecked use of paramilitary caçadores do mato (bush hunters) and their leaders, the capitães do mato (bush captains). These men, many of whom were of Indigenous or African ancestry (“Indian carijós or mulattos”) were self-interested, officials reported, and often indiscriminate in carrying out their duties. In spite of royal regulations intended to limit unofficial violence, along with capturing those who had fled into freedom, the caçadores and capitães were known to provoke confrontations and take into custody those engaged in mining or other work, imprison them, and then extort money from their owners in exchange for their return.34 As they complained of the limits of judicial practice and of the poor quality of resources to curtail flight and other allegedly criminal acts, officials in Minas also took aim at slave owners for failing to defend social order when it came at the expense of their interests. “A senhor invests more in hiding a black evildoer,” Assumar judged, because “in losing him to justice there is no
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one who will restitute his loss.”35 Slave owners, he also reported, covered up crimes even when owners were themselves victims “to avoid the risk of losing the value [of the enslaved person] if they were apprehended.”36 Owners were also known to use enslaved laborers in their own attacks on the crown’s interests. Merchants, officials reported, transacted illicitly with quilombo communities, while enslaved laborers smuggled gold on behalf of owners who, were the schemes to be discovered, could argue that they had no knowledge of the illicit activity.37 Yet perhaps the most glaring sign of slave owners’ disregard for political and social order was their use of enslaved men in private armed forces. Miners and merchants defended the practice by pointing to the need for security amid a mobile population aware of the goods and treasure that traversed roads to and from Minas.38 Like elites in Portuguese cities who deployed enslaved men as personal guards, those in Minas who depended on enslaved men to protect them and their property against crimes allegedly perpetrated by other enslaved men flouted royal restrictions on the bearing of arms.39 Considering conditions in Minas, in 1711 the king advised Governor Albuquerque that he could use his own judgment on the matter because he understood that “there it was not possible to put in practice the prohibitions on the use of arms as in this kingdom due to the considerable dangers in the expansive hills and mountains that people travel through on foot without the shelter of settlements or inns.” By 1726, however, the crown had moved to tighten restrictions on the possession of weapons in Brazil. Recognizing that the “dangers” of the countryside demanded exceptions and accommodations, the governor in Rio was advised that slave owners nevertheless should exercise “vigilance” and ensure that enslaved workers “do not use prohibited weapons unless they want to lose their services during the time they are condemned to the galleys.”40 As the crown thus acknowledged that American circumstances could demand additional scrutiny of longstanding, if imperfectly enforced, prohibitions on the bearing of arms, royal officials in the region also warned of ominous connections between the use of militias of enslaved men and threats to royal authority. The Emboaba Manuel Nunes Viana’s authority on the ground was manifest in, among other ways, “his blacks,” and, according to Almeida, the revolt in 1720 had begun when men in Vila Rica sent their slaves into the streets. Although Martinho de Mendonça claimed that with Assumar as governor “the time of miners having black ruffians to use as instruments of disorder ended,” later dispatches, including some from Mendonça, denounced slave owners who continued to maintain private militias.41
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If the use of enslaved laborers to smuggle gold, to provide personal security, and to intimidate royal officials suggested that enslavers’ authority had become corrupt and excessive, socioeconomic relations, royal officials frequently complained, also revealed a reformulation of the practice of power in the pursuit of wealth. Apart from smuggling, in prospecting and in many of the lucrative commercial enterprises that met the needs of growing mining towns enslaved workers moved about, collaborated, and transacted with enslavers, free and freed people, and each other. Mobility extended to enslaved women who, in communities of bachelors or at work sites far from home, routinely sold prepared food. In doing so, Governor Lourenço de Almeida complained, they also made “themselves the owners of all the diamonds that the blacks mined.”42 For many residents of the region, such arrangements and transactions generated benefits. Slave owners could hire out enslaved laborers, the so-called escravos de ganho, to work in mining or commerce and at construction sites. Some owners distributed enslaved labor across various sectors of the economy, hedging against the fluctuations of commerce and mining yields. They sent out enslaved prospectors alone or in small groups to faiscar, panning with the funnel-shaped bateia for deposits of alluvial gold that could be found glittering in rivers and streams.43 To incentivize production, owners could also negotiate compensation with enslaved people who did the work of mining. Claims that enslaved laborers were stealing from owners were exaggerated, the Marquis of Abrantes speculated from Lisbon, because “if slaves routinely took more than half an oitava, their owners would know to inspect them more carefully and they would not let them get away with it.”44 These practices, encompassing enslaved people with diverse trades, including miners, blacksmiths, butchers, cooks, carpenters, and masons, were not unique to Minas Gerais, as both contemporaries and later historians of slavery in Brazilian cities have observed. “Especially in the towns and cities of Brazil,” the early eighteenth-century moralist Nuno Marques Pereira complained, owners’ paternal right and duty had eroded into relations defined only by monetary transactions. Owners paid their enslaved workers “by the day, or week, or month” and these people, in turn, “rented a house or a shack, in which,” Pereira imagined, “they commit many offenses against God.”45 As Assumar similarly protested in 1719, in Minas the way that enslaved people lived was not a “true slavery, rather it was more proper to call it a licentious liberty.”46 While Marques Pereira and Assumar worried about mobility as a source of moral disorder, for royal officials the crucial roles that enslaved people played in prospecting and commerce were also a problem because they represented
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not an exception but rather a new rule within local society and economy.47 As was the case with work discipline, the structures of slave ownership in Minas did not align with those of the plantations that Benci, Antonil, and others had scrutinized. Although the price of slaves remained relatively high, the ability to purchase on credit brought recourse to their labor within reach of those of modest means. Consider “the slave of the miserable blind beggar,” town councils urged the crown as they campaigned against the fiscal regime in the 1740s.48 As Eduardo Paiva’s examination of postmortem inventories in Rio das Mortes also shows, just 6.3 percent of free men and women did not possess slaves. At the same time, while less pronounced than in the Brazilian Northeast, wealth in Minas was still concentrated. Forty percent of owners who left a postmortem inventory possessed between one and five slaves, while the majority of slaves were owned by those with more than eleven in all.49 Slave ownership was extensive enough, Assumar complained, that even the formerly enslaved (negros forros) had become “the owners of farms and slaves.” The result, for Assumar, was an upending of the logic of slavery defined by both utility and hierarchies of difference. Slaves, he observed in 1719, had come from the “Guinea Coast and other parts of Africa” to Minas “to be used to extract gold from the earth.” Unfortunately, he continued, they had been “diverted” to other activities that facilitated the “many manumissions granted by their owners” and “liberty” obtained “by illicit means.” The formerly enslaved had come to own slaves themselves, “transacting and trading as if they had never been [enslaved], [when] the law had not conceded to them as much liberty as they now enjoy.” In response, Assumar sought to curtail the commercial activities of enslaved people, manumissions, and the practice of enslaved people owning slaves. The enslaved, he ordered, should not have “other blacks that they call their own.” Even if owners had consented initially to this arrangement, they were to assume these slaves as their own, without conceding any “dominion or administration” by other “captive blacks.”50 While Assumar’s orders did not have lingering effect, his reports on manumission reflected, even as they no doubt overstated, contemporary manumission practices. On the one hand, as historians of Brazilian slavery have shown, manumission was never as widespread as Assumar claimed. One recent study of late eighteenth-century Sabará indicates that about 2 percent of enslaved people were manumitted over a period of six years.51 On the other hand, as historians have observed, too, notwithstanding its modest scale, manumission shaped local social and economic relations throughout Brazil, and over the course of the eighteenth century rates of manumission in Minas were
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relatively high and the size of the freed population relatively large. Formal recognition of the new legal status of freed persons was registered in many contexts, including the death of an owner. In some cases, owners expressed an intent to manumit under certain conditions, including continued service over a period of time. Manumission could also rest on a contract between an owner and an enslaved person, or between an owner and a third party on behalf of an enslaved person, that stipulated a sum that would be paid to the owner over time, a process known as coartação or quartação. As Stuart Schwartz explains, once coartado/a, enslaved people were given “a certain freedom of movement or ability to gain or own property to accumulate the needed sum.” During this transitional period, in striving to complete the contract, some may have relied on enslaved workers that they themselves had come to own, “the tradition or custom of slave peculium.” While the archives of litigation over the terms of coartação reveal the arduous paths that many faced in completing these contracts, in urban markets and in the gold and diamond economies, some enslaved workers were able to translate mobility and commercial autonomy into resources for a change in legal status.52 Owners also perceived a benefit from coartação. Entering into such a contract with an enslaved worker could ensure a return on an investment and, as historians of Minas have noted, respond to downturns in the mining economy when the need for labor decreased.53 In such moments, as Paiva’s research indicates, those who owned one or two slaves were more likely to manumit in one way or another than those who owned several slaves and had the resources necessary to weather economic crises.54 Thus, while the image of owners on their deathbeds freeing slaves, including their own progeny, resonated with the early eighteenth-century discourse of patriarchal authority proffered by religious authorities, in practice financially strategic manumissions suggested that, as Assumar claimed of crime and punishment, owners’ economic interests defined slave society at the expense of what he and other officials regarded as the imperatives of social and moral order. For officials manumission mechanisms were pernicious as well because, along with undermining the hierarchy of owner and slave, in instances where third parties and enslaved slave owners were involved, they created “some type of subordination” among the enslaved themselves, an aberration so disquieting to Assumar that he urged clergy to disallow enslaved and free people of color from serving as each other’s godparents. The respect for godparents, he imagined, also formed the basis for an authority that sustained quests for freedom, manifest “in the retinues that went about into the forests through
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quilombos that they governed.” Writing of a quilombo in Rio das Mortes in 1719, Assumar explained that while initially he judged “the news that the blacks in that county had already elected a king, a prince and military officials” to be nothing more than a “folly of blacks,” additional reports of “the same circumstances” in other areas made him “think that the matter was now of great importance” and that the deployment of force was in order. Thus, as in disputes over the fifth among royal officials, governors, and town councils, official reports on slavery and the enslaved revealed that the social and political disorder for which Minas had become known was defined not by an absence of hierarchies but rather by the emergence of structures of authority that did not cohere to European imperial ideals: in this case, African recognition of African leadership, African ownership of slaves, African paternity, freedom, and mobility. Writing of Brazil’s seventeenth-century Northeast, Rocha Pita, too, had recognized this potential transformation, as resistance to enslavement generated new forms and spaces of authority within lands claimed by the crown. Without recourse to Aristotle and Plato, he reported, Africans “in Palmares forged a rustic, and in its own way well ordered, republic.”55 Concerning Minas, in turn, Assumar was equally certain of challenges to enslavement and racial hierarchy, and more doubtful of the results. The ascendance of Black authority, including “freed blacks,” he concluded, would mean the end of European rule and political community. Within a short time, he predicted, Minas would “be in the hands on those blacks” who, “as brutes, do not uphold the good order of the republic.”56 Ideals of “subordination” and a “general calm,” royal officials repeatedly complained, were also tested by demography. The mining rush had drawn mostly men, and mostly bachelors, to the region. While over the course of the eighteenth century the resulting gender imbalances became less pronounced, in the first decades of settlement they defied the crown’s efforts to consolidate a Europeanized patriarchal social order. Royal policies, as we will see in chapter 5, had long sought to encourage marriage among white settlers in Portuguese America. In 1721, to promote the formation of families in Minas, the king reiterated to Assumar the centrality of marriage to the American enterprise because it inculcated “a love for the land,” “peacefulness,” and obedience to royal authority. Asserting that such a disposition to obedience would increase as the numbers of new families grew, the king also ordered that only married men would be allowed to serve on town councils.57 As Almeida later informed the crown, however, the lack of European women in Minas made enforcing this standard impossible.58
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As royal officials and the king also argued, it was not only the lack of European women in Minas that made marriage and the cultivation of white patriarchal families difficult. “The greater part of the residents of these lands do not even try to marry,” the king observed, “due to the laxity and liberty of life there.” “It was not easy,” he clarified, “to pry men away from the concubinage of black women and mulattas.”59 Sex outside of marriage or a marriage promise was, of course, regarded as sinful, while the presumption of European men’s access to African and Indigenous women’s bodies was at least as old as the imperial enterprise itself. For royal officials in Minas, however, relations between European men and African women were especially troubling because they appeared to undermine the already besieged hierarchies that slavery both depended on and produced. While historians of slavery in Minas have shown that higher rates of manumission for enslaved women were linked to their participation in commerce, officials reckoned with the labor and place of African and African-descended women in Minas society through the prism of sex.60 The manumission of these women, officials denounced, had “illicit” grounding. Completing this view of African and Afro-Brazilian women luring their owners and other free men into unholy unions were the assumptions about the children they bore. In Minas, the king complained, “all of the families are becoming stained.”61 Born into slave status, the children of enslaved women and white men, labeled “mulattos” and “mulattas” by Europeans, were nevertheless viewed by authorities as a breach in social hierarchies. As Antonil imagined, with “that part from the blood of whites in their veins” they could “bewitch” their owners and do as they pleased. Brazil had become their “paradise,” he affirmed, in contrast to the “purgatory” and “hell” endured by whites and Blacks, respectively.62 Royal officials expressed similar preoccupations with the potentially subversive roles that mulattos played in communities of free and enslaved people. Mulatto liminality, he and other officials argued, was at the root of criminality and disloyalty. Martinho de Mendonça included mulattos, along with mamelucos (of European and Indigenous ancestry), in his list of “internal enemies,” while Almeida, writing to the king in 1722, characterized them as “one of the greatest calamities that threatened Minas” and, like Assumar, feared that their growing numbers threatened color hierarchies. “In a few years,” he concluded, “their numbers will vastly outnumber those of whites.” If the mulatto problem, defined by “restlessness” and “rebelliousness,” was evident “in all of Brazil,” officials in Minas also concluded that their social circumstances were amplified by the local economic opportunities. “Experience,” Almeida
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reported, “shows that wealth among these people leads them to commit all kinds of offensive depravities.”63 The king, in turn, worried about the “many young men” of illegitimate birth whose fathers neglected them and whose mothers were not “capable” of instructing them.64 In response, Almeida insisted that investing in their education was misguided. “Experience in all of Brazil,” he explained, showed that “because they are all children of blacks,” they would not “benefit from the lessons.”65 Royal officials in Lisbon and Minas further imagined that they could mitigate the consequences of the growing numbers of people of mixed ancestry and the wealth that some among them possessed by limiting their ties to the political order of settlements. In 1726, the king instructed Almeida to prohibit the service of men of mixed ancestry on town councils or as locally elected officials; the restriction encompassed “any man who is a mulatto within the four degrees in which mulatismo is an impediment,” while conceding electability to any man of mixed ancestry who was “married to, or the widower of, a white woman.” While early in the settlement of Minas, the king explained, “the lack of qualified people made it necessary to tolerate the admission of mulattos” to town councils, the growing numbers of residents of “clean birth” now made “indecorous the occupation [of the councils] by persons with a similar defect.”66 To further relegate mulatto social status, in governing Assumar and Almeida sought to impose on the population of mixed ancestry the kind of discipline and punishment that defined the regime of slavery. Writing to the king in 1727 about Manuel da Cruz e Sá, who ran a bordello, Almeida explained that were it not for public whippings, “the manner observed in all of this America regarding the punishment of mulattos and blacks even if they are freed,” the mulattos “in all of Brazil, and especially those in Minas, would have risen up against the whites.” At the same time, he conceded, the local state of affairs remained precarious. Although Cruz e Sá had not complained of a recent whipping because, according to Almeida, he was from Pernambuco where such punishments were to be expected, his associates in Minas, apparently bolstered by knowledge of less severe local processes, had convinced him to denounce its excess.67 By the 1730s, then, officials in Portugal and Brazil could point to various ways in which the gold rush and the regime of slavery upon which it depended had begotten a society and an economy that challenged imperial ideals of allegiance, incorporation, and social order. As they also recognized, in Minas the crown could not count on the weakly regulated violence of the plantation in its efforts to govern an African and African-descended population. The chal-
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lenge facing Gusmão and other officials who sought to ensure that the wealth of Minas flowed to royal coffers was, therefore, to identify regulatory practices that would account for and, if necessary, transform local social and economic relations defined by “shocks” and “oppressions” beyond the myriad taxes and tolls that the capitação was intended to supplant.68
American Social Order and the Production of Wealth The capitação was predicated on the idea that enslaved labor functioned, as in other American taxation schemes, as a proxy for both the actual and potential production of wealth.69 Already in the early eighteenth century, in addition to taxes levied in the slave trade, the crown had collected taxes on captives, along with other goods, as they entered Brazil and then again as they entered the mining region.70 Later, the bateia tax and the special “donation” tax for the marriage of the heir to the throne had been levied per capita on slaves.71 In some instances, the crown had sanctioned the confiscation of enslaved people in cases of tax evasion. The region’s town councils, in turn, had used slave ownership to calculate individual contributions to the negotiated and annually rendered fifth.72 In this regard, and as Gusmão himself insisted, the capitação affirmed and resuscitated existing fiscal practices based on Brazil’s enslaved population and the various forms its labor took. Yet, even as the capitação built upon established intersections of fiscal order and slavery, its practice, as outlined by Gusmão, also suggested a reformulation of the relationship between royal authority, enslaved people, and owners. To begin with, the registry of the enslaved population, the basis for the capitação, provided the crown with unprecedentedly comprehensive information about the economy and slavery in Minas. To produce this information, Gusmão’s plan, like other poll taxes, relied on simple recordkeeping. Registries listed the name and place of residence of the owner, as well as the name, gender, and “patria” or “caste” (casta) of each enslaved person. To clarify the matriculation standard, Gusmão included in his plan a sketch of the receipt (bilhete) for each enslaved person that showed with text and blank lines where certain information should be recorded (for instance, “if they are male or female, black or mulatto, or of another type [especie]”).73 The statutes that then enumerated the official procedures for the implementation of the capitação followed closely from these initial instructions.74 As noted in the previous chapter, as registration got under way, officials compiled lengthy logs of registered persons as well as charts that aggregated the information contained
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in the registries.75 As a result, while parish records and the roll for the earlier royal marriage donation remained important sources of knowledge of the number, age, and gender of enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians in Minas, the annual censuses between 1735 and 1749 were new, independent sources of demographic information; as Laird Bergad explains, they represented “the first time-series empirical data on a sector of the Mineiro population for the entire settled expanse of the capitania.”76 To produce this new quantitative knowledge of the enslaved population, intendants summoned the region’s slave owners to designated venues where they proceeded from the scribe’s table to that of the treasurer in a process that ensured that each receipt was properly completed, inspected, and stamped after the tax had been paid (figure 6). The capitação’s regulatory statute also enjoined officials to scrutinize the registries in order to ensure that owners did not pass off two enslaved people with the same name, patria, residence, or other “distinctions” as one. In this case the intendant was to annotate the receipts with references to aliases and additional contrasting features.77 That the registries contained more information about the enslaved than about the enslavers (such as age or “patria”), reflected Gusmão’s concern with evasion that could be achieved through the falsification of identity or age. To deal with the latter possibility and, more specifically, the possibility that owners would claim that an enslaved person was younger than the fiscal threshold of fifteen years old (or twelve in the new diamond district), Gusmão explained that “it will be easy to thwart such subterfuge by establishing a certain measure for males and females” and by placing measuring rods in public squares and churchyards. Owners were to understand that any enslaved person who measured the designated height “would be regarded as subject to the registration whether or not they were fifteen years of age.”78 Once again, what Gusmão touted as simplification, in this case achieved with a biometric spectacle, was to guarantee the capitação’s integrity. At the same time, with such evident preoccupation with measurement and markings, as well as homelands, the plan and its statutes bolstered a broader process in which Europeans produced knowledge about Africans that recognized persons in relation to perceptions of distinct “national,” or presumed ethnic, capacities and dispositions. Following the initial and disordered rush into the mining region, for example, royal officials and some settlers persuaded themselves that Africans from the Costa da Mina, an area that stretched from Elmina Castle to Lagos and included the Gold Coast, were the best suited for mining work. By the 1730s the demand in Minas for “Mina” slaves was
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Figure 6. A bilhete, or receipt, from a capitação matriculation done by Ignacio de Barros, pardo forro (freed man of color), for an enslaved woman “named Teresa, from Mina, 25 years old.” (With permission. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional—Brasil.)
notorious, fueled by traders’ and settlers’ mutually reinforcing claims of Mina technical expertise in mining and supernatural knowledge of how to find gold.79 Such a process of commodification, as Stephanie Smallwood observes, encompassed a cyclical and transatlantic alchemy. Along the African coastal area to which the Portuguese first imported labor to sustain their endeavors to extract gold, other European slave traders now sought out their Lusophone counterparts who would exchange Brazilian gold for Africans to be sold to gold miners in Minas Gerais. European categorizations of “Mina” Africans and, more broadly, African “nations” and “patrias” were contingent on language, provenience, and, in some cases, interpretations of embodied identity, such as the signs and marks invoked in the statutes for the capitação. What Aldair Rodrigues describes as the transformation of African ritual markings into “a technology for retrieving information from the colonial archives” was entirely at odds with the more complex and dynamic ways in which Africans
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produced and read such markings in their homelands and in diaspora. Such processes also went hand in hand with enslaver violence that left other marks on Africans’ bodies and with European appeals to phenotype that conflated Blackness and bondage, conspicuous in official and settler discourses about Brazil that used negro and escravo interchangeably.80 As the capitação thus recognized that within a regime of racial slavery, provenience and certain African and diasporic identities—Angola, Mina, Congo—had meaning on the ground in the mining region, it also challenged the economy of categories as forged within the slave trade and American slave markets. The higher price demanded for, and the presumed productive potential of, Africans deported from the Mina coast did not matter in the capitação’s calculations. Owners were to be taxed the same for all enslaved adults without regard to their real or imagined origins. With regard to embodied attributes, the appeal to height as an indicator of age, noted above, did resonate in the peça de Índias (Indies piece), an older fiscal and commercial unit used in the slave trade and slave trade contracts. Since the seventeenth century, Africans had been trafficked, and their enslavers taxed, based on how they measured against a whole peça, defined by ideal ranges of height and age for men as indicators of health and productive capacities. The capitação’s biometrics, however, were limited to height. And if in the slave trade many Africans were assessed as fractions of a whole, the new tax scheme in Brazil was based solely on counting heads. In other words, alongside commercial exchanges in which human beings were variously appraised and traded in relation to money and goods, Gusmão’s plan took human fungibility to an extreme.81 The increasing numbers of “Mina” Africans in Minas also meant that the label did minimal work in distinguishing enslaved people from one another in the registries. Thus, especially in the new diamond mining district, where the crown placed even stricter controls on the numbers of laborers, royal officials enjoined intendants to carefully record signs to account more precisely for individuals and their destinies.82 In these cases, the intendants’ and enslavers’ readings of Africans’ bodies were supposed to ignore what was shared in favor of what was unique. Crucially, however, any official recognition of Africans’ individuality was circumscribed by ownership; the plan and its statutes indicated that intendants were to record more than basic information only when two or more laborers of the same owner had the same name, homeland, residence, and age.83 In the context of the capitação the instrumentality of codifying African bodies and markings was foregrounded during the correição, a secondary
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inspection at owners’ “estates and farms” following the initial registration. As Gusmão imagined it, the correição would be an opportunity for owners to rectify errors in the initial registry or to register enslaved people who had been too ill to attend the primary registration. With proof of illness, the owner could pay a fine, register laborers, and pay the tax. Above all, however, the correição was intended as another safeguard against well-orchestrated acts of fraud. Royal officials were to gather “hidden information” and to summon workers, “free and captives,” to appear before them, and to inquire about others who might have evaded the initial registration. Owners were to present each enslaved laborer with the receipt generated when they were first registered. Officials were supposed to verify that the receipt matched the captive “with the same name and markings.” Officials would then stamp the receipt as proof of the inspection, thus guaranteeing that miners and their enslaved laborers could not pass the receipts along to other, unregistered people to mask evasion. Enslaved people who were identified as unregistered during the correição, or who presented themselves without a receipt, would be taken into royal custody, regardless of extenuating circumstances such as a lost receipt or one in the possession of an absent owner. Anyone who denounced an owner who had failed to declare ownership and pay the capitação on their person would be freed, and the owner would pay the tax to the royal treasury and additional fees for material and personnel costs.84 The challenge to slave owners’ authority, suggested by the arrival of royal officials commanding enslaved people to appear before them and, in cases of evasion, ordering their confiscation, was also manifest in Gusmão’s speculations about the ways in which residents would anticipate and participate in the correição and act upon knowledge of the matriculation process and the penalties for evasion. The correição would be a moment, he explained, when, “with hope that such scrutiny would result in their liberty, slaves would seek to verify that they were truly registered.” In addition, any enslaved person who wanted to verify their matriculation, the plan also advised, could request that the scribe do so, and, if he refused, they could then make the same request to a local judge. Thus, Gusmão explained, “for the price of liberty” each captive would become a “representative of royal rights”—a declaration, as historian André Costa has suggested, among “the most scandalous” uttered within the Portuguese royal court of the 1730s.85 Gusmão anticipated criticism of the universal application of the tax on all slaves, regardless of advanced age, gender, or occupation, by insisting on the potential for evasion created by the recognition of exceptional conditions and
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circumstances. Such “differences,” he explained, “were difficult to verify and subject to many forms of fraud.” As he argued further in response to criticism of the taxation of enslaved women at the same rate as enslaved men, slave owners would exploit a concession to gender difference with the stroke of a pen. By “changing one letter on the receipt, i.e. making Antonia Antonio, or Domingas Domingos,” he imagined, owners could make it appear as if they had paid the higher rate for men. As he also conceded, however, even if additional registration techniques, such as using a different type of receipt for women, would mitigate fraud, royal finances “ran the risk” that the number of enslaved women in Minas was so great that taxing them at a lower rate would substantially alter his calculations. Thus, only after “hearing from representatives of the peoples of Minas” and completing the initial registry, which would reveal the true number of enslaved women in Minas, would it make sense to revisit whether the crown should withstand a more thoroughly gendered scheme.86 Yet, for Gusmão, taxing enslaved women was founded on more than the promise that it would cut off avenues for fraud and thereby bolster royal finances. The labor of enslaved women, Gusmão insisted, could be just as profitable for their owners as that of enslaved men. They did many of the same jobs, including prospecting, and, he observed, they were “fecund enough that they produced profits for their owners by increasing the number of captives.” While, in contrast, the capitação did exempt “black women captives engaged in [local] commerce,” such enterprise, the statute indicated, would be taxed through town councils. Enslaved Black people and people of mixed ancestry (crioulos and mulatinhos) “born in Minas and no older than fourteen” were also exempted unless their owners “deployed them in mining, or in a similarly productive exercise.”87 Thus, rather than seeking more effective royal control over the extraction and circulation of gold, as was the case with some earlier schemes, the reform recognized, and sought to assess, the fiscal potential of the various wealth-generating arrangements made between settlers and the men and women they enslaved that mining had catalyzed. Such references to productivity also point to Gusmão’s view of the reform and its broad application as potentially reshaping society in Minas in ways that attenuated social and economic disorder. On the one hand, in defending the head tax for enslaved people engaged in domestic work with no apparent link to mining and the fifth, Gusmão pointed to precedent in earlier head taxes that included free servants (criados livres). It was only “just,” he argued, that owners with large contingents of captives dedicated to domestic labor “do not pay less
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for this particular comfort than for those employed in increasing wealth or public well-being.” On the other hand, the plan recognized that slave owners tended to deploy enslaved labor in activities other than mining when they were just as, or even more, “lucrative.” As the capitação forced owners to scrutinize further when and how they used enslaved labor, Gusmão argued, it would curtail practices that undermined productivity and social order. Accordingly, Gusmão explained of taxing enslaved women, it “was not befitting to create an opening for similar differences.” Rather, and notwithstanding his claim that some enslaved women generated substantial wealth, he predicted that adherence to his original scheme would mean “more enslaved men in place of enslaved women and fewer occasions that endangered consciences,” as settlers turned away from enslaved domestic labor to spare themselves the burden of the capitação and toward enslaved laborers who could produce wealth to offset the tax.88 As Gusmão’s plan made clear, he also shared with royal officials who had earlier governed the region an impatience with settler patriarchies that took form in large numbers of captives used as “goons” to intimidate and exact revenge against local rivals, or to serve their own “vice, or vanity,” instead of as laborers in activities that generated wealth. Taxing “unoccupied slaves,” Gusmão predicted, would compel owners to curtail these arrangements. At the same time, critical assessment of slave holding also underscored that paternal authority and obligation could be set aside in the interest of productivity and the revenue that would flow to royal coffers. Defending the taxation of elderly people, Gusmão thus affirmed that if, on the one hand, age did not determine whether enslaved laborers were productive enough to compensate for the head tax, on the other hand, those too old to work should be freed or sold. However, if slave owners were to try to unburden themselves of the head tax by forgoing the use of enslaved labor in commerce and other activities altogether, they would remain obligated to pay the maneio tax on what was earned with “one’s own industry.”89 Most counsel and commentary on the capitação shared Gusmão’s idealized view of relations between enslaved laborers and miners as a series of productive transactions that the new fiscal regime would sustain or, if needed, reform and revitalize. Such a view, they also argued, was shared by the enslaved themselves. As royal counselor Lopes Lavre judged, “as inept as he may be, a slave comes to terms with his owner about prospecting in ways that provide daily for both parties.”90 Like Gusmão, many counselors also endorsed the broad and general application of the tax even if it came at the expense of slave owners’
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authority and reiterated—indeed, in most cases amplified—Gusmão’s claims that large contingents of unoccupied enslaved laborers served “passions” and violent ends rather than utility and, therefore, should not be exempt. Nor, they argued, did owners with “a copious number of enslaved women” intended to “serve their appetites, or their vanities” deserve to be unburdened. Conversely, one counselor explained, the mining work that the tax scheme rewarded was superior to domestic work because it “broke” captives, tempered their “natural roughness and ferocity,” and, therefore, resulted in “a great relief among peoples and accustomed men to live with moderation.”91 Counselors also joined Gusmão to argue that manumission was a mechanism that could be deployed not only to punish, as in the case of evasion, but also to minimize the impact of insufficiently calibrated taxation. While owners could sell captives not engaged in producing wealth, they could also free those people whom, like the aged, they deemed “useless.” Even Jesuit counselors, who voiced exceptional concern with the welfare of captive laborers in commentary on the reform—arguing in favor of protecting those who denounced fraud from retaliatory violence and against manumitting the elderly to die in the streets of starvation—pointed to manumission as a mechanism that could resolve the impasse between owners and the crown over the new fiscal regime. For unproductive captives who remained in the owners’ household, a letter of manumission, they suggested, could serve as proof of incapacity and exemption from the capitação.92 On the ground in Minas the consequences of the new fiscal regime were diverse. As we saw in chapter 2, the reform rewarded productivity and efficiency, and, as Costa argues, resulted in increased infrastructural investments in mining. As Costa’s analysis of the effects of fiscal practice in Minas also indicates, the capitação favored large-scale enterprises with established means for ensuring productivity through vigilance and discipline—in other words, men employed to use violence against enslaved people to enforce the labor regime. At the same time, however, the reform’s implementation undermined forms of authority and exchange upon which the local economy depended. Miners had to pay the tax regardless of the actual yield from enslaved laborers working their claims. If owners responded to yields more meager than anticipated by increasing demands and withholding incentives, enslaved laborers could respond by decreasing productivity even further. While enslaved laborers could, as Gusmão insisted, denounce delinquent owners, as owners turned to more severe discipline to increase productivity, enslaved laborers also took flight to nearby quilombos in increasing numbers.93
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Not surprisingly, an imperiled economy of slavery, the governance of enslaved people, and their resistance were problems at the center of local political responses to the reform. Town councils reported on “robberies and deaths” attributed to people who fled enslavement, argued for better administration of capitães do mato, and suggested that Natives from villages in São Paulo could be resettled in Minas in order to displace quilombos. In the diamond district, where limits on the number of laborers attended the reform, town councilors complained that “to avenge” owners or to seek a “different owner,” enslaved people fled to the mines where, consistent with royal orders, they were “confiscated.” The official response, they argued to no avail, was unjust unless there was proof that owners had sent slaves there to flout royal restrictions. Responding to the increase in fugitives throughout the region, in 1743 the town council of Sabará petitioned the king to sanction an insurance mechanism so that insured enslaved laborers could be punished severely without depriving owners of their investment. Such a measure would contribute to the “health of the body of all of Minas,” as the fear of severe punishment would deter flight and thwart an “imminent” uprising. The king, the town council insisted, would thereby prevent that “an invasion of these domestic enemies transforms his kingdom’s garden into a dunghill.”94 Royal officials, in turn, used repression to destabilize free communities that had grown as large as several hundred members. The enslaved population’s flux, shaped by flight, death, and trade into the region, they judged, also demanded additional measures to ensure the capitação’s integrity. While Gusmão’s plan had indicated that slave owners had one month to register and pay a prorated tax on captives brought into the region, in 1740 Governor Gomes Freire fortified the regulation of the slave trade, ordering that “wherever new slaves entered” the region officials were to register the dates of entry, the names of traders, the identities of captives, and information about sales, thereby creating a record that could be used to evaluate whether owners fully disclosed the size of their enslaved labor force to royal intendants.95 Town councils also petitioned the crown to reconsider the “confiscations” that mounted as enforcement of the new fiscal regime took shape and that, according to one magistrate, proceeded summarily without any due process.96 Town councilors also complained, predictably, about investigations and denunciations of owners’ failure to pay the capitação. “Any person can denounce [untaxed] slaves,” explained the town council of São João d’El Rei, “including the slaves themselves in order that they be freed,” leaving owners “exposed to the loss of all of them.”97 Petitions also criticized the ways in which debtors
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and creditors manipulated the new scheme and how accusations of evasion had become weapons to be used against personal enemies, a claim made in individual petitions as well.98 As Alexandre Gomes de Sousa argued in seeking relief, he had been accused of evading the capitação because the intendancy officials were “his enemies, and those who had made the denunciations” acted “not out of zeal but rather out of hatred, for they only investigated those whom they wanted to rather than those whom they should have.”99 Gomes de Sousa, brother of Luís Gomes Ferreira, the author of the early treatise on tropical medicine Erário mineral (Mineral Treasury; Lisbon, 1735), also defended himself against the penalties for evasion by pointing to a misunderstanding that arose out of his efforts to reconcile the new fiscal regime and local circumstances. To avoid having the seventy-six slaves who worked on his farm in Itacolomi in the district of Vila do Carmo leave his property to go to the village “to buy tobacco, spirits and similar things”—outings, he claimed, that invariably led to “impudent acts”—he had started to sell these items on his own property. As the fiscal reform’s larger framework included taxes on commercial establishments, depending on their size, Gomes de Sousa had consulted the intendant presiding over the first collection, who told him he did not owe taxes “because the sales were not public and only for the slaves.” Gomes de Sousa’s troubles began, however, when other officials of the intendancy later interpreted the status of his commercial activities differently.100 Thus, in spite of dutifully paying the capitação on his large, enslaved labor force and taking steps to contain what he and other owners and officials perceived as the disruptions of captives’ social gatherings, he found himself facing an onerous penalty. Indeed, across the region slave owners argued that the new system did not adequately attend to local conditions and expectations forged as they and enslaved Africans had settled the region. Countering Gusmão’s depiction of “useless” and unproductive slaves, they claimed that enslaved labor could not be disentangled from the social imperatives of the crown’s imperial project. Enslaved men and women deployed in domestic work were “indispensable,” they wrote, “principally for the residents who by way of conjugal alliance ennoble settlements with the production of free men for service to the republic.” In this emergent social setting, they insisted, the absence of enslaved laborers “for domestic tasks” would be viewed as “indecorous [ for anyone] of middling status.”101 While enslaved labor was a feature of many Portuguese households, including that of the king, a later critical report, presented before the Overseas Coun-
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cil in Lisbon, similarly defended the need to respect the use of enslaved labor in domestic work by citing American imperatives. In Minas, the counselors explained, “it is the manner of the land, where it is not practical to have servants, or nannies, or any white women who subject themselves to service for a salary; and from these enslaved women their owners receive no profit other than the referred to [household] service.”102 In other words, what Gusmão viewed as an unproductive, decadent excess was, according to petitioners and critics, a practice that allowed the residents of Minas to cultivate a distinguished and, as some argued, pious way of life akin to what took shape within honorable households of Portugal.103 Forcing them to pay taxes on enslaved laborers, in turn, impoverished owners who could no longer adequately maintain them. The vicious cycle continued, the town council of São José explained, citing those “blacks whose owners’ inability to attend to their hunger and nakedness obliged them to leave their houses [. . .] and gave rise to so much abuse, banditry and death.”104 The capitação, therefore, ran counter to both justice and utility in its application to all enslaved people in Minas regardless of the nature of their work and in the extent to which it diminished the resources necessary for the maintenance of Europeanized social and moral relations.105 As local petitioners defended settlers’ property and wealth, they also appealed to the image of the “poor miner,” ostensibly the small-scale slave owner who, considering the diminishing chances of successful prospecting by the 1740s, could not afford to pay the capitação. These owners were especially hurt when, out of “hatred,” enslaved laborers who were aware that they had not been registered sought out intendants, as Gusmão had envisioned, to pursue manumission even if they knew that prospecting had not yielded gold. In other cases, “many poor persons who had only one enslaved man or woman,” the town council of Sabará attested, were to pay the tax even though “it was certain that in their extreme poverty they barely sustained themselves and never had an oitava of gold.” Even beggars, including “the blind who live from alms” with “a slave to guide them through their blindness,” paid as much per captive as did the richest miners, town councilors denounced. Rather than generate prosperity, the councilors concluded, the new tax further burdened a land of “great poverty” and engendered these and other “very pitiful” scenes.106 Invoking property rights, poverty, and the imperatives of social order to condemn the “confiscations of all [types] of slaves,” the petitions did not enlist royal officials’ timeworn warnings about the morally and socially destructive effects of a freed population. Rather, petitions recognized the free Black and free “mulatto” residents of the region as integral to local social and economic
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relations, and, they claimed, among those most aggrieved by the new fiscal regime. Indeed, the regulatory statute specified that those responsible for paying the capitação included “all free persons, European, or American, who are found to work with their hands to extract gold in Minas,” and “all free black men and women, and all freed mulattos and mulattas, born as slaves, and that work as farmers or miners and do not have slaves.”107 In other words, for freed people of color like Inácio de Barros, who, as noted at the start of this chapter, evaded the tax one year but paid it the following, the fiscal burden of slave ownership may have taken the place of paying the tax on their own persons. While earlier taxation schemes had encompassed similar requirements, in the 1730s, according to Martinho de Mendonça, the royal commissioner sent to implement the reform, in communities with many “mulatto sons of free men” and “many poor people,” the new demands were met with disapproval and in some places open rebellion.108 While Barros and others had sought to evade paying the tax, petitioners, in turn, asserted that free people of color also resorted to exceptionally desperate measures, including, officials testified, illicit transactions, in order to secure what was needed to pay the capitação. “By themselves,” the town council of Vila Nova da Rainha reported of free Black and “mulatta” women, “they pay the same capitação even while they are not employed in mining gold.” As a result, the council claimed, it was only in the commission of “great offenses against God” that these women found the means to meet their fiscal obligation.109 A critique written in Lisbon around the same time concurred and also argued more broadly that the application of the capitação to free people of color did not align with justice. As the magistrate Gomes Moreira observed sharply of the fiscal obligations of freed persons, under the capitação wealth corroded the legal dimensions of freedom. A freed person without the means to buy a captive, for whom they would have to pay the capitação, was “reputed to be a slave, subject to tribute, and does not get the privileges of a free person,” he explained, while those rich enough to own a taxable slave “get a complete exemption for their person.” The new fiscal regime was also flawed, he argued, in that it hinged on differences apparently unrelated to productivity, such as place of birth, in the case of exemptions for younger, American-born “mulatinhos.” For adults, in turn, the boundary between obligation and exception remained defined by color. What “difference” was at stake, Gomes Moreira asked, if “a white man who does not have slaves or a craft” is exempt from, while free men and women of color in the same circumstances remain subject to, the tribute? The answer, his own question posited, was that “between the
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white man and the freed slave there was no other difference than purity or impurity of blood.”110 Although, as noted above, Gusmão’s plan and its regulatory statute indicated that white men who worked in the mines were not entirely exempt from taxation, Gomes Moreira’s partial misreading illuminated the preservation of color hierarchies built into the new fiscal order. Already before the implementation of the reform, the crown had taken steps to reinforce labor obligations among free people of color in the region, instructing the governor to ascertain the number of “freed men of color [mulatos]” living in Minas “in great liberty”; to imprison any men of color, as well as slaves and “vagrants,” involved in “disorders”; and to send those with sufficient “guilt” and disposition to idleness to Colônia do Sacramento, where settlement attended a militarized response to disputed sovereignty, or to other areas where, presumably, the imperative of labor discipline was less pronounced.111 Under the capitação, in turn, as its statute indicated, the tax on white men was limited to mining but was extended to small-scale agriculture for free Black people and free people of mixed ancestry. Gusmão’s plan also included a recalibration of the system for monitoring the flow of people in and out of Minas that stipulated that “free or freed persons who arrive at Minas will be obligated to carry a passport, or document issued by the judge of the district recently departed,” as well as to register for the census within one month. Thus, building on the crown’s concurrent demand for an accounting of the region’s free and freed population, the reform promised to enhance official demographic knowledge and to reinforce Black productive and fiscal obligation. The maneio, a tax on productive activities with various assessment “classes,” also aligned with prevailing color hierarchies. As Gusmão explained, “no black man or woman, or free or freed mulatto man or woman,” could be taxed based on a category lower than that of 200 oitavas because “if this was not the case, whites would be left in an inferior condition to blacks and mulattos.” Even among laboring people, Gusmão thus assumed, whiteness was to afford a potentially inheritable fiscal privilege. While whites presumably paid the tax on enslaved people whom they owned, “it is not just,” he continued, “that a black or a mulatto pays less for what they possess in themselves [pelo que tem em si].” For free people of color, Gusmão concluded, this was the “price of living in Minas.” Those without resources to meet this obligation—those who, as the region’s governors had repeatedly reported to the king, imperiled the “public interest and good order”—had no place in the region.112 Accordingly, the capitação statute stipulated that people of color who could not pay the tax were to
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be subject to fines and then summarily “eradicated from Minas.”113 Seeking to increase revenue, the plan thus also forged and regulated what Nora Gharala, writing of Black tribute in New Spain, has described as a particular kind of “colonial subjecthood” for free people of African descent.114 Invoking the ideal of utility to challenge slave owners’ authority and their use of enslaved labor, Gusmão’s reform bolstered a social order that both punished Black poverty and disciplined Black productivity and wealth. On the ground in Minas, reporting from royal officials reinforced the idea that the poor and free people of color, “the bare-footed” and “mulattos,” presented obstacles to an orderly collection of the fifth that would be overcome only with a show of force. Writing to Gomes Freire de Andrada on ways to prevent counterfeiting, Martinho de Mendonça recommended that “mulatto” goldsmiths be expelled from the region and that, with a semblance of due process in criminal cases against “black and mulattos,” a death penalty should be imposed as an example for others to behold.115 As Mendonça also witnessed, however, while the capitação upheld social hierarchies predicated on skin color and ancestry, the rebellion against the new fiscal regime in the São Francisco hinterland in 1736 exposed both the instability of those hierarchies in gold rush communities and the limits of official action. Reports and commentary attributed the rebellion to the “powerful”—local ranchers and farmers whose defiance of royal orders afforded opportunities for the “small folk” and enslaved people to wreak havoc. In response, officials argued that, while the arrests and punishments of the leaders were necessary and exemplary, the rabble could be pardoned. They were just “people of color [pardos] and rustic mamelucos, raised in the hinterland where they never witnessed obedience or any respect for the orders of the government or its ministers.”116 Yet, as military commanders entrusted with the restoration of order also reported, those who rebelled were not lacking the habits of orderly submission. Among the poor and people of color there were those who exercised authority, including a recently arrested “mameluco general who ruled over whites.”117 Mendonça, not surprisingly, dismissed such leadership as just as improbable as a quilombo “king.”118 Those who protested the capitação, in turn, recognized a similar disqualification at work in its implementation and, therefore, a call to action. It was time to take up arms, urged Paulo Barbosa Pereira, addressing his fellow “senhores residents, visitors, travelers, those who are white, as well as mulattos and mulattas, free black women and men, and from all castes [casta de gente].” At stake was the principle of just taxation. They would not pay the fifth on gold that had yet to be discovered. At stake, too,
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Pereira explained, was the racialized repression of the fiscal regime and its enforcement. The hinterland residents would fight to “the last drop of blood,” he pledged, so that “Senhor Martinho de Mendonça does not trample us, as he has trampled those in Minas, because we are people of all colors.”119 As we saw in chapter 2, a decade after the capitação’s implementation, the king, faced with petitions to alleviate the various burdens that the reform had imposed, called upon royal officials serving in Minas and Portugal to examine, once again, the region’s fiscal administration. Their reports recognized that the capitação had intervened in the local regime of slavery in ways that reshaped social and economic relations. Because enslaved laborers were taxed whether or not they found new deposits of ore, the use of their labor for prospecting had become a risk that many settlers could not, or would not, assume. Nor did reform account for what one counselor called “the experience of that way of life in Minas’ expansive terrain,” in which settlers, some arriving in the region “barefoot,” faced death, violence, and illness; where “poor widows” found themselves burdened with the tax on “a single enslaved man” who served in necessary and arduous domestic tasks; where miners, whose contingents of enslaved laborers fluctuated from one day to the next, did not have the time or resources to secure the licenses and certificates and other records of compliance that formed the basis of Gusmão’s regulatory apparatus. The consequences, some officials argued, were “ruinous” for settlers and the royal treasury.120 When the capitação was finally abolished in 1750, the new king José I also recognized its effects on the society and economy of slavery in Minas. Considering the “grave inconveniences” produced “in America” by “slave denunciations against owners,” his decree foreclosed on that practice unless “the peoples of Minas” requested otherwise in the future.121 Just as it did not bring an end to debates about fiscal order in Brazil, abolishing the capitação did not end the challenges to enslavement that both preceded it and shaped its implementation. Echoing Assumar’s complaints of a “licentious liberty,” one official reported in 1751 on enslaved people who spoke openly of how to escape enslavement while “almost all consider themselves to be freed because those who bought them, and who ought to have dominion over them, do not.”122 While, in this case, the official imagined royal support for more robust and repressive discipline, later reports pointed to persistent tensions between royal and enslaver interests. Both “white men” and “white women” in Minas, one magistrate asserted in 1780, rejected domestic service, and, as a result, the labor of “hundreds” of enslaved people was diverted from agriculture and mining to these tasks. Even worse was that “mulattos and
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blacks,” once freed, emulated “white presumption and idleness,” turning instead to “illicit means” to sustain themselves. The one exception was the proliferation of “mulatto” musicians, whose numbers in Minas, the magistrate claimed, exceeded those in all of Portugal. “But what interest does the state have,” he peevishly asked, “in this deluge of musicians?”123 At the same time, as had been the case with the capitação, the pursuit of the state’s “interests” and “utility” continued to disrupt local arrangements. Faced with a new royal scheme to regulate slave labor that included a mandatory separation of children from parents, enslaved people fled for quilombos or withheld their labor in protest. Their owners, the town council of Vila Rica complained in 1756, were left to seek a royal solution to their “afflictions.”124 While the capitação thus was part of a longer trajectory of contested relations among enslaved people, settlers, and royal authority, in calling into question the ways in which settlers and miners had negotiated the use of enslaved labor, the reform reflected broader metropolitan and mercantile understandings of American society that would gain ground in subsequent decades. Despite the resistance it encountered and its disputed effects, the capitação challenged local authority and local ways of life to shore up a political and social order that, rather than reproduce metropolitan patterns, would produce wealth to be extracted from Brazil. Difference, in this context, was not something to be overcome, or what the Count of Assumar had earlier regarded as menacing cultural and racial chasms that could not be bridged, but rather a set of socioeconomic conditions that required governance and regulation that would abet the flow of wealth toward metropolitan and imperial aims. In the absence of such an administration, Gusmão predicted in rebuking the end of the capitação, “the kingdom will lose the advantages of all the gold that never enters it.”125 Gusmão’s well-known “Cálculo,” or “Apontamentos discursivos sobre o dever impedir-se a extracção da nossa moeda” (Discursive Notes on the Need to Stop the Extraction of Our Money), written around 1749, offered a more extended examination of this predicament and of the social and economic interactions that either fostered or hindered imperial prosperity. Like Portuguese mercantile discourse of the previous century, the “Cálculo” pointed to a balance of trade that had become harder to achieve as money was drained from Portugal to pay foreign traders. “Money is the blood of the monarchy,” Gusmão began, invoking the familiar corporeal metaphor, “and it should have the same effect on its body as blood has on the human body.”126 While the “Cálculo” indicated that the burden of achieving vital circulation, or a favorable balance of trade, should be borne in one way or another by all vassals
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of the Portuguese crown, Gusmão also identified the roots of Portugal’s economic decline in Minas. Portugal, he explained, needed “the gold that [Minas] has, as well as the types of goods produced in America, the islands, and the kingdom, with all its overseas colonies, to pay foreigners [ for] all that we need from them.” Yet social transformations that attended the growth of mining threatened the purpose of these colonies. “The miners were sons of various lands of the kingdom,” Gusmão recounted, and until the 1740s “there was not yet in Minas daughters and granddaughters of white persons with whom one could marry, and settle.” As a consequence, in order to marry, “they all (or most of them) came to the kingdom as soon as they had amassed enough riches to be satisfied, or that was all they could possibly obtain.” While these circumstances had contributed to the flow of wealth to Portugal, they were interrupted as settlements succeeded and as “many good families with whom one could form ties” multiplied.127 In other words, like the excessive recourse to enslaved Africans for domestic labor, in Minas local prosperity both attenuated the social challenges that European settlers faced in slave societies and sustained a way of life that undermined, in multiple ways, the maintenance of Portuguese authority. American prosperity at once offered the possibility of shoring up racial boundaries and enunciating European power on American soil, and appeared to impoverish Europeans in Europe itself. As Gusmão deliberated on the problems of American administration that he had sought to resolve with the capitação, he also brought to a close another, better known, imperial enterprise. Based on exchanges of cartographic knowledge with Portugal’s ambassador to France, Luís da Cunha, in negotiations with the Spanish Gusmão defended the principle of uti possidetis and redefined the borders of Portuguese America to include the vast Amazon River basin.128 While the resulting Treaty of Madrid (1750) would be set aside a decade later, much of the new western border endured. In negotiating the boundaries between Spain’s and Portugal’s claims, Gusmão ratified Portuguese westward expansion from the South American coast, which the discovery of gold had accelerated, and which subsequent settlement, conquest, and diplomacy would consolidate. As we will see in the following chapters, across this territory and in the networks of exchange that linked it to other lands under and beyond Portuguese rule, royal officials and vassals continued to reckon with the challenges of cultivating American sociopolitical order in ways that recognized that it was not only political and religious continuities, but increasingly legal, cultural, and material discontinuities, that fulfilled the purposes of empire, made Brazil a colony, and guaranteed metropolitan prosperity.
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4 • Colonies and Commerce Wealth, Difference, and Empire
In 1750 “the peoples of America” mourned João V’s death with the kind of spectacular display of wealth and authority that had defined his reign.1 For a sovereign who had used Brazilian treasure to invest in an academy, libraries, art collections, and palaces in the kingdom of Portugal, as well as to fund lavish embassies to Paris and Rome, town councilors and royal officials across Brazil gathered to break the royal coat of arms “in the old style of the kingdom” and to stage funerary processions that affirmed imperial allegiances and celebrated local capacities. For the cathedral in Salvador, no less than 19,000 cruzados was spent on draperies and altar cloths of gold-fringed black velvet, with additional resources dedicated to an elaborate ephemeral mausoleum and the black velvet, brocades, and other finery that adorned it.2 In Minas, in turn, town councils in Ribeirão do Carmo (newly renamed Mariana), São João del Rei, and Vila Rica sponsored elaborate public rites that attested to the glory of João V’s reign in the “most remote parts.”3 The Portuguese-born sculptor Francisco Xavier de Brito (d. 1751) was enlisted to build an ephemeral mausoleum for the late king in Vila Rica, while the town council commissioned a canopy for the Church of Our Lady of the Pillar, where Brito’s stunning work on the chancel was drawing to a close and the funeral mass would take place, “made with all due magnificence and adorned with all of the grandeza that the land permits.”4 These and other moments of American celebration and commemoration were then memorialized in ekphrastic accounts of processions and commemorative architecture written by American literati, in some cases published in Lisbon, in order to ensure that local commitments, and the resources that underwrote them, would be acknowledged far and wide.5 As the authors and
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readers of such accounts recognized, however, American grandeza and wealth, and their multifaceted effects, could be equivocal. If American processions affirmed loyalty and piety, they also disclosed, as one metropolitan censor suggested, remarkable efforts “to acquire” and an “ambition to spend.” Even as American vassals had “gilt the throne of the Kings of Portugal,” their local extravagance, as the royal academic António Caetano de Sousa observed in 1717 of the account of Bahian celebrations of the Marquis of Angeja’s grandson’s birth, seemed destined to end in depletion. “In such sparkling festivities,” Sousa concluded, “noble citizens appeared to want to spend all of the gold that the mines produce.”6 Writing in 1709 for the Overseas Council, António Rodrigues da Costa posed the problem more bluntly. The “excessive luxury in Brazil that grew even greater with the abundance of gold” could not, he warned, be reconciled with the reinvigoration of empire that Brazilian treasure promised to sustain.7 This chapter examines eighteenth-century royal and local reckonings with American wealth and the predicaments that Brazil’s treasure and resources created within the politics and political economy of empire. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, American vassals and royal officials contested the ways in which the wealth produced in the mining region upheld, or imperiled, political and social order. The kingdom’s and the empire’s prosperity, Alexandre de Gusmão advised, depended not only on fiscal rigor but also on a thorough circulation of treasure beyond Brazil. From the mines and American ports were to come what the Esquecido Siqueira da Gama, writing in the 1720s, described as “the most opulent fleets” that “every year” carried “millions and millions” in goods and “many arrobas, and more arrobas, of the finest gold.”8 According to Gusmão, however, the Portuguese had failed to administer these flows and instead followed a path toward the “imaginary riches of the gold mines” that ended in ruin. Foreign traders reaped rewards, while the wealth exhibited on Lisbon’s streets, he denounced, was a mirage that obscured the reality of a depopulated Portuguese countryside and a destructive imbalance of trade.9 Royal officials who sought to understand and regulate the transatlantic dimensions of wealth also recognized the function of consumption within the empire’s moral and political economies. Like their counterparts across the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world, they examined the diverse effects of luxuries that took the form of commodities and social practices, including the lavish rites noted above.10 The so-called pragmatic laws that officials formulated in response to perceived excesses and transgressions were
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notoriously difficult to enforce. Elite women, as one early eighteenth-century Portuguese poet averred, could turn out in the finest and forbidden fashions and rely “on royal ministers who are all of their acquaintance” to ensure that they would be spared legislated penalties.11 Yet repeated violations of these laws did not preclude their repeated renewal. Sumptuary laws and the discourses that upheld them, together with the contestation they provoked, thus became part of the political, social, and economic transformations that they sought to discipline.12 More specifically, as we will see below, the conception of, debates about, and responses to a new Portuguese sumptuary law, the Pragmática of 1749, exposed tensions between moral and mercantilist notions of social and economic exchange, European and American knowledge of how to display wealth, and the sociopolitical hierarchies of slavery and the expression of Black resources and authority. The regulation of American wealth and consumption also figured prominently in broader assessments of the imperial economy. While the extraction of Brazil’s resources had animated Portuguese settlement since the sixteenth century, in the mid-eighteenth century royal officials and reformist critics scrutinized Brazil’s status within the empire not as a conquest that rendered tribute but rather as a “colony of commerce” that generated metropolitan wealth. After all, the Count of Assumar argued in 1733, commerce, instead of soon-to-be-depleted mines, was the source of “true riches.”13 Thus, reformminded officials argued, present and future prosperity rested on a more comprehensive administration of the imperial economy that would ensure that the colonies produced raw resources and consumed goods fabricated elsewhere. In practice, as a number of historians have shown, such a “colonial pact,” or “colonial system,” was conditioned by permeable inter-imperial boundaries and the integration of interests pursued, as we have seen in earlier chapters, by Portuguese vassals on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, tracing debates about American wealth, consumption, and commerce, the policies those debates informed, as well as American responses, illuminates how local and royal officials, critics, merchants, producers, and consumers came to conceive of the colonial within the empire as an expression of mercantilist aspirations and what such aspirations meant for the transatlantic exercise of authority. The key to transforming what Gusmão had decried as “imaginary” and dissipated riches into enduring prosperity for the monarchy was not, critics and royal officials argued, a historic political-cultural continuum forged in the aftermath of conquest, but rather the administration of socioeconomic difference.
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Wealth, Consumption, and Social Order Luxury, the royal academic Father Rafael Bluteau reminded readers of his Vocabulario portuguez, was a condition closely allied with lust (luxuria), one of the seven mortal sins. And as the Jesuit António Vieira had preached in a mid-seventeenth-century sermon, cited in Bluteau’s entry, in its excess luxury was all-embracing: “Everyone wants more than what they can have, no one is content with necessities, everyone aspires to superfluities, and this is what is called luxury. Luxury of the person, luxury of dress, luxury of the table, luxury of the house, luxury of the dais, luxury in one’s children, luxury in one’s servants, etc.” Accordingly, as in other Christian monarchies, Portugal’s medieval and early modern kings, in some cases at the request of the kingdom’s Cortes, legislated limits on luxury consumption to abet their subjects’ piety and uphold confessional solidarities and distinctions. These pragmatic laws were about “the state of things,” Bluteau explained, intended to regulate public spaces, reform abuses, and attend to “the spiritual and temporal governance of the republic.”14 The peak of Portuguese sumptuary regulation was a series of late seventeenth-century laws (1668, 1677, 1686) that curbed “excesses” and vanities manifest in the dress of people and their servants, in the construction of coaches and furnishings, and in funerals.15 The laws applied to all vassals, including those of “any title and preeminence,” with enumerated exceptions to some prohibitions, such as membership in military orders and the clergy. New regulations, as the 1668 law made clear, were to be “inviolately” observed “in the Royal House and Court”; no one with dress that went afoul of the rules would be admitted to an audience.16 In contrast to earlier laws, late seventeenth-century pragmatics and the sumptuary discourse that defended them also foregrounded economic order and threats to that order posed by luxury that diverted resources to other lands. Thus, the laws defined limitations on dress and furnishings with reference to both the consumption of foreign goods—prohibitions on the use of French hats and lace, Italian brocades, and certain English and Dutch textiles—and the promotion of domestic manufacturing, especially silk. Because the king had issued orders to “give new form to the factories of the kingdom,” the text of the 1686 law explained, his vassals were not to use “any type of cloth, black or colored,” that was not fabricated within Portugal itself.17 As Bluteau’s entry indicates, however, what Alan Hunt has described as a broader “functional transformation” of European sumptuary law to align with
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mercantilist designs did not mean that the spiritual and moral peril of luxury had been overcome. Seventeenth-century Portuguese sumptuary laws, Nandini Chaturvedula has shown, reinvigorated a discourse on consumption in which threats to moral, social, cultural, and economic order were intertwined. Writing from Portuguese India in the early eighteenth century, royal officials denounced Portuguese elites’ excesses in commemorations of their children’s births and the widespread use of palanquins for transportation because they suggested an increasing proximity to, rather than triumph over, local culture and religion and drained resources away from more useful enterprises.18 In Portugal as well the specter of mutually reinforcing moral and economic ruin lurked in elite households where, royal counselor Martinho de Mendonça complained, fathers spent extravagantly on children’s clothing that would be in tatters within a year while an attendant and “pernicious” attraction to luxury endured.19 Indeed, those young men who went on to study at the University of Coimbra, the physician-reformer António Ribeiro Sanches reported, readily indulged in excessive accessorizing of their already expensive robes, flocking to stores to buy stockings, buckles, gloves, and sheaths. What was “learned and acquired” there, and then “spread throughout the kingdom,” Sanches despaired, was an unfortunate commitment to “superfluity” and “the habit of not being able to wear what was not fabricated outside the kingdom.”20 In eighteenth-century Brazil a growing population and the associated increase in commercial exchange and consumption also generated worries among local and royal officials. On the one hand, the starkly disparate access to resources within settlements fueled critique. As we saw in chapter 3, town councils complained of the hardships that extended from the material deprivations of enslavement into the households of white settlers and free and freed people of color. If the mining boom provided opportunities for some settlers, migrants, and merchants to enrich themselves, many more were, as Laura de Mello e Souza has observed, “disqualified” from the wealth that mining generated.21 On the other hand, prospecting and hinterland settlement drove the development of internal markets for food, slaves, and goods that generated wealth and, in some cases, its conspicuous display. Merchants and shopkeepers, as Júnia Furtado’s study of early eighteenth-century Minas shows, carried extensive inventories of goods and textiles of varied prices and quality, including Asian manufactures that made their way across global trade routes to American ports. A coastal mercantile elite also grew richer and more acquisitive. In Bahia those with means to do so purchased cotton, French linen, and French hats. As Robert DuPlessis observes, silk was more readily available
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in Salvador than in most Anglophone markets.22 To Rio de Janeiro as well, the powerful royal official Cardinal João da Mota e Silva reported in 1734, merchants sent taffetas, padded cottons, luxury fabrics of floral design, and “silks of all qualities.”23 Even in more remote outposts of Portuguese sovereignty, social and political exchanges could feature the display of imported finery. Arriving in Pará in 1751 as governor of the State of Grão Pará and Maranhão, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado was struck by the appearance of the local elites, who greeted him “brimming with cloth of gold.”24 Chroniclers and royal officials scrutinized these displays of wealth and luxury and concluded, like their counterparts in Portugal, that it undermined both morality and prosperity. In Pernambuco, the historian Sebastião da Rocha Pita wrote, the “vice” and “grave offenses” abetted by “Brazil’s liberty and wealth” were so great that residents were tempted to see a pestilence that afflicted the region in 1686 as divine wrath.25 In the mid-eighteenth century, the Benedictine Domingos de Loreto Couto concluded, the “plebes, and people” of Pernambuco continued to distinguish themselves as exceptionally “vain.”26 In Minas, as we have seen, officials likewise complained of wasteful spending on enslaved labor for frivolous ends. Along with “black cooks, mulatta confectioners, and crioulo tavern-keepers,” Antonil reported, settlers eagerly indulged themselves with “everything that gluttony accustomed them to want and seek.” Credit extended to “the poor” by itinerant merchants, as one official in Minas reported, exacerbated a “luxury pernicious to the republic,” while across Brazil in propertied households excessive consumption could be found on lurid display. Horses beyond what were needed for the running of sugar plantations and mills, excessively solicitous footmen, and even small bands of musicians, Antonil protested, undermined the virtuous “parsimony” that allowed estate owners to invest in infrastructure and labor that produced wealth and ensured an estate’s success.27 With American opulence based in agriculture and “the copious and sudden downpour of gold,” Rocha Pita similarly observed, a poor administration of assets had left “some households (which in other times were very rich) today with diminished potential, or almost exhausted.” While estate owners contended with higher prices for foodstuffs and other goods in growing settlements, as well as “accidents of time” that followed the turning of “fortune’s wheel,” “luxury, and the prodigiousness with which they spend their wealth,” had precipitated their decline and left them without resources “proportionate to their greatness.”28 A decade later the royal magistrate Wenceslao Pereira da Silva reiterated Rocha Pita’s assessment of wealthy households where consuming passions
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imperiled individual fortunes and collective prosperity. Along with the gold rush, Caribbean competition, a disorganized slave trade, and a lack of productive investments, luxury not only led to the “ruin” of Brazil’s plantation economy, he argued, but also produced widespread social disorder. The recent practice of being carried about by enslaved men atop a lavishly adorned chair, “the carriages of this land,” had spread to “persons of inferior condition” who spent excessively or became indebted to maintain appearances. Instead of a “competent parsimony proportionate to their quality [sua qualidade] and resources,” American vassals indulged their appetites and dressed “as they saw fit” without any moderation in the use of fabrics or adornments. Such excessive consumption, Pereira da Silva judged, made effeminate what was once virile or, conversely, transformed what was supposed to be virtuously feminine into manly worldliness. “One cannot distinguish persons of one sex from the other by the ornamentation of their dress,” he huffed, “because they confuse their qualities.”29 As recent events had revealed, the luxury that disorganized social relations also threatened political order. While in Brazil’s Europeanized settlements “great wealth” was often adjoined to “known nobility,” as Rocha Pita approvingly noted, the display of such wealth required careful calibration. The so-called Maneta revolt in 1711, he explained, was sparked in part by merchants annoyed that one of the wealthiest among their ranks had come to “live with an arrogance and ostentation inappropriate for the honest dealings of their profession.”30 While Pereira da Silva’s and Rocha Pita’s concern for social hierarchies that were destabilized as means supplanted rank in consumptive practice resonated across late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, in Brazil, royal officials and chroniclers also affirmed, the corrosive effects of wealth and luxury multiplied to produce a particularly American social and moral disorder. In contrast to courtiers in Portugal who, the governor of São Paulo explained to royal minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo in 1768, refrained from excessive expenditures on shoes, “in this land” women with only meager incomes, and who did not know how to sew or spin, spent lavishly on dress. While in Portugal, he added, “many gentlemen and good people of the provinces” dressed in linen, “here whites dress in the finest velvets, and no one dresses in anything but Holland cloth, all of it bought on credit.”31 Such luxury, the Benedictine chronicler Loreto Couto feared, reified American hierarchies that displaced, rather than reinforced, European ones. When women in Pernambuco promiscuously adorned “flowing gowns” in spite of their “commonness,” he explained, nobility collapsed into whiteness.32 The moralist Nuno
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Figure 7. Enslaved women collecting offerings for the Feast of the Rosary, Rio de Janeiro (ca. 1770), in Carlos Julião, “Notícia summaria do gentilismo da Asia [ . . . ] Ditos de figurinhos de brancos e negros dos uzos do Rio Janeiro e Serro do Frio [. . .].” (With permission. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional—Brasil.)
Marques Pereira similarly described Brazil as a place where social authority dissipated into a sumptuous and strange ruin. “Born in the Court, Lisbon’s children raise themselves in India and lose themselves in Brazil,” the disoriented narrator of his Compendio narrativo do peregrino da America (Narrative Compendium of an American Pilgrim, 1728) observes after failing to resist Bahia’s “labyrinth” of luxury and vice.33 In official discourse, the convergence of luxury, difference, and the breakdown of moral order conjured in Compendio and other reports was most conspicuously embodied by African and African-descended people and their allegedly transgressive dress. In Brazil, as historians have documented, burdened with the task of making their own clothes, enslaved people used locally grown cotton and imported textiles to fashion their attire as they saw fit. While most enslaved people had access only to coarse cottons and linen, in urban settings where they, especially women, entered the marketplace as producers, retailers, and consumers, dress could be elaborate (figure 7). For both enslaved and
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free people of color, dress and public appearance, especially on occasions such as marriages, funerals, and religious feast days, were part of dynamic and ongoing diasporic negotiations of status and belonging.34 Royal and religious officials, in contrast, reduced the creativity of African and African-descended women manifest in dress to a lasciviousness that threatened settler piety and virtue. With their “pomp and excessive cleanness,” Governor João de Lencastre complained to the king in 1695, women of color led astray the city’s Bahianborn residents, merchants “from the kingdom,” and, worst of all, members of the clergy who allegedly gazed upon these women and thereafter abandoned the “decorum of their habit.” As Lencastre also reported, the immorality of Black women’s dress threatened multiple boundaries intended to separate the enslaved and owners, people of color and whites, and honorable and dishonored families within Bahian society. Women in households of more modest means, he explained, chafed at the sight of enslaved women whose dress outshone that of their own daughters in simple skirts of baize and responded by abandoning “modesty” and “honesty” in efforts to invert the circumstances.35 The king, Pedro II, was so moved by Lencastre’s letter that in 1696, in order to suppress such an “excessive and ruinous example,” he prohibited “enslaved women in all of the State of Brazil” from using dresses made of silk, lace, cambric, or Holland cloth.36 Royal, religious, and local officials in Brazil, however, continued to complain about the threats that Black women posed to public order and to negotiate the discipline that would defend that order. At the turn of the eighteenth century, out of “laudable” zeal, the Bishop of Rio de Janeiro sought permission for nightly roundups of women in the city’s streets. As the Overseas Council advised in 1703, however, earlier and similarly repressive forays in Bahia had generated a “popular clamor” that verged on riot. Nor was such broad action necessary, counselors explained, considering that “a woman walking at night was an indifferent action from which sin did not necessarily follow”; poor working people, after all, used the night to carry water back to their homes. Moreover, the counselors added, some of the troubles could be curtailed by enforcing the regulation of public space already affirmed in the Ordenações Filipinas. As the code had established, after nightfall, ushered in by the tolling of the bell, those whom authorities encountered walking about, including “any white slave, whether Moor or Christian,” were subject to arrest and punishment, while those unarmed and with a candle or a lantern, “in the street on their way to a certain place,” could attend to their needs undisturbed.37 As royal counselors in Lisbon thus sought to limit what they regarded as potentially disruptive policing of women in urban areas, they found complaints
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about the “dress of enslaved women” in Brazil entirely persuasive. Following their counsel, that same year Pedro II affirmed the ban on enslaved women’s use of silk and gold, as did his successor João V in 1709 in response to a letter from Salvador’s town council denouncing the “liberty with which enslaved men and women are accustomed to live and dress.”38 Yet the reiteration of such restrictions suggests a lax enforcement on the ground. In the years that followed, merchants continued to count on Black consumers and a robust demand for fabrics, including “silks of all quality,” in Brazilian markets. As Cardinal Mota reported in 1734, “Compared with the kingdom, in the conquests the consumption of more and better silks has increased because their use has extended even to black men and women.”39 Royal and religious authorities, in turn, persisted in arguing that Black consumption and dress posed threats to social and moral order. As the Bishop of Pernambuco complained in 1726 and 1738, the “great openings in the skirts” worn by Black women constituted a “provocation to sensuality” incompatible with Christian worship.40 For royal officials, Black dress and luxury, and the access to resources they implied, also challenged a social order in which Blackness was constituted in material privation. As Lencastre argued, the disarray that luxury caused was most glaringly embodied in “mulattos raised in the houses of their owners who dress them as if they were not captives” and in free people of color who spent their earnings “in a glowing adornment of their persons.”41 Decades later, Martinho de Mendonça similarly sneered at dandified mulatto goldsmiths, while Carvalho e Melo complained that Black luxury exposed a lack of knowledge of how to properly consume what had been acquired and the waste that inevitably followed. Slaves who did not have shoes, he reported, used gold to “buy the finest cornered hats from Spain, ribbons of gold and silver, velvet breeches and brocade robes.” To add to the travesty, and “with a total disregard for what all of this cost them,” Black miners then used their hats as vessels for drinking water and wore their finery for the dirty work of the mines.42 For royal and religious officials, such profligate acquisitiveness threatened color hierarchy. Among men of color, Lencastre fumed, their “panache is growing in such a manner that they want to be equal to whites in everything.”43 “In all of the conquests,” a royal treasurer in Belém reported later in 1733, “black women walk around brimming with silks and gold, and are treated better than white women.”44 For the town council of Mariana, petitioning the king in 1755, mulattos who squandered their inheritance “wearing new and ostentatiously adorned festive dress” similarly signified an irreverent bid for “equality” that failed to “recognize the superiority of whites.”45 As Loreto Couto concluded, writing of Pernambuco, “Black commoners see themselves with such liberty
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that they take care that they lack nothing more so as to be like whites.”46 The most striking result of such consumptive disorder and transgression, Pereira da Silva reported, was that it was “only by accidents of color that one could distinguish some from the others.”47 Recognition of skin color and its presumed social significance, in other words, could salvage social and cultural order, but only barely, while the threatening impropriety of Black wealth in the form of finery and adornment remained glaring. And even more menacing, as town counselors in Vila do Principe suggested later in 1762, was Black wealth’s potential to corrupt the exercise of authority. “Mulattos,” they denounced, simply bribed their way past legislated restrictions on their service in local government. Calling for a royal affirmation of the disqualification of Black residents from local government, town councilors in Mariana similarly warned that Black wealth inevitably displaced the nexus of whiteness, wealth, and authority with a newfangled “despotism,” as “the greater part of [the population of ] this continent is blacks and mulattos.”48 In the 1730s, as we saw in the last chapter, Alexandre de Gusmão confronted Black, and more specifically “mulatto,” wealth by arguing that it could be disciplined through taxation, or what he called “the price of living in Minas.”49 Other officials, conflating Black participation in commerce with excessive consumption, argued for special policing of the places where such exchanges took place.50 While such restrictions limited opportunities for Black acquisition, Black wealth in movable goods, as Russell-Wood observed, was also vulnerable to “juridical abuse” animated by accusations of theft.51 As a group of people who identified themselves as “Black crioulos [American-born] and mestiços,” men and women, living in various towns in Minas, engaged in “all manner of business, dealings and contracts for purchases and sales,” argued in a lengthy mid-century petition to the king, “white persons” swindled them and made false accusations of indebtedness. Judges had sided with their accusers, and the petitioners had ended up “violently imprisoned” and in some cases publicly whipped.52 Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, royal officials also offered broader responses to what they regarded as the disorder of Black “riches,” in an effort to impede the entrance of people of color into the propertied class. In 1722, writing from Minas, Lourenço de Almeida went as far as to suggest that the king “promulgate some law against natural rights, that is that Your Majesty should prohibit any mulatto from being his father’s heir even if his father does not have another white child, and in this case the heir should be the closest relative.” Such a restriction, he imagined, would discourage white
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men from having children with Black women.53 The curtailment of inheritance rights, the Overseas Council explained a few years later, was an appropriate response to local demography and “customs” different from those of Portugal.54 As the Council also recognized, the regulation of wealth and inheritance in order to reinforce color hierarchy encompassed the regulation of marriage. Thus, in 1734 counselors reiterated the need to regulate marriage by denying inheritance rights to “bastards, children of a black woman or a mulatta woman, children or grandchildren of a black man or a black woman,” and prohibiting marriages between “whites” and “blacks.” Notwithstanding the Tridentine defense of matrimonial free will, they explained, the king could “legitimately [. . .] prohibit whites from contracting marriage with mulattos because the just cause of not infecting families sufficed.”55 Just a few years later, Martinho de Mendonça similarly decried the “proliferation of mulattos, more industrious and insolent than blacks and to whom redound and will redound in the future by way of succession, bequests and other means all of the riches of the country.” At the root of the problem, he explained, were “black” and “mulatta” women whose wealth, acquired “illicitly” or from men with whom they lived, made them more attractive partners than the “many sheltered maidens, and the many poor women in this country.” An exemplary solution, he added, could be found in Louis XIV’s measures for the “French Colonies in America,” which “imposed the gravest of punishments for all relations with and marriage to black women, and that disqualified mulattos not only for legitimate succession but also for bequests and endowments that exceeded basic sustenance.”56 Writing to the king in 1755, Mariana’s town council agreed. The problem of “mulatto” inheritance demanded a royal intervention that would set aside such rights, exploited, they claimed, by “untrustworthy” Black women who falsely identified wealthy men as fathers of their children.57 In contrast to the patriarchal standards of heredity that prevailed in metropolitan settings, colonial conditions thus demanded a foregrounding of matrilineality in order to disqualify Black proprietorship.58 Although the crown did not enact such categorical restrictions on marriage or Black inheritance and property rights, in Brazil some royal officials did seek to thwart the transfer of property to “mulatto and illegitimate children,” even when their deceased Portuguese-born fathers were “plebeian.”59 While royal counselors in Lisbon cast doubt on such proceedings, the preoccupation with Black wealth, and above all its display, also surfaced in other ways in mid-century governance. A new sumptuary law, the Pragmática of 1749, that curtailed the use of luxuries, especially foreign ones, affirmed the
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material expression of social and political hierarchies defined by ancestry and color. Following a preamble that inveighed against “pernicious luxury” and “the taste for novelties,” as well as initial chapters that enumerated the finery and ornamentation in dress and transportation prohibited for persons “of any social position or sex,” a separate chapter explained that in “the conquests” the “liberty with which blacks and mulattos, children of a black man, or a mulatto, or of a black mother, dressed in the same manner as white persons” had resulted in “great troubles.” To address these circumstances the law prohibited people of color, regardless of gender, from wearing silk and other finery “even if they are freed or born in liberty.” Those who broke this law would be fined and those who could not pay the fine would be publicly whipped. Repeat offenders would be exiled permanently to São Tomé.60 Advising the crown on the drafting of the law, royal counselor and magistrate Vaz de Carvalho defended the provisions for the conquests with explicit appeal to Black depravity. As Lencastre had insisted decades earlier, Vaz de Carvalho argued that, because it flouted the virtue of parsimony as well as social hierarchy, luxury among those of lowest rank corroded society as a whole. Along with the “bad example that it can give to others,” the “luxury of blacks and mulattos, even if they are freed or born free,” he wrote, demanded “particular care” “because of their propensity to crime.”61 A more extensive commentary on the Pragmática, in turn, upheld prohibitions on the dress of slaves and people of color within a defense of the display of “grandeza.” While sumptuary law offered an important remedy against the “gravest harms that luxury and vanity cause in kingdoms and republics,” Nicolau Francisco Xavier da Silva observed, it also addressed the need to dispel “the dangerous confusion that is born of luxury, nurtured in emulation, and increases in excessive and abusive dress and trappings” that did not correspond to social differences defined by ancestry, status, and wealth.62 That the Pragmática denounced people of color who dressed “in the same manner as white persons” suggests that royal officials concurred with earlier claims, noted above, that color alone did not always sufficiently clarify the “confusion” and “emulation” that Black access to resources made possible and that Xavier da Silva condemned.63 Although the Pragmática, and the counsel that supported it, thus affirmed a familiar sumptuary discourse of American social and moral disorder, the announcement of the law reinvigorated, rather than quelled, debates about the standards for consumption across the monarchy’s territories. Silvia Lara has argued that the new sumptuary law ran counter to expectations about public appearance as a form of social distinction in Brazil. While no one in a position
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Figure 8. A lady in her sedan chair, Rio de Janeiro (ca. 1770), by Carlos Julião, “Notícia summaria do gentilismo da Asia [ . . . ] Ditos de figurinhos de brancos e negros dos uzos do Rio Janeiro e Serro do Frio [. . .].” (With permission. Acervo da Fundação Biblioteca Nacional—Brasil.)
to write a rebuke appears to have challenged the associations of Black women, silk, and sin in official and religious discourse, the Pragmática’s geography of consumption undermined what Tamara Walker, writing on Lima, has called “an aesthetic of mastery”: slave owners’ use of the dress of enslaved laborers to display their own wealth. In Brazilian cities, as in Spanish America, seignorial opulence took shape in public retinues of owners and enslaved men and women that featured luxury and uniformity of dress. Wealthy women were attended by women, and carried about by men, whose dress was very similar to their own (figure 8). As one account of the Bahian celebrations of a royal marriage reported, with the city’s “nobility” turned out in brightly colored velvets, embroidered silks, and feathered hats, “there was no one who did not dress their lackeys, pages, and porters [. . .] in expensive liveries with silver-buckled shoes, suspenders, and gold cufflinks.” That both slave owners and the enslaved dressed in finery did not denote an erosion of social authority. Rather, Lara and Walker have argued, in the context of assumptions about the bodies
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of enslaved people as “fundamentally different,” even identical dress became the “ultimate statement and sign of alterity.”64 The politics of slave dress in Brazil also resonated in contemporary Portuguese religious discourse that, as we saw in chapter 3, asserted a symbolic conjoining of the bodies of masters and slaves. “The body of the slave, or domestic servant, is like part of the body of the master,” the priest and jurist Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha observed in a mid-eighteenth-century treatise. Or, as Prior António Cortez Bremeu explained, defending partus sequitur ventrem, “slavery belonged to the body.” Representational practice, in turn, took shape across a range of material realities. Simple black ribbon and cloth added to the dress of enslaved people to mourn the mother of the priest who owned them, the king ruled in 1754, was an appropriate display that connected servitude to the owner’s grief.65 At the same time, the dress of enslaved people could signal seignorial abdication or incapacity. In the mining region where, as we have seen, slave ownership was widespread and could encompass those with meager resources, the “nakedness” of the enslaved, members of local town councils complained, registered an owner’s hardship.66 The meaning and consequences of dress, luxury, and emulation thus depended on the presumed intentions of both the emulated and the emulators. While officials regarded an unsanctioned use of finery by enslaved people as disruptive and corrosive, even a sign of illicitly obtained property, within seignorial spaces finery or its absence registered American elites’ potential or failure to produce wealth and exercise authority. The Pragmática’s racialized standards of consumption for “the conquests” foreclosed on these expressions. The merchants of the Mesa do Bem Comum (Board of the Common Good), a commercial association in Lisbon, also cited the practices of social distinction in Brazil to argue against the Pragmática. Their petition, however, urged the king to set aside the prohibitions on the dress of free people of color because they jeopardized transatlantic political culture. “All republics,” the petitioners observed, recognized certain men as being of the highest “estimation,” even in smaller towns where these men were not of “letters and nobility.” “In the republic of America,” they further explained, these men included the “many” men of color “who have households and distinguished families; others who are sugar mill owners, and of great wealth”; successful merchants; and still others whose “purity of customs” and military service had been recognized by the crown. In a political community in which people of color constituted the “largest body,” the petitioners concluded, “the inferior condition to which they were born should not deprive them of the credit and esteem” upon which the
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community itself depended.67 In contrast to officials’ recurrent complaints of mulatto criminality, the petitioners thus called attention to how wealthy men of color in Brazil had re-created Europeanized ways of life and the local civic bonds upon which the monarchy was grounded. As Iris Kantor has argued, they made clear that the Pragmática’s disregard for Brazil’s “gentlemen [fidalguia] of low extraction,” which encompassed people of color, carried the potential to jeopardize “loyalties.”68 At the same time, the Mesa’s petitioners implied that the law had misunderstood American social order altogether. “America,” they explained, “is a republic composed of blacks and mulattos.” “Whites” were “a minimal part,” “so few in comparison to blacks and mulattos.”69 Thus, an allowance for Black distinction, manifest in dress, was based not only on ideals of emulation and commensurability but also on the extenuating circumstances of non-European space. Less than a decade later, the men of color (homens pardos) of a brotherhood in Vila Rica contested sumptuary standards with a similar appeal to the contingencies of their implementation across the king’s dominions. While early eighteenth-century officials on both sides of the Atlantic worried about the use of arms by enslaved and Black men, the Pragmática, citing the problem of “homicides,” violent assaults, and brawls, had curtailed the bearing of swords by “blacks, and other persons of equal or inferior condition.” For the men in Vila Rica, however, their various professions and conditions, including the fact that many among their ranks were “sons of noble men,” demanded an exception to these restrictions. They conducted themselves, their petition explained, “like white men.” Imperial geography, they further argued, should not determine social status and its display in dress. “The supplicants should not be of an inferior condition than that of the pardos” in Lisbon, they insisted, “where such usage is not prohibited but rather permitted, as it is for white men.”70 The king, apparently persuaded of the exceptional imperatives of American social ceremony, granted their request to include swords in the attire for the brotherhood’s processions.71 As the Vila Rica petition also reveals, in Brazil, as elsewhere in the Portuguese crown’s dominions, in restricting dress the Pragmática created a forum for negotiating expressions of status and, as Jorge Pedreira has noted, reinforced the king’s role as arbiter of “social taxonomies upheld by law.”72 While the Vila Rica petitioners met with success, the process of petitioning for exceptions to sumptuary regulation could afford the king’s representatives opportunities to further exploit and discipline the effects of Black wealth in Brazil. In 1751 two “mulattos” sought out the viceroy of Brazil to object to the
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Pragmática’s prohibitions on their use of swords. They were “merchants with wealth and manners,” the viceroy reported, and they offered to pay 3,000 cruzados to the royal treasury for the restoration of sumptuary privileges that the law denied. While the viceroy, as he tersely noted, “did not permit” the exception, the men returned “a few days later” offering the same sum in exchange for positions of leadership in a local regiment of men of color. In this case, the viceroy accepted the “donation” and granted the request. He would have done so, he pointedly added, “even without” what they offered.73 By the time the viceroy sent his report on the transaction, appeals to the king to reconsider the consequences of sumptuary restrictions had led as well to revisions of the Pragmática itself. Just a few months after the law’s promulgation, a new royal charter recognized concessions to finery produced within the monarchy’s dominions and suspended “for now” the prohibitions pertaining to “blacks and mulattos” in “the conquests.” To explain the changes, the king’s charter referred only obliquely to “some reasons of equal consideration that were presented to me when I determined the referred to prohibitions for blacks and mulattos in the conquests.”74 The disavowal of decades of moralizing critique of Black luxury realigned Black sumptuary standards in Brazil with those in Portugal and conceded ground to local displays of both seignorial and Black authority and wealth. As the Pragmática, its critics, and revisions to the law all recognized, social relations in Brazil, shaped by the enslavement of Africans on a vast scale, demanded forms of regulation that recognized Europeanizing ambition as well as American difference.
American Consumption and Empire The Pragmática’s defense of “good customs” against a “taste for novelties” was defined by sites of production, exchange, and consumption. Embroidered clothing was permissible provided that it was produced in the king’s “dominions, not of some other fabrication.” Silks were initially prohibited for Blacks and “mulattos” in “the conquests,” as we have seen, but more broadly restricted to those “manufactured in my dominions or brought from Asia on Portuguese vessels.”75 This protectionist design reiterated late seventeenth-century assumptions, noted above, about the connections among wealth, luxury, foreign trade, and the unrealized potential for manufacturing in Portugal. In the 1670s, the jurist and diplomat Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo (1618–1680), influenced by French economic writing and policies—particularly those of Colbert, which he had observed at close range during a posting in Paris—offered a
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comprehensive assessment of Portugal’s “poverty,” which he saw as produced in part by luxuries that drained the kingdom of gold and silver. He argued that investment in domestic manufacturing was the key to achieving a favorable balance of trade. “There are two sources for all the wealth of empires,” Bluteau also affirmed in a 1679 treatise on mulberry trees and silkworms: nature and art. While silk manufacturing would arrest the “withdrawal of money from the kingdom,” domestic taxation would offset any decline in customs revenue, he insisted, while the superior quality of Brazil’s tropical commodities, especially sugar and tobacco, meant that their profitability would withstand the attendant reordering of textile trading networks.76 Among those counseling the king, Luís de Meneses, the third Count of Ericeira, appointed head of the royal treasury in 1675, then led the effort to transform these ideas into practice. Guided by Meneses, in the 1670s and 1680s the crown recruited foreign artisans to support manufacturing, especially silk production, while the pragmatic laws of 1677 and 1686, noted above, limited the use of potentially competitive imports.77 Although early eighteenth-century Anglo-Portuguese treaties, most notably the Methuen Treaty of 1703, relegated seventeenth-century sumptuary incentives for domestic manufacturing, royal officials continued to reckon with the ways in which consumption shaped the flows and accumulations of wealth in the monarchy’s territories.78 In 1708, clarifying the applications of earlier laws, João V affirmed that he intended limits on consumption to curtail not only the “disorder of luxury and vanity,” but also the poverty that resulted from excessive spending. It was through these “purchases and sales,” the king observed, that “the resources of the kingdom went to strangers.”79 A year later, royal counselor António Rodrigues da Costa similarly noted the broader mercantile and imperial ramifications of unregulated consumption, advising the crown of the need to use a “pragmatic law to moderate the excesses of the residents of Brazil, prohibiting the use of all expensive foreign products and textiles.” As Rodrigues da Costa also suggested, however, it was the manner in which these goods reached consumers, rather than the goods themselves, that threatened the empire’s prosperity. Thus, he argued for exempting Asian goods transported “in our ships” from any restrictions in order to increase “our commerce in India and Macao.”80 In the 1730s, the king, advised by the Overseas Council, affirmed that imperial commercial networks should define the permissible scope of luxury, banning the importation of Asian goods to the kingdom’s ports “in ships or other embarkations that are not mine or those of my vassals.”81
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As they reconsidered paths toward a balance of trade, eighteenth-century royal counselors also returned to the connections among the empire’s commercial predicaments, luxury, and Portuguese manufacturing. In a broader assessment of the monarchy’s continental diplomacy, Gusmão judged that the treaties with Great Britain had created a “servile yoke,” as textiles flooded into Portugal’s ports and foreclosed on the “construction of new factories.”82 Around the same time, two Frenchmen, Robert Godin and Claude Silbert, more optimistically sought royal permission to open a new silk factory in Portugal. Writing in 1734, Cardinal Mota initially expressed skepticism but later endorsed the project, with some modifications. Other European states, he noted, supported manufacturing with economic and honorific incentives, while foreign luxuries drained profits from the “immense riches that God gave us in Brazil.”83 That same year, with royal approval, investors formed a silk production company. Although members of the company bickered, and insufficient supplies of raw silk hampered production, by the 1740s a factory, now in Lisbon’s Rato neighborhood, had one hundred looms, two hundred artisans, and hundreds of women employed to fold silk. The sumptuary restrictions that may have bolstered a demand for local silk were not rigorously enforced, however, or at least that was the impression that guided the diplomat Luís da Cunha, who had met Silbert in the Hague in 1729, to argue for a renewal of the pragmáticas of the previous reign. Reiterating the recommendation in 1742, Da Cunha reminded the heir to the throne of the need to moderate the influx of “the chief commodity [droga] that France sends us, which is fashion.”84 In his “Calculo,” written, according to Cortesão, at the beginning of 1749, Gusmão similarly decried the ruinous effects of an “embrace of luxury” and an “abandonment of industry” on the kingdom’s and the empire’s economies. A new “sumptuary law” defended at the royal court by one magistrate was, Gusmão concluded, the only constructive contribution to consultations that otherwise seemed destined to increase “the kingdom’s poverty.”85 Plans for the Pragmática of 1749 thus emerged out of royal officials’ considerations of how best to administer commerce, consumption, and the unmet potential of manufacturing in Portugal in order to sustain a balance of trade. The law’s earliest critics, in turn, called into question whether it achieved such effects. Reducing the circulation of “foreign” goods would create “national wealth,” one official insisted, yet it was just as important to recognize the invention, artistry, and manufacture associated with luxury as “the soul of commerce.”86 The new limits on the use of gold and silver, silk factory owners argued even before the law’s publication, would undercut their enterprise.87
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After publication, goldsmiths complained that, because the law left unclear the limits on the use of gold buttons, people stopped buying them entirely. For the Mesa do Bem Comum the fixed prices for silk stockings regardless of where they were sold were unacceptable because they failed to account for transatlantic transportation costs. The crown also received numerous petitions representing hundreds of women lacemakers in the north of Portugal and in Peniche asking for reconsideration of the new restrictions on the use of lace. Religious authorities confirmed that men from poor villages often sailed to Brazil from Lisbon or Porto to go to the mining region, leaving their wives and children to fend for themselves. Because the Pragmática cut off their modest incomes, they and their families were left materially and “spiritually” vulnerable.88 In this case, too, the Mesa do Bem Comum joined the fray. The incomes of members of “the feminine sex who occupy themselves day and night in this laudable work” were spent in local markets to buy necessities, the Mesa’s petition explained, rather than on foreign goods, while the law’s limits on the use of lace foreclosed on profit-generating trade to America.89 In response to such criticisms Gusmão argued that the handwringing over domestic production was nonsensical. Dismissing claims that luxury production bolstered the kingdom’s economy as a “false application of the maxim that the arts should be promoted,” he explained that in “civilized” countries ostentation and poor taste were never allowed to flourish at the expense of “utility.” Citing Nicolas Delamare’s Traité de la police (1705–1738), Gusmão also enumerated French pragmatic laws, observing that the French more recently had cultivated a greater tolerance for brocades and ribbons because they recognized that, as residents of other kingdoms embraced such “superfluities,” it was France that reaped the rewards. And, as he had argued of the head tax in Minas, he insisted that making exceptions rendered regulations pointless. Sumptuary laws, he noted sharply, were intended to “prohibit things that are in use,” and if they stopped short of prohibitions that would put people out of work there were no objects or practices that could be reformed. The lacemakers could find other work, he concluded, as their counterparts presumably had in the past when restrictions on luxuries were in place.90 Other royal counselors, however, were less committed to the sumptuary cycle that Gusmão elaborated. And, as the abrupt revisions to the Pragmática, noted above, suggest, it was they who prevailed. Having amended the limits on domestic production and restrictions on the dress of Blacks in the conquests within months of the initial law, in 1751 the crown affirmed and clarified allowances for “all lace made within the limits of the continent of Portugal.”91
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As the Mesa argued, such alterations were also necessary because the law relied on broader, flawed assumptions about trade, with consequences that extended beyond the problems created for Portuguese-made luxuries. Especially damaging was the law’s initial failure to account for the extent to which Indian and European textiles, including many of those forbidden by the law, were part of complex networks of exchange that included the transatlantic slave trade and Brazilian markets. If sugar and tobacco have “no outlet to Italy and Hamburg,” the Mesa’s petition explained, “then overseas fabrication and cultivation stop, the fleets get smaller, and the damage is felt by everyone with interests in those fleets.”92 Regarding the law’s calamitous effects on American consumption, the Mesa also charged that the law’s chapter on Africandescended people’s use of silk cut into an important market for Portuguese merchants. Defending, as we have seen, Black consumption as an expression of American sociopolitical order, the petition further explained that if the American population were divided into tenths, nine-tenths were “blacks and mulattos” who consumed “all types of cloth,” especially lighter fabrics like silk, that the Pragmática initially had banned.93 In the 1730s a royal treasurer in Belém had made a similar claim before the king when the governor and captain-general of the State of Maranhão prohibited “Indian women, black women, mamelucas, mulattas, and all Tapuia women whether enslaved or free” from using silk, gold, and silver adornments in their dress. “Black women,” the official had explained, “were spending more in one year than white people spend in three.” In that moment as well, merchants in Brazil and in Portugal had protested the forced contraction in demand and, apparently, persuaded the king to intervene. When, in response to a royal order, the governor rescinded the restrictions, he acknowledged that the merchants’ board in Portugal had complained to the king that “those from this marketplace were not providing an outlet for their wares due to the prohibition.”94 The Mesa’s response to the Pragmática of 1749 thus returned to an earlier assertion that curtailing Black consumption meant that the flows of wealth within the empire would be diverted in ways that damaged the balance of trade. “Brazil’s wealth [cabedais] came to Portugal,” the Mesa clarified, “because fabrics went [to Brazil] from Portugal.” The racialized political economy of the Pragmática, in contrast, meant that “wealth stayed in America.”95 Writing earlier in the decade from London during a diplomatic posting, Carvalho e Melo had offered a similar, though broader, analysis of production, consumption, and the circulation of wealth within the empire.96 A “true calculation,” he wrote in “Relação dos Gravames” (Account of Liabilities, 1741),
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showed that the settlers who purchased, among other goods, wine, tools, and linen, enriched Portugal’s vintners, artisans, and merchants. Commerce with the monarchy’s extra-European territories allowed Portugal to live a mercantile dream. Without the burden of risky foreign trade, he explained, “one harvests, as if within one’s house, all the fruits of commerce.”97 The fruits of commerce, and the benefits they accrued to the crown, he argued later, in 1750, could materialize even in exchanges that flouted royal regulation and administration. The untaxed gold that made its way to Portugal, he wrote in advising the crown to abolish the head tax in the mining region, was transformed into royal revenues because “no one eats, drinks, dresses or puts on shoes without paying the treasury.” In the end, he averred, “the thieves of Minas come to be businessmen in the kingdom.” And when it came to consumption within Brazil, a similar logic applied. “Those same blacks,” whose wasteful use of velvets and brocades for mining work Carvalho e Melo had disparaged, were, in the end, part of a potentially virtuous cycle. “These thieves too,” he concluded, “return everything they have stolen from the royal fifth within a few fleets.”98 Following the Pragmática’s publication, reports on American marketplaces, where the exchanges that the Mesa and Carvalho e Melo had conjured took place, seemed to confirm the law’s detrimental effects on American consumption and, therefore, imperial commerce. News of the law had sown confusion and led local consumers to defensively overreact, a royal treasurer in Maranhão wrote to the king in 1753. When the residents of São Luís learned of the regulations, business had ground to a halt. “After [the law] was published,” he explained, “the people became terrified” and stopped buying “not only what was rightly prohibited” but also much of what was not. Uncertain about the timeframe for applying the law, merchants responded by petitioning for a twoyear allowance for the use of fabrics already imported or purchased. Assessing the petitions, the Overseas Council urged the king to favor the request, and, the following month, the king agreed.99 As the Council also argued, beyond justifying the need for a merciful royal intervention, the petitioners shed light on a larger predicament and cast doubt on the wisdom of regulating consumption in Brazil with the same standards that applied in Portugal. “It is commonly judged that sumptuary laws are not befitting of the conquests,” the counselors advised, “where enforcement is not easy, and expenditures are not so prejudicial [because] they redound to the kingdom’s well-being and an increase in commerce.”100 Just two years later the king received similar advice on how to respond to a letter from the Olinda town council that had argued for additional regulations on “excessive luxury
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and disordered forms of dress.” “Sumptuary laws,” one counselor asserted in response, “are always of suspect observance and generally are no longer necessary in the conquests.”101 As a late expression of Portuguese sumptuary tradition, the 1749 Pragmática thus had proven to be an unconvincing intervention into efforts to discipline American wealth and consumption. While effective sumptuary regulation was, and always had been, elusive, there was something about the conquests that made even the intended ends of such regulation useless and misguided. American difference and American excess, even as they flouted metropolitan sensibilities and racialized sociocultural hierarchies forged in conquest, could generate commercial and metropolitan prosperity.
Colonies of Commerce In the mid-eighteenth century the political-economic function of American markets and American consumption also figured prominently in broader analyses of the empire’s economy and in plans for reform that these analyses inspired. The balance of trade, invoked with frequency in debates about sumptuary law, implicated commercial treaties and entanglements with political allies and rivals. As his archive suggests, Carvalho e Melo took special interest in British debates on Anglo-French commerce, waged in pamphlets and newspapers in the 1710s, as the commercial consequences of the end of the War of Spanish Succession had come into view. Whigs and Tories had disputed not only whether the balance of trade with France was negative or positive but also, as William Deringer has elucidated, whether, considering the complexities of trading circuits and recordkeeping, the not-yet-hegemonic concept of a trade balance could be translated into meaningful quantitative calculation and, if so, how.102 Writing from London in the 1740s, Carvalho e Melo, in turn, looked at both quantitative and qualitative evidence to scrutinize Anglo-Portuguese trade and its ramifications across the empire. While the kingdom’s wealth would be bolstered by an “in house” exchange of goods, he explained, such an exchange had been undermined by houseguests who abused their host’s hospitality. Especially since the Methuen Treaty, British trading firms, merchants, goods, finance, and shipping had embedded themselves in Portuguese commercial circuits in ways that damaged Portuguese interests. The British leveraged Brazilian demand in partnerships that gave them access to Brazilian markets and in deals that left Portuguese merchants burdened with inferior and out-of-date stock.103 The British also abused their access to Portuguese markets that the treaty guaranteed by “conquering” consumers with well-made goods and then
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later flooding markets with those of lesser quality. Beyond these schemes was the contraband trade in goods. Such conditions, Carvalho e Melo argued, were bad for the balance of trade and bad for fashion. “The English,” he complained to his relative and secretary of foreign affairs, Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho, “want to rule over the character of other nations and subject them to their own nation’s lack of taste.” One solution, Carvalho e Melo advised, was to lift sumptuary restrictions on French luxuries in order to give the English competition. The French, at least, recognized “a diversity of national tastes” and sought to please their customers without “doing violence” to local preferences.104 Carvalho e Melo also recognized the need to elucidate the future of Portugal’s Asian commercial enterprise. Notwithstanding setbacks suffered in the 1730s with the Maratha capture of Salsette and the Northern Provinces (Carvalho e Melo’s younger brother was killed defending Goa in 1740), the Portuguese, he argued, were poised to recover Asian commerce, especially in the wake of recalibrated European demand. “The general customs of all urbane nations,” he explained in one report, had transformed Asian textiles from “mere luxury” into “necessities.” As a result, he observed, the potential revenue generated by shipping goods from Asia had increased. And while other European merchants could not licitly import goods that competed with national manufactures, the Portuguese could freely trade in Asian calicoes, prized for their use in clothing and furnishings. Thus, if the Portuguese could not fabricate goods in high demand, they could at least control their flow to Europe and the crown’s ultramarine possessions. Reexporting goods to Spain and Italy, and, above all, to Brazil, would offset any deficits accrued in Asian trade.105 At mid-century, back in Portugal and serving a new king, Carvalho e Melo reaffirmed his analysis of Anglo-Portuguese commerce with references to “theft” and exchanges that produced aberrant expressions of authority and wealth. The flow of Brazilian gold into British hands was so disproportionate, he bristled, that across an impoverished Portugal there were vassals who knew nothing of Brazilian mines, who had not seen “the effigy of their king on a gold coin,” while in London a robust circulation of those coins made João V’s likeness more familiar than that of the British sovereign.106 Luxury, Carvalho e Melo also concluded, was something that the Portuguese could no longer afford. Because the Portuguese did not have the means to fabricate the goods that realized their “pompous fantasies,” the commercial benefits of luxury could not accrue. Instead, the pursuit of luxury fueled dependence on foreign trade, “weakened” the monarchy, and left the people “corrupt” and “effeminate.”107
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Such an analysis, as a number of historians have observed, inspired Carvalho e Melo, acting as José I’s prime minister, to defend a series of reforms in the 1750s and 1760s intended to mitigate British predations and fortify Portugal’s status as an imperial entrepôt. With fewer restrictions on AsianPortuguese trade, Portuguese merchants were required to sell goods in Portugal rather than in Brazilian ports on the way back to Lisbon. In 1755 the crown also proscribed the so-called comissários volantes, or itinerant traders, who worked with British merchants to export goods to Brazil, often flooding American markets with cheaper wares that undercut established local merchants with Lisbon partnerships. As Mendonça Furtado reported from Pará in 1751, in a land where “even the most minor commercial maxim” was unknown, the comissários simply swindled local residents. In contrast to merchants in Brazil interested in maintaining circuits of exchange, the royal order denounced, the “ill informed” comissários also besieged local economies with aggressive foreclosures. Rather than prosperity, they left behind the ruin of “public faith” visible in the “many and considerable losses, from which followed bankruptcies, and perturbations in the commerce of that continent.”108 In the mid-eighteenth century, Carvalho e Melo’s reformism also targeted institutions that regulated royal finances and commerce. In 1761 the crown created a new royal treasury (Erário Régio) that centralized fiscal administration, with treasury boards (juntas da fazenda) in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia by the end of the decade.109 The same legislation ordered that for all accounts royal treasury officials would deploy “the mercantile method,” or double-entry bookkeeping, an ambitious goal that neither the French nor the English—the “urbane nations” invariably invoked in contemporary reformist legislation— had fully achieved. Although an earlier scheme for a Portuguese Asian trading company had foundered in a royal court full of rivals and paralyzed by João V’s illness, in 1755 Carvalho e Melo also steered the crown toward a policy of monopoly trading companies for Brazil, creating the Companhia de Grão Pará e Maranhão to bolster both Portuguese merchants and American commercial potential. That same year Carvalho e Melo did away with the Mesa do Bem Comum, which had protested the creation of new trading companies, and formed a new and self-consciously professionalized Board of Commerce (Junta de Comércio) entrusted with representing merchants of various types, administering commercial taxation, and promoting intra-imperial commerce. As the Board’s statutes indicated, a new school of commerce would aid in the Board’s endeavors by addressing what Carvalho e Melo had described as a woeful lack of formal preparation among Portuguese merchants.110
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Living in London at a time of ascendant public interest in what Mary Poovey has called “financial writing,” Carvalho e Melo had come to understand that the Portuguese needed to cultivate practical and theoretical knowledge of commerce as a tool to be used in navigating relations with an important ally and rival. As his London library catalogs, especially one of primarily English-language books entitled “Bibliothèque Britannique,” further suggest, he recognized the need to shore up his own knowledge of political economy and contemporary debate. Along with the works of seventeenth-century British mercantilists William Petty (in French), Thomas Mun, Charles Davenant, Josiah Child, and Carew Reynell, Carvalho e Melo acquired King’s The British Merchant, Daniel Defoe’s pamphlets on calicoes and trade with India (1719 and 1720), John Bennet’s The National Merchant, or Discourses on Commerce and Colonies (London, 1737), and the Dictionnaire universel du commerce (Paris, 1723) by Jacques Savary des Bruslons, son of Jacques Savary, the author of the best-selling Le parfait negociant (1675), a 1726 edition of which Carvalho de Melo also possessed.111 Carvalho e Melo’s commitment to acquiring knowledge of the economy and to making more specific inquiries into the production of wealth, the promotion of commerce, and the regulation of consumption shaped the school of commerce, or Aula de Comércio, mandated in the creation of the Board of Commerce and founded in Lisbon in 1759. Initially offering instruction in arithmetic and accounting as well as surveys of weights and measures, currency exchange, freights, and insurance commissions, the Aula’s curriculum, as Rodrigues and Craig suggest, also bore a striking resemblance to Malachy Postlethwayt’s 1757 plan for a British mercantile college.112 The Aula’s second, long-serving headmaster, the Swiss-born and naturalized Portuguese vassal Alberto Jaqueri Sales (1731–1791), developed the curriculum to include instruction in contemporary mercantilist theory and practice. His manuscript textbook entitled “Notícia Geral do Comércio” (General Report on Commerce), José Luís Cardoso has explained, outlined a series of mercantilist principles that foregrounded metropolitan recourse to colonies as sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods. With subsidies from the Board, Sales expounded these principles in a revised and extended translation of Savary des Bruslons’s widely read Dictionnaire universel. As Sales noted in various entries, especially one on luxury, his Diccionario do commercio, completed over the course of the 1760s and early 1770s, also drew on Postlethwayt’s 1757 translation of Savary’s dictionary, Jean-François Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), and François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais’s anonymously
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published Elémens du commerce (1754) to celebrate commerce and the virtuous cycle of enrichment and “the perfection of arts and sciences” that it fostered.113 Savary des Bruslons’s Dictionnaire universel, as William Reddy notes, “systematize[d] the everyday knowledge and beliefs of merchants, producers, government officials, and consumers about commerce.”114 Equally crucial to the Aula’s curriculum, the Dictionnaire surveyed how European states had extended their sovereignties and the various types of “colonies” forged in the process: those founded to provide settlement for surplus population, those founded to secure conquered territories, and those that sustained commerce. The colonies of Portugal, according to Savary des Bruslons, were among the latter category and included territories where commodities in demand in Europe could be cultivated.115 In Sales’s Diccionario do commercio, in turn, the entry on colonies began with a translation of what appeared in the Dictionnaire and—in contrast to Bluteau’s simpler early eighteenth-century definition of a colony as settlers and the land they settled—affirmed the commercial purposes of ultramarine possessions. Sales, however, also incorporated a longer analysis of “colonies of commerce” from Forbonnais’s recent Elémens that reframed the history and purpose of Portugal’s American territory. Commercial colonies, Sales explained, could be further divided into two types: one was exclusively commercial, and the other was at once commercial and agricultural. It was the second type that had been forged following the “discovery of America” and after a “conquest of lands” that led to either the expulsion or subjugation of “ancient residents.” Both types shared “the common effect of enriching the metropole that establishes them” and depended on settlers’ recognition of the authority of the “metropole” and “an immediate subjection and interest subordinate to its progress.” The hierarchical nature of metropolitan-colonial exchange was defined further by a series of laws. First, Sales argued, colonies “should not have any type of cultivation or arts that may enter into competition with those of the metropole, therefore a colony that produces the same goods as the metropole is more dangerous than useful.” Second, he clarified, “the colonies may not legally consume foreign goods, or their equivalents, that the metropole can furnish them,” nor should they sell directly to foreigners products traded in metropolitan ports.116 While, as noted above, Carvalho de Melo’s earlier writings from London evince a similar understanding of the purposes of “colonies,” in the 1760s Sales’s articulation of what later historians described as “the colonial pact” achieved a kind of orthodoxy.117 The king and Carvalho e Melo, often with other courtiers in tow, attended the ceremonies that opened the Aula’s academic
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year and student examinations. Graduates went on to administrative positions on the Board and in the royal treasury where they presumably had opportunities to apply the principles of hierarchical exchange that their studies had elaborated.118 The mercantile canon also gained greater visibility beyond the Aula, most notably in José Manuel Ribeiro Pereira’s paraphrastic translation of Forbonnais’s Elémens dedicated to Carvalho e Melo.119 As one official claimed, extolling the Board of Commerce, Lisbon booksellers could not keep up with demand for books on the commercial arts. In 1770, underscoring an official regard for the mastery of mercantile science, the crown also recognized the “nobility” of the merchant profession.120 By the 1760s, as new economic discourses and practices became institutionalized, more critical analyses of mercantile maxims and their applications in the empire, such as those that Carvalho e Melo had offered in “Relação dos Gravames,” also circulated among royal officials, including a series of “dissertations” and “discourses” by António Ribeiro Sanches. Born in Penamacor in 1699 to a family of New Christians, Sanches left Portugal for Italy in 1726 after a cousin denounced to the Inquisition his alleged dedication to the “Law of Moses.” Throughout an exile that took him to France, London, and Leiden, where he continued his medical studies, Sanches maintained ties to Portuguese royal officials, including the diplomat and royal academic Luís da Cunha, whom Sanches met in the Hague and then reencountered in Paris two years before Da Cunha’s death in 1749. Like Martinho de Mendonça, whom he knew and admired, Sanches embraced modern knowledge that inspired him to invest in educational reform. As early as the 1730s he was at work on a revised medical curriculum for the University of Coimbra, published much later in Paris in 1763, while his Cartas sobre a educação da mocidade (Letters on the Education of Youth, 1760) offered a broader account of what Sanches described as a secularized “political education” that would inculcate habits of action “useful” to oneself and to “the state where one was born.”121 By midcentury Sanches had also finished his most widely read works, Dissertation sur l’origine de la maladie vénérienne (Dissertation on the Origins of Venereal Disease; Paris, 1750), which would serve as the basis for his later entry on venereal disease in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1771), and Tratado da conservação de saude dos povos (Treatise on the Conservation of the Peoples’ Health; Paris, 1756, and Lisbon, 1757), dedicated to the Duke of Lafões.122 The foundations of what José Vicente Serrão has described as Sanches’s loose and at times “dissident” synthesis of mercantilist and physiocratic principles are evident in copious notes scattered throughout a series of journals
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that Sanches kept over several decades beginning in the 1740s.123 Along with a critique of Portugal’s socioeconomic order, Sanches prepared separate analyses of “the colonies of Portugal,” informed by the work of Davenant, Mun, Child, Melon, Savary, and Forbonnais and by the histories and policies of Portugal’s rivals, especially the British and the French. While he included some of his conclusions in Cartas sobre a educação, beginning in the 1750s Sanches developed more fully his understanding of the generation of wealth, the status of the colonies, and Portugal’s economic predicaments, as well as his recommended remedies, in letters to royal officials and in “projects” and “notes” of various lengths, including a comprehensive survey entitled “Discursos sobre a America Portugueza” (Discourses on Portuguese America, 1763).124 While Sanches did not purge the term “conquest” from his notes and reports, his examination of the past, present, and future potential of modern empires relied upon the category of “colony” and a categorization of “types of colonies” borrowed from Savary des Bruslons and Forbonnais.125 His analyses also reiterated principles of mercantile exchange that, as Abigail Swingen has observed of English economic writers, foregrounded an integration of, rather than competition over, resources and labor within the empire as a whole.126 Colonies served as sources of raw materials, needed for production in “the capital,” that would otherwise be purchased from foreigners. Colonies were to “consume everything that is fabricated in the capital, and therefore,” Sanches explained, “within them little or nothing was to be fabricated other than what was a primary and indispensable necessity.” Because the price of goods was based on the cost of raw materials, labor, and the “time and money that an artisan spent in learning his craft,” it followed that any manufactures “in the colonies” should require “little instruction, little knowledge and as a consequence little expense.”127 The logic of these metropolitan-colonial arrangements crystallized in the image of a capital city, where artisans and men of learning lived, and the surrounding villages, whose inhabitants dedicated themselves to the production of “raw materials” to be sent to the city for fabrication and consumption. “In this way,” Sanches observed, “goods circulated and their circulation maintained the state and its villages just as was the case with the kingdom and its colonies.”128 The principle of “mutual,” but hierarchical, dependency also served as the foundation for Sanches’s elucidation of the specific trajectory of Portugal and its empire. Like Savary des Bruslons, he began by observing that Portugal did not have the type of colonies formed from surplus population. Rather, Portugal’s colonies were either those intended to secure conquered territories or
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those, like Brazil and Maranhão, that were commercial.129 As Sanches further asserted, the creation of these colonies, animated by the “Gothic” ethos of conquest, had been costly. Beginning in the fifteenth century, “inebriated by papal maxims” and beholden to “the [papal] donations [. . .] of all that we conquered,” the Portuguese had been drawn into protracted and so-called “just wars” to enforce the crown’s spiritual and temporal claims.130 In America the fixation on “dominating” Indigenous peoples and extracting gold had stunted the growth of other sources of wealth. The Portuguese had treated the monarchy’s new territories as the Spanish treated theirs, Sanches explained with reference to Montesquieu’s widely read critique, “cut[ting] down whole trees in order to harvest their fruit.”131 This approach to empire had left unmet the potential of both metropolitan and American agriculture, even as the metropolitan economy, especially Portuguese industry, had languished. Portugal, Sanches judged, had become, like Castile and Russia, a “colony” of England, exporting raw materials and importing its manufactures for consumption in Portugal and Portugal’s own colonies.132 Like Da Cunha, Carvalho e Melo, and the authors of the mercantilist canon he had studied, Sanches thus was keenly interested in colonial wealth, production and consumption, and other political-economic contingencies upon which the balance of trade and the kingdom’s and the empire’s prosperity depended. As we will see below, turning to Brazil, Sanches concluded that for the territory to function as a colony of commerce, local social order and governance would have to be redefined.
Making Conquests into Colonies Sanches’s commitment to “write for public utility,” as he described it in 1757, and his ties to high-ranking royal officials, especially Da Cunha’s nephew Luís da Cunha Manuel, nominated as minister of foreign affairs by Carvalho e Melo, and Vicente de Sousa Coutinho, Portugal’s ambassador in Paris, animated his well-known, and overarching, reformist critique of what he described as the “Gothic” monarchy of which the legacies included violence, religious intolerance, undue clerical and Inquisitorial authority, and disrespect for commercial and agricultural industriousness.133 Sanches’s Cartas defended instead a “civil state” founded upon the subject’s “oath of fidelity” to the sovereign and a civil equality that set aside privileges of lineage. While the sovereign could distinguish among his subjects, Sanches explained, such distinctions were to flow from his own authority rather than “generation” or lineage. At stake, too, he argued, was the kingdom’s social and economic prosperity,
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hindered by arrangements interwoven into Portugal’s antiquated political order, including noble and ecclesiastical land tenure, both of which diminished agricultural productivity and, therefore, inhibited the growth of a population dedicated to “useful” enterprise.134 Turning to the empire, Sanches defended the idea that sovereignty could be forged out of conquest by way of the conquered people’s tacit or explicit consent and an “oath” that established a pact defined by the sovereign’s duty to “conserve” conquered peoples and the conquered people’s duty to “obey.”135 Yet, he explained, because “the diverse and expansive colonies of Brazil” were “colonies of commerce,” such a foundation did not obtain. Portugal had sent settlers, many of whom were banished criminals, and the resulting settlements “were not founded to preserve what had been conquered as were those in India. These colonies,” Sanches observed, “started with the cultivation of the land and with commerce with the native inhabitants in the products of their lands.” Portuguese America, therefore, needed a “mode of governance” that reflected these distinct circumstances.136 In “Discursos” Sanches suggested that the inhabitants of colonies could, at their own expense, send two representatives to “the capital” to represent their “interests.” Such representation was not intended to create transatlantic continuities in governance, however. As Sanches suggested, following his critique of “Gothic monarchies,” the purposes of empire were not served by reproducing metropolitan institutions. Portuguese India’s “ruin,” he argued, was implicated in its foundation as “another kingdom with the same ecclesiastical, civil and military laws” as Portugal. As those conquests had drawn to a close, “there were many hands open to receive and very few left for work.”137 Extended across the globe, Sanches explained, the political culture of European monarchy then dissipated to the point of collapse. “To give and decree the same laws, honors, titles and offices in the same way in India, Africa and America as in Portugal,” he clarified, lending his medical expertise to the well-known corporeal metaphor, was “the same as transplanting the head of the kingdom to its limbs,” an operation that created a terminally monstrous body with a head deprived of blood and “enervated” limbs that “fell away in pieces.”138 In place of the transplanted old regime that Rocha Pita had celebrated and that settlers in the mining region had invoked, Sanches, like Martinho de Mendonça, argued that colonies needed a distinct form of rule based on a “simplified” sociolegal order, or what Sanches described as “consular jurisprudence.”139 To begin with, any recognition of honors and privileges needed
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to reproduce the hierarchy of colony and metropole. For the kingdom, he insisted, it was imperative that “the colonies have an inferior status” in relation to the economy of honorific distinction and privilege “practiced in Portugal.”140 Above all, however, the “civil society of the colony” was to be one where sociopolitical differences were minimal. As in the case of towns and villages, Sanches argued, “neither the pomp of ecclesiastical distinctions, nor the grandeza of gentlemen, nor deference to nobility” was befitting for the colonies. Without intervening hierarchies “between the sovereign and the inhabitants of colonies,” he explained, governance would be like the leadership of “an army in campaign” or a “warship,” unmediated and indisputable.141 Sanches’s simplified social-political order mitigated the potential for rebellion and, above all, promoted the production of wealth and its flow to Portugal. Any honors and privileges in colonies, he argued, were to reflect the imperative of productivity rather than relative proximity to royal power. Thus, in agricultural colonies it was farmers who were to enjoy the “greatest distinction.” Without the lure of undue privileges in the colonies, migration from Portugal would decrease, Sanches also claimed, while in the colonies themselves settlement would be guided by industriousness rather than a quest for royal largesse. Setting aside exclusive privileges and monopolies—“monsters of Gothic government,” as Sanches called them—would further allow settlers and merchants to fully cultivate their capacities to respond to demand.142 The suppression of unproductive ecclesiastical holdings by limiting bequests to the church, together with requirements that sugar mill owners be married or have legitimate heirs, would further liberate the agricultural economy’s unmet potential.143 Finally, curtailing honors and ending high-ranking ecclesiastical offices in Brazil would mean the end of inquiries into lineage and Inquisitorial attestations of purity, a practice that, as Sanches argued elsewhere as well, marginalized New Christians and debilitated a society’s productive potential. Along with the drain of resources toward Minas and Caribbean competition, Brazil’s sugar economy, he explained, had suffered from the Inquisition’s persecution of New Christian mill owners.144 Both the dismantling of sterile hierarchies and privileges and the development of the colonial economy, Sanches recognized, depended on educational practice. Beyond basic numeracy and literacy, he advised, public and private instruction should be forbidden in the colonies. He argued, as noted above, that skill and education increased the price of labor and the costs of colonial production, and, as a consequence, imperiled the balance of trade between the metropole and colonies. Relatively unskilled labor, in turn, aligned with
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the colonies’ function as markets for manufactures made in the metropole or imported to America by metropolitan traders. Indeed, although there were exceptions, such as the fabrication of clothing for enslaved people, Sanches argued categorically against any manufacturing in the colonies, including of textiles, arms, paper, and books. Such prohibitions, he explained, ensured that “the residents of the colonies” would live “in continuous dependence on the kingdom.”145 Foreclosing on instruction in Latin and Greek, philosophy, geometry, and “any form of science,” Sanches elaborated, would reinforce social equality, suppress the growth of the clergy, and preserve the colonial population’s dedication to producing the commodities that sustained the empire’s commerce.146 Anticipating complaints that such prohibitions ignored the “established nobility” and put “the native-born in a plebeian state of disrepute,” he appealed to the mercantilist logic that ideally guided imperial exchange. Wealthy Americans would be allowed to send their children to Portugal for education, he explained, so that “the riches of the colonies [would] circulate through the kingdom.” “In this way,” Sanches added, “new and wealthy men would compensate” for the loss of the Portuguese-born sent to the colonies. Once established in Portugal, those from ultramarine territories would “send for their assets,” just as Gusmão claimed had been the case with bachelors from Minas who went to Portugal in search of brides. Education in Portugal, Sanches added, would also inculcate love for “the patria” and, for some Americans, open up the possibility of royal service and honors, provided that they did not serve the crown in Brazil.147 Thus, the departure of wealthy “Brazilians [Brazileiros]” for Portugal to pursue their education promised a cyclical, and virtuous, recalibration of the social order that sustained Brazil’s function within the empire. “Brazil would be left with” a population of common people, who would be less likely to rebel, Sanches concluded, and more dedicated to the production of raw materials, which was “the only thing befitting a large colony.”148 As Serrão has observed, the connections between Sanches’s reformist vision and royal policies are complex. To a certain extent, Sanches’s defense of limits on education and printing in colonies was a defense of the Portuguese American status quo. In the preceding centuries the crown had not invested in educational institutions, while the expulsion of the Jesuits from the empire in 1759 left the order’s American schools and libraries, such as those where Rocha Pita and other Esquecidos had studied, in disarray. Without a university in Brazil, some settlers did send their sons to Portugal for higher education
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and, as the career of Alexandre de Gusmão indicates, such an education could lead to royal service. With regard to printing, in contrast to thriving local print cultures in Spanish America and earlier allowances for printing in the State of India, Brazil did not have a press.149 Affirming these restrictions in the late 1740s in response to reports that a Lisbon printer had set up shop in Rio, the crown invoked commercial rather than political imperatives, citing an inefficient circulation of resources between Portugal and Brazil. “Even with whatever [required] licenses,” royal orders explained, printing was forbidden because the higher costs in Brazil ran counter to “utility.” Consequently, until the early nineteenth-century transfer of the royal court, neither Rio de Janeiro, the American capital after 1763, nor Portuguese America’s other growing cities had a printing press. Manuscripts written in Brazil, including accounts of rites of allegiance such as those that marked the death of João V, had to be sent, like raw materials, to the metropole to be fabricated into books and pamphlets that could be shipped across the Atlantic for Brazilian readers to consume.150 With regard to Sanches’s broader socioeconomic program, while Sanches and Carvalho e Melo shared disdain for what Carvalho e Melo described as the “conquerors’” need for “perpetual war with conquered peoples” that destroyed the conquered land’s capacity to produce wealth, Sanches’s critique of monopolies and his more limited framework for trading companies ran counter to Carvalho e Melo’s approach to bolstering, and regulating, American commerce. Sanches’s influence on education reform in Portugal, in contrast, was, as Serrão describes it, “direct.” Carvalho e Melo challenged ecclesiastical amortization, Inquisitorial authority, and the distinctions between New and Old Christians that Sanches had decried.151 Sanches’s arguments against colonial manufacturing, in turn, anticipated a 1785 prohibition on textile manufacturing in Brazil, which, the law’s defenders argued, had resulted in a decline in customs revenues and the export of Portuguese silk fabric and ribbon. Although in earlier decades the crown had conceded the utility of limited American manufacturing, the new law took aim at “the great number of workshops and manufactories” across Brazil, enumerating an extensive list of luxury fabrics and adornments that would no longer be made there. An exception for “coarse cotton cloth” used for wrapping goods and for the “dress of blacks” recognized the “grave burden” that buying exclusively imported goods imposed on “Blacks, Indians and poor families” across Brazil. American production, in other words, was to align with what Sanches called “plebeian” consumption. At stake, too, royal minister Martinho de Melo e Castro argued of the 1785 law, was the circulation of wealth, which, together with anticontraband
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measures issued the same day, the prohibition on manufacturing would promote by ensuring that “utilities and riches of these most important colonies” did not remain “the patrimony of their inhabitants and of the foreign nations with which they share them.” Whether American opulence was a problem depended, as royal officials earlier in the century had argued, on how goods were supplied. For those in Brazil who could afford them, “luxury and other precious commodities” could be procured through inter-imperial exchange. Otherwise, Portugal would be the most “sterile and useless” of the monarchy’s dominions, and Brazil’s “inhabitants will be totally independent of the governing capital.”152 Sanches’s synthesis of the political economy of Portugal’s colonies thus defended existing, and envisioned new, administrative actions in Portuguese America intended to ensure that, notwithstanding Brazil’s resources and Brazilian acquisitiveness, Portugal remained the center of political and economic power. Although neither imperial hierarchies nor the extraction of wealth from America was new, Sanches perceived a need to elucidate the ways that American difference upheld imperial prosperity. While those who contested the Pragmática likewise claimed that administrative continuities had to be set aside in order to accommodate the social-political alterities that slavery had produced and, thereby, ensure that American wealth found its proper metropolitan destinations, Sanches more broadly, and more bluntly, argued that laws and institutions in colonies were to uphold dependency rather than foster aspirations to authority. Colonies, as he affirmed in one of his many annotations, were places where it “should not be easy to get rich.”153 In this sense, while, as Júnia Furtado has argued, metropole and colony are “purely formal concepts” that do not account for an integration of interests or a sharing of “cultural values,” Sanches’s reports on Portugal’s colonies suggest that such an erasure was the point.154 The “Gothic” laws and the politics of honors may have forged Portuguese extra-European sovereignty, but they did so, he insisted, in ways that undermined its purposes. Although the Portuguese did not embark on the kind of wholesale legal reforms that Sanches had envisioned (and through the late 1770s Sanches remained critical of the “old kingdom” of Portugal), in the second half of the eighteenth century royal officials assumed, like Sanches, that the integrity and prosperity of the empire were based not only on political-cultural transformations that followed conquest, but above all on delineation of the productive and consumptive functions of the colony of Brazil in the administration of social and economic relations. In other words, even as the idea that colonies were
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to function as sources of raw materials and markets became commonplace in transimperial and Portuguese economic discourses, royal policy sought to discern how that function could be sustained in practice. While officials and merchants on both sides of the Atlantic debated regulatory approaches to production, consumption, and the circulation of wealth, they shared an increasing appeal to empire as a whole composed of necessarily different parts. As Manuel Teles da Silva suggested to Carvalho e Melo in 1752, a “new empire” in America needed “particular, and so to speak, territorial regulations.”155 Mideighteenth-century Portuguese endeavors to occupy and settle American territory, as we will see in the next chapter, further consolidated social and economic discontinuities across Portugal’s Atlantic empire.
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5 • Peoples and Colonies Settlement, Labor, and the Geography of Empire
The ship was about one day out from its final destination, past the most dangerous stretches of the voyage from the Azores to Pará, when on September 17, 1754, it ran into a shoal. Once apprised of the misfortune, Governor Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado dispatched canoes to the rescue, but disaster could not be averted. As Mendonça Furtado reported to royal officials in Lisbon, the losses were manifold: supplies for a planned expedition, numerous parcels sent to settlers, the bishop’s vestments and provisions for his household. Royal orders and instructions written in confidence to officials in Pará also went down with the ship and, Mendonça Furtado conjectured, could wash ashore and fall into the hands of those who had no business reading them. To make matters worse, the ship’s lost cargo included salt. Until the local supply could be replenished, he explained, settlers were left with “the extreme” of using sugar to season their food. Most “painful,” of course, was the loss of life and the toll of the wreck on survivors. “Two blacks entrusted to the captain” and thirty-eight “white persons” (poor men, women, and children) perished in the turbulent waters that engulfed the vessel. Those who made it to shore on a quickly assembled raft were left “in the greatest misery,” grieving, barefoot, and with only the clothes on their backs.1 The wreck was one of many that befell their ships as the Portuguese conquered and traded in the early modern Indian and Atlantic oceans. In the sixteenth century some had even inspired what Josiah Blackmore has characterized as a uniquely Portuguese “shipwreck narrative enterprise.” Eventually compiled in Bernardo Gomes de Brito’s Historia Tragico-Maritima (1735-36), shipwreck accounts disrupted the memory of heroic mariners and conquerors, foregrounding the crushing costs, rather than the glorious benefits, of
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what Charles Boxer described as Portugal’s “seaborne” empire.2 The reports of the 1754 tragedy at sea, in contrast, were more laconic. Those aboard had left the Azores behind not to conquer or trade but rather to “people [povoar],” or populate, joining the growing number of “couples of the islands.” These were people who took up the call of crown-sponsored settlement in the Amazon River region near the porous and unstable boundaries of the State of Grão Pará and Maranhão and territory claimed by European rivals. This chapter examines how Portuguese officials and residents of Portuguese America invested in this and other settlement endeavors, and how debates about population, difference, and labor shaped practices of imperial administration and perceptions of the empire’s geography and political economy. Like their counterparts across the Atlantic world, royal officials and critics committed to administrative reform invoked population as a predicate for, and a sign of, prosperity. What difference did it make if the mines were depleted, the Count of Assumar asked in 1733, since, in contrast to the “sickly” and depopulated Bahian backlands, the “good climate” in Minas had given rise to “good dwellings” and thriving farms and ranches that sustained “flourishing” coastal settlements and filled royal coffers.3 “Everyone knows,” António Ribeiro Sanches reiterated later, in Tratado da conservação dos povos (Treatise on the Conservation of Peoples; 1756), “that the most solid base of a powerful state consists of a multitude of subjects.”4 With regard to Portugal’s American territory, royal officials, including Luís da Cunha, affirmed that settlement and its expression in the principle of uti possidetis were also the key to keeping Portugal’s American rivals at bay.5 In the context of expanding sovereignty and eighteenth-century rivalry, the Portuguese also recognized that reaping the benefits of a large population required knowing its capacities. As Martinho de Mendonça argued in the 1730s, William Petty’s “political arithmetic” had made plain that for “resolutions of state to be certain,” they needed to be founded on “exact calculations” of vassals and their productive and consumptive roles. Accordingly, like their counterparts in other European states, over the course of the eighteenth century Portuguese royal officials invested in more comprehensive and frequent measuring of populations living in the monarchy’s territories. Alongside the new census for the capitação in Minas, Lima’s Geografia historica, published under the aegis of the Academia Real, included the Marquis of Abrantes’s 1732 census of “hearths and souls” in the kingdoms of Portugal and the Algarves, while as early as the 1720s the crown sent instructions to religious and royal officials in Brazil to count and racially categorize people living in their jurisdictions.6
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The size of populations across the monarchy’s territories, officials and chroniclers recognized, hinged on several variables, including fertility and mortality, and—as the canon of Évora, Manuel Severim de Faria, had argued in the previous century—a mobility that was part and parcel of the empire. As Faria had stressed as well, while some states used colonies to counter the effects of what they judged to be surplus population, Portugal’s demographic resources were chronically limited. “Since the time of King Manuel,” Sanches, too, affirmed in Cartas, Portugal had done nothing more than “unmake itself” in order “to birth other kingdoms.”7 As the Portuguese negotiated and then implemented the Treaty of Madrid (1750) that extended the crown’s claims into western American hinterlands, royal officials thus had to answer questions of how, and with whom, to settle what Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo called a “vast frontier [raya].” For both royal officials and critics like Sanches, the costs of colonial settlement achieved through migration could be offset somewhat by the production of wealth and social order across the empire. The population, in other words, had to be not only measured, evaluated, and grown, but also managed.8 Invoking French internment of the poor and itinerant, Sanches endorsed the longstanding Portuguese practice of extra-European banishment, advising that “the colonies should be the General Hospital for any man above twenty years without a trade, without assistance, who lives from his labor [but] who cannot show how he feeds and clothes himself.” Arriving in Brazil, these men could be divided among settlers and “forced to work.”9 As royal courts banished people to Brazil and other Portuguese territories, eighteenth-century royal officials invested as well in the settlement schemes noted above, recruiting poor farmers and their families to put down roots and reproduce in the American hinterland. For the Portuguese, what Foucault and historians of Europe’s eighteenth century have described as an emerging “biopolitics” also encompassed a reevaluation of the role that Indigenous peoples could play in defending American territorial claims. Earlier projects to promote explicitly “white” settlement gave ground to what Manuel Teles da Silva described as the neglected possibility of making “from such a diversity of savages, Tapuias, blacks and mulattos a China in Brazil.”10 Crucially, as in earlier moments of conquest and occupation, European settlers, Natives, and intermarried couples were to be joined in the settlement endeavor by enslaved Africans. While Sanches expressed a dissident concern that the “plunder” of Africa would run its course and a “lack” would then demand a new “way of increasing the people,” royal officials, traders, and set-
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tlers pursued commercial, financial, and political means to expand the slave trades to Brazil.11 Mid-century reforms also redefined the geography of slavery and Black labor within the empire. Thus, together with settlement schemes and a new regime for Indigenous dispossession and labor, the ancient practice of enslavement that the Portuguese had used to conquer and incorporate lands into the monarchy, and that produced much of the wealth that circulated within the empire and thereby connected its parts, came to mark the boundaries between metropolitan Portugal and the colony of Brazil.
Empire as Settlement Scheme Among those who accompanied Pedro Álvares Cabral on his momentous voyage in 1500 from Portugal to India were twenty degredados, men judged by royal courts to be guilty of crimes and sentenced to punitive banishment. The men, whose ranks included skilled artisans, were part of a pool of labor to be used as Cabral saw fit. Thus, reckoning with his unplanned detour across the Atlantic to eastern South America, Cabral decided that when he returned to his original itinerary he would leave two of the banished behind. In the Land of the Holy Cross, as Cabral called the territory he claimed for the Portuguese crown, the men were to live among Indigenous peoples and learn their customs so as to facilitate future Native-Portuguese transactions. At the same time, as the account of Cabral’s landing made clear, the Portuguese also imagined that the banished men would transform—“domesticate” and “pacify”— the coastal Natives who, after trying to force the men back to Cabral’s ships, ended up harboring the castaways out of pity (the men cried as Cabral set sail without them) or simply tolerated their presence on the coast.12 Cabral’s move resonated in ultramarine settlement practices that the Portuguese had deployed as early as the 1450s, when royal courts began banishing those found guilty of crimes to uninhabited Atlantic Ocean islands: the Azores, Madeira, and, above all, São Tomé and Principe. In the 1490s the latter islands also received two thousand Jewish children taken from their parents in Portugal and forcibly baptized. Coerced settlement by the banished appealed to officials because it offered one solution to two problems: criminality and religious heterodoxy in Portugal, on the one hand, and the need for human resources to consolidate royal possession of newly claimed lands, on the other. On the islands and other Portuguese outposts, the banished served as soldiers and in the galleys; they farmed; and, in some cases, they traded in enslaved Africans.
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As royal courts and the Inquisition banished men to increasingly remote destinations in Africa, Asia, and America, women living outside of patriarchal households, as well as enslaved women and women accused of vagrancy, prostitution, and other crimes, were also trafficked throughout the empire under the auspices of royal and religious authority. In the fifteenth century, men posted to fortified enclaves in Africa could count on the crown to provide enslaved women and hired “castle women” to take care of domestic tasks. The crown’s recognition that these women would either trade in sex or be raped was very thinly veiled. In the centuries that followed, as the Portuguese expanded their extra-European claims, “errant” women with “little chance of marriage” in Portugal and women accused of prostitution continued to face banishment to fledgling settlements where, officials presumed, they might marry someone of equally low status and, once in the state of matrimony, mend the error of their ways.13 To bolster the consolidation of remote enclaves of Portuguese authority, the crown also granted dowries, in some cases in the form of royal offices, to “orphans of the king.” These daughters of men who died serving the crown were to marry men who were also committed to royal service beyond Europe. As was the case with banishment, orphan schemes offered “remedies” that both bolstered Portuguese ultramarine settlement and attenuated social disorder in the kingdom. Orphans were a problem, Faria argued, and “most dangerous” in the case of untethered poor girls and women. “All means,” he concluded, could be used to marry off these women who, once brought back into the fold of patriarchal authority, would produce a “multitude of people.” The pronatalism and commitment to Europeanized domesticity that marked such schemes further underwrote the empire in privileges granted to men who married and served abroad and, as we saw initially here, in the settlement of couples. In the seventeenth century the crown sent hundreds of couples to the coast of Mozambique and, in America, to Maranhão and Colônia do Sacramento.14 Migration from Portugal to the crown’s territories beyond Europe took shape outside of these official schemes as well, as Portuguese, pushed and pulled by various circumstances, sought better fortunes in territories under the crown’s control.15 Although most migrants were men, women of status as well as those of modest means found their way to ultramarine outposts. Their labor and management of assets in Portugal and in settlements, as Júnia Furtado has argued, propelled trajectories of social mobility that unfolded across the empire and exposed divergences between the lived experiences of women and religious and legal discourses of subordination, protection, and
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seclusion.16 By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the expansionist vigor that the migrations of men and women appeared to sustain had also triggered alarm as an ostensible cause of a decrease in Portugal’s own population. In response, a 1646 royal order required that Portuguese vassals who wished to leave the kingdom of Portugal secure a license. In the decades that followed, however, migration continued apace and, Faria asserted, remained among the principal sources of economic and political decline.17 The gold rush to Brazil only made the circumstances more dire. In just a short time, Simão Ferreira Machado recalled in introducing Triunfo eucharistico (1734), “half of Portugal” had come to Minas.18 Machado’s embellishment notwithstanding, recent calculations suggest that between 1700 and 1750, around 100,000 Portuguese migrated to Brazil, the high point of European-American migration within the early modern empire. The impact of migration relative to the population as a whole was at least three times that of migrations from other European states to settler colonies.19 The king, once again, sought to stem “the tide of multitudes,” Machado noted, because it threatened to deplete the kingdom of “people needed for agriculture and many endeavors of the republic.”20 More specifically, royal orders decried the “lack of people in this kingdom” and restricted migration to those who had official appointments, or who served those who did, enforced through an inspection of passports. Still, for many in Portugal what Luís da Cunha described in 1742 as “the aroma of the mines” overpowered any fears of punishment. Nor were the new rules to keep people in Portugal without contradictory effects. As the Gazeta de Lisboa reported in 1720, those who violated the orders would be banished to Africa for three years.21 As religious and royal officials also argued, effective control of the volume of migration to its ultramarine territories was not the only challenge facing the crown’s American enterprise. Rather than reproducing European social and moral arrangements, settlements, they reported, were engulfed in the disorder that followed from sinful encounters between Portuguese men and Indigenous peoples. Writing from Brazil, sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries judged that Portuguese men’s weakness in the face of the temptation posed by Native women was lamentable but also inevitable. Of special concern, their letters suggest, were nudity and forms of union and partnership that they did not recognize or that deviated from Christian sexual morality. Worse yet, rather than impose Christian moral and marital practices, settlers embedded themselves in polygamous and even incestuous relations, fathering numerous children with numerous women. Seeking to curtail these transgressions,
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Olimpia Rosenthal observes, the Jesuits “racializ[ed] the perceived dangers” of Portuguese-Native unions, embodied in offspring who tended, they claimed, to cultivate Indigenous ways of life. While Manuel de Nóbrega was more sanguine about women of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry whose unions with Portuguese men were celebrated in the Church, he and other Jesuits nevertheless invoked whiteness in their pleas for orphaned Portuguese women in new settlements. Portuguese men were sinful, they explained, but they also wanted to marry European women and would even “fight over” recently arrived unmarried servants.22 Eighteenth-century religious and royal officials rehearsed the Jesuits’ earlier judgments of settlers whose relations with Native, and now especially African, women ostensibly imperiled the moral integrity of American societies. Writing to the Count of Assumar in Minas in the early 1720s, the king affirmed that “illegitimate” offspring disordered social arrangements that were foundational to Portuguese sovereignty itself. The promotion of marriage, presumed to be contracted among Europeans, would “civilize” society and thwart “disobedience,” the king made known, and therefore it was crucial that “leading persons and others embrace the state of marriage and establish themselves with their well-ordered families.” As was the case in the early sixteenth century, however, those who migrated, especially to the mining region, were disproportionately men. The exodus of men who went in search of mineral wealth, Jaime Cortesão later argued, thus “devirilized” Portugal’s population, while in the mining region itself, Assumar’s successor complained, there were so few marriageable women that the overwhelming number of proposals their fathers received generated “a great unease.” In these circumstances, the governor also proposed, the king needed to relax the requirement that only married men exercise local leadership.23 Two decades later, one resident of Minas observed, such contingencies had yet to be overcome. European forms of patriarchy and racial hierarchy could be reconstructed, and utility promoted, he suggested, if men who “received” women of African and mixed ancestry and “all the other poor whores” were matched instead with poor, and presumably white, Portuguese orphans.24 What Rosenthal describes as the instrumentalization of European women’s role in reproducing a white population in Portuguese American settlement was also invoked in debates about religious life.25 In contrast to that of Spanish America, Brazil’s religious-institutional terrain did not include a convent, as Rocha Pita complained in his Historia, until the late seventeenth century, when the Portuguese crown sanctioned the foundation of the Convent of Santa
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Clara do Desterro in Salvador (1677). Although the crown continued to receive petitions from women and men in Brazil eager to spare themselves or their daughters the risks and costs of a transatlantic voyage to pursue monastic life in Portugal, decades would pass before additional convents were founded. Local requests for recolhimentos (shelters) met with more success, perhaps because residence in these houses did not necessarily imply that women had forgone the bearing of children. In the case of an extended absence from the home, for example, men could “deposit” wives and daughters in a recolhimento until their return.26 Convents, in contrast, foreclosed, at least officially, on reproduction. As one counselor explained in criticizing a petition for a convent from Rio’s town council in 1678, “in the conquests the increase of peoples was most befitting.”27 Eighteenth-century royal officials, steeped in broader debates about the damaging effects of widespread celibacy, reiterated the claim that convents were detrimental to the European settlement enterprise, appealing to the challenges of effectively deploying and also improving the population in the wake of the gold rush. “I suppose every woman in Brazil will be a nun,” Lourenço de Almeida, writing from Minas as governor, complained in 1722 of plans for a new convent in Rio de Janeiro.28 Convents and monasteries, Luís da Cunha argued in the late 1730s, remained the “first and most copious of hemorrhages,” an institutionalized convention that drained vital forces from Portugal. And “If the excess of monks and nuns is so harmful in the kingdom,” he further explained, “it is even more pernicious in the conquests where there is a need for people to work on plantations and in the mines and in the increase of commerce.”29 For Sanches, in turn, convents, as “so many arches of idleness’s triumph,” were symptomatic of a political and legal culture that privileged honor and old Christian identity over prosperity. As part of a “Gothic” legacy, monastic life, he argued, was also at odds with the simpler expressions of piety defined by relations between priest and parish, more appropriate for colonies because they did not infringe upon the imperatives of labor and reproduction.30 In 1722, and again in 1731, Almeida had offered João V a solution to the population problem in Brazil: prohibit women from leaving there to seek monastic life. Sending their daughters, often against their will, to convents in Portugal or the Atlantic Islands was “very common to people of low birth,” Almeida claimed, a tendency that meant “it will not be possible to settle Minas with the people needed to do so.” Marriages, in contrast, promoted growth in the settler population and also, he argued, a rootedness based on households led by men with legitimate heirs.31 In 1732 the king concurred. The “excessive”
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number of women who left Brazil under the “pretext” of pursuing religious life, or whose fathers denied them exercise of their free will (vontades) in marriage choice, a new royal order affirmed, did “great injury to the growth and settlement of that state.” To rectify these circumstances, he ordered, henceforth women were prohibited from traveling from Portuguese America to the kingdom of Portugal without a license.32 Like the 1749 Pragmática, the order created confusion, and the crown had to clarify that the prohibition on travel did not apply to married women who went from Portugal to Brazil with their husbands and then sought to return.33 Writing later in 1768, the governor of São Paulo also cast doubt on whether the order had, or ever would have, its intended effect. Many men, he complained, including those recently arrived from Portugal, shunned the stability of married life, perambulating “from one captaincy to another” while indulging in “vice.” Others were discouraged by the delays and expenses of the various attestations required for marriage. As a result, the governor claimed, “thousands” of women remained unmarried.34 Nor did the royal restrictions on women’s travel deter them from seeking pious alternatives to marriage. Both women and religious authorities in Brazil continued to petition the crown for new convents in Brazil. By the second half of the eighteenth century, royal and religious officials relented and approved plans for Salvador and Rio de Janeiro.35 The concession, however, did not mean that official concern with reproduction had ebbed. As the Archbishop of Salvador recognized in 1755, the best defense of the city’s four convents was not the piety cultivated within their walls but rather the city’s growth: they could not be judged to have substantially decreased “human propagation.”36 Scrutinizing women’s status and promoting marriage as a catalyst for Europeanization and the growth of white settlement, royal officials also took aim at conjugal practices common on both sides of the Atlantic. As the governor of São Paulo conceded, if substantial and legally superintended dowries were not in play, many men and women simply forwent religious ceremonies and lived together “for all of their lives.” While out of these unions came children, and therefore the growth of Portuguese settlements, their “illicit” nature, the governor argued, meant that they could not yield “good propagation or grounding” for communities upon which the imperial enterprise depended. Settlers’ lack of interest in, or unwillingness to submit to, royal and religious regulation, his letter made clear, aligned with other social problems, such as vagrancy and idleness.37
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The ideal of consecrated marriage as a socioeconomic and political foundation of empire thus informed both schemes to mobilize convicts and orphans and restrictions on the movement and religious lives of American-born women. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it also underwrote repeated plans, including one by Alexandre de Gusmão, to settle poor farmers from Madeira and the Azores in Brazil. While “married women” and “couples” were needed in American settlements, one report from Minas explained, on the Atlantic Islands, especially the Azores, the population had outpaced the land’s capacity to sustain it, and many residents could barely feed themselves.38 In the seventeenth century earthquakes and volcanic activity had left many Azoreans even more bereft. Thus, Azoreans had become a surplus population to be used in the kind of colonization schemes that, as Sanches’s categories of colonies indicated, the Portuguese had otherwise not been able to sustain.39 Like the explicit references to whiteness in orphan schemes, a pronatalist defense of Azorean settlement attached to officials’ warnings about the social and political consequences of a mostly Indigenous and African-descended population in the crown’s American territories. In 1720, advising the crown on how to bring order to the reported “chaos” in Ceará, António Rodrigues da Costa pointed to the “mulatto” Felipe Coelho who, after the departure of missionaries, had asserted his own authority over Native villages and, “coupling with Indian women, propagated a great number of children, all of whom followed his bad example, maltreating Indians and whites.” Such circumstances were possible, Rodrigues da Costa implied, due to a steady demise of fledgling white settlements. Because “there were no white women with whom to marry,” “many Portuguese men” had relations with Native women and produced children who were “impure, ill-mannered and poorly disciplined.” The solution, he also explained, was for the crown “to found a colony,” sending one hundred couples from the Atlantic islands, “preferably with daughters,” so that settlers would have “Portuguese women to marry.”40 In 1722, and again the following decade, advising on governance in Minas, the Overseas Council returned to a defense of Azorean settlement after reaffirming that the “many inconveniences” that followed from unions between Blacks and white settlers justified prohibition of their marriages; the proscription extended to marriages between white settlers and Black men or women, “mulatto/as,” and children and grandchildren of Black men or women. Citing the example of “other colonies” where couples had been sent to settle, including the “Indies of Castile” populated with people from the Canary Islands,
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counselors complained that the Portuguese had not sufficiently considered similar plans, and, if they had, they had not followed through. The failure to promote more robust settlement schemes, together with the restrictions on migration from Portugal, especially of women, meant, they explained, that Brazil was “peopled with mestiços.”41 New settlement schemes, officials insisted, arrested these trends and allowed the crown both to consolidate hinterland claims and to recover ground that had been ceded to the consequences of Portuguese sexual predation and Portuguese men who coupled with Indigenous women on Indigenous terms. Accordingly, eighteenth-century pamphlets extolled American climates, “informing the plebes,” as one explained, “of the lands of Pará,” while officials oversaw schemes with detailed contracts for transporting the couples. Broadsides announced that those who decided to embark would be provided transportation, tools, and funds to assist in settlement in the Amazon region and Santa Catarina in the South. Couples were required to present proof of marriage and of their connections to other members of their households who would be joining them, in addition to information about their “health, disposition, stature,” and trade. Writing in 1715, on a scheme that involved couples from Trás-as-Montes in Portugal and the Atlantic islands, Rodrigues da Costa argued that settlers needed to know “how to cultivate the land” and also should have a skill that would be useful in fledgling settlements, such as carpentry, iron forging, shoemaking, or healing. Men were to be under forty and women under thirty—in other words, able to work and to produce children. In some schemes men were exempted from military service for two years, even as governors envisioned the children of these couples as a pool of future recruits. To avoid undermining the domestic order that ostensibly would define the new settlements, the crown also issued detailed instructions for conduct during the transatlantic voyage. Along with providing daily rations, captains were entrusted with maintaining a strict separation of men and women aboard their ships. Women were not to speak to men other than their husbands and sons, with most of their time spent in a separate chamber where no man could enter except to attend to the ill and administer the sacraments.42 To ensure the success of mid-century settlement schemes, the crown sent governors in Brazil detailed instructions about how to prepare for the settlers’ arrival. At ports, local officials were to assume “the father’s role,” providing rations and temporary shelter. At their destination settlers were to receive rudimentary dwellings, land to cultivate, and the promised tools and funds. The settlers would then build new, sturdier homes for themselves as well as for the
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Figure 9. “Chart of couples” from the Azores, recording deaths at sea and following arrival at Santa Catarina, 1751. (With permission. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Portugal, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_021, Cx. 1, D. 46.)
next group of settlers who, in turn, would bear responsibility for later arrivals.43 Such plans, however, often fell apart under the weight of the unfortunate and unforeseen. Some would-be settlers did not survive the voyage from the Azores to Brazil. As we saw above, shipwrecks sometimes brought hopeful arrivals to desperate ends, while passengers on other voyages regularly succumbed to conditions aboard (figure 9). The remaining family members disembarked grief-stricken and exposed. Other passengers arrived seriously ill. Nearby military hospitals, royal officials in Brazil reported, struggled to heal the sick, while they contended with the challenge of extending charity to new widows and their numerous children.44 At the same time, governors also complained of circumstances produced not by fate and nature, but rather by those entrusted with implementing the plans—circumstances that, therefore, demanded correction rather than pity. Cohorts of settlers, they reported, included too many women and too many men who could not work. Officials in the Azores, the Overseas Council learned, “without the fear of God or respect for royal orders,” had dispatched an “excessive number of people who were useless and inept due not only to deformities and other incurable ailments, but also those who were decrepit
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due to their exceedingly advanced age.” Many could not even make it from port to the sites of settlement. As a consequence, would-be settlers became “vagrants.” As official reports also suggested, what Faria earlier had described as a settler “ease of living” was undermined by the lack, or an inadequate administration, of food and supplies for people who arrived with very few possessions of their own.45 Official paternalism, intended to promote the growth and productivity of new settlements, also took distorted shapes that generated conflict. The “stupid tyrannies” of the governor of Santa Catarina, one official denounced to the king in 1759, were so “excessive” that they produced “the effects of slavery.” Along with limits on what settlers could plant, the governor’s incursions into “domestic governance” meant that heads of households needed his permission to discipline their wives and to discipline or arrange marriages for their children. In response to punishments for violating orders, settlers fled and, without knowledge of the terrain, ended up drowning in hinterland waterways.46 Within settlements, broader pronatalist royal policies also backfired. A royal order that extended offers of land and supplies to the children of settlers who married within the first year, one governor explained, had led to “thoughtless” pairings and domestic discord. Driven by poverty, he conceded, settlers who married in this way “defrauded” the crown at the expense of those too young to benefit from royal grace. The Council concurred and advised the king that the goals of settlement would be better served by rewarding young settlers with resources once they reached marriageable age.47 In spite of these problems, however, from the mid-eighteenth century forward royal counsel continued to point to the political-economic imperatives of possession and productivity to defend settlement schemes. Writing in 1742, Luís da Cunha advised that even “foreigners,” regardless of their religious allegiances, should be encouraged to settle in Brazil. Intermarriage, he argued, would in time yield “good Portuguese and good Roman Catholics.” In 1747, as he affirmed that settlement voyages from the Azores would encompass up to four thousand couples, João V concurred. Royal orders, however, stipulated that foreigners could join the cohorts provided that they were Catholic and not “subjects of sovereigns who have dominions in America.”48 After 1750, efforts to implement the Treaty of Madrid further strengthened the need for de facto occupation in South America at borders where settlers would, as one official concluded, deter the encroachments of “bad neighbors.”49 By the 1770s the crown also expanded the strategic redeployment of settlers beyond Portugal and the Atlantic islands, sending several hundred families from the North
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African enclave of Mazagão, surrendered in 1769, to a make a “New Mazagão” at the Amazon region’s borders.50 Holding Portuguese ground in contested zones, these settlements would, officials insisted, promote economic utility based on an expansion of agriculture. As José da Silva Pais reassured the Overseas Council, settling couples in the south of Brazil would “increase the cultivation of those lands that were good for growing both American and European products.”51 And even if settlers were poor, as officials writing from Brazil frequently affirmed, the settlement schemes could be regarded as economically and politically sound because they increased the population of Portuguese America. After all, as Carvalho e Melo had reiterated in 1751, the “power and wealth of all countries consists mainly in the number and growth of the people who inhabit it.”52 In the eighteenth century the idea of “population” emerged, as Foucault observed, “not only as a problem but as an object of surveillance, analysis, intervention, modification etc.”53 While some contemporary critics and observers understood this transformation as having to do with perceptions of the “labor force” in the context of European population growth, for Portuguese royal officials the demographic scenario and the range of potential interventions were more complex. The Portuguese monarchy encompassed territories with populations that, as royal officials and critics argued, were differentiated not only by size but also by ways of life and embodied attributes. Earlier experience also showed that the growth of a white population in America could not be taken for granted. Sustaining American settlements and a social order defined by Europeanized forms of reproduction and production required, therefore, foreclosing on the mobility of some people while promoting the mobilization of others. Calculations and imaginings of populations were inseparable from the interplay of metropolitan imperatives and the delineation and actualization of capacities that served colonization.
Settlers and Natives in a Vast Frontier In the mid-eighteenth century the dynamic of population also inspired reconsiderations of the connections among the growth of white settlements, prosperity, and the maintenance and extension of Portuguese rule in Brazil. Surveying Portuguese America in 1751, just a year after the Treaty of Madrid, Carvalho e Melo returned to earlier critiques of the empire’s costs and concluded that, while vital, the promotion of European migration and reproduction alone would not sustain the crown’s American enterprise. “Even if the
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islands and the kingdom were left entirely deserted,” Carvalho e Melo reckoned, migration “would not be enough to settle such a vast frontier.” Making matters worse, the Spanish had “propagated” along intra-American borders where the Portuguese side was “deserted.” The solution he proposed was to summon to those areas vassals “from the kingdom and from America who are found to be civilized,” as well as Natives from the Tape missions who would be rewarded “even more favorably.”54 Writing to Carvalho e Melo the following year from Vienna, Manuel Teles da Silva similarly affirmed that settlement, “the most secure basis for the wealth and power of the state,” should proceed in Brazil’s hinterland “in any way. Moor, white, black, Indian, mulatto or mestiço.” “Everyone was suited” for the task, he explained, because “all are men, they are good if they are well governed and administered according to [our] aims.” With diverse peoples brought into the Catholic fold, he added, an allegiant and fertile domesticity would displace “useless wombs.”55 Recourse to Indigenous peoples for defense against European rival encroachments was nothing new. While in the so-called War of the Barbarians, the Portuguese had sought to gain control of the hinterland in exterminatory wars against Native peoples, royal officials had come to see the missionary enterprise at the borders of Portuguese territory as part of ongoing efforts to bolster both Native allegiance and the legitimacy of the crown’s claims. As the Overseas Council observed in 1695, “the heathens [gentios]” were “the hinterland’s walls.”56 By mid-century, however, scrutinizing socioeconomic conditions in Grão Pará and Maranhão, Mendonça Furtado reported “inexplicable” “confusion and disorder.” Pointing to insufficiently populated border regions, royal officials laid blame on settlers and a Jesuit administration of Indigenous villages that, they charged, hindered rather than nurtured Indigenous productivity, political incorporation, and the defense of Portuguese sovereignty. Natives frequently fled from mission villages to one of the many free communities (mocambos) in the hinterlands. News that settlers deployed the labor of Indigenous men far from mission settlements deterred others from moving into zones of Portuguese authority. Indigenous women, the governor of Maranhão explained in 1750, complained that settlers sent their spouses to work at great distances from their new villages, leaving them bereft. Some of these women also resisted European sexual violence and dispossession by curtailing their “propagation” and “multiplication.” They used “various herbs and roots with which they procured abortions,” the governor fumed, “while others sterilized themselves entirely.” Recent epidemics, officials attested, further ravaged Native communities. “There was no Tapuia, nor anyone with
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their blood, who did not perish from the potency of contagion,” one Lisbon pamphleteer reported in 1749 of an epidemic in Grão Pará.57 The royal instructions issued to Mendonça Furtado in 1751 before he assumed his duties as governor began to develop a reformist response to the prevailing, and reportedly disastrous, arrangements. Because the “decadence and ruin” of Grão Pará and Maranhão stemmed from an illicit enslavement of Natives by settlers and in missions, Mendonça Furtado was to reaffirm their status as free persons and ensure that they “did not experience the effects of slavery.” The settlers were to set aside their “barbarous” treatment of Natives and recognize that “it was more useful to have men who eagerly and voluntarily” served them than to contend with the labor shortages that followed from Indigenous resistance to their encroachments and demands.58 Writing to Gomes Freire de Andrada that same year, Carvalho e Melo argued further that the size and prosperity of settlements could be enhanced by “abolishing” the social distinctions between Portuguese and Tapes and granting privileges to those Portuguese who married the Tapes’ daughters. The children of such unions would be “reputed to be native to this kingdom, where they would be eligible for offices and honors” consistent with the norms of royal grace. Anyone who referred to them, “others like them,” or their mestiço children using the pejorative “barbarian” or “Tapuia” (the latter a term that for the Portuguese had come to connote bellicosity) would be punished.59 Elaborating on the governance of settler-Indian relations, Carvalho e Melo also invoked mercantilist calculations of population, wealth, and power. The destruction of the conquered was self-defeating, he explained, because “inhabitants” constituted “the principal wealth of states, and one state cannot produce enough people to populate many.” From this maxim it followed that “the conquerors” and “the conquered” should live instead “within the union of civil society and under the same laws, forming one body without any distinction.” Such a practice, deployed by the Romans, would ensure that “in Pará within a short time there would be as many Portuguese as today there are barbarians living in the forests.” The “one body” that stood for Portuguese American settlements would, in other words, eventually be a predominantly European one.60 Together with the ancient precedents that Carvalho e Melo explicitly invoked, the appeal to assimilation also resonated in more recent imaginings of populations. In the late seventeenth century, Petty, whose Political Arithmetic was of great interest to Carvalho e Melo, had proposed that the English could create a “union” with the “conquered” Irish through transplantation
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and “proportionable mixture.” The household would be a site where the Irish would be “transmuted” into loyal and industrious subjects.61 More akin to what the Portuguese viewed as their American predicament, in the 1660s JeanBaptiste Colbert, whom Carvalho e Melo admired and whose Testament politique (The Hague, 1684) he acquired in London, had argued that intermarriage between Indigenous women and French men in North America would forge both a legal-political and a physiological unity in French territory; “having one law and one master,” the French and Natives would “form one people and one blood.”62 While by the mid-eighteenth century French critics concluded that, rather than Frenchifying Natives, the scheme had made the French in America more “savage,” Carvalho e Melo and other royal officials committed to the idea that “white” settlers would “civilize” neighboring “settlements of Indians,” and, as Mendonça Furtado reported from Pará in 1753, in marrying Native women they would forge “common interests.” The crown, in turn, needed to reassure the settlers that such marriages did not produce “infamy” and to encourage Natives to overcome their “natural hate” for the Portuguese, engendered by the “poor treatment and contempt with which we treat them.” At stake was the Portuguese capacity to “people [povoar] this extensive state” upon which sovereignty and the extraction of wealth depended.63 Portuguese-Indigenous sexual relations were, as we have seen, nothing new. For eighteenth-century royal officials, the problem was that, as the Jesuits in Brazil and the French in North America had concluded, such relations tended to detach settlers from European ways of life rather than to consolidate European possession and Native allegiance. Using Native-settler unions to ensure Portuguese control over the American hinterland thus required a corresponding repression of people who in some cases were themselves offspring of Indigenous-Portuguese unions, most notably the cunhamenas (male in-laws), traders allied with Native principais (headmen) through conjugal unions with their daughters. In the 1750s both royal and religious officials took aim at their independence and disregard for Christian morality and the rule of European law. By 1753 a royal order, issued the previous year, reached the region announcing that white men who entered into relations with the daughters of principais would be punished with the lash or banishment to Angola. Cunhamenas with established alliances and networks began to face episcopal scrutiny as well and, in the 1760s, Inquisitorial persecution, incarceration, and coercive sanctification of their unions in Catholic rites that tore apart their alliances with Native leaders.64
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With such approaches to settlement taking shape in the first years of Dom José’s reign, Carvalho e Melo then ushered through their systematization. In 1755, the Overseas Council affirmed royal support for European-Native intermarriage. “The immense American continent cannot be settled and filled with vassals,” a royal treasurer argued in support of the measure, “except through communication between Europeans and Indians by way of marriages, which should be promoted.” The “Portuguese Nation” itself had used a similar strategy to gain footholds in Asia, “and in the same way” and “in no other way” could they promote their “dominion in America.”65 The following month the crown issued the Law on Marriages with Indians, which, in contrast to early eighteenth-century policy that discouraged interactions between settled Natives and settlers, codified the imperative of American population growth that could be achieved through “communication with the Indians, by way of marriages.” As Carvalho e Melo had earlier advised, the law stipulated that vassals who married Natives would not suffer “any infamy, rather they will be made deserving of my royal attention.” Those who defamed the descendants of those unions, calling them “cabouclos,” would be punished. As one magistrate observed, the measure, consistent with “the good laws of the politics of states,” ensured that Natives would “lose” their “name and color” and “in all ways would commingle with other vassals.”66 The same year as the Law on Marriages, additional legislation reaffirmed that Natives were free persons. To underscore the extent to which the settlers’ enslavement of Indigenous peoples had breached an established legal order, the Law of Liberties cited its precedents in toto. Setting aside recent “pretexts” for making exceptions to Natives’ free status, the law explicitly linked illicit enslavement with the dissipation of demographic resources. While “many millions of Indians” had been brought under Portuguese control, the text of the law stated, “the number of villages is very small.” Instead of invoking conquests and just wars that generated enslaved prisoners of war, and through which the crown had claimed sovereignty over American lands, the law reiterated contemporary official references to “communication” and interaction with Europeans as the grounds for reenergizing the languishing enterprise of “civilizing” and Christianizing Natives. With a change in course, the text of the law predicted, “the commerce of that state will grow in great benefit to the people who live there.” What Carvalho e Melo and other royal officials cast as a turn away from conquest did not, however, mean that Natives would not serve the Portuguese, whose settlements and cities were reduced to “ruin,” as
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one pamphleteer reported, when access to Indigenous labor was disrupted. Rather the law would initiate a new process for codifying the Natives’ duty to work for settlers, instructing local town governments to establish tables for daily wages.67 The crown further delineated a new framework for Indigenous status the day following the approval of the Law of Liberties, when an additional decree announced that the governance of Indigenous villages and the administration of labor arrangements would be “secular” and, thereby, displace those of the Jesuits and other missionary orders.68 Finally, the same year, informed by Mendonça Furtado’s counsel, the crown affirmed and elaborated upon all of these laws in the omnibus Directorio que se deve observar nas povoações dos indios do Pará, e Maranhaõ (The Directorate That Should Be Observed in the Settlements of the Indians of Pará and Maranhão). As historians of the eighteenthcentury Amazon region have explained, royal officials intended that the new Directorate would take the place of the missions as a structure for governing the Indigenous population in Grão Pará and Maranhão, and eventually all of Portuguese America. With missionary orders set aside in favor of parish clergy in the enterprise of Christianization, the new regime upheld Indigenous participation and leadership in local governance and the foundational politicaladministrative roles of villages and towns. However, what the Directorio described as the Indians’ “lamentable rusticity and ignorance” meant that they could not yet fully assume such authority. Therefore, “as long as the Indians do not have the capacity to govern themselves,” directors, appointed by the governor, were entrusted with administering Indigenous communities and with cultivating their “civility.”69 Privileging assumptions about universal human capacities, the Directorio’s affirmations of the crown’s commitment to evangelization and the potential for sociopolitical transformation sought to supplant hoary debates on the nature of Brazil’s Native inhabitants. While the Directorio’s defense of tutelage was similar to that of Siqueira da Gama, the Esquecido histories had cited radical differences, particularly those manifest in violence and war, to call into question Native rationality. The Count of Assumar likewise had disqualified Indigenous capacities, suggesting that only a “pontifical decree” stood in the way of recognizing that they were not fully human. For Rodrigues da Costa, in turn, “nature” had given Brazil’s Natives the capacity to serve and “nothing more.”70 In the years leading up to the Directorate reform, in contrast, Luís da Cunha argued that American difference could be understood in light of Europe’s pre-Christian past. “The Tapuias of Brazil,” he wrote in his “Carta de
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Instruções,” were “no less the Lord’s creatures” than “those in Europe, who for so many centuries lived in surrender to a blind and vile idolatry, howling in subjection to the devil’s dominion.”71 Carvalho e Melo, writing in 1753, similarly recast sociocultural transformations within a universal history in order to foreground transatlantic continuities even in the context of practices that earlier observers had argued set Native Brazilians apart. “We were all barbarians, as the Tapuias are today,” he laconically concluded, “only with the difference that we did not eat people.”72 As Da Cunha also claimed, rather than a product of corporeal difference, Native Brazilians’ alterity derived from social conditions that, while lamentable, were not specifically American. In Brazil’s backlands, he observed, the Tapuias “differ only in their color from our rustics in the provinces.”73 The comparison between rustics and the “Tapuia”—a term used by settlers and missionaries to describe Gê-speaking groups whom they considered bellicose and unsettled—resonated with earlier European applications of the category of rusticity to Natives and in unfolding perceptions of Native Americans and European “barbarians” as mirroring each other in their abjection.74 While jurists had recognized the rustic as one who lived apart from civic order, eighteenthcentury royal officials invoked rusticity to describe not only peoples they perceived to be unsettled but also poor communities within the orbit of European authority in which disorder had taken root. Writing of a visit to Trocano in 1756, Mendonça Furtado despaired at the “rusticity of the old settlement of miserable Indians,” while the Directorio, in turn, decried the social and moral “misery” manifest in Indigenous nudity as an “effect not of virtue, but rather of rusticity.”75 Such a categorization of Natives as rustics at once affirmed social and imperial hierarchies and elided statutory associations of Natives and children. Rustics should be dependent, but they were not innocent. Rather they were, as Bluteau’s Vocabulario indicated, ill mannered and debased.76 At the same time the denomination endorsed the possibility of transformation that would yield, as Da Cunha and Carvalho e Melo assumed, Christianization and “civility.” Rustics, including the “rustics over there” in the Americas, as sixteenth-century European jurists and missionaries had argued, could be reeducated so as to extirpate error.77 To overcome the sociocultural and material conditions that Mendonça Furtado and other officials decried, the Directorio proposed what Ângela Domingues has described as a thoroughgoing process of “Occidentalization.”78 Although missionary orders had encouraged the use of the “abominable” and “diabolical” língua geral, a generic reference to the linguae francae
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used by Natives and missionaries in coastal and Amazonian Brazil, moving forward, directors would ensure that Natives learned to speak Portuguese. Reiterating earlier, unsuccessful efforts to suppress the use of Indigenous languages, the Directorio pointed to the history of other empires to affirm that “the use of the language of the prince who conquered them, implanted in [Natives] affection, veneration and obedience.” New “public schools” for boys and girls would further inculcate European language, customs, and allegiance, as would requiring the use of new family names, chosen from those in use in Portugal. The crown also instructed directors to supervise the building or rebuilding of villages with “houses like those of whites; with various rooms within them,” so that, as families cultivated intimacy, they would abide by “the kind of separation that people of reason, bound by laws of honesty and civility, respect.” The preoccupation with Indigenous morality, in this case predicated on assumptions about boundaries within domestic spaces and the potential for “turpitude,” was conveyed as well in injunctions against drunkenness and prescriptions for dress. Rehearsing the sumptuary discourse on luxury and superfluity, “among the principal vices that have impoverished and ruined peoples,” and enjoining Natives to dress in “proportion to the quality of their persons and the degrees of their positions,” the decree recognized that in Indigenous communities the problem of dress stemmed not from excess but rather from nudity and “misery.” The task, therefore, was to cultivate Native “imaginations” in a way that would lead to “a virtuous and moderate desire to use decorous and decent forms of dress.”79 The Directorate was also predicated on the affirmation of intermarriage as a source of salutary transformation and population growth. Commenting on the new policies, royal counselors newly arrived at Salvador, including the founder of a new literary academy in Bahia, pointed to Mirabeau’s recent and anonymously published L’ami des hommes, ou traité de la population (1756) as a renewed defense of pronatalism. “Alliances” between Natives and Portuguese would increase the number of “settlers [povoadores], which constitutes the happiness of any republic.”80 Intermarriage would also underpin a more robust legal-political order for settler-Native relations that acknowledged the potential for Indigenous authority within Europeanized political practice. Following the Law on Marriages, the Directorio also pointed to marriage as the “sacred bond” that would serve to “totally extinguish that most odious distinction, which the most polished nations of the world abhorred as a common enemy of their true and fundamental formation.” Because, as the Directorio recognized, mixed marriages could become sites of “discord,” directors were
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to inform the governor of settlers who disparaged their spouses’ Indigenous ancestry. More generally, the new Directorate regime was to dislodge from “white” “imaginations” notions of Indigenous inferiority. Directors were to make known that the crown would not favor settlers over Natives, especially those with demonstrated “capacity,” in awarding honorific offices. Instead, the crown would treat the residents of Directorate villages as vassals and bestow “those honors that each one deserves considering the quality of their persons and the rank of their positions.”81 The Directorate scheme ratified intermarriage as part of a broader effort to cultivate communication between Europeans and Natives. Because contact with Europeans would counteract the Natives’ isolated rusticity, the Directorio urged that “whites” should move into Indigenous villages, refounded with Portuguese names. Integration would mitigate the entrenched and “odious separation” of peoples that had given rise to the “incivility” to which all found themselves “reduced.” The result would be an increase in the size of, and in the civility exhibited within, settlements. Civic bonds would be forged further in commerce. “Among the means that lead republics toward a complete happiness none is so effective,” the Directorio explained, “as the introduction of commerce, because it enriches peoples, civilizes nations, and consequently makes monarchies powerful.” The benefits of “selling, or the commutation of goods, and the communication between peoples”—“civility,” “interest,” and “wealth”—were intertwined and mutually reinforcing.82 As in the case of intermarriage policy, the Directorio recognized that civic and commercial relations required careful administration and mediation to ensure that settlers did not undermine the transformations that the reforms sought to achieve. Accordingly, the directors’ distribution of land to settlers was to be guided by recognition that Natives were “the original and natural lords of those same lands.”83 In the case of commercial exchanges, however, the Directorio observed that “their rusticity and ignorance” meant that Natives did not “comprehend the true and legitimate value” of what they produced, nor could they secure a “just price” for the materials that they needed to buy. Therefore, while Natives were to be instructed in weights, measures, and prices, they were not to “conduct commerce in their own right.” Rather, the directors would supervise their transactions so that they were not swindled and so that they did not receive goods that promoted vice rather than utility, such as alcohol. Because royal officials also assumed that Natives did not understand how to calibrate production based on demand, directors were ordered to scrutinize Indigenous agricultural enterprises to avoid overproduction. The
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commercial success of Native communities, the Directorio posited, was tied further to their relationship to royal authority through fiscal obligation that underwrote, at least in part, the Directorate regime itself. The directors, entrusted with keeping records of taxation, production, and exchange, were to retain one-sixth of “all of what the Indians cultivate, and of all of what they acquire,” excepting foodstuffs.84 Finally, the Directorio upheld assumptions, expressed by royal officials and the preliminary reformist legislation, that the incorporation of Indigenous Americans into vassalage, a political culture of honors, and a market economy was not intended to relieve them of the obligation to work outside their own communities. As a number of historians have explained, the Directorate was above all a labor regime. While the existing missionary enterprise had channeled Native labor into royal service and settlements, as well as annual expeditions to harvest tropical forest products, directors were to further discipline and displace “the erroneous use of Indian labor that had prevailed until today.” The Directorate thus relied on forms of violence and coercion that the reform law claimed it would replace. In administering Indigenous labor, directors were also expected to inculcate a moral understanding of work. The cultivation of the land was “honorable and useful,” a bulwark against the “pernicious vice of idleness” that was “congenital” in “uncultivated Nations” who, “fostered in the dense murk of their own rusticity,” had lost the “lights of natural understanding.” A new “civility,” in contrast, would be inseparable from increased utility and productivity.85 In this sense, rather than eradicating Native rusticity, the reform would enable an expression of its utility. After all, as Bluteau explained, rusticity was marked by “a manner of work” belonging to the “man of the countryside habituated to the humblest forms of agricultural work”— precisely the kind of labor that was needed in American hinterlands to bolster local economic exchanges and Portuguese possession.86 The Directorate reform acknowledged that it was not only Indigenous labor that demanded discipline. Settlers, royal officials on both sides of the Atlantic reported, harbored misapprehensions about American socioeconomic hierarchies that jeopardized settlement schemes. The “disorder” that stemmed from widespread “white indisposition to the mechanical crafts” should not be reproduced, the Overseas Council advised in 1750 as it ordered the governor of Santa Catarina to limit settler access to Indigenous laborers.87 As instructions to Mendonça Furtado similarly underscored the following year, settler couples needed to understand that they were expected to farm “in the form that they had on the Islands” and that such work would not disqualify them from hon-
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ors.88 As Mendonça Furtado then judged, soon after arriving in Pará, transforming a land reduced to “penury and misery” by settlers indisposed to work would require punishments as well as rewards.89 Reiterating such reports, the Directorio announced that settlers who went to settlements to “civilize the Indians” were to “inspire them with the example of their work” and, therefore, they could not disparage “working the land with one’s own hands.” Anyone who failed to uphold these standards would be expelled.90 Conveying such a message, Mendonça Furtado recognized, entailed impressing upon settlers who chose to marry Indigenous women that the sacred bond was not a cover for the enslavement of their wives.91 More exemplary were numerous marriages between settlers and Native women who, he explained to Carvalho e Melo in 1756, received from the crown a modest dowry of simple clothing, tools, and salt, and went “very happily to their new lands.”92 The honors to which settlers, as well as Natives, could aspire, did not endanger the duty to manual labor because they were conditioned by local, American socioeconomic conditions, or what the instructions to Mendonça Furtado described as the “custom of the country.”93 The Directorate thus shared with other contemporary settlement schemes the aim of securing territory through a well-administered propagation of laboring people subject to Portuguese authority. Together, the Directorate and the settlement of couples were to forge an American population as what Sanches described as “plebeian,” dedicated not to the pursuit of honorific idleness, but rather to work, the only endeavor “appropriate for such an expansive colony.”94 In the years that followed the publication of the Directorio, as historians of the Amazon region have shown, the implementation of its labor regime, where most administrative energy was spent, proved to be contingent on a range of local conditions and relations.95 In some areas, Natives rejected the new labor regime, moving farther away from European settlements, which they then could strategically raid. Local officials responded with punitive campaigns that further entrenched patterns of Indigenous-Portuguese warfare, especially in areas such as Goiás, to the south, where access to new mines was at stake. In Native villages where communal lands were preserved, Native leaders continued to exercise leadership in negotiations with officials and settlers over labor and resources, and used intermarriage to bolster lineages and control access to land. Some Natives left settlements but, as Heather Roller has argued, their mobility was not necessarily a rejection of settlement. Their movements between villages could have the effect of sustaining their communities under Portuguese rule. Although in the following decades royal
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officials continued to fret about Indigenous mobility as forms of desertion and vagrancy, they also recognized that it was crucial to local economies and the project of settlement itself. Settled Natives brokered contacts with Natives living beyond areas of Portuguese control. In the Amazon region especially, settlers and officials remained beholden to Indigenous knowledge of its waterways. Expeditions to collect tropical forest products thus relied on Native labor and yet remained loosely regulated.96 With regard to enslaved Natives freed by the Law of Liberties, although Mendonça Furtado undertook a limited effort at resettlement, concerned that freed people would leave the settlement labor force, he ordered that they stay put and work for wages. Many did continue to work for settlers; insufficient supplies of money meant that they were often paid in goods. Over time and subsequent generations, and in spite of the limited implementation of the Directorate’s educational program, some Natives living outside of Native villages also acquired skills that evinced the kind of “civility” that the Directorio had imagined and therefore exempted them from compulsory labor.97 As Native peoples continued to reshape European designs for the settlement of American hinterlands, new arrangements and negotiations bolstered royal authority. By the end of the decade, an older missionary enterprise was further limited by the crown’s expulsion of the Jesuits from Portuguese territories. For royal officials, their persistent authority among Natives on Brazil’s borders posed an intolerable threat. It was not an “evangelical spirit,” Teles da Silva remarked in 1758, that had armed and “disciplined” thousands of Natives and created “an intermediary power” from the Amazon to Rio de la Plata.98 The men whom Mendonça Furtado disparaged as would-be “conquerors,” who led slaving expeditions that “tyrannized” the hinterland, proved more difficult to depose. In some places, it was representatives of Portuguese authority themselves who launched campaigns into lands “infested” with Natives who resisted the Directorate’s encroachments. Pamphleteers celebrated new “conquests.”99 In this sense, royal policies, long marked by tensions between perceptions of Natives as irredeemably savage and as potentially Christian and loyal, were at once sustained by deep-rooted European violence and renovated by the idea of an American population that could be forged. In the context of territorial and commercial rivalries, the Directorate, a new, and conspicuously royal, regulatory apparatus for sex, marriage, labor, and other forms of Native-Portuguese exchange, signaled a quest not only for Native allegiance in hinterlands and borderlands but also for sociocultural transformation that
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would engender the growth of a population that was colonial because it settled and worked in the service of metropolitan economic ends.
Slavery and Empire Severim de Faria’s seventeenth-century critique of empire as a drain on Portugal’s population and prosperity included a striking caveat for Portuguese America. “These colonies are not so damaging to us,” he explained, “because they take from us fewer people.” The occupation of and extractive enterprise in America had demanded relatively fewer Portuguese because they depended on a different source of settlement: the trade in enslaved people from fortified enclaves in Africa to Brazilian ports. Conquest and enslavement on one side of the Atlantic, codified by royal and religious authority and brimming with commercial possibility, allowed the Portuguese and their rulers to extend their power to the other side as its colonial potential came into their view. From this approach to “settlement [povoação],” Faria reported, the Portuguese had reaped spectacular rewards, most notably “the most abundant commodity of sugar, which we supply to almost all of Europe.”100 In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, the European migratory rush to mines both tested and affirmed this pattern. In response to what officials perceived as excessive migration from Portugal, the crown legislated limits on travel to Brazil. At the same time, in Portugal and Brazil, royal officials, settlers, and observers argued that the production of wealth depended on enslaved African labor. “Experience showed,” wrote the governor of Maranhão to João V in 1750, that it was with both the end of Indigenous enslavement and “the introduction of Blacks from Guinea” that “all of the rest of Brazil” had “begun to flourish.”101 Or, as one pamphleteer rephrased the mercantilist maxim, “All of the wealth of the land consists in the multitude of slaves and subjects.”102 Neither European settlement schemes nor the Directorate overturned these circumstances. Indeed, the Law of Liberties carefully elucidated its own limits among American “slaves and subjects,” noting that while for Natives the “presumption of their freedom within divine, natural and positive law” prevailed, those “who came from enslaved black women” were to remain “under the dominion of their senhores.” Were slave owners to invoke such origins as a “pretext” for retaining Natives in slavery, the law’s application would rest on answers to the question of whether such persons “are reputed or appear to be Indians.”103 The crown also envisioned an expansion of enslaved African
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labor in the Amazon region, as instructions issued to Mendonça Furtado made clear. The governor was to consult with the “principal residents, and the most intelligent and interested persons” and apprise himself of the number of slaves they needed and of how the residents could finance their purchase.104 Because the demand for enslaved labor there would not be met with persons “who came from enslaved black women” alone, royal officials were to consider as well new, and predictable, connections to the transatlantic slave trade. The latter endeavor recalled seventeenth-century schemes defended by, among others, the Jesuit António Vieira. Yet, as a new Amazon trade had settled in Portuguese popular verse, where Black women were scornfully sent to the “kingdom of Pará,” in practice it had been hindered by greater demand in other ports, fleeting trading companies, and, as official correspondence reiterated, settlers’ poverty. Before 1750, according to one estimate, no more than 3,500 Africans had entered the region.105 Settlers and merchants, in turn, touted the region’s lucrative commodities, including sugar, tobacco, cotton, leather, coffee, vanilla, rice, and bark, and complained that they were cut out of the commercial networks that ensured the efficient transport of these products to Portugal and that they lacked labor for their production. Slaves arriving at Pará were quickly sold, an account of one expedition explained, “because we have no one else to make what we need.”106 In 1752, responding to a petition from the town council of São Luis about an insufficient local slave market, the crown issued a cautious endorsement of direct trade between Maranhão and Portugal, and Maranhão and the Guinea coast.107 Just a few years later, the slave trade also figured in Carvalho e Melo’s plans to bolster the extraction of Amazonian wealth. The statutes of the Companhia do Grão Pará e Maranhão, founded in 1755, indicated that, because the settlers lacked “black slaves whose service had been so useful in Your Majesty’s other dominions in Portuguese America,” the new company would take on the transatlantic slave trade to the region.108 Part of a longer line of mostly short-lived trading companies, the Companhia thus bolstered a triangular commerce to Brazil where private investment and direct trade with the African coast played important roles as well. Walter Hawthorne concludes that more than 22,000 Africans, mostly from the Upper Guinea region, were brought into Maranhão between 1750 and 1787.109 Problems with supply persisted, as officials and settlers complained. Writing in 1759, the governor reported that the region still lacked “workers, who should be blacks,” and argued that settlers needed more flexible credit that would allow for investments in a larger labor force rather than in one or two slaves whose
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labor would not significantly transform their farming.110 Still, as Domingues da Silva and Vieira Ribeiro have observed, the slave trade to the region continued to grow, even after 1777 when the Companhia’s monopoly ended.111 While Native labor remained crucial to certain sectors of the regional economy, especially the harvesting of tropical forest products, local demands and royal policy ensured that connections among enslaved African labor, the occupation of strategic border zones, farming, and cultivation for export became entrenched.112 As the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão bolstered the slave trade to the north of Brazil, contemporary royal legislation further reflected official perceptions that “the happiness and conservation of the commerce of Brazil and this kingdom” depended on reforming transatlantic and inter-American traffic.113 While in earlier decades royal officials, including Gusmão, had urged the crown to consider the slave trade as part of American administration, in 1751 the crown began taking action to reinforce its imperial dimensions by foreclosing on the flow of “hundreds” of enslaved Africans to “Spanish dominions.”114 For the first time, according to Alencastro, the Portuguese intervened in the slave trade to Spanish America in order to attend to what the law described as the “damage to the public good and to my treasury” and “disorder” in Brazil by forbidding the trade in “blacks from the ports into hinterlands that are not of my royal dominions.” Additional regulations sought to stem slave trading in “Colônia do Sacramento, and other areas neighboring the Portuguese frontier” with registries of enslaved people who entered those areas, died, or went to other lands under Portuguese rule.115 In 1756, in response to complaints made by Salvador’s town council that some slave traders had forged a “quasi monopoly” and thereby depressed the supply of labor for the cultivation of sugar and tobacco, the crown also opened up the transatlantic slave trade to “all those who wanted to pursue it, permitting freedom in dealings and commerce, not only in the ports where such was previously the case, but also in all African ports.” In Portuguese Africa, in turn, Carvalho e Melo promoted the relegation of export duty contracts in favor of freer trade arrangements. As the Count of Arcos reported from Salvador, however, the reforms did not mitigate “the peevish disposition of the inhabitants of Brazil.” The “new form of commerce” also destabilized the demand for goods on the African coast and disorganized prices and financing mechanisms in Brazil. In Lisbon and Brazilian ports royal officials and those who traded in and procured enslaved Africans continued to contest the terms for “the most important branch of commerce.”116
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At the beginning of the following decade, surveying a trade that, as Acioli and Menz observe, “unified the four parts of the Portuguese empire,” the crown once again invoked a “marked lack of [enslaved labor] for agriculture and mining” in Brazil, issuing an order, to take effect six months after its promulgation, that forbade the disembarkation of “any slave [preto ou preta alguma]” in the kingdoms of Portugal and the Algarve. While enslaved persons who were brought to Portugal in violation of the order would be manumitted, the king did not intend “that anything would change with respect to black men and black women who are in these kingdoms.” The order, in other words, neither ended hereditary enslavement nor freed those who were enslaved in Portugal. Rather, the law was to function as a switch in the slave trade’s circuitry, closing access to one outlet to redirect its flow to another. The law’s recognition of the contingencies that linked Portuguese and Brazilian labor regimes was underscored in its defense of a self-consciously European socioeconomic order. Many of “the extraordinary number of black slaves” brought to Portugal worked as servants, its text explained, leaving free white men who had once engaged in such work in a state of “idleness” and “vice.”117 The law, as Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg have suggested, resonated with contemporary debates about free soil in France and England, while its attack on slavery as an impediment to metropolitan public virtue and productivity reflected an official interest in dissociating Portuguese society from the slave trade, or what the law described as the “many and great inconveniences that stemmed from the excess and depravity with which, contrary to laws and customs of other polite courts, slaves are transported annually from Africa, America and Asia to these kingdoms in such extraordinary numbers.”118 As Faria had reported in the previous century, the fear that slaves, “Kaffirs and Indians,” would overwhelm Portugal was as old as the extra-European conquests. “To the kingdom come so many captives, as so many natives leave,” that soon “they will be more than us,” the sixteenth-century poet Garcia de Resende had imagined.119 While such influx and transformation remained an anxious figment, Didier Lahon estimates that by the mid-eighteenth century around 400,000 Africans had entered Portugal, coming from diverse places of origin. In the first half of the eighteenth century, ships arriving at Lisbon carried people from eastern Africa and Asia, including enslaved Africans deported first to Goa. Some arrived on vessels that sailed from Africa to Brazil and then to Portugal. Others traveled with merchants, settlers, and officials returning from Portuguese America, an itinerary rendered in eighteenthcentury popular verse in which the “sounds” and forms of Black performance on Portuguese streets came “from Bahia.”120
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While the 1761 law promised to curtail both circumatlantic and transatlantic itineraries, in 1767 the crown further bolstered barriers to the entrance of African-descended people into Portugal, setting aside slave traders’ selfinterestedly narrow reading of the law in which “black” slaves were freed upon arrival in Portugal but enslaved “mulattos” and “mulattas” were not. It was not “just,” the new order clarified, that the 1761 law freed Black men and women, while their children of mixed ancestry remained enslaved.121 Just over a decade later, the crown once again intervened to reshape the institution of slavery in Portugal and the Portuguese empire. The order, dated January 16, 1773, began with a broadside against the “perpetuation” of the “slavery of black men” that flouted the 1761 law. The text also took aim at “indecency,” “confusion and hatreds,” and, affirming the ideal of economic productivity, “the damage to the state in having so many injured, destitute and useless vassals” on the margins of honorable service and lucrative agriculture and commerce.122 As Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg observe, the 1773 law appeared to counter enslaver reproductive strategies that the 1761 law had left intact. Conjuring scenes of rape in the Algarve and “some provinces of Portugal,” its text pointed to those lacking in “sentiments of humanity and religion” who kept “enslaved women in their houses, some whiter than they themselves, calling them pretas or negras, or in some cases mestiças and others truly black in order that, by way of a reprehensible propagation and an abominable and sinful transaction, they perpetuate captivity.” Because in “successive and lucrative concubinages,” slave owners had leveraged the “pretext that the wombs of enslaved mothers could not produce free children, according to civil law,” the new law set aside the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem for anyone born after its publication. While these children would be “entirely free,” enslaved people previously born to women who were or had been enslaved, and whose own mothers were or had been enslaved, remained in bondage. Appealing to presumptions about generational and cultural distance from Africa, however, the law also decreed that those who could trace their enslavement back to their great-grandmothers’ legal status were immediately freed.123 On the ground in Portugal, the laws’ effects were diverse. On the one hand, as Lahon observes, a demand for enslaved labor in Portugal persisted, met by people who remained in captivity there as well as by an illegal trade from Africa, the Atlantic Islands, and Brazil that lasted until the early nineteenth century. On the other hand, the intended disruptions to the influx of enslaved people into Portugal from Africa and Brazil registered in Lisbon’s customs house, police intendancy, and Black religious brotherhoods. While customs officials and the police intendant investigated those suspected of breaking the
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laws, Black religious brotherhoods sent representatives to the ports to ensure that those who arrived were apprised of the new legal framework and its implications. With royally chartered rights to advocate for their members’ freedom and to defend enslaved people from “poor treatment,” the brotherhoods, as Fernanda Domingos Pinheiro has shown, began to invoke the new laws in suits to restore a freedom that had been “usurped.” As royal courts then adjudicated claims in ways that asserted freedom for some and upheld enslavement for others, the new laws and their implementation reaffirmed, above all, royal authority over slavery and the slave trade.124 As the crown sought to gradually fashion Portugal as “soil free from slaves” and to bolster the slave trade’s south Atlantic routes, the new legal framework also recognized, and sought to regulate, the complex geography of Black mobility in the empire.125 Redirecting the slave trade away from Portugal, the 1761 law acknowledged, opened up new paths to legal freedom within the monarchy’s territories. The use of such innovations as a “pretext” by those who “deserted” to Portugal from “ultramarine dominions,” its text noted, would not be tolerated. The 1761 law also elaborated a framework for disciplining Black labor by requiring that “all free black men and free black women who come to these kingdoms to live, to do business or to work as servants, partaking of the full freedom that they have to pursue such endeavors, must without exception carry passports issued by the town councils from where they depart.” Black people who arrived without documentation would be arrested and deported to where they came from, with those who had brought them or transported them paying the cost.126 With regard to those who remained enslaved, the law and its implementation also laid the ground for royal scrutiny of the wayfaring use of their labor. In 1766, for example, when the Porto merchant Narciso Martins da Costa Guimarães went to Bahia “due to commercial necessity,” he took two enslaved people along to serve him during his stay. A decade later, his return to Portugal, without forfeiture of the slaves to the law’s mandated manumission, required securing a royal provision for exemption.127 Following the 1761 law’s promulgation, appeals to the crown made clear that the widespread use of enslaved labor in transatlantic commerce demanded additional royal explanation of the new demarcations. After merchants complained that mandated manumissions impaired the manning of commercial vessels, in 1776 the crown clarified that the right to manumission for the newly arrived to Portugal “in no way” applied to “enslaved sailors” provided that they were duly registered aboard those ships as “equipage.” Although merchants who traveled from Brazil to Portugal, royal officials discovered, could flout
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the order’s intent by applying the label to enslaved domestic servants who accompanied them, later iterations of the order both defended enslaved labor at sea and distinguished between slave owners from Portugal’s “colonies,” who enjoyed the exception, and Portuguese ship owners, who did not, in order that they might employ greater numbers of “white sailors” from the kingdom.128 In the broader context of the empire and a slave trade overwhelmingly directed toward the Americas, the laws’ impact was modest. Yet the new legal framework’s juxtaposition of enslaved colonial labor and free white metropolitan labor, even in the context of maritime mobility, served to mark slavery as colonial and the colonies as enslaved. The divergence between metropolitan and colonial societies and economies was also recognized in pamphlets that dramatized the contemporary predicaments of slavery in the empire. A dialogue, set in Portugal, between a lawyer and a miner returned from Brazil, Nova e curiosa relaçaõ de hum abuso emendado (New and Curious Account of a Corrected Abuse, 1764), defended, as its title suggested, the amelioration of “abuse” in the context of enslavement and criticized those who argued that “blacks were born only to be slaves.”129 Yet the crux of the dialogue was an examination of the question of whether the miner should sell an enslaved man to Brazil. As the miner explains, the sale was intended as punishment for protesting his decision to deny the man manumission. In response, the enslaved man had invoked royal privileges granted to a local brotherhood that protected its members from sale beyond Lisbon. The lawyer, in turn, affirms that selling the slave to Brazil would not only be a mortal sin, as the miner’s confessor had earlier concluded, but also a violation of the law that exposed the miner to demands for royally sanctioned redress.130 The miner, however, continues with tales of his time in “the Brazils” and of a relentless labor regime, confirming “miseries” of which the lawyer is “informed” but which he presumably has not witnessed in Portugal. In Brazil, poorly clothed and fed, “blacks” work “night and day,” subjected to the “most severe punishments” and the “most injurious names.” Suggesting that “blacks get used to” such mistreatment, the miner also regales the lawyer with reports of murderous violence perpetrated by owners against enslaved people. Although the lawyer reacts with incredulity to the claim that enslavers enjoy impunity for their crimes, he cannot entirely rebut the miner’s account. When the miner says he would like to see how the lawyer would “deal with one hundred or two hundred disobedient, treacherous, lazy and thieving blacks,” the lawyer concedes that “he would do worse than most over there.”131 As readers thus learn, if in Portugal abuses could be “corrected” and the law upheld, in
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America slavery’s massive scale, and the social disorder that ostensibly followed, nullified recourse to the judicious exercise of patriarchal authority in the context of bondage.132 Assessments of continuities and divergences within the empire also animated the reception of the reformist laws in Brazil. Local officials, enslavers, and the enslaved appear to have recognized the 1761 law’s exclusively metropolitan scope.133 As noted above, enslavers expressed reluctance to take enslaved people to Portugal, and, as historians have shown, a fragmented archive reveals that in the decades that followed, it was their arrival in a Portuguese port that initiated enslaved people’s claims to legal freedom.134 The 1773 law, in contrast, was met with questions and debate about its intentions and geography. As royal officials reported, within months of its promulgation, “the dangerous news” circulated in Portuguese America’s Northeast. Residents of a town in Paraíba, white, “mulattos and blacks,” free and enslaved, men and women, exchanged printed and handwritten copies of the law and inquired into its effects in homes and shops, in the streets, as well as in larger public gatherings, including one in the town square and another at the nearby Tambaú beach. Officials, in turn, imagining conspiratorial “conciliabules and conventicles” and alarmed at the possible “dire consequences,” namely, that people would understand that the law had ended their enslavement, reacted swiftly, mobilizing troops and spies and making arrests. The governor ordered the posting of notices to clarify that “the said law did not pertain to His Majesty’s royal dominions in America but rather only to the kingdoms of Portugal and the Algarve.”135 The testimony and interrogations that followed, officials concluded, dispelled fears of large-scale mobilization among enslaved people. One man testified that he had heard that some enslaved people had claimed that the public notice of the law’s application in Portugal exclusively was “false [fingido]” but also that the same stories were “vague” and that it seemed that after the notice was publicized, talk of the law had ebbed. Some among the local elite affirmed that they were unaware of the controversy before official responses started taking shape, while one lawyer reported that after a sugar planter had shown him a copy of the law, he had explained that “he understood it to pertain only to slaves in Portugal, precisely as a supplement to the law of 1761 in which His Majesty had liberated captives who went from America to Portugal.” Another lawyer had similarly reassured local slave owners that the “spirit of the law” did not apply in Brazil.136
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As Luiz Geraldo Silva has elucidated, the testimony also revealed a complex social network of African-descended men, identified as pardos, or of mixed ancestry, who traversed the Brazilian Northeast and the Atlantic. One man on a stay in Lisbon had sent a copy of the law to another in Pernambuco, who had sent it to one of the defendants in Paraíba, where it circulated among members of a local militia of men of color and where copies of the law proliferated. As a white resident testified, for a modest sum, a “mulatto” was offering copies, “very poorly written and in the terms of a Portuguese-ified língua de preto” (a reference to contemporary characterizations of Black speech).137 Those arrested included members of local regiments of men of color, as well as members of a local cultural elite: the pardo music teacher Pedro de Alcântara de Bulhões and the painter Felix Caetano, who clarified at the beginning of the interrogation that he was “born free.” Prompted by their interrogator, some confessed to being “interested in reading and writing.” Bernardino Nogueira da Silva testified that “since childhood he had been inclined to read,” while Bulhões indicated that he regularly read books on the military arts and comedies, considering their bearing on music, and that he was “curious about news” coming from royal officials and the king. While witnesses reported that the men, most notably Caetano, had asserted that the law “freed all the crioulos [American-born people of African descent] of Brazil” or that it freed “all pardos in Brazil,” in their own testimony those detained clearly and consistently rebutted the accusations and sustained that they had understood that the law applied only to Portugal. As Caetano explained, accusations that he had spread word that the law freed slaves in Brazil were absurd. He owned five slaves himself, and it was not “natural that he would want to lose them.”138 Bulhões, in turn, concluded his testimony by affirming that he had not heard of any concerted dissemination of the law or of gatherings that would have fomented a rebellion in favor of emancipation. Rather, he insisted, “the people” were simply interested in understanding clearly what the law intended, considering the circulation of “diverse judgments,” including one that asserted that “blacks were to be allowed to serve in town councils.” The latter claim, as Silva has suggested, may have stemmed from readings of the law focused on a phrase that indicated the extent to which slavery had created “so many injured, destitute and useless vassals” disqualified from “public offices.”139 It seems likely that readers, and listeners, also took note of the law’s final order in which the king did away with the “distinctive
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reference to libertos [ freed persons].” The end of such a distinction, disparaged as a Roman error, made freed people “eligible for all offices, honors and distinctions.”140 Doing so undercut an entrenched political and legal legacy of enslavement for freed people, including the codified “defect of color” that by the seventeenth century had been incorporated into constitutions, initially preoccupied with Jewish and Muslim lineages, that regulated religious offices, royal service, and processes for awarding honorific status.141 The 1773 law’s condensed generational trajectory of integration and expanded opportunity for honors and service coincided with other royal interventions into the regulation of social order, most notably a series of laws that dismantled distinctions related to lineages of religious conversion and a cult of “purity” among Portuguese elites. The culmination was the end, five months after the law on slavery, of codified distinctions between Old and New Christians. As Pedreira has argued, Carvalho e Melo recognized the politicaleconomic purposes of measures that bolstered the status of merchant communities, which until then had borne the burden of “the symbolic association between businessmen and conversos,” however small the latter’s actual numbers.142 Beyond Portugal, the 1773 law’s language of honors and privileges also resonated with legislation on Indigenous marriage and status, noted above, and with royal orders and instructions issued in 1761 and 1774 that the king’s vassals “born in oriental India and dominions [. . .] in Portuguese Asia, being baptized Christians, and not having other legal impediment,” could enjoy honors and privileges just like those “born in these kingdoms, without any difference.” It was the recently expelled Jesuits, the orders made known, who were to blame for the inculcation of “differences” and “aversions” that undermined an earlier “common cause of honors, consanguinities and interests.”143 The preoccupation with lineage, António Ribeiro Sanches argued, was a problem as well because it contributed to the dissipation of wealth and to depopulation across the monarchy’s territories, as the persecuted fled to places where they faced fewer perils.144 Writing on Asia in 1774, Carvalho e Melo concurred, defending a reckoning with European dearth and the contemporary imperatives of empire. Portugal had neither the resources nor the people, as the royal charter declared, needed to populate, defend, evangelize, and illuminate “these remote and vast regions.” As a result, it would be “Natives,” instructed and guided by Europeans, who would do so. And, while officials earlier had cited Portuguese Asia’s history of “common interests and consanguinities” as a model for redefining the status of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, now it was more recent experience in Portuguese America that inspired
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change. In Grão Pará and Maranhão, Carvalho e Melo explained, in place of people who once wandered “like beasts” through the bush or “trembled like slaves in the corrals that the impious Jesuits called missions” were “many thousands of useful vassals.”145 With regard to African-descended people in Brazil, however, the consequences of the 1773 law’s intervention into the regulation of social order were ambiguous. While officials in Paraíba sought to make known that the law pertained only to Portugal, witnesses testified that some residents had lingered on the phrase “his dominions” in the text as an indication of a broader scope. As Caetano reportedly explained, “these dominions as well were Portugal’s,” and therefore the law did bear upon the status of people in Portuguese America. One witness recalled an encounter with a freed pardo cobbler named Alexandre who had shared that a new law freed “the slaves of Portugal and its dominions.” Having seen a copy of the law, the witness explained, he had countered that the reference to “dominions” pertained only to the “Board of Commerce of these Kingdoms and Dominions,” one of several agencies accountable for the law’s enforcement. During his own testimony, in turn, Alexandre, identified in the record with the surname Guedes, reassured his interrogator that such conversations reflected confusion rather than machinations. “Whites and pardos” had “doubts,” he recalled. They had heard of a letter from Bahia that announced the order but “did not understand well” if the changes were “also for Brazil or only for Portugal.” Uncertainty about the law’s scope and, by extension, the social geography of empire endured. In the years and decades that followed, as Silva and Priscila de Lima Souza have shown, other royal officials expressed ambivalence about whether the law’s suppression of the social disqualification of freed people applied to American territory. Their deliberations took place in response to petitions made by free people of color in Brazil who cited the 1773 law and, in at least one case, the 1774 law pertaining to Asia, as support for claims to honors, privileges, and positions of authority.146 On the one hand, such appeals were part of a longer history of royal interventions, guided by “just reason,” that set aside sociopolitical impediments, often in the reference to generational distance from enslavement and from Africa, memberships in religious brotherhoods and militias, and wealth. As petitioners of a brotherhood in Minas had persuaded the king at mid-century, they should not be “in an inferior condition to that of men of color” in Portugal.147 Although waning, in the eighteenth century the royal disposition to dispense with impediments to reward the military service of African and African-descended men in Brazil was still
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conspicuous.148 In their defense against the Dutch, the Esquecidos Siqueira da Gama and Rocha Pita recalled, the Portuguese had counted on regiments led by the “praise-worthy black” Henrique Dias and the Tobijara chief Poti, known as António Felipe Camarão, and the crown had recognized their feats. “Everyone knows,” Siqueira da Gama also explained, that it was the prince’s prerogative “to make great those who were born small.”149 The Relaçaõ’s lawyer similarly reminded the miner that Portugal “owed” much to the “blacks from the conquests in Brazil,” including one who was decorated with the esteemed Habit of Christ because the Portuguese king “had not wanted that an accident of color deprived of honors” a man who had earned them.150 On the other hand, as Silva and Souza argue, in the late eighteenth century men of color who cited the 1773 law deployed a new discourse of difference, moving from appeals to set aside “defects” and Aristotelian “accidents” of color toward claims to categorical “equivalence” within a hierarchical social order. Such a critique of discriminatory practices and demands for royal redress coincided with the crown’s own reformist challenges to the traditional politics of “natural” differences.151 As Sanches argued as well, the monarchy’s interests were served best with colonies in which sociopolitical privileges and honors were minimal and resulted from meritorious actions, as evaluated by the crown, rather than from lineage.152 Yet, faced with these petitions, the crown declined to clarify whether the clauses of the 1773 order did, in fact, pertain to the social status of freed persons in America. Perhaps royal counselors understood that calling further attention to an order that set out to gradually dismantle slavery in Portugal would prompt new debate and action in Brazil. Writing of the Paraíba incidents, the governor warned of people whose “aspirations to shake off the yoke of slavery” were constant and whose “use of reason made them formidable.”153 The ambiguity around the 1773 order’s application also allowed royal officials to locally administer social arrangements in ways that served the crown. As both officials and petitioners recognized, the crown could not forgo the militia service of men of color in places where white defense forces were precarious, nor could it categorically disregard men of color who “were sufficiently capable of serving” the public good on the “frontier,” where settlements were fledgling. As one petitioner explained, writing to Queen Maria I (r. 1777–1816) from Mato Grosso in the 1780s, in many new hinterland settlements “the feminine element was composed of black women from the [African] coast,” a circumstance that raised questions about the status of their “propagations,”
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“European” intentions, who would provide local service to the crown, and the “spirit of [royal] orders” in Portuguese America.154 At the same time, royal officials could uphold disqualifications, invoking the perils of pardo and mulatto mobility in societies in which Africans and people of African descent were majorities and making timeworn claims about propensities to insubordination. As the Benedictine chronicler Loreto Couto summarized the stereotype, a lack of virtue tended to distract those of the “mulatto” “caste” from the realities of their “nothingness.” Exceptions, therefore, could not become the rule. Those “known as brown in color,” he averred, “with their immoderate desire for honors of which they are deprived, not only due to accident but also substance, do not abide the differences.”155 Indeed, as the uncertain scope of the 1773 order bolstered the crown’s role as an arbiter of American social order, negotiations over the legacies of racial slavery for sociopolitical hierarchies were framed by an anti-Blackness that mid-century reforms strenuously affirmed. The Directorio took aim at the “scandalous” use of the term “blacks [negros]” to describe Natives and people of mixed ancestry, and accused those who did so of seeking to lay the foundation for Indigenous enslavement. Directors were to punish anyone who used the term “blacks” to refer to men whom the king had “ennobled and declared exempt from all and any infamy” as an affront to the “royal laws of His Majesty.”156 The 1774 law on Asian subjects included strikingly similar injunctions against those who disrespected in word and deed “natives of India, or their children or descendants calling them blacks or mestiços.”157 These new codifications of Blackness in relation to other forms of difference resonated on both sides of the Atlantic during a time of growth in the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and, as officials and petitioners made clear, ongoing dependence on enslaved people in the endeavor to settle and extract wealth from American territory.158 Thus, as reformist laws bolstered a geography of labor in the empire in which the slave trade served colonial production and reproduction, royal officials and vassals reckoned with the sociopolitical dimensions of this geography on the ground in Brazil by affirming that the bonds between the sovereign and American vassals were circumscribed by racial difference. Examined together, eighteenth-century settlement schemes, the pronatalist promotion of intermarriage, the Directorate, and the diverse provisions that bolstered African slavery in Brazil can be seen as part of broader metropolitan endeavors to reconfigure the empire to better promote the production and circulation of wealth. Guided by the mercantile maxim that population is a
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source of prosperity because it is a source of labor, royal officials on both sides of the Atlantic sought to reinvigorate longer trajectories of occupation, production, and extraction in Portuguese America through a dynamic and calculated arrangement and reproduction of peoples. Redefining the status of some of those people and upholding the enslavement of others, while regulating mobility, labor, productivity, and the sociopolitical relations that racial slavery created, both defined and integrated the empire’s parts and fortified the discontinuities that made Portugal metropolitan and Brazil colonial.
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Epilogue
In 1779 it was Queen Maria I’s turn, just two years into her reign (1777– 1816), to summon learned men in Portugal to gather as an academy. In this case, rather than history, it was a self-consciously Enlightened science that was to guide their quests to discern how the Portuguese “nation” could “know perfectly the lands that they inhabit, what those lands contain and produce, and their capacities,” and thereby defend imperial sovereignty and prosperity.1 The inquiries that took shape within the new Academia das Ciências de Lisboa (Academy of Sciences of Lisbon) were predicated on recognition of how, in the preceding decades, Brazilian treasure and other forms of American wealth had transformed the empire’s politics and economy. As the locus of imperial opulence and power shifted to Portuguese America, the postconquest imperative of political incorporation and the re-creation of an old regime of allegiance, honors, and rewards had given ground to inquiries and debates about how to more systematically increase and better administer the circulation of wealth within imperial networks of exchange. These inquiries and debates were transimperial.2 From vantage points in Brazil and Portugal, as well as England and France, and through the lens of rivalry, the Portuguese drew on new analyses of wealth and the purposes of empire that encompassed their empire’s past and present to reckon with the consequences of American treasure and commerce. As the mercantilist idea that, as colonies, extra-European territories were to function as sources of raw materials and markets became a commonplace, royal officials also sought to discern how that function could be sustained in practice. Along with commercial regulations, they envisioned an American socioeconomic order in which legal, political, and social differences would abet certain forms of production
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and consumption that would enrich the kingdom of Portugal. In taxation and settlement schemes, new policies for Indigenous labor and administration, and ad hoc yet unremitting efforts to increase the transatlantic slave trade, royal and local officials sought to forge in Brazil societies and economies that complemented rather than reproduced those in Portugal. Notwithstanding contemporary appeals to trade as a peaceful counterpart to war in imperial contests, new policies charted pursuits of commercial prosperity by recalibrating rather than forgoing imperial violence. The mercantilist socioeconomic projects formulated within the circles of Portuguese royal authority were also contested and negotiated, among officials, in Atlantic ports, and on the ground in Brazil. As vassals of the crown, people in Brazil continued to appeal to transatlantic continuities of rights and royal justice. Yet, especially in enclaves of Portuguese settlement, the claim that, within the “system” of Portuguese rule, Brazil had been transformed from a conquest into a colony took hold.3 American empire was constituted in an ambitious and unfolding socioeconomic regulatory project. Within the Portuguese monarchy’s territories, as the Italian-born natural scientist Domenico Vandelli reported to the new Academia das Ciências, utility would flow from “regulating” “all the branches of civil economy” based on “principles deduced from a sound political arithmetic.”4 Yet, as Vandelli also argued, for imperial administrative “systems” to be followed, they first had to be examined and evaluated in light “of the nation’s actual circumstances.”5 And as Vandelli and his fellow academics recognized, the Portuguese empire’s present remained defined by adverse, and seemingly entrenched, conditions and arrangements. An empire that was still insufficiently known, the earlier commitment to write its past and cartographic present notwithstanding, was besieged by the predations of historic rivals. “For a long time,” Brazilian-born abbot José Correia da Serra observed in his inaugural address, “the substance and wealth of the nation” had flowed to “strangers.” The English, Vandelli reported, were so committed to a contraband trade that undercut both mutual agreements and Portuguese interests that in London one could openly invest in and insure such endeavors. For Portugal the results were “poverty” and a dependency so abject as to be, according to Vandelli, tantamount to “slavery.”6 Great wealth had been extracted from the ultramar, he conceded, and yet, he also explained, citing “the great statesman Alexandre de Gusmão,” “Portugal was nothing more than a transitory depository of the colonies’ riches.”7 Thus, the task before the Academia was to find new solutions to old problems.8
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Those problems included gold. With mining revenues in decline, academics turned to earlier debates among royal officials and the critical analyses of Iberian empires that circulated within Europe to scrutinize the consequences of American treasure. The discovery of gold and diamonds, José Joaquim Soares de Barros recounted, had “fired the imagination” of many who went in search of fortune. In the end, however, “with abundant gold the nation had bought an illusion of reprieve and a great indolence.”9 Other academics argued that the ramifications of American treasure were more complex and that Brazilian gold and a porous and global imperial economy were mutually dependent. If Brazilian gold had filled royal coffers, together with the silver that had wended its way through inter-American commerce, Vandelli explained in a 1788 report, “Portugal and Its Colonies,” for the Board of Commerce, it was the “absorption” of this treasure into a vast Asian marketplace that ensured its value.10 Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, Carvalho e Melo’s godson, writing at the beginning of his own formidable diplomatic and ministerial career, also recognized that the Portuguese empire’s predicaments could not be explained with simplistic accounts of how gold had distracted from other pursuits. While he echoed Gusmão in his assessment of the Brazilian mines that had, in the end, produced only “an apparent wealth” as their returns steadily decreased, Souza Coutinho also rejected the assessments of “celebrated men” including Montesquieu who, he argued, attributed to mining certain detrimental effects that arose from other, independent circumstances and poor administration. Portuguese policy, accordingly, needed to recognize the interdependence of different paths to the production of wealth and exchange within the empire. Mining, Souza Coutinho explained, created “a new demand for consumption for planters, manufacturers and all branches of industry.”11 Yet consumption and manufacturing were also elusive pieces of the contemporary imperial puzzle. For some, a solution could be found in an accruing engagement with cameralist writings, including Bielfeld’s Institutions politiques (1774), that inspired a return to the problem of luxury and the question of whether it had been more corrosive than beneficial. Even amid persistent associations of gold and American excess, José Verissimo Álvares da Silva concluded, luxury was an “instrument through which reason advanced” and, when regulated accordingly, produced wealth and population growth.12 As the first volume of the Academia’s Memórias económias (1789) also indicates, however, many of the most influential members concluded that earlier commitments to manufacturing had been misguided. During the previous reign,
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Vandelli reported (without naming the now ostracized and deceased Carvalho e Melo), royal officials had “followed Colbert’s system, providing considerable resources to manufacturers.” Experience, he argued, called into question this approach to economic administration. While manufacturing could mean that resources circulated within Portugal and its colonies rather than to foreign traders, what Portugal gained by consuming domestically produced goods was not as much as what was spent on grain—imported, he explained, because too many people were dedicated to fabricating goods instead of sowing and harvesting in fields. Filling the demand for luxuries with those that were locally produced also deprived the crown of taxes on imports.13 A sounder path to prosperity, Vandelli and other academics argued, was greater investment in agriculture and in the cultivation of the natural resources found across the monarchy’s territories. Economic administration, Vandelli explained, should begin with recognition that the “products of the land are the only, and true, form of wealth.”14 Vandelli also underscored what agrarianism, as historians have described the new economic program, meant for the empire. Appealing to the categories defended within the Aula de Comércio and by Ribeiro Sanches, he identified Brazil as a colony of both commerce and agriculture.15 Science, especially botanical science, would illuminate the possibilities of new, diverse, and “useful” products of the land. Notwithstanding the queen’s and her counselors’ interest in setting aside many of Carvalho e Melo’s policies, the pursuit of a more systematic exploitation of natural resources across the empire had roots in the previous reign. Vandelli had been recruited by Carvalho e Melo to revise the curriculum at the University of Coimbra, where he taught chemistry and natural history, and later served as director of a new royal botanical garden founded at the Ajuda Palace in 1768.16 Across the Atlantic in Rio de Janeiro, an earlier scientific academy (1772–1779) also had endeavored to deploy botanical knowledge in new cultivations. In the following decade, the Academia undertook to renew the study of possible transplantations within Portuguese territories of trees and plants with a commercial potential that appeared to be hiding in plain sight. Metropolitan science’s “discovery of the forest” would also abet what the Academia’s members conceived of as a more systematic administration of commercial supply and demand in the context of contemporary rivalry, and would thereby reinvigorate both the intraand the inter-imperial circulation of commodities. Thus, as Vandelli and other academics elaborated the possibilities of expanding cultivation of cotton, flax, cochineal, tobacco, and anil for indigo, the Jesuit botanist João de Loureiro
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reported on his survey of botanical resources extending from Timor to Bahia. The arduous itineraries of transplantation could be curtailed, Loureiro concluded, with a transimperial incursion from Macapá in northern Brazil into neighboring Guiana to procure nutmeg and cinnamon in the form of “small plants, or at least seeds.”17 As science promised to bolster an imperial commodity inventory, the turn toward the products of the land renewed earlier debates on the question of labor. “Today it is a demonstrated point,” Álvares da Silva observed before the Academia, “that the happiness of the republic is not measured by its conquests, nor by the extent of its territories, nor by the gold and silver mines that it possesses, but rather by its population and labor force.”18 Sustaining an agricultural economy, Vandelli reminded academics, thus demanded large and growing rural settlements. Citing Severim de Faria, the Count of Ericeira, Luís da Cunha, and Gusmão, and echoing Ribeiro Sanches, he argued for land tenure reforms and investments in transportation networks as grounds for promoting a virtuous cycle of production and propagation in Portugal’s countryside that would displace “the total decadence” that followed from “the conquests.” With regard to Portuguese America, Vandelli reiterated earlier official concerns with vast “unpopulated and uncultivated” lands. On the one hand, and as was the case in Portugal, bringing to fruition the project of settlement was a matter of economic and moral administration.19 Promoting colonial agriculture meant diverting labor from other enterprises back toward the cultivation of lucrative commodities. Such a plan was acknowledged in the 1785 ban on manufacturing in Brazil. Considering the “great and wellknown lack of population” there, the text of the law asserted, the growth of “manufacturers” decreased the number of “cultivators” as well as those who could go forth into “uncultivated and unknown” hinterlands. The prohibition on manufacturing in Brazil, therefore, both upheld an important market for Portuguese manufactures and redirected settlers toward an expanding production of agricultural commodities.20 On the other hand, like mid-eighteenth-century complaints of settlers who assumed that migration to Brazil meant that the labor of enslaved Africans and Indigenous peoples liberated them from the work of farming, Vandelli argued that imperial and racial hierarchies could undermine the ideal of plebeian settlement and productivity. “The labor in all of [American] agriculture is delegated to enslaved blacks,” he observed, “there being no white man who will deign to be a farmer.” Such a misconception on the part of settlers, he concluded, cast doubt on whether agriculture in Brazil could be expanded.21
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Writing to Vandelli from Brazil, the Bahian-born, Coimbra-educated jurist and student of political economy José da Silva Lisboa affirmed impressions of excessive and frivolous recourse to enslaved labor. Some among Salvador’s residents, he claimed, would endure other material deprivations if it afforded them the use of just one slave. The standard was at least two enslaved men so that public outings and exchanges could be conducted from a sedan chair. “Whoever leaves the house without this African cortège,” Lisboa averred, “will be viewed as abject and miserable.” Anyone who defied the rule, and was “carried about by people who looked like him,” would be stoned as a “visionary and innovator.”22 Yet, despite such critique, neither Vandelli and his fellow academics nor royal officials in Portugal and Brazil foresaw, much less advocated, an end to slavery in Brazil. For Vandelli and other critics, as Pernille Røge has observed of French physiocracy, slavery and enslaver idleness were abstract problems relegated to the margins of political-economic analysis by the profits generated in plantation agriculture.23 As Vandelli affirmed, the slave trade guaranteed Brazil’s function as a colony. The “indispensable” traffic sustained Brazil’s agriculture, “its settlement and riches,” and the empire’s economy as a whole. As he also reported, however, the trade remained besieged by foreign interlopers and contrabandists. In response, Vandelli pointed in general terms to the need to “make the Portuguese flag more respected” on the African coast and to “make the trade freer.” Other kinds of regulations would further ensure the supply and lower the costs of enslaved Africans, including measures that mitigated “cruel treatment” so as to curtail the loss of life and, therefore, laborers. Brazil, Vandelli suggested further without extensive comment, needed “a policing for these slaves, like what is done in the islands of Saint Domingue and Martinique, etc.”24 Whether Vandelli was thinking of the French Code Noir, and the ideal of punitive order that it had come to represent in earlier reports from Brazil by the Count of Assumar and Martinho de Mendonça, or whether he had in mind more recent accounts of the rigors and efficiencies of a Caribbean “plantation machine” unfettered by communal institutions that re-created European ways of life, his recommendations did not gain traction among royal officials or among planters and mill owners in Brazil who, as Marquese has explained, instead viewed the quality of cane and refinery efficiencies as the primary factors that determined their profits.25 It was always “easier” and “prettier” to write plans for agricultural enterprise, Silva Lisboa remarked, than to put those plans into practice.26 Even when, just a few years later, sugar planters in
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Brazil learned that Africans and African-descended people had taken up arms and liberated themselves from enslavement on the island of Saint Domingue, they recognized the need to thwart the spread of large-scale emancipatory mobilization in Brazil but remained more interested in profiting from the disruptions in Caribbean competition than in making changes to the loosely regulated discipline of the plantation regime. Revolutions in the Caribbean, as well as in North America and in France, also raised questions about the politics of monarchy and empire. As Gabriel Paquette has recently observed, academic and official, agrarianist political economy sought “to conciliate between the forces of tradition and currents of modernization and to inscribe innovation within a conservative framework.” While Portuguese academics and officials shared with French physiocrats the commitment to agriculture as a source of wealth, their critique of earlier monopolies did not extend to an ideological embrace of free, and inter-imperial, trade. Diversifying commodity production, they argued, would produce wealth and connect the parts of an imperial whole.27 The contemporary precarity of Portugal’s political power in Europe, Souza Coutinho explained early in his tenure as Secretary of the Navy and Overseas Dominions (1796–1801), also had to be reckoned with in the context of imperial geography. Portugal, he observed (as Luís da Cunha had before him), depended on its colonies to remain independent from Spain. Accordingly, surveying the need for “improvements to His Majesty’s dominions in America” and the “political system” that would ensure the crown “the conservation of its vast dominions, particularly those of America,” Souza Coutinho invoked an ancient history of incorporation, of lands “discovered” and then “organized as provinces of the monarchy” and united by “the same administrative system.” An old regime of honors, privileges, and “uses and customs,” he recounted, had sustained “a mutual and reciprocal defense” and a common Portuguese political identity.28 Yet, as Carvalho e Melo had done in the preceding decades, Souza Coutinho affirmed the fundamentally mercantile nature of the ties between the metropole and its colonies in the present. The monarchy encompassed “parts so different that separated they could never be as happy” as they were unified under Portuguese rule. The reason was that their commodities would be deprived of a “common entrepôt” and “Europe’s general market.” Political integration, in other words, served commercial ends. While conceding the possibility of some manufacturing in Brazil, Souza Coutinho also argued that “for many centuries” agriculture would be more beneficial than “the arts,” which, in order to strengthen imperial bonds, were to be “promoted in the metropole”
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where the size of the territory foreclosed on more extensive cultivation. What might “at first glance” appear to be “a sacrifice” on the part of Brazil was, he explained, in practice part of the network of reciprocities. At the same time, these reciprocities were hierarchically organized around Portuguese interests.29 As one of Souza Coutinho’s correspondents further affirmed, colonial wealth and commercial autonomy could potentially undermine obedience to, and profits for, the metropole. The goal of imperial governance, therefore, was to regulate economic and social relations in ways that ensured that the colonies would receive their “physical and moral necessities,” while what was “extracted from them” would sustain Portugal’s broader imperial and commercial enterprise.30 Souza Coutinho’s protégé, Brazilian-born bishop José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho, also endeavored to recapitulate a view of the empire’s mercantile system in the context of Portugal’s relations with other states. In Ensaio económico sobre o comércio de Portugal e suas colónias (Economic Essay on the Commerce of Portugal and Its Colonies), published by the Academia das Ciências in 1794, he explained that the metropole, like a mother, had the obligation of defending “the colonies her children” and securing their lives and property. The colonies did “their part” as they traded directly only with the metropole and as they purchased metropolitan manufactures to dress themselves. Considering a voluminous commerce in Brazilian goods that sustained Portuguese surpluses with other European trading partners, Azeredo Coutinho also countered earlier concerns with the inter-imperial balance of trade, asserting that even a resurgence of agricultural exports that outpaced Portuguese commerce to Brazil strengthened interconnectedness. Portugal could have a trade deficit with Brazil because the “creditor always looks after the debtor as he looks after his own estate; he works for his prosperity rather than his ruin.” In an empire defined by economic bonds and purposes, rather than undermining Portuguese authority, Brazil’s agricultural and commercial prosperity thus upheld a reassuringly hierarchical “harmony of interests.”31 Yet, as the century drew to a close, the harmony of interests and of differences, delineated throughout the preceding decades in law and imperial governance and intended to produce metropolitan prosperity, was also defied by local challenges to colonial socioeconomic order in Brazil. In 1789 in Minas, where the mining enterprise appeared to be in decline, an impending derrama, the by now contested and ineffective per capita collection that made up for deficits in the quota for the fifth, catalyzed a republican conspiracy among rich and locally influential residents who envisioned remaking the region. Political and economic independence from Portugal would be constituted, they
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argued, with the end of restrictions on currency circulation, diamond mining, and manufacturing; with elected governance; with the end of enslavement for the American-born; and with the pardoning of debt to the royal treasury. “Europe was a sponge,” one of the conspirators asserted, “sucking all the substance” from Brazil.32 In 1798 in Salvador, in turn, pasquinades announced a revolution that would end enslavement and the racialized discrimination that men of color faced, especially within local militias. “There would be no differences” among soldiers who were “citizens” and “mostly men of color and blacks,” the pasquinades made clear, when it came to their salaries and their potential for leadership. Soldiers were joined in plotting for changes that included “liberty” and the end of commercial restrictions by tailors, also men of color, and for whom the conspiracy would later be named, as well as members of the local, white elite.33 In both cases, investigations revealed transatlantic revolutionary aspirations that ran counter to the regulation of wealth and difference that marked the eighteenth-century politics of colonies. Incarcerations and interrogations also led to findings of guilt and then punishment, including gruesome, lethal sentences for one of the Minas conspirators and the men of African descent in Salvador accused of having orchestrated the plot there. While the crown thus repressed the challenge to its imperial sovereignty in America, as the following century began colonial arrangements would be tested further, not by revolutionary action or economic crisis but rather, as had been the case a century earlier, by rivalry and a war between Great Britain and France.34 French ambition in Iberia, and the transfer to Rio de Janeiro of the Portuguese royal court that it precipitated, would demand a new reckoning with the geography of empire, and with the differences within it that the monarchy had sought to organize and exploit, as the colony of Brazil became the center of Portuguese political power.
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Abbre v i at ions
AEP AGTM
AGTMAT
AGTMDB
AGTMET
AGTMOV
AHU ANTT APM BNB
Mendonça, Marcos Carneiro de. A Amazônia na era pombalina. 3 vols. 2nd ed. Brasília: Senado Federal, 2005. Cortesão, Jaime. Alexandre de Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid (1695–1735). Pt. 1, vol. 1. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Instituto Rio Branco, n.d. Cortesão, Jaime. Alexandre de Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid (1750). Pt. 3, vols. 1–2: Antecedentes do Tratado. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Instituto Rio Branco, 1951. Cortesão, Jaime. Alexandre de Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid (1750). Pt. 2, vol. 2: Documentos biográficos. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Instituto Rio Branco, 1950. Cortesão, Jaime. Alexandre de Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid (1750). [Pt. 5:] Execução do Tratado. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Instituto Rio Branco, n.d. Cortesão, Jaime. Alexandre de Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid (1750). Pt. 2, vol. 1: Obras várias de Alexandre de Gusmão. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Instituto Rio Branco, 1950. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Lisbon Arquivo Público Mineiro, Belo Horizonte, Brazil Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro
207
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BNP Res. DH RAPM RIHGB
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abbreviations
Manuscritos Reservados, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon Documentos Históricos. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1928–1955. http://memoria.bn.br. Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro (Belo Horizonte). http:// www.siaapm.cultura.mg.gov.br. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro). https://www.ihgb.org.br/publicacoes/revista-ihgb.
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Notes
Introduction 1. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 225, 231–232; Dean, With Broadax, 91–96; Anastasia, A geografia do crime, 27–29. On Native enslavement in São Paulo and expeditions from there into the hinterland, see Monteiro, Negros da terra. For a recent English translation of Monteiro’s book by Woodard and Weinstein, see Monteiro, Blacks of the Land. 2. Barros, Quadro elementar, cl. 3. “Copia do papel que o senhor Dom Joam de Lancastro fez, sobre a recadaçam dos quintos do ouro das minas, que se descobrirão neste Brazil, na era de 1701,” Bahia, January 12, 1701, in Rau and Silva, eds., Os manuscritos, vol. 2, 14–17. 4. Monteiro, O rei no espelho, 189–191, 322. On discontinuities, networks, and the “spectrum of activities” denoted by empire and the imperial, see also Blackmore, Moorings, xviii–xx; Marcocci, A consciência, 67, 76. 5. Cardim and Miranda, “A expansão da coroa portuguesa,” 74–75; Blackmore, Moorings, xxii. 6. Gandavo, Tratado, 79–80. On the naming of Brazil, see also Vasconcelos, Noticias curiosas (1668), 218–219; Souza, “O nome do Brasil.” 7. Puntoni, O Estado do Brasil, 36. 8. “Carta de El Rey D. Joaõ o IV, em que fez Principe do Brazil, e Duque de Bragança, e senhor dos mais estados desta Caza aos immediatos successores á coroa [. . .],” October 27, 1645, in Sousa, Provas, 792–793; Gouvêa, “Poder político,” 293–296. 9. Cardim and Münch Miranda, “A expansão da coroa portuguesa,” 88. 10. Gazeta de Lisboa, August 25, 1736. 11. Saunders, “The Depiction of Trade as War,” 225. 12. Cardim, Portugal unido y separado, 34–35; Cardim and Münch Miranda, “A expansão da coroa,” 57. 13. Pitta, Historia, 67.
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14. Senado da câmara, Salvador da Bahia, August 12, 1688, quoted in Cardim and Krause, “A comunicação,” 87–88; Cardim, “Representatives,” 45. 15. Cruz, “From Flanders to Pernambuco,” 6–9; Cardim and Münch Miranda, “A expansão da coroa,” 57, 70–71, 81–92. In the African enterprise as well, although it was initially represented as a crusade, the Portuguese privileged commerce, especially the trafficking in slaves, pursued through military engagement and diplomacy. Founded initially in 1609, the Relação in Salvador was suspended in 1626. A new statute (regimento) for the Relação was issued in 1652. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society, 240–241. 16. [Conselho Ultramarino], [Consulta], Lisbon, December 15, 1714, DH 96, 141–142. 17. [Costa], “[Consulta] sobre os papéis que se oferecerem de arbítrios acêrca das minas para com êles se segurarem os interêsses da Fazenda Real e se pôr em melhor forma o govêrno daquellas terras,” Lisbon, July 17, 1709, DH 93, 219–220. Between 1720 and 1807, 86 percent of royal revenues from gold were shipped to Portugal from Rio de Janeiro. See Costa, Rocha, and Sousa, O ouro do Brasil, 86. 18. Relaçam da Vitoria. On news reaching Lisbon of the second French assault, see Ataíde, Portugal, Lisboa e a corte, 233–234; “Rellação da infeliz desgraça que succedeo na cidade do Rio de Janeiro com a guerra que segunda vez lhe fizerão os Francezes em Septembro de 1711,” in Rau and Silva, eds., Os manuscritos, vol. 2, 79–80. 19. Cruz, Um império de conflitos, 79–83; Cavalcanti, O Rio de Janeiro setecentista, 44–54; Oliveira, “Plantas de fortificação”; Pijning, “Regulating Illegal Trade.” 20. Costa, [Consulta], February 26, 1711, cited in Mello, A fronda, 355–356; [Costa], “[Consulta] sobre os papéis,” 221. 21. Monteiro, O rei no espelho, 316–327. 22. Souza, “Liturgia real,” 558. 23. Sousa, [license] in Pitta, Breve compendio. 24. Barros, Relação panegyrica, 16. 25. Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez, vol. B–Cz, 379. 26. Leão, Descripção do Reino de Portugal (1610); Manuel [de Melo], Ecco polytico, 38v. 27. Barros cited in Blackmore, Moorings, 67. 28. Mascarenhas, Os Orizes conquistados, 1. 29. Pitta, Historia, 56. Diogo Barbosa Machado’s Bibliotheca Lusitana, vol. 1, refers to “colonies of the Portuguese” in Mazagão, Ceuta, Macao, and Tangere (66, 119, 174). Blackmore argues that Zurara and Camões drew a distinction between the imperial and the “Portuguese colonial presence” and were more focused on the former (Moorings, xxiii). On the complex resonance of the Latin colo in literary representations of Portuguese American settlement, see also Bosi, Dialética. 30. Pagden, Lords, 124–125; Magnusson, The Political Economy of Mercantilism, 219– 221; Shovlin, “Commerce, Not Conquest”; Tavárez, “A New System.” On the absence of references to Spain’s American “colonies” until the later eighteenth century, see also Burkholder, “Spain’s America”; and Adánez, “From Kingdoms to Colonies.”
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31. Alexandre de Gusmão, “Apontamentos discursivos sobre o dever impedir-se a extracção da nossa moeda para fora [. . .] a cujo papel vulgarmente chamão O Cálculo de Gusmão [. . .],” [1748–1749,] in AGTMOV, 194–199. On the emergence of macroeconomic views of the empire among Portuguese courtiers, including Gusmão, see Costa, “Sistemas fiscais.” Raminelli also traces a shift in nomenclature as representative of a shift in Lusophone ideas of empire from political dominion to economic exploitation but locates the turning point in the 1780s. See Raminelli, “Construir colônias,” 4–5. 32. António Ribeiro Sanches, “Discursos sobre a América Portuguesa,” December 3, 1763, Oliveira Lima Library, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, ms. 84/I-Codices, fol. 17. 33. “Representação dos homens de negócios do Rio de Janeiro ao rei [D. João V] solicitando que o ouvidor-geral do Rio de Janeiro [. . .] observasse a lei de eleição dos pelouros, admitindo aos suplicantes como eleitores ou como vereadores, a fim de poder concorrerem com os naturais da cidade e residentes nela,” [before August 3, 1746,] AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 39, D. 4048. 34. Coutinho, Ensaio economico; Silva, “The Profits from the Portuguese-Brazilian Translatlantic Slave Trade.” 35. Santos, Memórias para servir à história, 188, 237. 36. Freire, Relação da conquista do gentio Xavante. On eighteenth-century conquests, see Langfur, The Forbidden Lands, especially chap. 5. 37. Academia Real das Ciências, Memórias económicas, vol. 1 (1789). 38. Novais, Portugal e Brasil. On Novais’s work, its inspirations, and its influence, see Costa, “A independência na historiografia,” 92–96. 39. Novais, “Condições da privacidade na colônia,” in Souza, ed., História da vida privada, 13–39. 40. Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse,” 861–863; Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura. For more recent empirical analysis see Silva, “The Profits of the PortugueseBrazilian Transatlantic Slave Trade.” 41. Alencastro, O trato dos viventes, recently translated into English as The Trade in the Living. With regard to the critique of Novais’s formulation of the old colonial system, research on the last quarter of the eighteenth century has questioned the idea of protracted structural “crisis.” Deficits that Novais saw as indicative of Portugal’s redundancy were small, and there is little conclusive evidence of a significant increase in contraband. Accordingly, Pedreira has argued, it was not the unsustainable structural contradictions of metropolitan-colonial relations but rather a political crisis—the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia—that disrupted Atlantic trade, undercut Portuguese interests within the empire, and brought about the collapse of the old colonial system. Contraband, Pedreira also argues, should be recognized as a feature of, and even “congenial” to, all imperial economies. See Pedreira, “From Growth to Collapse,” 843, 846–849, 861; Alexandre, Os sentidos do império.
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42. Furtado, Homens de negócio, 276. 43. Fragoso, Bicalho, and Gouvêa, “Introdução,” in O antigo regime nos trópicos, 22. 44. Fragoso, Bicalho, and Gouvêa, “Introdução,” 24; Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics. Gouvêa and Bicalho investigated various aspects of Brazil’s town councils and the men who participated in local politics. See, for example, Bicalho’s, “As câmaras ultramarinas e o governo do Império,” in O antigo regime nos tropicos; and her discussion of contractual claims in Bicalho, A cidade e o império, 384–392; as well as Gouvêa, “Redes de poder,” 297–330. 45. Fragoso and Gouvêa, “Introdução: desenhando perspectivas,” 19. The old regime in the tropics and debates about its potential are also explored in Bicalho and Ferlini, eds., Modos de governar; and Souza, Furtado, and Bicalho, eds., O governo dos povos. 46. Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?” 74–75; Hespanha, “Depois do Leviathan,” 65. 47. Fragoso and Gouvêa, “Introdução: desenhando perspectivas,” 21. On the implications of corporative models of social organization and law for slavery, see also Mattos, “A escravidão moderna nos quadros do império português,” 141–162. While Mattos examines the ways in which the old regime incorporated slaves, she also observes, with resonance in Novais’s argument about private life, that enslaving was a way of becoming a senhor. 48. Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?” 75. On Hespanha’s analysis, see also Puntoni, “Revisionism in the Tropics.” 49. Xavier and Nogueira da Silva, “Introdução: construção da alteridade,” 48–49; Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?” 75. 50. Souza, O sol e a sombra, 68–69. 51. Puntoni, O Estado do Brasil, 16, 19; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 246–253, especially on previous debates on seigneurialism in Brazil. For critique of the emphasis on old-regime continuities, see also Figueiredo, “Narrativas das rebeliões.” For an analysis of the “particular” nature of the society forged in Minas, see Silveira, O universo do indistinto; and his more recent critique of the old regime in the tropics framework in A colonização como guerra. 52. Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?” 72–74. 53. Souza, O sol e a sombra, 55; Puntoni, O Estado do Brasil, 17–18. 54. Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?,” 75. 55. “One must answer to God,” the eighteenth-century physician Luís Gomes Ferreira warned slave owners who failed to attend to slaves who fell ill, while also disclosing, “for those who buy slaves,” how signs on a slave’s body might betray an incapacity for work. See Ferreira, Erário mineral, 258, 432–433. 56. Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?” 75. 57. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 12–13. 58. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 23, 200. 59. Coates, Convicts and Orphans.
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60. Xavier and Nogueira da Silva, “Introdução: construção da alteridade,” 21–22; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 27. 61. Araújo, A cultura das Luzes, 20–21; Carvalho, “Introduction: Partial Enlightenments,” 8–9. Paquette suggests that eighteenth-century Portugal exhibited “an unusual intellectual openness” (Paquette, Imperial Portugal, 46). On debates on the empire in the seventeenth century, see Hanson, Economy and Society; and Brockey, “An Imperial Republic.” 62. Gusmão, “Apontamentos,” 197. 63. Grafe, “Polycentric States,” 241–262. 64. Stumpf, Os cavaleiros do ouro; Fragoso, Homens de grossa ventura; Voigt, Spectacular Wealth. 65. Osorio, “Of National Boundaries,” 117. 66. Fragoso and Sampaio, “Introdução: monarquia pluricontinental,” 10. See also Fragoso and Gouvêa, “Introdução: desenhando perspectivas,” 16–20. 67. Souza, O sol e a sombra, 49, 55, 73. Hespanha, “Antigo regime nos trópicos?” 53. Hespanha locates a break in old-regime “colonial strategy” and, more precisely, its absence in the mid-eighteenth century, a moment defined by the beginning of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo’s government. On shifts in the political culture of the monarchy, see also Monteiro, “Governadores e capitães-mores”; Monteiro, “Identificação da política setecentista”; Bicalho, “Inflexões na política imperial.” Although administrative reform in 1736 did not fully empower new secretaries of state, the corporatist and decentralized logic of power of the old regime was challenged by an increasing centralization of authority in the crown. In relation to imperial governance, while the Overseas Council, created in 1642, continued to advise, João V, as Nuno Monteiro observes, consulted with whomever he pleased. Monteiro, D. José, 45. 68. On “ethnography of administrative practice,” see Souza, Sol e sombra, 14, 16, 19, 20, 76. 69. Stern and Wennerlind, “Introduction,” in Mercantilism Reimagined, 3–22; Soll, “For a New Economic History,” 532; Goodman, “Mercantilism and Cultural Difference”; Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism”; Amussen, “Political Economy and Imperial Practice”; Newell, “Putting the ‘Political’ Back in Political Economy.” 70. Grafe, “Polycentric States,” 241. 71. Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 5; Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 66–91. 72. Eacott, “Foreign Strength,” 555. See also Tavárez, “A New System.” 73. Rodrigues da Costa, [Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino], July 24, 1715, DH 96, 179–181. 74. Cunha, “Police Science.” 75. Proença, Apontamentos, 309–310. 76. Monteiro, Negros da terra, 129. In Woodard and Weinstein’s translation: slavery was “a pervasive way of looking at the world.” See Monteiro, Blacks of the Land, 123. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 7–8.
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77. Gusmão, “Apontamentos,” 197. 78. Kuethe and Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World, 26. On the French empire see Røge, Economistes. 79. Coutinho, “Memória sobre o melhoramento dos domínios de sua Magestade na América” (1797 or 1798), in Coutinho, Textos políticos, vol. 2, 49.
Chapter 1. Conquests and Histories 1. “Noticias [. . .],” November 22, 1725, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1725). On Rocha Pita’s correspondence with the Academia, see “Noticias [. . .],” December 23, 1722, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1723); Rocha Pita to Academia Real, Bahia, August 12, 1722, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, “O livro 2o” (1929), 71–72; and Academia to Pita, Lisboa Ocidental, April 10, 1723, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, “O livro 2o [. . .]” (1924), 91. 2. António Rodrigues da Costa, “Da Academia Real. Approvaçaõ [. . .]” and Joseph Barbosa, “Do Ordinario. Approvação [. . .],” in Pitta, Historia. 3. Fr. Boaventura de São Gião, “Approvação,” in Pitta, Historia. 4. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, xxv. 5. Brockey, “An Imperial Republic,” 268–269. 6. Cruz, “From Flanders to Pernambuco,” 18. 7. Monteiro, “Overseas Alliances,” 59–60. 8. Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire in Asia, 144–180; Pedreira, “Costs and Financial Trends,” 62–68. 9. Van Groesen, ed., The Legacy of Dutch Brazil. 10. Monteiro, “Overseas Alliances,” 59–60. In 1661, the Dutch agreed to recognize Portuguese sovereignty in northeastern Brazil. 11. Pedreira, “Costs and Financial Trends,” 64–66. 12. Gouvêa and Bicalho, “A construção política,” 23–45; Fragoso and Gouvêa, “Introdução,” in Na trama das redes, 13–33; Alencastro, O trato dos viventes; Schwartz, “The Economy of the Portuguese Empire,” 35–37. 13. Monteiro, “Portugal, a Guerra de Sucessão de Espanha e Methuen,” 97–110; Cruz, Um império de conflitos, 61–63; Hanson, Economy and Society, 262–265; Cardoso, “Leitura e interpretação,” 11–29. 14. Pita, Tratado político, 7–9, 54, 103, 136. On the “Tratado” and the earlier “Mirror of Princes,” see Sinkevisque, “Historiarum copia, história seleta: o Tratado político (1715) de Sebastião da Rocha Pita,” in Pita, Tratado político, 52. 15. [Conselho Ultramarino], Consultas do Rio de Janeiro, March 11, 1712, AHU, [Cód. 233], PT/AHU/CU/104/0233, fol. 29v. 16. Tarouca cited in Monteiro, “Portugal, a Guerra de Sucessão de Espanha e Methuen,” 102.
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17. Furtado, Oráculos da geografia; Silva, “D. Luís da Cunha e o Tratado de Methuen”; Cluny, “Elites aristocráticas: diplomacia e guerra”; Almeida, Páginas dispersas, 163–182. 18. [António Rodrigues da Costa] in [Conselho Ultramarino], “[Consulta] sobre os papéis que se oferecerem de arbítrios acêrca das minas para com êles se segurarem os interêsses da Fazenda Real e se pôr em melhor forma o govêrno daquellas terras,” Lisbon, July 17, 1709, DH 93, 219. 19. Monteiro, “Portugal, a Guerra de Sucessão de Espanha e Methuen,” 103. 20. Conselho Ultramarino, [Consultas], July 17 and 24, 1715, DH 96, 165–187. 21. “Decreto porque ElRey N.Senhor D. João o V foy servido instituir a Academia Real da Historia Portugueza,” December 8, 1720, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1721); “Systema da Historia Ecclesiastica e Secular de Portugal, Que ha de escrever a Academia Real da Historia Portuguesa,” in Collecçam dos documentos (1721). Academia publications did not require the approval of the Desembargo do Paço, while the Inquisitorial license did not appear in the books themselves. For a comprehensive history of the Academia, see Mota, A Academia Real da História. Scholars have noted that the Academia Real was part of a resurgent intellectual life in eighteenth-century Portugal that included the foundation of eighteen literary and scholarly academies in Lisbon and another twenty-one across Portugal between 1721 and 1755. See also Araújo, A cultura das luzes, 20; Braga, A Arcadia Lusitana; Monteiro, “No alvorecer do ‘iluminismo’ em Portugal.” On Portuguese royal patronage for learning and scholarly inquiry, see Delaforce, Art and Patronage; and Delaforce, The Lost Library. Correspondence between Diogo de Mendonça Corte Real and Luís da Cunha on the acquisition of atlases and mathematical and scientific instruments is reproduced in AGTMAT, pt. 3, vol. 1, 252–260. 22. “Decreto [. . .],” December 8, 1720; Kagan, Clio and the Crown, 263; Grafton, The Footnote, chap. 6. The fourth Count of Ericeira, Francisco Xavier de Meneses (1673– 1743), a member of the Royal Society of London and the Roman Accademia, had a large library of first editions and manuscripts, inherited from his learned father, Luís de Meneses (1632–1690), that he made available to scholars. As historians have noted, there were important exceptions to the injunction to consult archives. Regarding the Cortes of Lamego, the apparition of Christ to Affonso Henriques at Ourique, and the historical primacy of the archbishopric of Braga, the censorship board instructed that academics “follow the opinion that they were true.” While nineteenth-century historians would identify Lamego and Ourique as pious myths, in the eighteenth century, as Mota explains, these events attested to the independence of Portugal from the kingdom of León in the twelfth century and, more recently, from the Spanish Habsburgs in the seventeenth. Mota, Academia, 72–73. 23. Gusmão, “Noticias,” July 24, 1732, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732), 3.
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24. “Systema,” in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1721). On the Jesuit Denys Pétau, or Petavius, and his De doctrina temporum (1627), see Grafton, Worlds Made by Words, 115–117. 25. Cortesão, AGTM, 292; “Estatutos da Academia Real da Historia Portugueza,” in Sylva, Historia da Academia Real, 45–46; Bernardo, “The New Golden Age,” 157–172. 26. Myrup’s study of the Overseas Council shows a trend toward the appointment of “letrados” over “cape and sword” aristocrats beginning in the eighteenth century. See Myrup, Power and Corruption, 41–44. The fifth Count of Ericeira, Luís Carlos de Meneses, served in India in 1717–1720 and again beginning in 1741. Pedro de Almeida Portugal, the third Count of Assumar, served as governor in Brazil before assuming a post as viceroy of India. António Rodrigues da Costa was a member of the Overseas Council, while Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença would join the Council following his return from an appointment in Brazil in the 1730s. 27. Ericeira, “Oraçaõ Academica,” January 4, 1731 [5], in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). 28. Brochado, “Noticias,” February 17, 1731 [7], in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). 29. Almeida, “Pratica do Conde de Assumar [. . .],” May 21, 1733 [19–20], in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1733); “Pratica de D. Francisco de Sousa” [8], January 24, 1726, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1726); Diogo Barbosa de Machado, “Noticias,” October 22, 1724, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos Documentos (1724); Ericeira, “Oraçaõ Academica.” 30. Sylva, Historia, 283. 31. On early representations of Africa see Marcocci, “Prism of Empire.” 32. Manoel Dias de Lima, “Noticias,” March 29, 1731, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732); Sylva, “Prologo,” in Historia. 33. Machado, Bibliotheca Lusitana, vol. 1, 136. Diogo Barbosa Machado referred to Relacaõ e descripçaõ de Guiné na qual se trata das varias naçoens de negros, que a povoaõ, dos seus costumes, leys, ritos, ceremonias, guerras [. . .] que escreveo o capitaõ André Gonçalves D’Almada offerecida ao Senhor D. Gabriel Antonio Gomes (Lisboa Occidental: Na Officina de Miguel Rodrigues, 1733). He had seen a manuscript copy in the library of his brother, José Barbosa. The dedication was signed António da Costa Valle. Almada received the habit of the Order of Christ and a dispensation for his “defect of blood” in 1598. He was the son of a man of status on Cabo Verde and the son and grandson of women of African descent. See Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 128. 34. Kantor, Esquecidos, 36–37. In 1658 representatives from town councils in Portuguese America requested the creation of the post of chronicler of the State of Brazil. Diogo Gomes Carneiro of Rio was nominated but did not complete his work. See
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Cardim and Krause, “A comunicação entre a câmara de Salvador e os seus procuradores em Lisboa,” 54. 35. Sylva, “Prologo,” in Historia; Ericeira, “Noticias,” November 2 and 16, 1724, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1724). 36. António Caetano de Sousa, [license], in Faria, Noticias de Portugal [. . .] acrescentadas, pelo Padre Jozé Barbosa [. . .] (1740). On Manuel Severim de Faria and editions of his work, see Brockey, “An Imperial Republic,” 265–285; Francisco António Lourenço Vaz, “Introdução,” in Faria, Notícias de Portugal (2003), vii–xxviii. 37. See Brito’s dedication and Sá’s license in Brito, Historia Tragico-Maritima. A recent edition of Boxer’s English translation is C. R. Boxer, ed. and trans., The Tragic History of the Sea. 38. Marquis of Valença, “Noticias,” March 13, 1732, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). 39. Manoel Dias de Lima, “Noticias,” May 12, 1722, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1722). 40. Manoel Dias de Lima, “Noticias,” May 12, 1722, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1722); Manoel Dias de Lima, “Noticias,” August 19, 1723, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1723). 41. “Systema.” 42. Telles, Historia, 63. See also letters from Manuel Caetano de Sousa, who did not endorse Gusmão initially, to Francisco de Almeida, Lisbon, March 1 and 15, 1732, BNP Res., Cód. 11185 (http://purl.pt/27903); Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 1, 183. 43. Gusmão, “Noticias,” July 24, 1732, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). 44. Conveying the Academia’s request to governors there, the viceroy instructed them that the town councils under their jurisdictions were to examine their “archives and registries” and send him copies of relevant materials. See “Carta que se escreveu ao capitão-mor da capitania de Espírito Santo, sobre os documentos para a Academia Real” [Bahia, November 24, 1722] and “Carta para Aires de Saldanha de Albuquerque, governador do Rio de Janeiro, sobre os documentos para a Academia Real; e a mesma se escreveu a Rodrigo Cesar de Menezes, governador da capitania de São Paulo e Dom Manuel Rolim de Moura, governador de Pernambuco” [Bahia, November 24, 1722], DH 71, 195–196. See also correspondence to and from religious and political authorities in Goa and Brazil in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, “O livro 2o” vol. 26, 54–59, and vol. 27, 70–76, 84–88, 113–118; “Livro de Registro das Cartas,” Ministério do Reino, liv. 482, ANTT, PT/TT/RAH/002/0001; Kantor, Esquecidos, 66–69. On the imperial archive, see Osorio, “Of National Boundaries,” 102–103. 45. “Systema.” The Academia thus participated in what Diogo Curto has described as an “initiative to systematize works relevant to European expansion” that had currency in other parts of Europe. Curto, “As práticas,” 422.
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46. Machado, Memorias para a historia de Portugal, vol. 1, 168–183. 47. Marquis of Abrantes, “Noticias,” August 13, 1722, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1721). Abrantes cited Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Canto 1: “Cujo alto Imperio / O Sol logo em nascendo vé primeyro, / Veo tambem no meyo do Emisferio, / E quando desce o deixa derradeiro.” 48. Gusmão, “Pratica,” March 13, 1732 [pp. 6–9], and Brochado, “Noticias,” February 17, 1731 [p. 6], in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). 49. Sylva, Memorias para a historia de Portugal, vol. 3, 1467–1468. 50. Gusmão, “Pratica” [pp. 6–9]. 51. Joaõ Couceiro de Abreu e Castro, “Noticias,” April 29, 1723 [pp. 97–98], in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1723). The Academia also responded to Father António Caetano de Souza’s inquiry about the “limits of the Goan Church” by referring him to Manuel Rodriguez Leitão’s Tractado analytico e apologetico sobre os provimentos dos bispados da coroa de Portugal, published posthumously in 1715, and “the bulls that pertain to ultramarine bishoprics.” See “Para o Padre D. Antonio Caetano de Souza,” in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, “O livro 2o,” vol. 26, 101–102. 52. Kantor, “A Academia Real de História Portuguesa,” 259–260. 53. “Carta de Diogo de Mendonça Corte-Real para o Conde de Tarouca [. . .], July 4, 1724, in Cortesão, AGTMAT, pt. 3, vol. 1, 253. See also Manoel Caetano de Sousa, “Dissertação da verdadeira intelligencia da extensão da terra que significa pella palavra territorio” [1720], BNP Res., Cód. 3301. 54. Machado, Memorias para a historia de Portugal, vol. 1, 577; vol. 2, 728; Ericeira, “Introducçaõ panegyrica na conferencia publica [. . .] Que se celebrou no paço em presença de suas magestades, e altezas [. . .],” October 22, 1729, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1729); Furtado, Oráculos, 263–276. 55. Manoel Dias de Lima, “Antonomasias, epithetos puros, e compostos, e parallelos del-Rey D. Manoel com as causas, porque lhos deraõ,” in “Noticias,” November 18, 1723, Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1723). 56. “Noticias,” March 15, 1731, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). 57. Costa, “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino a S.M. no anno de 1732, feita pelo conselheiro Antonio Rodrigues da Costa,” RIHGB 7 (1845): 499–500. 58. Count of Ericeira, “Licenças. Approvaçam da Academia Real,” in Manoel de Azevedo Fortes, Tratado do modo o mais facil (1722). On geography and chronology as the eyes of history, see Merrills, History and Geography; and Grafton, What Was History? chap. 2. 59. Lima, [dedication], in Geografia historica de todos os estados soberanos da Europa. 60. Manuel de Azeredo Fortes, “Noticias,” October 9, 1721, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1721); Fortes, “Noticias,” October 22,
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1722, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1722); Fortes, Tratado do modo mais facil. On efforts to bolster geographical knowledge, including the purchase of Theodore Boendermaker’s atlas, see “Carta de Diogo de Mendonça CôrteReal ao Conde de Tarouca transmitindo-lhe ordens de D. João V para comprar um ‘Atlas Generalis’ [. . .],” January 14, 1722, in AGTMAT, pt. 3, vol. 1, 244–245. On Dutch mapmaking see Schmidt, “Mapping an Exotic World.” 61. Sylva, Historia, 64. In July 1723, João Couceiro de Abreu e Castro also referred to work on Brazil’s geography. See “Noticias,” July 22, 1723 [238], in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1723). Fortes’s Tratado do modo o mais facil surveyed the geometry of measurement, while the first volume of Lima’s Historia geografica (1734) began with an “astronomical geography” that reviewed geographic vocabulary, landforms, and the different “systems of the world” from Ptolemy through Descartes. 62. Lima, “Noticias,” November 4, 1723, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1723). He apparently did not complete this work. 63. Manuel de Campos, “Noticias,” March 15, 1731, in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). Manuel Caetano de Sousa reported that Fortes complained that he did not have “the means” to complete his cartographic project. See Sousa to Francisco de Almeida, Lisbon, May 31, 1731, BNP Res., Cód. 11185 (http://purl.pt/27903). 64. Luís da Cunha, November 11, 1721, cited in AGTM, 277–278. See also “Carta de Diogo de Mendonça Côrte-Real para D. Luiz da Cunha em que lhe fala do Atlas de Delisle [. . .],” September 30, 1721, in AGTMAT, pt. 3, vol. 1, 222–223; AGTM, 319. 65. Da Cunha, November 11, 1721, cited in AGTM, 277–280; “Carta de Diogo de Mendonça Côrte-Real,” in AGTMAT, pt. 3, vol. 1, 222–223; Manoel de Campos, “Noticias,” March 15, 1731 (p. 7), in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732); Furtado, Oráculos. 66. “Alvará de D. João [. . .],” November 18, 1729, in AGTMAT, pt. 3, vol. 1, 265; Fortes “Noticias,” March 15, 1731 (p. 3), in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). See also additional correspondence on the “mathematician padres” in AGTMAT, pt.3, vol. 1, 265–290. 67. Kantor, Esquecidos, 101–103. While some biographers have claimed that Rocha Pita studied at the University of Coimbra, there is no record of this in the Coimbra archive. See Jesus, “A História da America Portugesa (1730),” 145. 68. Curto, “Cultura letrada no século do barroco (1580–1720),” 482. 69. Candido, Formação da literatura brasileira, 82–88; Martins, História da inteligéncia brasileira, vol. 1, 300–301, 306–307; Bandeira, Noções, 277–278. 70. Caetano de Brito de Figueiredo, “Dissertação Sexta. Na qual se trata das aves do Brasil,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 5, 200; Caetano de Brito e Figueiredo, “Dissertações academicas e historicas, nas quais se trata da historia natural das couzas do Brazil [. . .],” 1724, BNP Res., ALC. 319 (http://purl.pt/31055). The BNP
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catalogue indicates that in the mid-eighteenth century this and other Esquecido manuscripts were in the Alcobaça monastery. As Rocha Pita assured his readers, his account of early settlers was based on “ancient, authentic manuscripts conserved in various places in this province” (Pitta, Historia, 57). 71. Luís Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas, e resolutas, para melhor averiguação da verdade na história do Brasil,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 5, 12; Luís de Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas e resolutas [. . .],” BNP Res., ALC. 393 (http://purl.pt/30881). Hereafter, citations of this work are from Castello’s edition. 72. Brito e Figueiredo, “Dissertação Segunda. Da Origem dos indios, e primeiros povoadores da America, e se tiveram os antigos dela algum conhecimento,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 5, 159. On “disputas com palavras” see also Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 13, 24; Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica do Brasil,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 5, 229. On Machado’s and Soares da Franca’s debate about the date of Brazil’s “discovery,” see Inácio Barbosa Machado, “Exercisios de Marte: nova escolla de Bellona, guerra brasilica [. . .] que offerece ao ex.mo Senhor Vasco Fernandes Cesar de Menezes [. . .] [manuscript],” [1725], BNP Res. (http://purl.pt/31056), fols. 42–43. The BNP has two copies of this manuscript with slightly different paginations. On debate and genre, see also Kantor, Esquecidos, 198–199, and Nicolazzi, “Entre ‘letras e armas,’ a história como disputa.” 73. [Anonymous], “Décimas,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 1, 91. 74. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 46. 75. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte”; Pitta, Historia, 214–215, 655. See also Pita, “Oração do acadêmico vago Sebastião da Rocha Pita presidindo na Academia Brasílica, 2a Conferência de 7 de Maio,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 1, 131–140. Wilson Martins characterizes Rocha Pita’s work as exhibiting a “nostalgia of classicism.” Martins, História da inteligência brasileira, vol. 1, 302. 76. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 17; Brito e Figueiredo, “Dissertação segunda,” 158–161. 77. Pitta, Historia, 51. 78. With greater emphasis on the mid-eighteenth-century Bahian Academia dos Renascidos, Iris Kantor examines debates about American history as universal history, including Saint Thomas, in “Do dilúvio universal ao Pai Sumé,” and Kantor, Esquecidos, 232–234. 79. Nóbrega, Cartas do Brasil, 101–102. 80. Pitta, Historia, 62–63. 81. Pitta, Historia, 48–49, 61–63; Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 261, 269; Vasconcelos, Notícias curiosas (2001), 71, 120. 82. Brito e Figueiredo, “Dissertação Segunda,” 158. 83. Pitta, Historia, 62. 84. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, 206–210; More, Baroque Sovereignty, 57–109.
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85. Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 267–269. 86. Pitta, Historia, 63. 87. Pitta, Historia, 145, 148, 287. 88. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 66. The reference is to several Portuguese protagonists in early Portuguese Asia. 89. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 52; Cruz, “From Flanders to Pernambuco,” 21–23. 90. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 21. Such a reference, Kantor has argued, resonated in a providential vision of empire that gained momentum in Portugal and its empire following the death of King Sebastião in 1578 and assumed even fuller form in the seventeenth-century writings of the Jesuit António Vieira. See Kantor, Esquecidos, 96–97. Rocha Pita reiterated this vision in a political treatise completed in 1715 and an oration he read before the Esquecidos. See Pita, Tratado político, 53–59; Pita, “Oração,” 137. 91. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 25. 92. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 63. 93. As Cruz explains, soldiers and observers, including the Jesuit António Vieira, understood the term “guerra brasílica” as a lesser form of war defined by guerrilla tactics, skulking, and a lack of discipline. See Cruz, “From Flanders to Pernambuco,” 23. 94. Machado, Fastos politicos, vol. 1, 251; vol. 2, 165, 234, 236. On the battlefield conduct of Natives as a measure of their civilization in histories of conquest, see Adorno, The Polemics of Possession, 125–147. Rocha Pita similarly regarded Native “gruesome blood thirst” in Brazil as remarkable and in stark contrast to the “rationality” and “domesticity” of the peoples the Spanish had conquered. Yet, unlike Machado, he suggested that these conditions made Portuguese triumphs in America more impressive than those of their Iberian rival. Pitta, Historia, 48–53. 95. Machado, Fastos politicos. According to Innocencio, Fastos was originally published in shorter installments. See Silva, Diccionario bibliographico portuguez, vol. 3, 203–204; Curto, Cultura imperial, 371. 96. Machado, Fastos, vol. 1,15, 280. 97. Pitta, Historia, 54. 98. Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 238; Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 25v. 99. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 82–83, 93–94. 100. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 15; Puntoni, A guerra dos bárbaros, 283–285. 101. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 105–106; Pitta, Historia, 48–53. 102. Brito e Figueiredo, “Dissertação segunda,” 154. 103. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 27–36; Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 272. Siqueira da Gama pointed to Simão de Vasconcellos’s reports of doubts about Indigenous humanity among early settlers. 104. Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fols. 60–61.
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105. Brito e Figueiredo, “Dissertação segunda,” 154. 106. Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 246, 272. 107. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 27–36. 108. Pitta, Historia, 147–148. 109. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 37, 40, 48–49. 110. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 48–49; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, first part, question 96, article 4; Marcocci, A consciência de um império, 426; Russell-Wood, “Iberian Expansion and the Issue of Black Slavery,” 33–35; Kaufmann, A Companion to Luis de Molina, 183–225. The limited Esquecido references to Africans and their enslavement include slave population estimates in Soares da Franca’s brief parish surveys and Rocha Pita’s references to the slave trade and to Henrique Dias as a “black of notable valor” in the wars against the Dutch. See Pitta, Historia, 304, 308, 323, 562. 111. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 43–44, 53. 112. Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 293. 113. Machado, fols. 25, 26; Souza, Inferno atlântico, 32. 114. Pitta, Historia, 399–400. 115. Pitta, Historia, 54, 79, 461–462. 116. Soares da Franca, “Dissertações da história eclesiástica,” 231. 117. Hierônimo Roiz de Crasto, “Sonêto,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 1, 151–152. 118. Rocha Pita, “Prologo,” in Pitta, Historia. In 1669, the Bahians’ request for a university whose graduates would have the same honors as those of Coimbra was denied. See Cardim and Krause, “Comunicação,” 78. 119. Pitta, Historia, 285, 321–322, 486–487, 655–666. Siqueira da Gama used similar imagery. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 144. 120. Pitta, Historia, 655. 121. For images of transformation and rebirth, see Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 98, 144; João Álv’res Soares, [introduction to] “Sonêto,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 1, 67; Gonçalo Soares da Franca, “Sonêto,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 3, 327–328; Frei Ruperto de Jesus e Sousa, “Discurso,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 3, 291; Félix Xavier, “Oração acadêmica em que se discute esta questão curiosa: qual foi o mais ilustre descobrimento do Brasil: o primeiro, em que nêle se introduziram as armas portuguêsas, ou o segundo, em que nêle se descobriram os tesoros das academias,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 4, 85–94. In recognition of João V’s dedication to literature and scholarship, the Esquecidos’ first subject of their meeting of May 7 was “Quanto deve a república das letras a majestade del-rei nosso senhor [. . .].” See Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 1, 148–183. 122. João Álv’res Soares, “Oração acadêmica na Academia dos Esquecidos [. . .] Em 8 de Outubro de 1724 [. . .],” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 3, 143.
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123. The Esquecidos took up the question of imperial transformation and its geographic dimensions explicitly at a number of their meetings, especially one in which the first official subject for examination was “the State of Brazil in dispute with that of India over which owed more to the government of his most Excellent Lord the Viceroy [. . .].” As viceroy of India (1712–1717), Meneses had distinguished himself by leading a series of successful naval campaigns against piracy and insurgent local leaders. Following his return to Portugal, he was sent to Brazil as viceroy in 1720, where he remained until 1735. For his service to the crown he was granted the title of Count of Sabugosa in 1729. See Frei Ruperto de Jesus e Sousa, “Discurso” [Sonêtos], and João de Brito e Lima, [Sonêtos], in Castello, O movimento academicista vol. 1, t. 3, 289–304, 317–319, 334–336. 124. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 144–145. 125. Brito e Figueiredo, “Canção real panegírica,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 3, 325. 126. Siqueira da Gama, “Prosopopéia da Bahia, e Goa,” in Castello, O movimento academicista, vol. 1, t. 3, 332–334; Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 167; Machado, “Exercisios de Marte,” fol. 19. 127. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 65–80; Kantor, Esquecidos, 98–99. 128. Bicalho, “Conquista, mercês e poder local.” See also Fragoso, “Fidalgos e parentes de pretos.” 129. Pitta, Historia, 137–138. The list of “people born in Brazil who exercised offices of distinction in ecclesiastical and secular governance in the patria and beyond” that appeared before the Historia’s index included multiple, annotated entries for Rocha Pita’s uncle João da Rocha Pita. Pitta, Historia, 659–662. 130. Pitta, Historia, 139. 131. Rodrigues da Costa, “Licenças da Academia Real,” August 10, 1726, in Pitta, Historia. 132. Pitta, Historia, 136–137. 133. Pitta, Historia, 57–60. On narratives of Caramuru, see Amado, “Mythic Origins”; Fr. Manoel Guilherme, “Do Santo Officio. Approvação do [. . .],” in Pitta, Historia. 134. Pitta, Historia, 60–61. 135. Costa, [license], Lisbon, March 15, 1709, in Pitta, Breve compendio. 136. Pitta, Historia, 527, 585–589. 137. [Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino], Lisbon, July 27, 1712, in DH 96, 41–52. See also Lamego, “Os motins do ‘Maneta’ na Bahia.”
Chapter 2. Reason and Experience 1. Costa, “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino a S.M. no anno de 1732, feita pelo conselheiro Antonio Rodrigues da Costa,” RIHGB 7 (1845): 498–506; AGTM, 393.
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2. Stumpf, Os cavaleiros do ouro. On the discourse of rewards for discoveries in early Minas see Andrade, A invenção das Minas, especially chap. 3. On the festive affirmation of royal authority in Minas, see Paes, “O reinado de D. João V.” 3. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 274. On the forging of vassalage, tribute, and empire, see Gharala, Taxing Blackness, 32–38. 4. Henriques, “The Rise of a Tax State”; Hespanha, “A fazenda”; Hanson, Economy and Society, 141–159. 5. [Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino], Lisbon, July 27, 1712, DH 96, 44; Cruz, Um império de conflitos, 70–71, 97. 6. Russell-Wood, “Local Government,” 193–197; Gouvêa, “Dos poderes de Vila Rica.” 7. Pedro de Almeida, Count of Assumar, to João V, Vila do Carmo, March 26, 1718, “Primeiro copiador das respostas dos senhores governadores desta capitania [Minas Gerais],” fols. 53–55v, BNP Res., http://purl.pt/27086. On Assumar’s representation of Minas as an inferno, see Souza, O diabo, 70–71, a reading of the anonymous Discurso histórico e político sobre a sublevação que nas Minas houve no ano de 1720 that illuminates the Discurso’s complex set of authors, Assumar and two Jesuit interlocutors; for an English translation, see Souza, The Devil, 34. 8. Gomes Freire de Andrada to Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho, Vila Rica, August 30, 1748, in BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 229. 9. Goodman, “Mercantilism and Cultural Difference,” 229–250. See also Irigoin and Grafe, “Bargaining for Absolutism”; and Grafe, “Polycentric States.” 10. Alexandre de Gusmão, “Apontamentos discursivos sobre o dever impedir-se a extracção da nossa moeda para fora [. . .] a cujo papel vulgarmente chamão O Cálculo de Gusmão [. . .] [Principios de 1749],” in AGTMOV, 194–199. 11. Ordenações Afonsinas (1446), Livro 2, titulo 23, item 26. 12. Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” 55–56; Ordenações Filipinas (1603), Livro 2, titulo 34, item 4. 13. “Foral de Duarte Coelho,” September 24, 1534, in Dias, ed., História da colonização, 312. See also “Carta de mercê e doação das minas de ouro e de prata que Fernão Álvares de Andrade, Aires de Cunha e João de Barros venham a descobrir nas suas capitanias do Brasil,” June 18, 1535, in Dias, ed. História da colonização, 270. 14. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 268, 272. The royal monopoly on revenues from the export of pau-brasil (brazilwood) is referred to as the “pau-brasil fifth.” See Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” 295. 15. Ferreira, Repertorio juridico mineiro, 185–208. On early regimentos, see also Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 57–71. 16. “[Consulta] Sobre a queixa que faz o governador do Rio de Janeiro do superintendente das minas do ouro o desembargador José Vaz Pinto,” September 7, 1703, DH 93, 156–157. 17. Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 67–80.
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18. Count [of Assumar], D. Pedro de Almeida to [D. João V], Vila do Carmo, January 8, 1719, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 258. This correspondence is also recorded in “Primeiro copiador,” fols. 62v–68v; Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 162; Russell-Wood, “Manuel Nunes Viana.” 19. Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 266–270. 20. [D. João V to António de Albuquerque Coelho de Carvalho], Lisbon, November 9, 1709, in Mendonça, ed., Século XVIII, 99–100; “Parecer do marques de Marialva, sobre as desordens ocorridas nas minas do Rio de Janeiro,” in Rau and Silva, eds., Os manuscritos, vol. 2, 62–64. The 1709 creation of the captaincy of São Paulo and Minas do Ouro ended the existing administrative unit called the Repartição do Sul. Manuel Nunes de Viana continued to be at odds with royal officials. See “Termo que fez Manoel Nunes Viana,” October 18, 1718, RAPM 2 (1897): 392–393. 21. António de Albuquerque Coelho de Carvalho to João V, Minas, August 7, 1711, in “Primeiro copiador,” fols. 10–12. 22. Carta régia, June 9, 1711, in Vieira, Ephemerides Mineiras, vol. 2, 340; “[Carta régia] Sobre a expulsão dos religiosos e clérigos das Minas,” May 19, 1723, and “[Carta régia] Sobre não consentir frades nestas Minas,” RAPM 30 (1979): 168–169, 221; Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, August 4, 1724, RAPM 31 (1980): 187–188; “Provisão (cópia) de D. João V, ordenando ao governador das Minas para avisar os ouvidores a fim de prenderem todos os clerigos e frades que não possuissem licença régia para residirem nas Minas nem tivessem ocupação na Igreja [. . .],” February 10, 1738, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 34, D. 56; Fonseca, Arraiais, 85–96. 23. “[Consulta] sobre os papéis que se oferecerem de arbitrios acêrca das minas para com êles se segurarem os interêsses da Fazenda Real e se pôr em melhor forma o govêrno daquellas terras,” Lisbon, July 17, 1709, DH 93, 230; [“Termo da junta geral,”] November 10, 1710, in “Livro de registo dos termos, cartas dos governadores António de Albuquerque e Dom Brás Baltasar da Silveira, escritas a Sua Majestade [. . .],” Biblioteca Nacional de España/Biblioteca Digital Hispanica, Mss/7644, fols. 8–9; Brás Baltasar da Silveira to João V, São Paulo, September 8, 1713, “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 16. 24. “[Consulta] sobre os papéis,” 223–224, 233; Monteiro, O rei no espelho, 289–291; Fonseca, Arraiais, 139–152. 25. Monteiro, “Trajetórias sociais,” 283. 26. The “Livro de registo dos termos, cartas dos governadores António de Albuquerque e Dom Brás Baltasar da Silveira, escritas a Sua Majestade” includes copies of the pareceres and representações from “people’s representatives” and “nobility” in Minas and São Paulo. The “Primeiro copiador” includes correspondence about representations from the town councils. 27. Brás Baltazar da Silveira to João V, N.S. da Vila do Carmo, June 26, 1715, “Primeiro copiador,” fols. 35v–37. 28. Carta Régia [to Brás Baltazar da Silveira], November 16, 1714, in Lara, Legislação, 241–242; Brás Baltazar da Silveira to João V, Vila do Carmo, March 28, 1715, “Livro de
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registo dos termos, e cartas,” fols. 67–68. See additional correspondence on the rebellion of “residents of Morro Vermelho” in “Livro de Registo,” fols. 70–73. On the crown agreeing to thirty arrobas, see Carta Régia, October 20, 1715, in Lara, Legislação, 245; “Termo estabelecido sobre a forma do pagamento dos quintos do ouro nas Minas,” Vila Rica de N.S. do Pilar, July 22, 1716, and “Termo estabelecido acerca da cobrança a fazer sobre cargas, gados e negros nas Minas,” Vila Rica de N.S. do Pilar, July 23, 1716, in Rau and Silva, eds., Manuscritos, vol. 2, 178–182; Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 191–192. 29. Furtado, Chica da Silva, 9–10; Cavalcante, Negócios, 54–55. 30. [Pedro de Almeida, Count of Assumar], “Diario da Jornada.” The law is transcribed in “Documentos a que se referem as instrucções,” 205–210; Boxer, Golden Age, 192. On minting and the circulation of Brazilian gold, see Macedo, Silva, and Sousa, “War, Taxes, and Gold,” 200–205. 31. [Pedro de Almeida, Count of Assumar], “Um documento inédito”; Pedro de Almeida [Count of Assumar], Vila do Carmo, March 26, 1718, “Primeiro copiador,” fols. 53–55v; Mathias, “No exercício de atividades comerciais.” 32. “Carta do Conde D. Pedro de Almeida para Bartolomeu de Sousa Mexia,” Vila do Carmo, June 1, 1720, in Rau and Silva, eds., Manuscritos, vol. 2, 269–272. 33. Almeida to [João V], September 18, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 85–86. 34. See “proposals” made by “the people of Vila Rica when they rebelled” and reports of subsequent negotiations in “Livro de registo dos termos,” fols. 47–53. 35. See Assumar’s letters regarding the revolt and his response, dated July 21, 1720, and August 3, 1720, transcribed in Magalhães, “Um episodio,” 545–564; and in “Primeiro copiador,” fols. 97–108; Marcos and Monteiro, “Penachos de ideias,” 253–284. 36. Assumar to [João V], Vila Rica, July 21, 1720, in Magalhães, “Um episodio,” 559. 37. Assumar to [João V], Vila Rica, September 30, 1720, “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 110; Assumar to [João V], Vila do Carmo, January 21, 1721, “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 113. Pedro de Almeida went on to distinguished service in Portugal and India and was rewarded with the titles of Marquis of Castelo Novo and Marquis of Alorna. 38. Assumar to [João V], Vila Rica, August 30, 1720, “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 108. A number of historians have analyzed the defense of Assumar’s actions in Discurso histórico e político. Along with Souza’s introductory study, cited above, see Monteiro, “Catilinária mineira”; and Almada and Monteiro, “O Discurso e a Noticia.” 39. “Sobre a creação do novo governo de São Paulo” [Alvará], December 2, 1720, RAPM 30 (1979): 123–124. 40. Almeida to [D. João V], September 18, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 85–86. 41. [D. João V] to Almeida, March 26, 1721, RAPM 30 (1979): 131; Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, September 10, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 89–90; Almeida to [D. Joao V], Vila Rica, January 31, 1724, RAPM 31 (1980): 165–173; Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, August 3, 1724, RAPM 31 (1980): 186–187; “Representação dos oficiais da câmara da Vila do Carmo sobre a reunião da junta geral das Minas e câmaras para o assento da Casa
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de Fundição e Moeda e pagamento dos reais quintos,” August 20, 1724, AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_011, Cx. 5, D. 58. 42. “Cópia do papel que o senhor Dom Joam de Lancastro fez, sobre a recadaçam dos quintos do ouro [. . .],” Bahia, January 12, 1701, in Rau and Silva, eds., Os manuscritos, vol. 2, 14–17; “Representação do governador da capitania de S.Paulo para que se proiba abrir caminhos das Minas Gerais,” July 6, 1726, in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 21–22; Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 277–298; Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 50–53; Langfur, Forbidden Lands, 32–35; Zemella, O abastecimento da capitania, 115–131. 43. Cavalcante, Negócios, 37–38. 44. José da Cunha Brochado, “Voto em hu[m]a consulta do Conselho da Fazenda sobre as minas novas,” [Cópia], Lisboa Occidental, March 5, 1718, BNP Res., Cód. 9889//3 (http://purl.pt/31545). 45. Ebert, “From Gold to Manioc”; Vanneste, “Money Borrowing.” 46. “Parecer do Marques de Abrantes sobre a mesma materia da cobrança dos quintos das Minas Geraes,” April 28, 1724, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 5, D. 417. 47. Costa in “[Consulta] sobre os papéis que se oferecerem de arbitrios acêrca das minas para com êles se segurarem os interêsses da Fazenda Real e se pôr em melhor forma o govêrno daquellas terras,” Lisbon, July 17, 1709, DH 93, 221. As noted initially here, Assumar, among other royal officials, argued that living in Minas caused moral degeneration. See [Anonymous], Discurso histórico, 64; Mendonça de Pina e Proença, “Reflexões de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença sobre o sistema da capitação c. Março 1734,” in AGTMOV, 418; Pereyra, Compendio narrativo, 12, 18. 48. Boxer, Golden Age, 204–206. Anonymous, “[Noticia a respeito das minas de diamantes da Capitania de Minas Gerais, no Brasil, desde a sua descoberta em 1728, até 1773 [. . .],” [after 1776], BNP Res., Cód. 7167 (http://purl.pt/26776). Petitions requesting recognition for discoveries are transcribed in “Descoberta de diamantes em Minas,” RAPM 2 (1897): 271–285. See also Carta Régia, February 8, 1730, in RAPM 16, no. 1 (1911): 439–440. One resident of Rio recalled that even a decade later there was “little knowledge of raw diamonds in that land,” even among goldsmiths. On the diamond district, see Furtado, Chica da Silva, 20–30; and Carrara, “Desvendendo a riqueza na terra dos diamantes.” 49. Gazetas manuscritas v.1 (1729–1731), 77, 86, 88, 142, 187. The word used was arrates, the plural of arrátel, a customary unit of measurement, according to Bluteau, equal to a pound. See Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez, vol. A–Az, 540. 50. Boxer, Golden Age, 207–208. 51. [D. João V] to Almeida, November 23, 1725, RAPM 30 (1979): 191–192; Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 1, 142. 52. Gusmão, “Resposta de Alexandre de Gusmão a vários pareceres” in AGTMOV, 111. On the challenges of analyzing private royal treasury receipts to ascertain the volume of gold mined and taxed, see Costa, Rocha, and Sousa, O ouro do Brasil, 192.
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53. Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 1, 182 (December 18, 1731). Almeida, who may have been linked to a counterfeiting ring, reportedly returned to Lisbon with a fortune as large as 18 million cruzados. See Furtado, Chica, 23; Cavalcante, Negócios, 38, and Romeiro, Corrupção, 279–361. On local critique of Almeida’s administration, see Romeiro, Vila Rica em sátiras. On Almeida’s administration see also Atallah, “Práticas políticas.” The crown prohibited governors from engaging in commerce from 1678 to 1709 and then reinstated the prohibition in 1720. See Furtado, Homens, 185; Mathias, “No exercício de atividades comerciais”; Miranda, “Na vizinhança dos grandes,” RAPM 42, no. 2 (2006): 106–117. Father Martinho de Barros advised the crown that the people of Minas found paying the tribute “repugnant” because they suspected it benefited the private wealth of governors rather than the crown. See “Sobre o quinto do ouro das Minas Gerais, Terceiro voto do [Padre Martinho de Barros],” February 6, 1724, AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_011, Cx. 5, D. 8. On reports of counterfeiting, see Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 1, 141–142. A 1731 interrogation described an extensive and well-guarded operation. See “Treslado da delação que fez Francisco Borges de Carvalho de seu socio Ignacio de Souza de Ferreira, de ter cazas de fundição. E de cunhar moedaz,” ca. 1731, BNP Res., Cód. 6699 (http:purl.pt/2008). 54. Romeiro, Corrupção, 232–235; Furtado, Chica, 25–29. In 1739 diamond mining reopened based on four-year contracts. 55. “Alvará em fórma de Ley, pelo qual V.Magestade ha por bem ordenar que se naõ abraõ novos caminhos, ou picadas para as Minas em que já houver fórma de arrecadçaõ da sua real fazenda [. . .] [publicado e registrado],” October 29, 1733. 56. Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 2 (1732–1734), 288. Cortesão concluded that the plan was written in August but reportedly formulated the previous year. See AGTM, 350–353. 57. Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History, 86–88. 58. “Conta que dâ a S. Magestade Nicolau Antunez Ferreira, morador de Vila Rica,” August 29, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 15, fol. 36v. 59. Count of Ericeira, “Diário,” October 13, 1733, cited in AGTM, 351. The comment is partially transcribed in Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 2, 288. 60. “Projeto da capitação e maneio, proposto a D.João V por Alexandre de Gusmão, 1733,” in AGMTOV, 57, 81–83. Manuscript copies include “Relatorio não assinado sobre a utilidade que haveria para a fazenda real e alivio para os vassalos se nas Minas Gerais houvesse apenas dois tributos, a matricula de escavos e o manejo,” n.d., AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_005, Cx. 23, D. 2; “Parecer sobre o tributo que se deveria impôr em Minas Gerais em lugar do quinto [. . .],” n.d., BNP Res., Cód. 1934; “Regimento da capitação, para melhor arrecadação dos quintos,” in AGMTOV, 131. 61. Pacheco, Frei Pantaleão Rodrigues Pacheco, 67; Macedo, Silva, and Sousa, “War, Taxes, and Gold,” 194; AGTM, 355. 62. “Projeto da capitação,” 83–84; AGTM, 355–356. On slavery and earlier schemes see Carta Régia, July 24, 1711, in Lara, Legislação, 236; “Parecer do conego João da Mota,”
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in “[Consulta] Sobre o quinto do ouro das minas geraes,” after February 5, 1724, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx.5, D. 8. 63. Gusmão, “Resposta de Alexandre de Gusmão a vários pareceres,” 120, 123. On the plan for diamond mining see Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 81–82. In the mid1730s, writing from Paris, Luís da Cunha commented on a similar head tax scheme for Minas described to him by a “Jew born in Rio de Janeiro.” See Da Cunha, Instruções políticas, 344–346. 64. AGTM, 355–357. 65. Gusmão, “Projecto da capitação,” 88–89; Gusmão, “Resposta,” 124. On earlier reformist discourse and taxation as an instrument of state-led social reform, see McCormick, William Petty, 138–147, 157, 162. Gusmão’s approach resonated in Petty’s observation that while poll taxes were “very unequal,” they also potentially “spurred” fathers to see that their children worked “upon their first capacity” to pay their own poll tax (Petty, Treatise of Taxes, 42). 66. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 61–62, 81–83. 67. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 64. 68. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 68–69. Gharala analyzes a similar effort to revitalize tribute in New Spain with “new printed instruments” intended to increase the collection and legibility of revenues. Gharala, Taxing Blackness, 141. 69. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 65, 74–75. On officials dispatched to carry out the plan, see “Instruções para a execução do sistema da capitação ao Conselho Ultramarino, redigidas por Alexandre de Gusmão, January 28, 1736,” in AGTMOV, 141–145; “Carta régia digida ao Conde das Galveas . . . a respeito da criação de intendências da fazenda,” Lisboa Occidental, January 31, 1736, BNB, Ms. II-33, 39, 85 (mss. 1483643_0003); Magalhães, “A cobrança do ouro,” 121–122. 70. Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation, 43; Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 57. On services and retail in the Minas economy at mid-century, see Silveira, Universo, 87–91. 71. “Carta de Alexandre de Gusmão ao Beneficiado Antônio Batista, para que êste comunique ao Rei o resultado das conferências com os jesuitas sobre o sistema de capitação,” March 18, 1734, in AGTMOV, 348. Manuel Caetano Lopes de Lavre made a similar point about the scheme in “Fontes historicas,” 666. 72. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 69. 73. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 84–85. 74. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 100–103; Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” 248–249; Lima, “Oferta e demanda.” 75. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 103. 76. [Count of Assumar] Pedro de Almeida, Lisbon, October 8, 1733, ANTT, PT/ TT/MSBR/0002, fols. 112v–113. The same report is reproduced as “Parecer do Conde de Assumar [. . .] sôbre o projeto de maneio [. . .],” in AGTMET, 515–521. Official
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recommendations for slave trade regulations recurred in the context of rivalry. In the seventeenth century see “Projecto em que se mostra como foy o tempo passado, e o prezente, e será o futuro o Estado do Brasil formandose huma companhia [. . .],” ANTT, PT/TT/MSLIV/1096, fols. 37v–39v; and on a plan to create a trading company farther south, closer to São Tomé, “Alvará porque Vossa Magestade ha por bem confirmar as condiçoens com que Joaõ Dainsaint, e seus socios se querem estabelecer na Ilha do Corisco no Rio das Anges para della tirarem escravos, e os levarem aos portos do Brasil [. . .],” December 23, 1723; Acioli and Menz, “Resgate,” 59–63; Lopes and Marques, “O outro lado”; Pinjing, “Regulating Illegal Trade,” 331; d’Azevedo, “A Companhia da Ilha do Corisco.” 77. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 103–104. On the Costa da Mina see Carlos da Silva Jr., “Ardras, minas e jejes”; Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith, 25–31, 45–51; Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, chap. 1. 78. Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” 243. 79. Costa, Rocha, and Sousa, O ouro, 63–70. 80. “Parecer de Diogo de Mendonça” and “Parecer de Lourenco d’ Almeida,” [1733], in “Fontes historicas,” 665, 648–649. 81. “Parecer do Conde de Assumar, D. Pedro de Almeida, sobre o projeto de capitação,” September 21, 1733, in AGTMET, 503–506. 82. José de Araujo, Simão Estevens, and João de Seyxas, [“Parecer,”] ANTT, PT/TT/ MSBR/0002, 94. 83. “Fontes historicas” includes commentary on Gusmão’s plan reproduced from documentation in the APM (pp. 605–676). A similar, but not identical, set of comments can be found in “Pareceres sobre o projecto da capitação, e maneyo de que leva copia Martinho de Mendonça,” in “Cartas e outros papéis oficiais relativos ao Brasil,” ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, including reports from José Carvalho de Abreu, [“Cópia da Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino,”] Lisboa Occidental, October 3, 1733, ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 107; the Count of Assumar, the Bishop of Rio (May 29, 1736), Manuel Telles, the Viscount Thomas da Silva Telles, Martinho de Mendonça, João Alvares da Costa, Valerio da Costa Gouvea, a joint parecer from the Jesuits José de Araujo, Simão Estevens, and João de Seyxas, and copies of reports from the Overseas Council. This documentation includes a table indicating the number of enslaved people in Vila Rica based on parish records and other quantitative information, such as “mapas” of matriculated slaves, as well as a “Lista dos papeis que se mandão nesta occasião a Martinho de Mendonça, por iate, que parte em 22 de Marco de 1734, para os comunicar com o Conde das Galveias.” Additional commentary is reproduced in AGTMOV. On reports of debate at the royal court see Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 2, 288–289. 84. [João Alvares da Costa], [ca. 1733], ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 86. 85. Mendonça, [Parecer], n.d. [before 1733/34], ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fols. 81v– 82. Assumar made a similar argument the previous decade. See Assumar to João V, Vila do Carmo, January 14, 1721, “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 112.
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86. Gusmão, “Resposta,” 110–127; Gusmão to Batista, March 18, 1734, in AGTMOV, 349–351, refers to the theological rectitude of the scheme. On Gusmão’s reward for service see AGTM, 361–365. 87. Schultz, “Learning to Obey.” 88. [Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e] Proença, Apontamentos, 309–311. On William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690) and ideas on quantitative knowledge and taxation, see McCormick, William Petty, 138–140; Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 126–128. Such an interest in simplification and the systematic gathering and use of information appears to anticipate a more thorough “rationalization” of administrative information in the Portuguese empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. See Santos, “Administrative Knowledge.” 89. Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 2, 292–293 (October 27, 1733, and November 3, 1733); “Regimento dado por El Rei D. João V, mas escrito por Alexandre de Gusmão, ao novo governador das Minas [sic], Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença [. . .],” October 30, 1733, in AGTMOV, 105–109; “Lista dos papeis,” ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 116; “Parecer de governador dando conta de situação em Capitania,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 33, D. 1. Although the AHU catalog indicates this document was written before 1737, the text itself is not dated. Mendonça concluded the report by noting that it was based on observations made “in little more than two months since he had been in the country,” suggesting it may have been written earlier in his tenure in Minas before the rebellion against the new tax regime. For a study of his administration see Cavalcanti, “O comissário real.” As Mendonça assumed his duties, the king continued to receive advice. See “Informações dirigidas ao Rei por Manuel Soares de Sequeira, advogado nas comarcas de Vila Rica, Sabará, e Rio de Mortes, sobre a arrecadação do quinto real do ouro [Cópia do século XIX assinada por Joaquim Miguel Lopes de Lavre],” [Lisbon, post1735,] AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 30, D. 63. Sequeira introduced himself as having served as a lawyer in Minas for thirteen years before returning to Lisbon in 1735. 90. “Regimento dado por El Rei D. João V,” in AGTMOV, 106; “Regimento da capitação,” 128–137; also as “Regimento que se deve observar [. . .] para a boa arrecadação do ouro e bilhetes da capitação” (ca. 1735), in “Livro de registro de portarias e ordens expedidas a esta Intendencia,” Vila Rica, BNB, 1–10,06,005 (http://objdigital.bn.br/ objdigital2/acervo_digital/div_manuscritos/mss1436001_1448077/mss1436056.pdf); “Regimento da capitação [dos escravos],” 37–44. For a later discussion of revisions, see “Consulta (cópia) do Conselho Ultramarino sobre o regimento da capitação de que deu conta Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença, em carta de 1736, Agosto 3,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 34, D. 66; Gusmão, “Resposta,” 111–114, 117. 91. Cited in White, “Fiscal Policy,” 215–216. 92. “Termo da junta que se fes [. . .]” [cópia], [Vila Rica], March 24, 1734, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 26, D. 23. 93. “Despacho sobre assunto relativo a cobrança de quintos,” Lisbon, September 23, 1734, AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_011, Cx. 27, D. 23.
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94. Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 3, 139 (September 27, 1735). Gusmão attributed an increase in gold brought to smelteries in the year preceding the capitação to Mendonça’s “excessive vigilance”; “all burned in prisons and confiscations.” See Gusmão, “Reparos sobre a disposição da Lei de 3 de Dezembro de 1750, a respeito do novo método da cobrança do quinto do ouro nas Minas [. . .],” December 19, 1750, in AGTMOV, 229. On torture and the severity of both Mendonça and Gomes Freire, see also Desembargador Frei Sebastião Pereira de Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação e de proposta de arrecadação do real quinto do ouro por contrato,”] Lisbon, December 12, 1747, in Códice Costa Matoso, vol. 1, 447–448 (a copy is also included in BNP Res., Cód. 6980); Félix de Azevedo da Fonseca, [“Parecer contra a capitação e as casas de fundição e pela imposição de quantia equivalente ao quinto sobre os generos,”] Sabará, April 26, 1751, in Códice Costa Matoso, 540; Desembargador Tomé Gomes Moreira, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais e em que se mostra ser mais útil o quintar-se o ouro, porque assim só paga o que o deve,”] Lisbon, 1749, or “Parecer em defesa das casas de fundição apresentando em junta sobre mundança do sistema de arrecadação do quinto do ouro realizada em 6 de outubro de 1749 no Conselho Ultramarino,” in Códice Costa Matoso, 474, 476–479. Gomes Freire insisted that he had encouraged those present at the meeting to speak freely and claimed that when he learned of Mendonça’s excesses, he advised him to abstain and “believed” him to have done so. Yet he also defended the campaign against counterfeiters as necessary, independent of the capitação reform. See Gomes Freire de Andrada to Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho, Vila Rica, August 30, 1748, in BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 233v. 95. “Bando,” Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, January 2, 1738, and “Regimento da capitação, para melhor arrecadação dos quintos,” in “Livro de registro de portarias e ordens expedidas a esta Intendencia.” The regimento is also published as “Regimento da capitação, para melhor arrecadação dos quintos, proposto e articulado por Alexandre de Gusmão,” in AGTMOV, 128–137; Mendonça to Galveias, April 28, 1737, in AGTM, 398; “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça para o Secretário de Estado Antônio Guedes Pereira [. . .],” May 13, 1737, in AGTMDB, 178. The AHU includes several “mapas” along with official reports on the capitação, while the collections of the APM and the BNB include several registries. In addition to the regimento, the crown issued a law about the transport of gold to Portugal: “Ley porque V. Magestade ha por bem, que todo o ouro em pó, folheta, ou barra, ou lavrado em peças grosseiras [. . .] que vierem do Brazil, venha tudo dentro nos cofres das naos de comboy, e vá à caza da moeda,” [publicado registrado,] March 2, 1736. 96. Royal revenues received in Lisbon excluded the costs of administration and defense in Brazil and, therefore, did not reflect what was collected on the ground in Minas. Carrara describes the period between 1736 and 1751 as “by far the period of greatest fiscal prosperity.” Carrara, Receitas e despesas, 49; Carrara, “Eficácia tributária”;
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Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” especially chaps. 4 and 5; Sousa, “Brazilian Gold and the Lisbon Mint House”; Pedreira, “Costs and Financial Trends,” 67; Costa, Rocha, and Sousa, O ouro, chap. 3. 97. “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença para D.João V, informando que tomou posse do governo da capitania das Minas em 1736, Maio 15,” Vila Rica, May 27, 1736, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011_Cx. 31, D. 98. Part of Mendonça’s correspondence on the rebellion is reproduced in “Motins do sertão.” For a study of the rebellion see Anastasia, Vassalos rebeldes, chap. 3; and Figueiredo, “Furores sertanejos.” Early in 1736, a Lisbon newsletter reported that Mendonça “promised a great shipment of gold” and that some of the town councils had not accepted the capitação. See Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 3, 159, 161 (January 17 and 24, 1736). The most concerted opposition was in Vila Nova da Rainha, Sabará, and Vila do Principe. By the end of the year, the same newsletter recounted that there were “many who complained of the rigorous grip with which Martinho de Mendonça collected the capitação.” Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 3, 218–219 (December 4, 1736). On his administration see also Mendonça to D. João V, Vila Rica, December 16, 1736, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 32, D. 63. Criticism was reiterated in reports written in the late 1740s and early 1750s, cited above, in Códice Costa Matoso, 227, 445–447, 474–475. Officials writing from Goiás also reported an uprising against the capitação. See “Carta do superintendente e intendente-geral das Minas de Goiás [. . .],” Goiás, March 20, 1736, and “Carta do superintendente-geral [. . .] sobre a devassa tirada [. . .],” Goiás, March 19, 1737, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_008, Cx. 1, D. 29 and 31. On the early settlement of the area see also Santos, Bandeirantes paulistas. 98. Mendonça to António Guedes Pereira [Secretário de Estado da Marinha], Vila Rica, October 2, 1737, and December 23, 1737, in “Motins,” 660, 663–672. On opposition to Mendonça’s administration, see also “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça para Gomes Freire de Andrade sobre movimentos sediciosos em Minas Gerais,” November 1, 1737, in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 31–33; “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a carta de 1736, Dezembro 16 de Martinho de Mendonça [. . .] dando conta da assuada ou prinicipio de motim que houve [. . .],” Lisbon, April 2, 1738, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011 _Cx. 34, D. 44; and “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a assuada ou principio de motim [. . .], Lisbon, April 2, 1738, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 34,D. 46. The scant direct evidence of efforts to mobilize people in Minas includes Paulo Barboza Pereira, [untitled and undated, ca. 1736; addressed to “todos os senhores moradores . . . ” (cópia)], ANTT, PT/MSBR/0010, fol. 95; and “Padre noço” [a parodic prayer], ANTT, PT/MSBR/0010, fol. 210. 99. Martinho de Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, June 6, 1736, and August 31, 1736, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 324–325, 350; “Memorial para a conta que ei de dar a Sua Magestade [. . .] para ivitarem os malifisios que freqüente/mente se cometem nos certoins deste Brasil sem temor/da Justissa divina e umana [. . .]” [copy and transcription of ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0010, fols. 222–225v], in Botelho and Anastasia,
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D. Maria da Cruz, 80. On the longer trajectory of discourses of ungovernability, see Silveira, O universo do indistinto. 100. [Unsigned], Vila Rica, December 12, 1736 [copy and transcription of ANTT, PT/ TT/MSBR/0003, fols. 210–213v], in Botelho and Anastasia, D. Maria da Cruz, 127. 101. Mendonça to Guedes Pereira, Vila Rica, October 17, 1737, in “Motins,” 662; Gomes Freire to Mendonça, [Rio de Janeiro], September 19, 1736, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 258. 102. Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, April 26, 1737, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 419; Mendonça, “Reflexões,” 421; Mendonça, “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e de Proença a Gomes Freire de Andrada [. . .], September 24, 1734, in AGTMDB, 133; Gomes Freire de Andrada to Mendonça, [Rio de Janeiro], October 19, 1736, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 263; Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, July 14, 1736, and Mendonça to Conde de Galveias, Vila Rica, March 14, 1737, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 334–335, 415. 103. Mendonça to Guedes Pereira, Vila Rica, December 19, 1736, in “Motins,” 654. 104. Domingos Alvares Telles Bandeira, Prauna, October 5, 1736 [copy and transcription of ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0010, fols. 115–124], in Botelho and Anastasia, D. Maria da Cruz, 107, 108, 111. 105. “Conta que dâ a S. Magestade Nicolau Antunez Ferreira,” fol. 25v. 106. Telles Bandeira, 105–106. 107. Mendonça, “Reflexões,” 421; Mendonça, “Parecer de governador dando conta de situação em capitania.” 108. Mendonça to Guedes Pereira, Vila Rica, December 23, 1737, in “Motins,” 670–671. 109. Mendonça to D. João V [Parecer], Vila Rica, July 31, 1736, in “Motins,” 655. The sergeants-major and locally elected judicial officials Domingos de Abreu Lisboa and Fernando da Mota contested this rite and reported that a lack of compliance had led to their detainment. See “Representação de Domingos de Abreu e de Fernando da Mota, sargentos-mores e juizes ordinários de Vila Rica, por eleição, pedindo insenção para aquele senado da obrigação e costume introduzido [. . .] de irem em corpo de câmara visitar o governador no dia da posse [. . .] a semelhança da câmara do Rio de Janeiro,” Vila Rica, May 17, 1735, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 29, D. 65. One resident later claimed that the incident derailed a local agreement on punishing fugitive slaves. See Anonymous, [“Papel acerca do estabelecimento de um seguro de escravos e suas muitas utilidades,”] in Codice Costa Matoso, 535. On the incident see also “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença para D. João V, dando o seu parecer sobre a razão que houve para a prisão de Domingos de Abreu Lisboa e Fernando da Mota, [after January 20, 1736], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 31, D. 58. 110. Mendonça, “Reflexões,” 421. 111. Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas; Figueiredo, “Quando os motins se tornam inconfidências”; Anastasia, Vassallos rebeldes; Villalta, “El-Rei, os vassalos e os impostos.”
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112. [Francisco Barreto Pereira Pinto, Carta], July 6, 1736, Arraial de São Romão, ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0010, fols. 38–39v. A petition and “arbítrio” from the miner Domingos Antunes Barrozo cites similar language, [Lisbon], ca. 1747, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fols. 152–153, 156v: “exploring and conquering the barbarous” “at their cost.” Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 274; Andrade, Invenção, 107. On this discourse in the Brazilian Northeast see Mello, Rubro veio. 113. “Vila Rica em câmara,” July 5, 1741, RAPM 2 (1897): 287. 114. “Carta (cópia) de Antônio Rodrigues de Macedo, intendente de Vila Rica [. . .] sobre representações feitas a D. João V pelas câmaras das vilas de Minas Gerais [. . .],” Vila Rica, August 26, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 45, D. 75. 115. “Vila Rica em câmara,” July 5, 1741, RAPM 2 (1897): 287–88; and AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_003, Cx. 8, D. 717. See similar claims in “Vila Nova da Rainha em câmara,” September 1, 1742, RAPM 2 (1897): 288–289; and AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 8, D. 742, which also includes a second letter from “judges and other officials of the town council,” dated October 10, 1744; “Vila de São João d’El-Rey em câmara,” October 17, 1744, RAPM 2 (1897): 297; “Carta dos oficiais da câmara [. . .] ao rei,” Vila do Principe do Serro do Frio, October 10, 1744, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9, D. 802. 116. “Vila Real do Sabará em câmara,” August 28, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 198; “Representação dos oficiais da câmara de Vila Real do Sabará, expondo prejuizos [. . .],” Vila Real do Sabará, September 24, 1746, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 47, D. 59; Figueiredo, “‘Viva o Povo! Morte aos traidores!’” 117. “Vila Nova da Rainha em câmara,” September 1, 1742, RAPM 2 (1897): 288. 118. “Vila de São João d’El-Rey em câmara,” October 17, 1744, RAPM 2 (1897): 297. 119. Mendonça to D. João V [Parecer], Vila Rica, July 31, 1736, RAPM 1, no. 2 (1896): 655–656. 120. “Parecer do Conde de Assumar, D. Pedro de Almeida, sobre o projeto de capitação,” September 21, 1733, in AGTMET, 511. 121. Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino, October 14, 1734, BNP Res., Cód. 6979, fol. 13. 122. “Carta (cópia) de Plácido de Almeida Montoso, intendente de capitação e dos diamantes do Serro do Frio [. . .] sobre representações feitas a D.João V pelas câmaras das vilas de Minas Gerais [. . .],” Vila Rica, August 26, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 45, D. 76. 123. “Carta (cópia) de Bento Antônio dos Reis Pereira, intendente da comarca do Rio das Mortes [. . .] sobre representações feitas a D.João V pelas câmaras das vilas de Minas Gerais [. . .],” Sabará, September 20, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 45, D. 97. 124. Gomes Freire de Andrada to Cardeal da Mota, n.p., September 14, 1743, in AGTMET, 522–526. 125. Mendonça to João V, Vila Rica, July 31, 1736, and Mendonça to João V, Vila Rica, December 13, 1736, in “Motins,” 650, 654, 656–657; “Carta [Mendonça ao D. João V]
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recomendando que os sargentos-mores e juizes ordinários de Vila Rica Domingos de Abreu Lisboa e Fernando Mota fiquem privados de servir cargos nas câmaras daquele governo,” [ant. March 29, 1738], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 7, D. 608. 126. Mendonça, [Parecer], n.d. [before 1733/34], ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fols. 81v– 82. 127. Mendonça to D. João V [Parecer], Vila Rica, July 31, 1736, in RAPM 1, no. 2 (1896): 655. 128. [Mendonça de Pina e] Proença, Apontamentos, 351. 129. [Mendonça de Pina e] Proença, Apontamentos, 348–350. On the political culture and political philosophy of the Restoration, see Torgal, Ideologia política; Monteiro, O rei no espelho, 73–106. 130. Almeida, Páginas dispersas, 184–191, 195; Monteiro, “Identificação da política setecentista,” 967. 131. Filipe Maciel, “Noticias [. . .] de 29 de Outubro de 1731,” in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1731–1732). On the reading at the palace see “Diario de 6 de Novembro de 1731” in Gazetas manuscritas, vol. 1, 165. Maciel rebutted “Memorias do Collegio Real de S. Paulo da Universidade de Coimbra [. . .] por D. Joseph Barbosa,” in Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1727). The Academia also commissioned Manuel de Azevedo Soares to write a history of the Portuguese Cortes. See Academia Real da História Portuguesa, Collecçam dos documentos (1722). 132. The Cortes of 1653 and 1673 included representatives from American cities. See Pedro Cardim, “The Representation of Asia and American Cities,” in Cardim, Polycentric Monarchies, 44–45; Cardim, Bicalho, and Rodrigues, “Representação política,” 87–89. 133. Mendonça to D. João V [Parecer], Vila Rica, July 31, 1736, in RAPM 1, no. 2 (1896): 655. Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro observes that the period of the Restoration was unique in terms of extra-European administration and that educational and cultural institutions sought to preserve European exclusivity. See Monteiro, “Governadores e capitães-mores,” 96–99. 134. Martinho de Mendonça, [Parecer], n.d. [before 1733/34] ANTT, PT/TT/ MSBR/0002, fols. 81v–82. Later experience in Minas led Mendonça to reiterate the point. The privileges of town councils in Portugal to elect officers of local regiments, he explained in 1736, did not apply “in America” where “repeated orders” had established that these appointments would be made by the crown. It was “prejudicial” to royal governance to proceed as if American town councils were the same as those “with a vote in the Cortes.” Mendonça to Rafael Pires Pardinho, Vila Rica, June 19, 1736, ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0006, fol. 64r–v; Mendonça to Guedes Pereira, Vila Rica, December 23, 1737, RAPM 1, no. 2 (1896): 669. As Mendonça responded to the accusation, made by a magistrate in Minas, that his “maxims” established “the absolute and despotic power
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of [his] Majesty,” “such discourteous and petulant” defiance of authority was what one would expect from the infamous English Parliament. 135. Gonçalo Manuel Galvão de Lacerda, [“Cópia da Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino,”] Lisboa Occidental, October 3, 1733, ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 106. 136. Martinho de Mendonça, “Instrução dada a André Moreira para a cobrança da capitação no sertão,” “Anexo II,” in Anastasia, Vassalos rebeldes, 144–115. 137. Gomes Freire de Andrada to Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho, Vila Rica, August 30, 1748, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fols. 235v–236; Gomes Freire de Andrada to Frei Gaspar da Encarnação, Vila Rica, August 30, 1748, in AGTMET, 527–531; Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação e de proposta de arrecadação do real quinto do ouro por contrato,”] Lisbon, December 12, 1747, 437, 445; Moreira, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais,”] 490. 138. [Arbítrio], Domingos Antunes Barrozo, [Lisbon], [ca. 1747], BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 153. 139. “Alvará em forma de Ley, por que V. Magestade ha por bem annular, cassar, e abolir a Capitação [. . .],” December 3, 1750. See also “Methodo que os procuradores dos povos das Minas Geraes propozerão para a arrecadação dos quintos do ouro [. . .] tomando em Vila Rica a 24 de Março de 1734,” [imprint], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 57, D. 39; Magalhães, “A cobrança do ouro do rei.” Magalhães suggests that the decision to end the capitação had been made by 1748, but that there was no clear alternative to replace it. See “Papel de Francisco Xavier Ramos inviado ao Conde de Tarouca [. . .],” September 28, 1749, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 54, D. 7, also transcribed as “Parecer não assinado relativo ao metodo de arrecadação do real quinto das Minas, cópia do século XIX assinada por Joaquim Miguel Lopes de Lavre,” September 29, 1749, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 54, D. 8; Desembargador Tomé Gomes Moreira, Lisbon, 1749, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais,”] 464–504; “Consulta da junta sobre a cobrança do quinto do ouro e o melhor metodo para a sua arrecadação,” October 6, 1749, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 54, D. 18. BNP Res., Cód. 6979 and 6980 include numerous reports on the capitação and the aftermath of its abolition. 140. “Alvará,” December 3, 1750, 1, 4; Magalhães, “A cobrança,” 130. 141. Bicalho, “Conquista, mercês, e poder local,” 29–30. 142. António Costa da Freire, [Procurador da Fazenda,] “Papel oferecido [. . .] em impugnação da mesma Ley,” Lisbon, January 4, 1751, BNP Res., Cód. 6979, item 10. 143. Gusmão, “Reparos,” 230; Sebastião José de Cavalho e Melo, “Voto original [. . .] mostrando a necessidade de se abolir a capitação [. . .],” or “Voto sobre o metodo que se pode seguir para a cobrança dos quintos [. . .],” [November 20, 1750], BNP Res., Cód. 6979, fols. 1, 4. Also in AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 57, D. 21, 22. 144. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo to Gomes Freire, Salvaterra de Magos, February 18, 1752, Museu Imperial, Arquivo Histórico, II-POB-18.02.1752. Writing to his brother
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in 1755, Carvalho e Melo presented the response to the town councils as an example to be followed in Maranhão: a “profound silence” on the part of the crown “until experience illuminated the rudeness of those peoples, so that they understood the good that His Majesty did for them.” Sebastião José [de Carvalho e Melo] to Mendonça Furtado, Lisbon, May 12, 1755, in AEP, vol. 2, 360–362; Cruz, Um império de conflitos, 235, 252. 145. Gusmão, “Reparos,” 233–235, 250. 146. Viscount Thomas da Silva Telles, [ca. 1735,] ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 78. 147. Gusmão, “Apontamentos,” 197. 148. [Melo], “Discurso politico sobre as vantagens que o reino de Portugal póde tirar da sua desgraça por occasião do terremoto no 1o de Novembro de 1755,” in Cartas e outras obras selectas, 110–112, 106. 149. Melo, “Voto original [. . .],” fols. 1–3. 150. “Parecer do Conde de Assumar, D. Pedro de Almeida, sobre o projeto de capitação,” September 21, 1733, in AGTMET, 502–503. 151. Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação,”] 437; Gomes Moreira, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais,”] 467.
Chapter 3. Taxing Gold and Taxing Slaves 1. “Recibos de pagamento de matriculas de escravos em 1745,” BNB, Ms. 10–04–006 n. 001 (digital mss. 1436024). See also figure 6. 2. “Projeto da capitação e maneio, proposto a D. João V por Alexandre de Gusmão, 1733,” in AGTMOV, 86. 3. On eighteenth-century ideas of integrated economies, moralities, politics, and science, see Stern and Wennerlind, “Introduction,” in Mercantilism Reimagined, 6–7. 4. “Regimento” (1603), in Ferreira, Repertorio juridico, 172. 5. “2o regimento das terras mineraes do Brasil,” August 8, 1618, in Ferreira, Repertorio juridico, 180. While this statute recognized Natives as potential “discoverers,” the 1644 regimento did not. See also Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 63. Contemporary royal instructions and correspondence refer to efforts to distribute Native labor across their own villages for subsistence farming and in mines close to their villages. On the use of Native labor see “Regimento de Sua Magestade para as minas da repartição do sul” (1644); “Regimento das minas de prata de Itabahyana,” June 28, 1673, in Ferreira, Repertorio juridico, 182–185; Arthur de Sá e Menezes [Governor] to Joseph Rebello Perdigão, São Paulo, March 3, 1700 [Minuta de hum regimento para Minas], and Arthur de Sá e Menezes to D. Pedro II, Rio de Janeiro, May 5, 1700, in Mendonça, Século XVIII, 58–62, 65; “Carta régia agradecendo a Isidoro Tinoco de Sá [procurador-geral dos indios] os serviços prestados a liberdade dos indios de São Paulo,” January 18, 1701, and “Carta régia ao governador da capitania do Rio de Janeiro,” January 20, 1701, in Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Documentos interessantes para a historia e costume de
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São Paulo, vol. 51 (1930), 11–12. On Native-settler relations see also Monteiro, Negros da terra; Langfur and Resende, “Indian Autonomy”; Resende, “‘Brasis coloniales’: índios e mestiços nas Minas Gerais setecentistas,” 222–227. 6. “Regimento dos superintendentes, guarda-móres, e officiaes deputados para as minas do ouro,” April 19, 1702, in Ferreira, Repertorio juridico, 201. Antonil explained that the size of claims drawn by lots was proportionate to the number of “slaves brought to prospect.” See Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 251. 7. Pitta, Historia da America Portugueza, 232–233. 8. Count of Sabugosa [Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses], Bahia, August 23, 1730, in Almeida, ed., Inventario, 26–27. 9. “Alvará regio mandando que dos negros vindos de Angola para a Capitania do Rio de Janeiro, duzentos cada anno, fossem vendidos aos paulistas pelo mesmo preço dos escravos da terra,” January 20, 1701, in Documentos interessantes, vol. 51 (1930), 12–14. The law made specific reference to Paulistas (settlers from the captaincy of São Paulo). See also correspondence of Governor-General Rodrigo da Costa from 1703 to 1706, cited in Diniz, “Introdução,” in Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 40–41. On problems of enforcement, see “[Consulta] com a carta inclusa do governador Dom Álvaro da Silveira sôbre as muitas dúvidas que tem arguido acêrca da lei que se estabeleceu sôbre os escravos que haviam de ir para as minas,” Lisbon, September 10, 1703, DH 93, 157–158; and a series of cartas régias from 1703, 1704, 1707, 1709, and 1711, in Lara, Legislação, 222–223, 227, 230, 233. 10. Carta Régia, March 24, 1709, in Lara, Legislação, 230. See, for example, the threeyear contract for transporting slaves to Minas, “Carta régia e certidão sobre compra e transferencia de escravos de Pernambuco para Minas Gerais por Estevão Martins Torres,” Lisboa Occidental, April 25, 1739, BNB, Ms. I-10, 04, 005 n. 2 (digital mss. 1436025). 11. Álvaro da Silveira Albuquerque [Governador do Rio de Janeiro] to Pedro II, Rio de Janeiro, May 11, 1703, and Álvaro Silveira de Albuquerque to Jorge Soares de Macedo, September 28, 1703, in Mendonça, ed., Século XVIII, 88–89. On the end of quotas see “[Consulta] sobre Sua Magestade mandar declarar que os moradores da Bahia e das mais capitanias do Brasil possam mandar negros as minas, vista a liberdade que está permitida aos do Rio de Janeiro,” Lisbon, February 9, 1710, DH 93, 263–264. The supply of slaves for Minas was linked to royal regulation of trading between the Mina coast and Brazil that initially barred traders from Rio de Janeiro. See Soares, People of Faith, 48–51. On the mining economy and the demand for enslaved labor, see also Lopes, “Brazil’s Colonial Economy and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” 49–56. 12. Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History, 87; Libby, “As populações escravas das Minas setecentistas,” 407–414. 13. On social order and disorder in Minas see Souza, Desclassificados; and Silveira, O universo do indistinto. In 1715, for example, the crown sought to prohibit distilleries
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on plantations, citing the effects on social order among the enslaved. See “Ordem,” November 18, 1715, in Lara, Legislação, 246. 14. Anonymous, [“Papel acerca do estabelecimento de um seguro de escravos e suas muitas utilidades,”] 1751, in Códice Costa Matoso, vol. 1, 532. 15. Brás Baltasar da Silveira to João V, Vila da N.S. do Carmo, March 18, 1715, in “Primeiro copiador das respostas dos senhores governadores desta capitania [Minas Gerais],” fol. 26v, BNP Res. (http://purl.pt/27086); Guimarães, “Os quilombos do século do ouro,” 9, 40–43; Gomes, “Seguindo o mapa das minas,” 113–142. 16. Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, April 20, 1719, RAPM 3, no.2 (1898), 265; Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, July 13, 1718, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 251–252; Souza, Desclassificados, 108–109. See also Pedro de Almeida to João V, Vila do Carmo, June 7, 1719, in “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 75; Romeiro, Corrupção e poder, 325–326; Schwartz, “Rethinking Palmares,” 118–122. 17. [Anonymous], Discurso histórico, 150. On Palmares see Gomes, Palmares; Schwartz, “Rethinking Palmares”; Anderson, “The Quilombo of Palmares.” 18. Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, May 27, 1726, RAPM 31 (1980): 215–216; [Martinho de Mendonça], “Parecer de governador dando conta de situação em capitania” [ant. 1737], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 33, D. 1. 19. Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, July 13, 1718, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 251–252; Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, April 20, 1719, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 263–266. 20. [Almeida, Pedro], “Um documento inédito,” 35; [Anonymous], Discurso histórico, 150. 21. On quilombos see Alvará, March 3, 1741, and Provisão, March 6, 1741, in Lara, Legislação, 297–299. Nicolao Antunes Ferreira, [parecer on Minas,] Vila Rica, August 29, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980. Ferreira noted the persistence of flight and linked it to property damage and theft. On slavery and militarization see Silveira, A colonização como guerra, chap. 9. 22. Nicolao Antunes Ferreira, [parecer on Minas,] Vila Rica, August 25, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 29v. 23. Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, July 13, 1718, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 251–252. The reference is to the seventeenth-century French Code Noir. On similar spectacular and punitive violence in the exercise of juridical power in the French empire, see Williard, Engendering Islands, 142, 151–152. 24. Ordenações Filipinas (1603), Livro 5, titulo 70. See also Alvará, February 1, 1545, a response to complaints that in Lisbon there were “many freed slaves who live on their own, with them captives have much communication and exchange, and they encourage captives to poorly serve their senhores and to steal from their houses because they have certain hiding places where they can store what they have stolen.” The law
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prohibited commerce and hospitality between Mouriscos and enslaved people. Lara, Legislação, 141. 25. Marquese, Feitores do corpo, 46–68; Lahon, “Violência de estado,” 89–95. 26. On royal efforts to define owners’ responsibilities and limits on punishment, see, for example, Carta Régia, February 7, 1698, and Carta Regia, July 24, 1704, in Lara, Legislação, 211, 224; “Carta Régia tratando de assuntos relacionados aos maus-tratos ao escravos no Brasil, enviado ao governador e capitão-geral do Estado do Brasil,” Lisbon, March 2, 1700, BNB, Ms. II-31, 01, 018 n. 10 (digital mss. II-31_1_18n10). Alvará, May 5, 1703; Carta Régia, November 5, 1710; Provisão, January 17, 1714; Provisão, April 17, 1720, in Lara, Legislação, 219, 232–233, 237, 259. On petition practices see Marquez, “Afflicted Slaves”; and Russell-Wood, “‘Acts of Grace.’” 27. Carta Régia, March 20, 1688, in Lara, Legislação, 198. 28. Marquese, Feitores do corpo, 66–68; Carta Régia, March 23, 1688, in Lara, Legislação, 199. 29. Carta Régia, February 23, 1689, in Lara, Legislação, 201. 30. Vide, Constituiçoes primeyras; Count D. Pedro de Almeyda to [João V], Vila do Carmo, October 4, 1717, in “Primeiro copiador,” fol. 84r–v. 31. Armino, Economia christaã; Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 90; Marquese, Feitores, 51–65; Pereyra, Compendio narrativo, chap. 13. 32. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino relativa a carta de Gomes Freire de Andrada, governador das Minas, para João V, dando conta da liberdade e desafogo com que vivem os escravos naquelas Minas [. . .],” October 19, 1735, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_011, Cx. 30, D. 25; “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a carta de 1736, Julho, 26, de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença, onde da conta das mortes que fizeram os moradores de Taquaral e Passagem, Termo da Vila do Carmo,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 34, D. 40; and AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 34, D. 2725. Martinho de Mendonça’s correspondence reflects his frustration with the lack of action against extrajudicial violence and with an inadequate number of judges available to investigate crime. On summary sentencing see also Provisão, December 31, 1735, in Lara, Legislação, 294; and “Termo de resolução da conferencia que os ministros tiveram em presença do governador das Minas, o Conde de Galveas, para deliberar se podem realizar a junta, faltando o ouvidor do Rio das Mortes,” February 19, 1735, AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_005, Cx. 29, D. 32; “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença para D. João V dando comprimento a provisão de 1735, dezembro 31, acerca da formação da Junta dos seis ministros para sentencearem os crimes dos escravos nas Minas” August 12, 1736, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 32, D. 41; “Carta [de] Gomes Freire de Andrada ao rei [. . .] sobre a junta formada para sentenciar negros escravos [. . .],” Vila Rica, December 28, 1735, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 6, D. 559. For a later account of Mendonça’s efforts to discipline and punish the enslaved who fled into freedom and criticism from other counselors, see [“Papel acerca do estabelecimento de um seguro
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de escravos e suas muitas utilidades,”] [1751], in Códice Costa Matoso, vol. 1, 529–536. Counselors argued that marks placed on escaped slaves would be confused with the marks that Africans gave themselves, “because they are all marked on the face [with marks] from their homelands and the more they have[,] the more grace and distinction they have.” Therefore, marking them further, as the provision had ordered, “did not serve as any example.” 33. Provisão, February 24, 1731, and Provisão, October 20, 1735, in Lara, Legislação, 288, 293. On the use of the ethnonym “carijó” to refer to any subjugated Indians, as well as “bastardo” as a generic term for people of Indian ancestry, see Monteiro, Negros da terra, 165–167. 34. “Regimento dos Capitães do Mato,” December 17, 1722, RAPM 2 (1897): 389– 390; Provisão, November 26, 1714, Alvará, January 12, 1719, and Provisão, January 18, 1732, in Lara, Legislação, 243, 249–250, 289–290; Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, May 27, 1726, RAPM 31 (1980): 215–216. Almeida attributed rumors of “Black” conspiracies to self-interested bounty hunters. On capitães and caçadores do mato, see also Dantas, “‘For the Benefit of the Common Good’”; Silveira, Universo, 145–146; Botelho, “Capitão do Mato,” in Romero and Botelho, eds., Dicionário histórico de Minas Gerais, 94–96; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 179. Baltasar da Silveira suggested policing slaves in transit between housing and work sites with some sort of passport. 35. Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, July 13, 1718, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 251–252. 36. Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, April 20, 1719, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 263–266. 37. Cavalcante, Negócios de trapaça, 118; “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença, para D. João, sobre as providências que resultaram ineficazes para o castigo de crimes que diaramente cometem negros e carijos,” Vila Rica, November 10, 1737, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 33, D. 63; Ramos, “O quilombo e o sistema escravista,” 186. 38. Furtado observes that before traveling through Minas, men made sure their wills were in order. See Furtado, Homens de negócio, 97–100. 39. On regulations and debates in earlier centuries, see Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves, 113–133. On conflict between slave owners and royal officials over the arming of enslaved people, see also Kraay, “Arming Slaves in Brazil,” 149–154. 40. Carta Régia [to Albuquerque], July 24, 1711; Provisão, March 28, 1714; Provisão [to Luís Vaia Monteiro], January 21, 1726, in Lara, Legislação, 236, 239–240, 274. In 1756, in response to reports that enslaved “mulattos, and blacks” continued to use “knives and other prohibited arms,” the crown issued orders for harsher penalties for those who disobeyed the order. See “Ley, em que se accresentaraõ as penas impostas contra os mulatos, e pretos escravos do Brasil [. . .]. De 24 de Janeiro de 1756” (Lisbon: Officina de Miguel Rodrigues, 1756).
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41. Martinho de Mendonça, “Reflexões de Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença sobre o sistema da capitação c. Março 1734,” in AGTMOV, 421. On public displays of violence, clientelism, and slave ownership, see Romeiro, Paulistas e Emboabas, 86–94. 42. Lourenço de Almeida, [Bando] (1732), cited in Cavalcante, Negócios de trapaça, 115; Lourenço de Almeida, “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino relativa a carta de Gomes Freire de Andrade, governador das Minas, para João V, dando conta da liberdade e desafogo com que vivem os escravos naquelas Minas [. . .],” October 19, 1735, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 30, D. 25. As the mining enterprise extended out from Minas Gerais to the north and west, royal officials reiterated complaints about an excessive autonomy among the enslaved, as well as orders to limit Black women’s participation in commerce at mining sites because they intercepted gold before it could be collected by owners, transactions that also evaded the royal treasury. See, for example, “Regimento de hu bando sobre as negras de taboleiro não venderem nas lauras do descuberto de S. Luiz” [Vila Boa de Goyaz, 1739], and “Bando sobre a prohibição que se pôs as negras para não andarem de taboleiro vendendo pellas lavras,” Arrayal de N. Senhora dos Remedios, July 16, 1741, in Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Documentos interessantes, vol. 22 (1896), 140, 164; “Regimento de hu bando para não estarem negras forras, e escravos em tabernas e ranchos sem os Srs. ou brancos, etc.,” Vila Real do Bom Jesus [Cuiabá], January 25, 1727, “Regimento de hum bando sobre os negros, e negras não hirem vender as lavras, e não haverem fornos fora da Vila,” Vila Real [do N. Senhor do Bom Jesus, Cuiabá], September 18, 1727, in Documentos interessantes, vol. 13 (1895), 110–112, 126–127. 43. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 37–38. 44. “Parecer do Marques de Abrantes sobre a mesma materia da cobrança dos quintos das Minas Geraes” April 28, 1724, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 5, D. 417. 45. Pereyra, Compendio narrativo, 159. 46. Assumar to Ouvidor of Comarca of Rio das Velhas, November 21, 1719, quoted in Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil,” 87n. 47. Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil,” 87–90; Russell-Wood, Slavery and Freedom, 104–127; Silveira, O universo, 111–140. On slavery in urban contexts other than Minas, see Lara, Fragmentos setecentistas; Algranti, O feitor ausente; Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro; Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil. 48. “Vila de S. João d’El-Rey em câmara,” October 17, 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 298; Mathias, Múltiplas faces, chap. 3 and 245–273; Zemella, O abastecimento da capitania, 157–161. See also Alvará, March 26, 1721, in Lara, Legislação, 260, part of an effort to regulate the purchase of “negros fiados.” 49. Paiva, Escravidão e universo cultural, 133–134, 140. In the eighteenth century in the comarca of Rio das Mortes, the largest group of owners were those who possessed between one and five slaves, or 40 percent of the inventories studied. Yet more than half of the slave population was owned by men with more than eleven slaves, while 32.5
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percent of slave owners had between twenty-one and forty slaves. In some areas the percentage of owners with fewer than ten slaves was higher. See Libby, “As populações escravas,” 433. See also Stumpf, Os cavaleiros do ouro, 159. Silveira’s analysis of data from mid-century indicates a concentration of slave ownership among commercial establishments (Universo, 93). Residents of Minas complained of the cost of litigation and petitioned the crown for regulation of the assessment of the value of enslaved people in repayment of debt. See “Requerimento dos moradores de Minas Gerais, solicitando que sejam tomadas providencias [. . .],” June 8 [ant. 1742], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 42, D. 61. 50. Count of Assumar, “Bando,” Vila do Carmo, November 20, 1719, APM, Seção Colonial (hereafter SC) 11, fols. 282–283. 51. Dantas, Black Townsmen, 99. 52. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 252–254; Pinheiro, Em defesa da liberdade, 169–173; Libby and Paiva, “Manumission Practices.” Higgins offers a broader analysis of manumission in “Licentious Liberty,” chap. 5, while Laura de Mello e Souza argues for the importance of recognizing the specific character and consequences of coartação. See Souza, Norma e conflito, 151–174. 53. Recourse to coartação appears to have grown during the eighteenth century in Minas. Souza, Norma e conflito, 159; Libby and Paiva, “Manumission Practices,” 122. 54. Paiva’s research shows that the highest percentage of alforriados (manumitted) was among owners who had one enslaved laborer, but the majority were freed by those with between six and ten. Fewer people were freed by those who owned more than forty-one slaves. See “Número de escravos alforriados e coartados registrados nos testamentos—Comarca do Rio das Velhas, por tamanho da posse (1720–1784),” in Paiva, Escravidão, 175. See also Stumpf, Os cavaleiros do ouro, 111–117. 55. Pitta, Historia, 273–274. 56. Assumar, “Bando,” November 21, 1719, APM, SC-11, fols. 282v–283v; Count [of Assumar] D. Pedro de Almeyda to João V, Vila do Carmo, April 20, 1719, RAPM 3, no. 2 (1898): 263–265. See also Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 39 and chap. 2. On Assumar’s denunciation of African “kings” and queens in religious festivals, see Kiddy, Blacks of the Rosary, 78. 57. [D. João V] to Assumar, March 22, 1721, RAPM 30 (1979): 125–126. 58. Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, September 28, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 95; Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, April 19, 1722, RAPM 31 (1980): 110–111. 59. [D. João V] to Almeida, January 27, 1726, RAPM 30 (1979): 229–230. 60. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 11. On African and Afro-Brazilian women in commerce in Minas, see Dantas, “Miners, Farmers, and Market People.” For a study of Black women in the economy in the second half of the eighteenth century, including households headed by women, see also Furtado, “Perolas negras.” 61. [D. João V] to Almeida, January 27, 1726, RAPM 30 (1979): 230; “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino para que não possa ser eleito vereador ou juiz ordinário homem
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que seja mulato até quarto grau ou que não for casado com mulher branca,” Lisbon, September 28, 1725, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 7, D. 26. 62. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 92–93. 63. “Carta de Martinho de Mendonça Pina e Proença [. . .] para D. João, dando conta da situação em que encontram as ordenanças daquela Capitania [. . .],” December 18, 1736, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 32, D. 65; Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, April 20, 1722, RAPM 31 (1980): 112–113. In the following decade, the governor, the Count of Galveias, wrote to the king expressing concern with the growing population of free people of color. In 1733 the king asked the governor to conduct a census of freed people and people of color in the captaincy and conjectured that “freed mulattos were more insolent because the mixture that they had from whites gave them so much pride and vanity that they abscond from work and most live their lives as idle people.” See citation and analysis in Souza, Norma e conflito, 154–155. As correspondence indicates, the crown had earlier requested an accounting of residents with respect to legal and marital status, gender, and color, while officials complained that such orders were difficult to execute. See “Carta do arcebispo da cidade da Bahia, Luís Alvares de Figueiredo ao rei [D. João] sobre as dificuldades em atender as ordens para se fazer a lista de todos os habitantes [. . .] com distinção de pessoas brancas, machos e fêmeas, casados, solteiros, livres e escravos, mestiços e pretos [. . .],” Bahia, January 25, 1733, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 45, D. 3996. 64. [D. João V] to Assumar, March 22, 1721, RAPM 30 (1979): 125–126. The king asked Almeida to work with town councils to ensure that each town had a primary education (reading and writing) teacher and another who taught Latin. 65. Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, September 28, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 95. 66. [D. João V] to Almeida, January 27, 1726, 229–230; “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino para que não possa ser eleito vereador ou juiz ordinário homem que seja mulato até quarto grau ou que não for casado com mulher branca,” Lisbon, September 28, 1725, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 7, D. 26. A similar argument was made in “Carta do [capitão—mor do Rio Grande do Norte], João de Barros Braga, ao rei [. . .] informando que era costume local permitir a ocupação de cargos públicos por mulatos e mamelucos por falta de homens brancos,” Natal, March 24, 1732, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_018, Cx. 2, D. 165. 67. Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, July 30, 1727, RAPM 31 (1980): 229–230. 68. On the various sites of slavery that attended the forging of modern political authority, see Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves, 98–99. 69. Cardoso, Alguns subsídios, 18; Lara, Legislação, 236, 241–245; Mathias, Múltiplas faces, 274–280. On slavery and taxation in North America, see Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 37–38. 70. Carta Régia, January 10, 1699, Cartas Régias, February 27, 1711, and March 23, 1711, as well as a series of Provisões and Cartas Régias in 1714, in Lara, Legislação, 200– 201, 214, 233–241; “Termo estabelecido acerca da cobrança a fazer sobre cargas, gados
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e negros nas Minas,” Vila Rica de N.S. do Pilar, July 23, 1716, in Rau and Silva, eds., Manuscritos da Casa de Cadaval, vol. 2, 180–182. On problems with the collection of the taxes on slaves brought into the region and “the smuggling of blacks,” see [Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino,] Lisbon, August 8, 1733, in ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR, Cód. 6, fol. 68; Boxer, The Golden Age, 82, 191. 71. [D. João V] to Almeida, March 15, 1727, RAPM 30 (1979): 265–266. Precedents were cited in Frei Sebastião Pereira de Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação e de proposta de arrecadação do real quinto do ouro por contrato,”] Lisbon, December 12, 1747, in Códice Costa Matoso, 435. Pereira de Castro also commented similarly and extensively on various critical reports on the capitação. See “Minas do Brazil,” BNP Res., Cód. 6980. 72. Carta Régia, May 7, 1703, in Lara, Legislação, 220. The roll included lists of owners, numbers of slaves, and amounts collected. See, for example, “Câmara de São João del Rei. Rol dos moradores de Rio Acima, São João del Rei, Brumado, Villa, Caminho do Campo [. . .] São João del Rei,” 1717[–1721], BNB, Ms. 1–10, 04, 003 n.001 (digital mss. 1436018); “Rol dos moradores e escravos de Vila Real [. . .],” Vila Real, 1717, BNB, Ms. 1–10, 04, 002 (digital mss. 1436017). In 1724, royal counselors debated the use of slaves as an index. See “Parecer do Conego João de Motta,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 5, D. 401. Although counselors identified the potential prejudicial effects of the practice, the collection of the fifth remained closely associated with counting slaves. See “Carta de José de Carvalho Martins, ouvidor-geral da Comarca do Serro do Frio, para João V, informando sobre a arrecadação que fizera dos reais quintos em divida da capitação de 1732,” Arraial do Tejuco, April 18, 1732, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 26, D. 51. 73. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 64. 74. “Regimento da capitação, para melhor arrecadação dos Quintos, proposto e articulado por Alexandre de Gusmão,” in AGTMOV, 128–137. 75. The APM retains several registries. Here I consulted “Livro primeiro de matricula de escravos” (1738), APM, SC 2012 1738. The AHU archive includes scattered references to the registries and the “mapas,” or tables, generated on the basis of the registries: “Carta de Francisco da Cunha Lobo, intendente da Comarca do Serro do Frio, para D. João V, enviando dois mapas [. . .],” July 8, 1736, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 32, D. 2; “Mapa do rendimento da capitação de Sabará,” [1735/1736], AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_005, Cx. 30, D. 58; “Carta de Bento António de Reis Pereira, intendente da câmara do Rio das Mortes, para D. João V, enviando mapas [. . .] [1737/1738],” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 36, D. 37; “Mapa da capitação dos escravos da Comarca do Serro do Frio [. . .] 1738,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 36, D. 92; “Carta de Gomes Freira de Andrade [. . .] a D. João V, informando medidas por ele tomadas para obviar a fraude na cobrança dos capitações dos escravos,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 39, D. 33; “Carta de Mateus Franco Pereira, intendente de Sabará a D.João notificando do
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envio da mapa relativo ao producto da matricula de escravos da referida intendencia do ano de 1743,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 44, D. 85. See also “Mapa dos negros que se capitaram desde que principiou a capitação em cada um das comarcas,” [ca. 1751], in Códice Costa Matoso, 406–413. 76. Bergad, Slavery, 83. Gomes Freire de Andrada affirmed that parish records had been useful at the beginning of the capitação and should remain a source of information, together with additional registries of slaves entering the region. “Carta de Gomes Freire de Andrade [. . .] a D. João V [. . .],” Vila Rica, April 30, 1740, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_005, Cx. 39, D. 33. As Bergad notes, Charles Boxer provided an extensive survey of the capitação data using a report in the Códice Costa Matoso. 77. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 68; “Regimento da capitação,” 129. See, for example, “Recibos de pagamento de matriculas de escravos em 1745,” BNB, Ms. 10– 04–006 n. 001 (digital mss. 1436024). 78. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 70; “Regimento,” 128; “Regimento da capitação [dos escravos, que se occupão em minerar diamantes],” 37. 79. Rodrigues, “African Body Marks,” 320–322; Paiva, “Bateias, carumbés, tabuleiros,” 187–189; Pimentel, Viagem ao fundo das consciências, 124–125; Acioli and Menz, “Resgate,” 55–63. 80. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 10, 32; Lopes and Marques, “O outro lado,” 22; Marques, “Um banqueiro-traficante inglês,” 89; Rodrigues, “African Body Marks,” 332; Silva Jr., “Ardras, minas e jejes,” 9–12, 24–25; Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans,” 247–250, 258. On the interwoven histories and “re-inscribing logics” of race and mercantile capitalism in early modern Anglophone and Iberian contexts, see Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, especially chap. 2. 81. “Contrato dos direitos novos,” October 8, 1751, in Silva, Supplemento, 215; Morgan, Reckoning, 58; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 157–158; Gómez, “Pieza de Indias,” 47–50. Ferreira’s medical treatise, Erário mineral, included advice for scrutinizing the bodies of enslaved people prior to purchase (pp. 432–433). 82. Rodrigues, “African Body Marks,” 322; Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 98–100. 83. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 68, 70; “Regimento,” 129. 84. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 65, 70–72, 76; “Regimento,” 130. The “Projecto” indicated that “withheld slaves” will be freed “in the name of His Majesty,” while the statute linked manumission more narrowly to a denunciation by the enslaved person. 85. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 65, 70, 72. In 1734 the crown issued a law for the diamond district that established that all diamonds larger than twenty carats had to be rendered to the crown and “according to the custom of the lands in which they were found for the sovereign are reserved those with special greatness.” The enforcement scheme included freedom for enslaved miners who gave such diamonds to royal authorities, with compensation for owners, and for enslaved laborers who denounced
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others who sought to hide such discoveries. See Lei, December 24, 1734, in Lara, Legislação, 291–293; Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” 247. 86. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 63; “Resposta de Alexandre de Gusmão a vários pareceres e duvidas sobre o projeto da capitação, 1733,” in AGTMOV, 125. 87. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 62; “Resposta de Alexandre de Gusmão,” 124– 125; “Regimento,” 129. 88. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 62–63. 89. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 63, 82–83; “Resposta Alexandre de Gusmão,” 124–125. On the critique of unproductive slave labor in other Atlantic contexts, see Charles and Cheney, “The Colonial Machine Dismantled,” 144–145. 90. “Discurso de Manuel Caetano Lopes Lavre sobre o novo systema que se propoem para a arrecadação das rendas reais das Minas,” ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 64; “Fontes Historicas,” RAPM 12 (1907): 665–676. 91. “Parecer de Gonçalo Manoel Galvão de Lacerda,” Lisboa Oriental, September 17, 1733, RAPM 12 (1907): 654–662. Lacerda had doubts about “generality” and the lack of distinction of enslaved people based on age and sex, but sided against establishing a payment scale, “because a senhor does not retain a slave unless he is in conditions to serve him. A slave may not be able to endure the work of mining, but is able to serve very well in the house, and when he becomes incapacitated [he hopes] that the senhor will forgo payment and free him” (659). Along with endorsing Gusmão’s claim that recognizing gender difference would lead to fraud, he concurred that enslaved women were either productive, and therefore should be taxed, or served various forms of “luxury” that the tax could and should work against. Lourenço de Almeida, in contrast, endorsed the head tax, but argued that it should be restricted to laborers in mining. “Parecer de Lourenço d’Almeida [1733],” RAPM 12 (1907): 647. 92. João de Seyxas, Simão Estevens, and Joseph d’ Araujo, [“Parecer,”] ANTT, PT/ TT/MSBR/0002, fols. 94–95; and “Reflexões sobre o sistema da capitação pelos Pes. Joseph de Araújo e João Seixas, da Companhia de Jesus, 13 de Março de 1734,” in AGTMOV, 425–428. On taxing older enslaved people, see also Viscount Thomas da Sylva Telles, ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0002, fol. 78. 93. See the petition from the câmara de Vila Real do Sabará, August 28, 1743, in BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 201; Costa, “Sistemas fiscais,” 227–234. On the “quilombo de Ambrósio” and Gomes Freire’s campaign against the community, see Barbosa, Negros e quilombos, 31–39. 94. “Carta dos oficiais da câmara de São João del Rei [. . .] sobre os continuos roubos e mortes [. . .] informando que as insolências cresceram com a proibição as câmaras fazerem despesa com capitães do mato,” April 28, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9, D. 830; “Representação dos ofíciais da câmara da Vila do Principe, comarca do Serro do Frio, expondo o prejuizo que se tem com a fuga e posterior confiscação dos escravos,” Vila do Principe, September 11, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 45,
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D. 80; “Carta dos oficiais da câmara de Sabará ao rei [. . .] solicitando que das aldeias dos tapuias de São Paulo se tirem 200 casais e se transportem para as Minas [. . .],” Sabará, October 17, 1744, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9, D. 807; Câmara de Vila Real do Sabará, August 28, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 201; Anonymous, [“Papel acerca do estabelecimento de um seguro de escravos e suas muitas utilidades,”] 1751, in Códice Costa Matoso, vol. 1, 532. 95. “Livro de registro de portarias e ordens expedidas a esta Intendência,” Vila Rica, April 28, 1740, BNB, Coleção Casa dos Contos 1–10–06–005; “Carta do governador [. . .] Gomes Freire de Andrada, ao rei [. . .] sobre despesas [. . .],” Vila Rica, June 24, 1741, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 8, D. 716; “Carta do governador [. . .] Gomes Freire de Andrada, ao rei [. . .] respondendo a provisão de 7 de Março de 1741 sobre o cumprimento do alvará de 3 de Março de 1741 que estabelece o castigo que devem ter os escravos que forem achados em quilombos,” Vila Rica, July 20, 1741, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_003, Cx. 8, D. 719; Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 73–74; Schwartz, “Rethinking Palmares,” 121. See also royal orders in March 1741 in Lara, Legislação, 297–299. 96. See petitions reproduced in “Impostos na capitania mineira,” RAPM 2 (1897): 287–309. On official responses and debates, see “Carta de Gomes Freire de Andrade, governador das Minas Gerais, a D. João V, dando o seu parecer sobre a representação dos oficiais da câmara de Vila Nova da Rainha, queixando-se do metodo da cobrança de capitação e solicitando modificação,” January 20, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 45, D. 2; Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação,”] Lisbon, December 12, 1747, Códice Costa Matoso, 452–453. Castro complained that the commercial aspects of the economy were being undone by the capitação. A magistrate enumerated various cases of unjust confiscations and repudiated instructions to confiscate “some others” if the undeclared laborers were not at hand. See Tomé Gomes Moreira, Lisbon, 1749, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais e em que se mostra ser mais útil o quintar-se o ouro, porque assim só paga o que o deve,”] or “Parecer em defesa das casas de fundição apresentando em junta sobre mundança do sistema de arrecadação do quinto do ouro realizada em 6 de outubro de 1749 no Conselho Ultramarino,” in Códice Costa Matoso, 494–495. 97. “Vila de S. Joao d’El-Rey em câmara, 17 de Outubro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 298–299. 98. “Vila de São José em câmara de 30 de Setembro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 294 (AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9, D. 796). A denunciation against Silvestre Coutinho revealed a series of entanglements related to credit and local socioeconomic networks. See “Intendência de Vila Rica, Autos da petição feita por Silvestre Coutinho em virtude da denúncia feita contra João de Costa Nunes Calado pelo não pagamento de um escravo,” Vila Rica, 1744, BNB, Ms. 1–10, 04, 008 (digital mss. 1436027). 99. [“Processo referente ao requerimento de Alexandre Gomes de Sousa, morador no sitio de Itacolomi, que solicita a isenção e devolução das capitações pagas por
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generos vendidos aos seus escravos dentro da sua fazenda,”] BNB, Ms. 1–26, 24, 052 (digital mss. 1443750). 100. [“Processo referente ao requerimento de Alexandre Gomes de Sousa”]; “Regimento da capitação,” 131; Ferreira, Erário mineral. 101. “Vila do Ribeirão do Carmo em câmara, de 17 de Outubro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 289–292. A similar argument was made in “Representação dos oficiais da câmara de Vila Rica, expondo os inconvenientes de arrecadação do real quinto [. . .],” Vila Rica, October 21, 1744, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 44, D. 108. 102. Moreira, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais,”] 468; Caldeira, Escravos em Portugal, 166–176; Sweet, “Hidden Histories,” 239. The status of the clergy’s obligations also generated debate. Earlier the Overseas Council had considered a complaint from the Vila Rica town council that clerics were exempt from the royal marriage donation tax levied on enslaved laborers but that “many clerics” were “mining and occupied in other endeavors with a considerable number of blacks.” See “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino sobre o pedido de esclarecimento solicitado pelos oficiais da câmara de Vila Rica [. . .],” May 17, 1730, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_005, Cx. 16, D. 82. The enforcement of the capitação appears to have renewed this debate and, while initial collection did not spare the clergy, the Overseas Council clarified the grounds for exemption (two slaves for “simple clerics” and three for “vicars”). Living in the “notable city and head [of the bishopric]” meant that the clerics required “at least two blacks to accompany them and another two that serve in domestic and necessary tasks.” See “Consulta (cópia) do Conselho Ultramarino sobre o regimento da capitação [. . .],” February 20, 1738, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 34, D .66; “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a petição efectuada pelos arcediagos e mais dignidades de conegos da Se de Mariana, a respeito da isenção de capitação de um certo numero de escravos de que careciam,” Lisbon, October 16, 1740, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 54, D. 43; and “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a petição do bispo da cidade de Mariana, na qual declarava serem-lhe necessarios nove escravos para os seus serviços isentos da capitação,” Lisbon, November 12, 1749, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 54, D. 81. 103. Madureira, Lisboa: luxo e distinção, 31–33. 104. “Vila de São José em câmara de 30 de Setembro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 294 (AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9, D. 796). 105. “Vila de São Joao d’El-Rey em câmara, 17 de Outubro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 297–298; [“Os juizes e mais officiais da câmara de Vila Nova da Raynha, 10 de Outubro de 1744,”] RAPM 2 (1897): 302–309; AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 8, D. 742; Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação,”] Lisbon, December 12, 1747, 453. 106. “Vila Real de N. Senhora da Conceição de Sabará em câmara aos 17 de Outubro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 301–302; AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9. D. 804; “Representação dos oficiais da câmara de Vila Real do Sabará, expondo prejuizos [. . .],” Vila Real do Sabará, September 24, 1746, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 47, D. 59.
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107. “Regimento da capitação, para melhor arrecadação,” 131. 108. Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 80–82. In 1720 freed people were required to pay the same tax on themselves as well as on their slaves. Martinho de Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, August 13, 1736, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 350. Mendonça reported that he had urged the intendant to practice “all moderation,” but that because the intendant had previous experience in Sabará, “he had proceeded in a more rigid manner.” 109. “Vila Nova da Rayhna, 10 de Outubro de 1744 [. . .] da câmara,” RAPM 2 (1897): 304. See also “Vila de São João d’El-Rey em câmara, 17 de Outubro de 1744,” 298; and AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 9, D. 803. The intendant of Vila Rica complained of some who extended credit to free women of color knowing that repayment depended on “illicit” work. “Carta (cópia) de Antônio Rodrigues de Macedo, intendente de Vila Rica [. . .] sobre representações feitas a D.João V pelas Câmaras das vilas de Minas Gerais [. . .],” Vila Rica, August 26, 1745, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 45, D. 75. 110. Moreira, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais,”] Códice Costa Matoso, 487–489. 111. Provisão, November 24, 1734, in Lara, Legislação, 291. 112. Gusmão, “Projeto da capitação,” 89, 94. On similar approaches to poll taxes in the French Caribbean, see Williard, Engendering Islands, 84. 113. “Regimento,” 131. 114. Gharala, Taxing Blackness, 44. Gusmão’s reform preceded the Bourbon reform efforts to revitalize Black tribute that Gharala analyzes. 115. Martinho de Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, September 19, 1736, and Martinho de Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, August 14, 1736, RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 258, 351. 116. Correspondence to Martinho de Mendonça, Vila Rica, December 12, 1736, transcribed in Botelho and Anastasia, D. Maria da Cruz, 127. 117. Writing to Mendonça, officials reported on Simão Correia, described most frequently as a mameluco. See ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0001: João Ferreira Tavares de Gouveia [Mestre de Campo] to Martinho de Mendonça, Piedade, October 1, 1736, fol. 42r–v; José de Morais Cabral, [Capitão,] to Martinho de Mendonça, Arraial de São Romão, September 24, 1736, fol. 50; Cópia da carta de José de Morais Cabral, [Capitão,] to Martinho de Mendonça, Arraial de São Romão, September 28, 1736, fols. 145–147; Cópia da Carta de José de Morais Cabral, [Capitão,] to Martinho de Mendonça, Pedras de Amolar, September 6, 1736, fol. 140r–v. 118. Martinho de Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, July 23, 1736, APM, SC, Cód. 55, fols. 91v–92v. 119. [Cópia de Manifesto, 1736], ANTT, PT/TT/MSBR/0010, fol. 95. A list of those imprisoned indicates that those accused in the revolt included men identified as “whites,” “pardos,” a “mulatto,” and “slaves.” See “Lista das pessoas que vam prezas para Villa Rica pella Justisia,” Sam Romam, November 3, 1736, and “Prezos que vam
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remetidos por ordem do Capitam comandante,” [November 3, 1736,] ANTT, PT/TT/ MSBR/0010, fol. 143r–v. 120. Gomes Freire de Andrade to Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho, Vila Rica, August 30, 1748, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fols. 235v–236; Castro, [“Papel acerca dos danos da capitação e de proposta de arrecadação do real quinto do ouro por contrato,”] Lisbon, December 12, 1747, 437, 445. See also Moreira, [“Papel feito acerca de como se estabeleceu a capitação nas Minas Gerais,”] 490. In an earlier report that recommended modifying but not abolishing the scheme, Gomes Freire also identified the negative effects on enslaved labor arrangements. Gomes Freire de Andrada to Cardeal da Mota, n.p., September 14, 1743, in AGTMET, 522–526. 121. “Alvará em forma de ley, por que V. Magestade ha por bem annular, cassar, e abolir a capitação [. . .],” December 3, 1750. See also “Methodo que os procuradores dos povos das Minas Geraes propozerão para a arrecadação dos quintos do ouro [. . .] tomando em Vila Rica a 24 de Março de 1734,” [imprint], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 57, D. 39. 122. The return to smelteries raised questions about implementation and the impact on trade and the economy. See “Consulta que satisfez o Conselho Ultramarino ao que S. Mag. ordena sobre o regimento das casas das fundicões das minas: respondida por Alexandre de Gusmão, 22 de Fevereiro de 1751,” in AGTMOV, 317–327. From Minas, too, officials offered criticism. See Félix de Azevedo da Fonseca, Sabará, [“Parecer contra a capitação e as casas de fundição e pela imposição de quantia equivalente ao quinto sobre os generos,”] April 26, 1751, in Códice Costa Matoso, vol. 1, 536–558; Anonymous, [“Papel acerca do estabelecimento de um seguro de escravos e suas muitas utilidades,”] 1751, in Códice Costa Matoso, vol. 1, 529–536; and BNP Res., Cód. 6979. 123. José João Teixeira Coelho, Instrução para o governo, 255–257. 124. “Representação da câmara de Vila Rica, ao Rei, dando conta dos prejuizos que causava aos mineiros a venda dos filhos dos seus escravos, o que provocava a fuga dos pais e até revoltas,” Vila Rica, July 24, 1756, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 70, D. 39. On privileges referred to in the petition, see also Coelho, Instrução para o governo, 184–185. 125. Gusmão, “Reparos sobre a disposição da Lei de 3 de Dezembro de 1750, a respeito do novo método da cobrança do quinto do ouro nas Minas [. . .],” December 19, 1750, in AGMTOV, 228–251. A manuscript copy is located in BNP Res., Cód. 6979 (n. VIII) and labeled as “Invectiva feita por Alexandre de Gusmão contra a observancia da dita ley depois de publicada.” Cortesão’s copy includes some additional passages noted in brackets. 126. Gusmão, “Apontamentos, discursivos sobre o de ver impedir-se a extracção da nossa Moeda para fora [. . .] A cujo papel vulgarmente chamão O Cálculo de Gusmão [. . .],” [1749,] in AGTMOV, 194. Cortesão reproduces the AHU manuscript of the text, noting that other and widely published versions include additions that could have been made only after Gusmão’s death.
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127. Gusmão, “Apontamentos discursivos,” 197. 128. Along with Cortesão’s monumental, multivolume collection of documents and narrative history, cited here, see, most recently, Furtado, Oráculos da geografia iluminista.
Chapter 4. Colonies and Commerce 1. Diogo Mendonça Corte-Real, “Ordem régia ao vice-rei e capitão-general do Brasil, para que observe o luto pela morte de D. João V,” Lisbon, August 27, 1750, BNB Ms. II-34,11,007 (digital mss. 1482609); Souza, “Liturgia real,” 558; Smith, “Os mausoléus de D. João V”; Santos, “Ceremónias funebres”; Bebiano, D. João V. 2. Barros, Relaçaõ panegyrica das honras funeraes, 8–9; “Censura do M.R.P.M. Fr. Joze Caetano,” in Pina, Sermaõ nas exequias. 3. “Breve descripção ou funebre narração do sumptuoso funeral e triste espectaculo que em Vila Rica do Ouro Preto [. . .] celebrou o senado della à glorioza memoria do sereniss[im]o Rey D. Joao o Quinto [. . .] no dia 7 de Jan[ei]ro de [1751],” BNP Res., MSS 5, n. 9 (http://purl.pt/31170). 4. “Auto de vereação, passos do conselho da casa da câmara,” [Vila Rica,] December 18, 1750, in “Funeraes de Dom Joao Quinto,” 359, 363; Santos Filho, “Características específicas,” 131. 5. See also Epanafora festiva, 6; Schultz, “Sol Oriens in Occiduo.” 6. António Caetano de Sousa, “Censura,” Lisboa Occidental, December 13, 1717, in Lima, Applausos natalicios. The author of Epanfora festiva suggested that one of the chairs that carried local clergy was so striking “that it seemed nothing more than an example of good taste, or of ostentatious opulence” (p. 15). 7. [Costa,] “[Consulta] sobre os papéis que se oferecerem de arbitrios acêrca das minas para com êles se segurarem os interêsses da Fazenda Real e se pôr em melhor forma o govêrno daquellas terras,” Lisbon, July 17, 1709, DH 93, 228. 8. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 14–15. 9. Gusmão, “Apontamentos discursivos sobre o dever impedir-se a extracção da nossa moeda para fora [. . .] a cujo papel vulgarmente chamão O Cálculo de Gusmão [. . .],” [1749,] in AGTMOV, 196. 10. Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” 38; Berg and Eger, “The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates”; Berry, The Idea of Luxury, especially chap. 6; Hont, “The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury.” 11. “Torina Quotidiana” [late seventeenth to early eighteenth century], in Rodrigues, Literatura e sociedade, 171. 12. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic, 33; Hunt, Governance of the Passions, 8–12. 13. “Parecer do Conde de Assumar, D. Pedro de Almeida, sobre o projeto de capitação,” September 21, 1733, in AGTMDB, 505. 14. Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez, vol. K–Ny, 212 and vol. O–Py, 697. The moral problem of dress was also treated in Diogo de Payva de Andrada, Casamento perfeito,
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chap. 23. On medieval and early modern laws, see Bethencourt, “Sumptuary Laws in Portugal and Its Empire.” 15. Lei [pragmática], July 9, 1643, in Silva, Colleção chronologica da legislação [. . .], 1640–1647, 215–216; Lei [pragmática], June 8, 1668, in Silva, Colleção chronologica da legislação portugueza [. . .], 1657–74, 147–149; Lei [pragmática], January 25, 1677, in Silva, Colleção chronologica da legislação portugueza [. . .], 1675–1683, 25–27, 30; Lei [pragmática], August 9, 1686, and November 14, 1698, in Silva, Colleção chronologica da legislação portugueza [. . .] 1683–1700, 64–65, 419–421. In the early 1690s, and again after 1698, the crown reiterated and clarified sumptuary law applications. 16. Lei [pragmática], June 8, 1668, 148. As Roche has argued, the impact of sumptuary law on the nobility strengthened the royal court “as a supreme enclave of social distinction.” Roche, The Culture of Clothing, 49. 17. Lei [pragmática], August 9, 1686, 65; Hunt, Governance, 91. 18. Hunt, Governance, 7, 98–99; Chaturvedula, “On the Precipice of Ruin,” 365– 366. On seventeenth-century sumptuary legislation, see also Rossini, “As pragmáticas portuguesas”; Cardoso, “Pompa e circunstância”; Hanson, Economy and Society, chaps. 5 and 7; and Ferreira, “Os limites no gosto.” 19. [Mendonça de Pina e de] Proença, Apontamentos, 188. 20. Sanches cited in Lemos, Ribeiro Sanches, 27. Students’ attire at Coimbra had been subject to sumptuary regulation in the sixteenth century. See Bethencourt, “Sumptuary Laws,” 280. 21. Voigt, Spectacular Wealth, 64, 71; Souza, Desclassificados, 21–22. 22. Furtado, Homens de negócio, 230–260; Zimmerman, “Global Luxuries at Home”; DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 1–1, 65, 67; Pereira, “Uma loja em Vila Rica”; Zemella, O abastecimento da capitania, 172–173. As Silveira observes, in Minas the critique of sumptuary disorder endured into the century’s last decades. See Universo, 179–180. 23. Silva, “Parecer do Cardeal da Mota sobre a instalação em Lisboa de uma manufactura de sedas,” Lisboa Oriental, February 9, 1734, 90. 24. “Carta do [governador e capitão general do Estado de Maranhão e Pará], Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, para o rei [. . .] sobre o recebimento e cumprimento das leis [. . .],” Pará, December 24, 1751, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 33, D. 3079. 25. Pitta, Historia, 428. 26. Couto, Desagravos do Brazil, 226–227. 27. Antonil, Cultura e opulência, 99, 262–263; “Comprovaçaõ das reflexoens feitas sobre o extracto das representaçoens que de Villarica se fizeraõ a El Rey N. Senhor em 25 de Agosto de 1743,” BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fols. 82v–83. 28. Pitta, Historia, 136. Two decades later, the archbishop similarly observed “decadence” that stemmed from residents who abandoned their parents’ and grandparents’ modesty to spend lavishly on diamonds, furnishings and slaves. See “Carta do arcebispo da Bahia, para Diogo de Mendonça Côrte Real, sobre o numero de freiras que
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podiam ser admittidas nos conventos [. . .],” Bahia, August 30, 1755, in Almeida, Inventario, 130–131. 29. “Parecer de Wencesláo Pereira da Silva, em que se propóem os meios mais convenientes para suspender a ruina dos tres principaes generos do commercio do Brasil,” February 12, 1738, in Almeida, Inventario, 28–29. 30. Pitta, Historia, 61, 587. 31. Luís António de Sousa, “Ofício n. 6 do [governador e capitão-general da capitania de São Paulo] [. . .] para [. . .] Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_023, Cx. 25, D. 2380. 32. Couto, Desagravos do Brazil, 226–227. 33. Pereyra, Compendio narrativo, 312–313. 34. Mól, “Entre sedas e baetas”; Dantas, “Miners, Farmers, and Market People”; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty”; Fromont, “Dancing for the King of Congo”; Walker, Exquisite Slaves; Hulman, The Politics of Fashion, 25. 35. “Carta do governador D. João de Lencastre para Sua Magestade,” Bahia, June 24, 1695, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 32, D. 4101. Scarano traced similar criticism of the dress of free people of color in Minas. See Scarano, Cotidiano, 94–117. 36. “Carta régia ao governador e capitão general do Estado do Brasil,” Lisbon, February 20, 1696, BNB, Ms. II-33, 23, 15, n. 4 (digital mss. 1483524), transcribed as Carta Régia, February 20, 1696, in Lara, Legislação, 208. Related to the king’s response, see Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino, Lisbon, January 30, 1696, and Consulta da Junta das Missões, Lisbon, January 24, 1696, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 32, D. 4099 and D. 4100. 37. Ordenações Filipinas (1609), Livro 5, titulo 79. 38. “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino sobre carta do Bispo do Rio de Janeiro,” Lisbon, September 4, 1703, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_017, Cx. 8, D. 801 (reproduced in Lara, Legislação, 460–461); Carta Régia, September 23, 1703, and Carta Régia, February 23, 1709, in Lara, Legislação, 221–222, 229–230. 39. Silva, “Parecer do Cardeal da Mota,” 90. 40. Dom Frei José Fialho, [pastoral letters of 1726 and 1738,] cited in Freyre, Casagrande e Senzala, 440. On social order, Black women’s dress, and similar elite preoccupations in Spanish America, see also Walker, Exquisite Slaves; Von Germeten, Violent Delights, Violent Ends, 144–165; Terrazas Williams, “Finer Things.” 41. “Carta do governador D. João de Lencastre.” 42. Martinho de Mendonça to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Vila Rica, August 14, 1736, in RAPM 16, no. 2 (1911): 351; Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, “Voto sobre o methodo que se pode seguir para a Cobrança dos Quintos que devem pagar a Sua Magestade as Minas do Brasil,” November 20, 1750, BNP Res., Cód. 6979, fol. 7. 43. “Carta do governador D. João de Lencastre.” 44. Mathias da Costa Souza, Provedor da Fazenda, Belem, September 16, 1733, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 16, D. 1516.
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45. Câmara de Mariana, [petition,] December 3, 1755, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 68, D. 98. 46. Couto, Desagravos do Brazil, 227. 47. “Parecer de Wencesláo Pereira da Silva,” 29. 48. Câmara da Vila do Príncipe cited in Stumpf, Os cavaleiros do ouro, 135; [Petition,] Câmara de Mariana, December 3, 1755, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 68, D. 98. 49. “Projeto da capitação e maneio, proposto a D. João V por Alexandre de Gusmão, 1733,” in AGTMOV, 89, 94. 50. [Parecer] Domingos António Barroso, [ca. 1747,] “Minas do Brasil,” BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 154; “Regimento de hum bando que se lançou nestas Minas sobre os negros não venderem ouro, e se lhe não poder comprar,” Arrayal do Sr. Bom Jesus do Cuyabá, December 2, 1726, in Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Documentos interessantes, vol. 13 (1895), 101–103. 51. Russell-Wood, “‘Acts of Grace,’” 312–313. 52. “Requerimento dos crioulos pretos das minas de Vila Real do Sabará, Vila Rica, Serro do Frio, São José e São João do Rio das Mortes, pedindo que lhes nomeie um procurador para os defender das violencias de que são vitimas,” [ant.] October 14, 1755, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 68, D. 66. 53. Almeida to [D. João V], Vila Rica, April 20, 1722, RAPM 31 (1980): 112–113. 54. “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino sobre as heranças dos mulatos de Minas Gerais,” Lisbon, July 8, 1723, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 4, D. 37; “Consulta de 6 de Agosto de 1723,” in Lara, Legislação, 512–516. On Almeida’s request to bar mulatto inheritance, the counselors split. Those who argued against cited practical reasons, including that inherited property might be located in Portugal where the law would not apply, and contradictions with canon and civil law. See also Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 120–121. 55. “Consulta (minuta) do Conselho Ultramarino sobre o inconveniente que se encontra nos casamentos entre brancos e negros que se realizam nas Minas,” December 11, 1734, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 28, D. 53. 56. Mendonça, “Parecer de governador dando conta de situação em Capitania,” [ant. 1737,] AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 33, D. 1. 57. [Petition], Câmara de Mariana, December 3, 1755, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 68, D. 98. 58. Williard, Engendering Islands, 89–90. Although the French prohibitions on intermarriage that Mendonça admired did not apply in the Caribbean, they were part of a broader set of policies that promoted all-white marriages. 59. “Representação dos oficiais da câmara da Vila do Principe, ao Rei, expondo a lamentável situação dos filhos mulatos e ilegítimos não poderem herdar dos pais, e solicitando decisão régia permitindo o poderem habilitar-se localmente,” Tejuco, August 9, 1746, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 47, D. 26.
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60. “Ley, e Pragmatica,” 1749, chap. 9. 61. “Parecer que o Desembargador José Vaz de Carvalho deu em 1749 ao Sr. D. João V quando premeditou fazer a pragmatica [. . .],” in Dias, “Luxo e pragmáticas,” 145. 62. Nicolau Francisco Xavier da Silva, “Discurso político, histórico, e jurídico, em que se prova concludentemente que o objecto, e fim das pragmáticas, e leis sumptuárias eve ser não só a moderação do luxo [. . .] mas também a distinção das pessoas [. . .],” in Dias, “Luxo e pragmáticas,” 73–74. 63. On early modern critiques of luxury, excess emulation, and threat to social order, see Kwass, “Ordering the World of Goods,” 88–89. 64. “Narração panegyrico-historica das festividades que na Cidade de Bahia solemnizou os felicissimos despozorios da Princesa N. Senhora [. . .],” Bahia, November 12, 1760, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 27, D. 5098; Walker, Exquisite Slaves, 21, 38–39; Lara, Fragmentos setecentistas, 106–117. On Africans in “spectacles of ostentation” in Mexico, see also Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 31–32. 65. Rocha cited in Lara, Fragmentos, 110; Bremeu, Universo juridico, 6. For Antonil, slaves were “the feet and hands” of the sugar mill owner. See Cultura e opulência, 90. “Carta Régia,” March 23, 1754, in Lara, Legislação, 311n. 66. “Vila de São João d’El-Rey em câmara, 17 de Outubro de 1744,” RAPM 2 (1897): 297–298. 67. “Representação da Mesa do Bem Comum contra a Pragmática de 1749,” in Dias, “Luxo e pragmáticas,” 112–113. The Mesa was associated with the brotherhood of Espírito Santo da Pedreira, founded in the fifteenth century. 68. Kantor, “Os Ramires de outras eras em outros espaços.” 69. “Representação da Mesa do Bem Comum,” 112. 70. “Ley, e Pragmatica,” 1749, chap. 14; “Requerimento dos homens pardos da Confraria de São Jose de Vila Rica das Minas, solicitando o direito de usar espadim e cinta” [ant. March 6, 1758,] AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 73, D. 20. 71. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a petição dos homens pardos da confraria do Senhor São José de Vila Rica das Minas Gerais, para poderem usar espadim,” Lisbon, March 13, 1758, AHU, AHU_ACL_011, Cx. 73, D. 27. See also Dantas, “Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals,” 122. 72. Pedreira, “Mercantilism, Statebuilding, and Social Reform,” 359. The law’s promulgation led to numerous clarifications of its scope. See “Decreto, em que se permittio, que os officiaes de guerra, de alferes para cima, possão trazer um galão de ouro ou prata na chapeo [. . .],” Lisbon, May 23, 1750, in Colleção chronologica de leis extravagantes, 378; [Ordem régia sobre avaliação das sedas,] August 25, 1753, in Supplemento á collecção, 258; [Assento], May 14, 1754, Collecaõ chronologica dos assentos, 434–435. 73. “Officio do Vice-Rei do Brazil, o Conde de Atouguia, para Diogo de Mendonça Côrte Real, ácerca do provimento de diversos postos militares,” Bahia, March 25, 1751, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 1, D. 69. The Overseas Council earlier criticized
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Atouguia’s use of payments in exchange for appointments. See “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobre os postos militares que proveu por donativo o vice-rei do Brasil Conde de Atouguia,” Lisbon, September 19, 1750, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 103, D. 8171. 74. “Alvará, [September 19, 1749,] porque V. Magestade há por bem permittir o uso das rendas fabricadas nos seus dominios [. . .] como também há por bem ordenar, que por ora não tenha effeito o cap. IX da pragmática de 24 de maio, a respeito dos negros, e mulatos das conquistas,” in Dias, “Luxo e pragmáticas,” 129–130. 75. “Ley, e Pragmatica,” 1749. 76. Bluteau, Instrucçam sobre a cultura das amoreiras, 4–5, 48; Faria, Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo, 311–390. 77. Hanson, Economy and Society, 163–184. 78. Cunha, Testamento político, 107–108; Melo, Escritos económicos, 31n17. 79. “Lei pela qual D. João mandava declarar como se havia de proceder quanto a trajes, adornos das casas, funerais, coches, seges, etc.,” Lisbon, May 8, 1708, ANTT, PT/TT/GAV/2/4/44. 80. “[Consulta] sobre os papéis que se oferecerem de arbitrios acêrca das minas para com êles se segurarem os interêsses da Fazenda Real e se pôr em melhor forma o govêrno daquellas terras,” Lisbon, July 17, 1709, DH 93, 228. 81. “Decreto em que se prohibio o despacho das fazendas da Asia, que naõ vierem em navios do reyno,” in Ordenações e Leys do Reyno de Portugal, 283–284. 82. “‘Grande instrução’ redigida por Alexandre de Gusmão e dirigida a D. Luiz da Cunha e Marco Antônio de Azevedo Coutinho [. . .],” October 1736, in AGTMAT, vol. 1, 432. 83. Silva, “Parecer do Cardeal da Mota,” 90. 84. Almeida, “A fábrica de sedas de Lisboa”; Cunha, Testamento político, 125–127. See also his critical comments on lifting restrictions on English textiles in “Carta de instruções,” 295–299. 85. Gusmão, “Apontamentos discursivos,”199. Gusmão defended Ericeira’s policies and the sumptuary law that supported them in “Apontamentos politicos, historicos, e cronologicos copiados das memorias secretas de Gusmão sobre as fabricas do reino,” in AGTMOV, 186–190. 86. “Parecer do Dr. Manuel de Almeida e Carvalho a D. João V sobre a lei sumptuária,” Lisbon, March 20, 1749, [ fol. 2], ANTT, PT/TT/CLNH/0006/7. 87. Almeida, “A fabrica,” 20–21. 88. “Memorial das mulheres que se occupavam em fabricar rendas nacionaes prohibidas pela pragmática de 1749,” BNP Res., Col. Pombalina, Cód. 693, fols. 9–10. See also petitions from town councils of Vila do Espozende and Vila do Conde, June 26, 1749, and “Representação do provedor e dos irmãos da Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Azurara, May 8, 1750, Arquivo Histórico, Museu Imperial (Petrópolis), dami.museu imperial.museus.gov.br/handle/acervo/979.
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89. “Representação da Mesa do Bem Comum,” 110. 90. “Parecer de Alexandre de Gusmão sobre o projeto de alvará que altera a lei da pragmática. Fins de 1750,” in Cortesão, AGTMDB, 484–493. 91. “Alvará [. . .] porque V. Magestade ha por bem modificar, e limitar a Pragmática [. . .],” April 21, 1751. 92. “Representação da Mesa do Bem Comum,” 108, 112. On trade networks of Indian textiles, plantation produce, enslaved Africans, gold and bills of exchange, see Kelley, “New World Slave Traders”; Lopes and Menz, “Vestindo o escravismo.” 93. “Representação da Mesa do Bem Comum,” 112–113. 94. The governor referred to the “Meza dos homens de negócio de Portugal.” Mathias da Costa Souza, Provedor da Fazenda, Belem, September 16, 1733, and “Carta do governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão, José da Serra, para o rei [D. João], em resposta a provisão de 16 de Fevereiro de 1734, sobre a proibição das escravas usarem telas preciosas, como ouro ou prata, sedas ou veludos,” AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_013, Cx. 16, D. 1516; “Bando do governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão, José da Serra, levantando a proibição do consumo das fazendas de ouro, prata, e seda,” Belém do Pará, June 4, 1734, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 16, D. 1504. Around the same time, Serra issued orders against the prostitution of enslaved women. See “Bando (cópia) sobre a prostituição de escravas,” Belém do Pará, August 20, 1733, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 15, D. 1396; and “Carta do governador [. . .] ao rei [. . .] em que da conta de vários assuntos,” Belém do Pará, September 24, 1733, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 15, D. 1427, fol. 7v. 95. “Representação da Mesa do Bem Comum,” 112–113. 96. His appraisals of commerce, Carvalho e Melo noted at the end of the “Relação,” were informed by his “ceaseless discoveries” in London that followed from friendships with those “well instructed” on Portugal and its empire. Eating and, above all, drinking with merchants, listening to the disgruntled employees of trading houses, and making inquiries among men with experience in Portugal and Brazil had allowed him to gather disparate communications that, once synthesized, brought the origins of Portugal’s troubles into view. He also moved in circles of British and expatriate elites. His fellowship in the Royal Society in 1740 was sponsored by the antiquarian William Stukeley, physician and botanist Hans Sloane and his son-in-law, and Portuguese-born physician Jacob de Castro Sarmento, who in 1720 had exiled himself to London where he was able to live openly as a Jew. See Melo, “Rellação dos gravames que ao comercio dos vassallos de Portugal se tem inferido e estão actualmente inferindo por Inglaterra [. . .],” in Escritos económicos, 94–95; Maxwell, Pombal, 6; Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 334–335. 97. Melo, “Rellação,” 42–43. 98. Melo, “Voto original.” Carvalho e Melo’s vision resonated with arguments made earlier by William Petty, whose work he acquired in London, about the advantages that
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accrued to the royal treasury and “the nation” when money was kept in circulation. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 127. 99. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino ao rei D. José, sobre a carta do provedor da Fazenda Real do Maranhão acerca da confusão que se vive naquela capitania devido à Lei da Pragmática,” Lisbon, June 26, 1754, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_009, Cx. 35, D. 3479. 100. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino ao rei D. José.” 101. “Carta dos oficiais da câmara de Olinda ao rei [D.José I], sobre a necessidade de se estabelecer a nova lei da pragmática contra a demasia de luxo naquele capitania,” Olinda, May 8, 1756, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_015, Cx. 81, D. 6704. 102. Carvalho e Melo’s London library included Charles King’s The British Merchant, published in 1721 and reissued three times between then and 1787. See Melo, Escritos económicos, 175. See also “Differents essais sur l’arithmetique politique [. . .],” BNP, Ms. PBA.168 (https://purl.pt/38735), a bound translation of Petty’s essays on political arithmetic that includes translations of Charles Davenant’s An essay upon the probable methods of making the people gainers in the ballance of trade (1699) (in Portuguese) and several issues of the British Merchant from the 1710s (in French). On British debates see Deringer, Calculated Values, 119, 146. 103. Melo, “Rellação dos Gravames,” 89–92. 104. Melo, “Carta de Ofício a Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho em 2 de Janeiro de 1741,” in Escritos económicos, 13. 105. [Melo], “Discursos sobre o commercio da Azia” [London, ca. 1744]; Nobre, “A East India Company e a perda portuguesa da Província do Norte.” The Portuguese had a long history of acting as middlemen for Asian luxury goods, including within Asia. See Sheng, “Why Velvet?” Carvalho e Melo’s analysis of Asian commerce apparently was informed by John Cleland (1709–1789), who served the British East India Company in Bombay from 1728 to 1740, where he learned Portuguese. Cleland, who would gain notoriety later as the author of the erotic novel Fanny Hill (1748), arrived in London in 1741 and, according to Carvalho e Melo, due to disaffection with the British government, shared his considerable knowledge of the British East India Company, buttressed by a large collection of manuscripts related to its administration, going as far as to formulate a scheme for a new rival Portuguese Asian trading company outlined in a “mémoire” from Cleland to João V that Carvalho e Melo enclosed. See [Melo], “Carta ao Cardeal da Mota em 19 de Fevereiro de 1742,” in Melo, Escritos económicos, 134, 158–161; Gladfelder, Fanny Hill in Bombay, 40–45. On earlier English views of the Portuguese Asian empire and Portuguese success in leveraging wealth in the Indian Ocean and, in the case of the slave trade, in the Spanish empire, see Eacott, “Foreign Strength.” 106. [Melo], “Discurso politico,” 105, 124, 149. 107. [Melo], “Discurso politico,” 155–159. 108. Paquette, “Views from the South,” 90–92; Estatutos da Junta do Commercio, 21; “Alvará com força de Lei, por que Vossa Magestade ha servido prohibir, que passem
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ao Brasil commissarios volantes [. . .],” Bélem, December 6, 1755; Mendonça Furtado to [Francisco Luís da Cunha Ataíde, chancelor-mor do Reino], Pará, October 6, 1751, in AEP, vol. 1, 86; Maxwell, Pombal, 44–45, 59–61. 109. Cruz, “Pombal e o Império Atlântico.” 110. Carta de Lei, December 22, 1761, in Silva, Collecção da legislação [. . .] de 1750– 1762, 816–835. Writing to Cardinal Mota from London in early 1742, Carvalho e Melo reflected on a growing body of knowledge about commerce and the importance of cultivating expertise and increasing the number of “persons practiced in commerce” in Portugal. See Melo, Escritos económicos, 149–152. He may have considered contributing to this endeavor with a partial translation of Petty’s Political Arithmetic entitled “Mecanismo politico, no qual se offerece á mocidade portugueza huma sufficiente instrucção pratica sobre os interesses do Estado no que pertence ao commercio e à agricultura,” [n.d.,] in “[Documentos de várias tipologias,] BNP Res., PBA.686. In 1757 the junta also took over the administration of the Rato silk factory. Maxwell, Pombal, 79; “Representação feita pelos deputados da Mesa do Espírito Santo dos Homens de Negócios [. . .] 1755,” reproduced in Carreira, As Companhias pombalinas, 303–329. On fiscal reform in Brazil see also Alden, Royal Government, 280, 287–294. 111. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 30–31. The collection that Carvalho e Melo presumably relied on included books and manuscripts on history, political philosophy, and law, mostly in French or French translation, but also in Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and English. The catalogs list works by Pufendorf and Grotius, Amelot de Houssaye’s French translation of Tacitus, Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding in French (Amsterdam, 1700), Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam, 1734), and the political testaments of Richelieu and Colbert. See “Lista de alguns livros da biblioteca londrina,” in Melo, Escritos económicos, 171–177. Pombal’s library inventory also lists Daniel Defoe’s Brief state of the question between printed and painted calicoes and the woolen and silk manufacture (1719), which urged the English to spurn Indian imports in favor of national manufactures, as well as Defoe’s The Trade to India critically and calmly considered (1720). Together with attentive treatment of the cloth and textile trade in Savary des Bruslons’s Dictionnaire, Defoe’s pamphlets may have informed Carvalho e Melo’s enthusiastic appraisal of the calico trade’s potential. See also Reddy, “The Structure of a Cultural Crisis,” 264–266. 112. “Estatutos da Aula do Commercio ordenados por El Rei Nosso Senhor [. . .],” in Silva, Collecção da legislação portuguesa [. . .] de 1750 a 1762, 656–660; Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 339–340; Cunha, “Police Science and Cameralism.” 113. Cardoso, “Uma ‘notícia’ esquecida,” 94–98; [Alberto Jacqueri de Sales,] “Diccionario do commercio” [1761–1773], vol. 1, BNP Res., Cód. 13104, fols. 226, 242, 264; [Sales], “Diccionario do commercio” [1761–1773], vol. 2, BNP Res., Cód. 13105, fol. 140, fol. 435; [Sales], “Diccionario do commercio” [1761–1773], vol. 3, BNP Res., Cód.
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13106, fol. 149 (http://purl.pt/13945). Multiple mid-century editions of João António’s Garrido’s Taboada curiosa (1737) also offered instruction in commercial arithmetic. At least one contemporary pamphlet sought to affirm an older ars mercatoria that, in the case of Iberia, was grounded in moral theology. See Jozé Maregelo de Osan [José Angelo de Moraes], Arte verdadeira para homens de negocios; Vilches, “Business Tools and Outlooks.” On the influence of Melo on contemporary Spanish reformist thinking, see Tavárez, “A New System,” 23. 114. Reddy, “The Structure of a Cultural Crisis,” 264–266. 115. Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire universel du commerce, 826, 940–948, 1323–1327. 116. [Sales], “Diccionario do commercio” [1761–1773], vol. 2, fols. 129–135; Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire universel, 130–132; François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais, Elémens du commerce, chap. 6. On Bluteau’s definition, see the introduction to the present volume. 117. On the colonial pact, eighteenth-century Portuguese mercantilism, and its various iterations, see also Falcon, A época pombalina. 118. Rodrigues and Craig, “English Mercantilist Influences,” 330; Cardoso, “Uma ‘notícia’ esquecida,” 94. A letter to the directors of the Companhia do Grão Pará e Maranhão cited Noel Chomel’s (French) economic dictionary and its supplement. [Mendonca Furtado,] Pará, November 15, 1757, AEP, vol. 3, 372. 119. [José Manuel Ribeiro Pereira,] Elementos do commercio. Pereira misidentified the author as Montesquieu, whose “mercantile maxims,” he argued, were manifest in Carvalho e Melo’s reforms, an appeal that probably bolstered his own professional success. Two years after the translation’s publication Pereira was appointed to the board of the Companhia de Grão Pará e Maranhão. See Lupetti and Guidi, “Translation as Import Substitution.” As they explain, an earlier translation of Fénelon’s anti-Colbertist Télémaque was similarly misread by Portuguese censors as a validation of Carvalho e Melo’s promotion of national manufacturing and commerce. Later Pereira wrote his own Aventuras finais de Telemaco (1785) in which he reiterated a defense of Carvalho e Melo, now ousted from power by the new queen, Maria I. By then Sales was also out of favor. See Cardoso, “Uma ‘notícia’ esquecida.” 120. “Carta de Tomé Joaquim da Costa Côrte Real para Mendonça Furtado,” Belem, July 7, 1757, AGTMET, 470; Pedreira, “Mercantilism,” 375. 121. Educated initially at Coimbra and Salamanca, in Leiden Sanches studied under the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738); his brilliant performance as a student led to a series of postings in Russia in the 1730s and 1740s, including as physician to the imperial army and at the Tsar’s court. As a member of the St. Petersburg Academy, Sanches arranged to send a large collection of books to the Academia Real de História. For biographical surveys and supporting documentation, see Lemos, Ribeiro Sanches; and Mendes, Ribeiro Sanches e o Marquês de Pombal. Sanches recalled seek-
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ing out Martinho de Mendonça to discuss the work of German philosopher Christian Wolff. In Cartas, he described Mendonça’s work on education as a “perfect book.” See [António Ribeiro Sanches,] Cartas sobre a educação da mocidade, 68; Sanches to Luiz da Cunha [Manuel], January 26, 1757, in Lemos, Ribeiro Sanches, 342–343; Sanches to Francisco de Pina e de Mello, Paris, September 16, 1760, in Ferrão, Ribeiro Sanches e Soares de Barros, 56, 67. 122. [Sanches], Tratado da conservaçaô da saude [. . .]. 123. Serrão, “Pensamento económico,” 27–28. While Sanches occasionally cited authors in his own reports, the journals provide an extraordinarily extensive record of his readings on scientific and political subjects. See António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” 5 vols., Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/18370–MSS/18374 (http://bdh.bne.es); António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, “Manuscrits du docteur Antonio Ribeiro Sanchés,” Cote: ms 2015, BIU-Santé—Médecine (Université de Paris) (https://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histmed/medica/cote ?ms02015). On Sanches’s interlocutors in Paris, see Furtado and Monteiro, “O abade Raynal,” 233. In one letter Sanches dismissed Mirabeau and his L’ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population (1756) as simplistic and failing to reckon with the importance of law. See Sanches to Francisco de Pina e de Mello, Paris, September 16, 1760, in Ferrão, Ribeiro Sanches, 61. 124. Sanches’s journals include copies of letters that he wrote on Portugal’s colonies but without indication of the addressee. One of his earliest reports appears to be “Projecto do doutor Sanches sobre o bom governo, augmento, e conservação das colonias,” [copy] 1753, BNB Res., Coleção Linhares, I-29, 18, 10 (digital mss. 1457430). In 1763 he wrote “Apontamentos para descobrir na America Portugueza a quellas producçoens naturaes que podem enriquecer a medecina, e o commercio,” Paris, October 2, 1763, BNP Res., Cód. 6941//4 (http://purl.pt/27752). Introducing this report, he referred to his intent to write two “tratados” on agricultural resources. The second report may have been on tobacco; an undated manuscript on the subject (housed in an archive at the Universidade de Minho) was published as “Sobre as lavouras e fábricas do tabaco do Brazil,” [n.d., after 1758,] and in Dificuldades, 167–181, where the editor dates the report to 1778. The same year as “Apontamentos,” Sanches wrote “Discursos sôbre a América Portuguesa,” [Paris], December 3, 1763, Oliveira Lima Library, Catholic University of America, manuscript collection, ms. 84–2077. This manuscript is written in Sanches’s hand. Oliveira Lima identified it as addressed to Luís da Cunha. Since his friend and former ambassador had died in 1749, this would be a reference to Da Cunha’s nephew Luís da Cunha Manuel. See Lima, “Portuguese Manuscripts,” 278. Innocencio, who had seen the manuscript and described it in detail, claimed that it was done “a instancia” de Carvalho e Melo. See Silva, Diccionario bibliographico portuguez, vol. 8, 261–263. Lemos, however, points to a passage in Sanches’s journals in which he writes of a report “on the colonies”: “of this I wrote 25 folios to Dom Vicente de Sousa Coutinho
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in the year 1763” (Lemos, Ribeiro Sanches, 176). Oliveira Lima also explained that he acquired the manuscript thirty years earlier as part of “the sale of the architect Nepumuceno.” See Lima, “Curiosidades bibliographicas,” Revista Brazileira (Rio de Janeiro) 16 (1898): 327–340. A later manuscript that Lemos identifies as part of the collection entitled “Considerações sobre o governo do Brasil desde o seu estabelecimento até o presente tempo” (1777) (Lemos, 187) is included in Difficuldades, 157–168. 125. See for example, Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 163; Sanches, “Projecto,” fol. 1. Writing on Brazil’s sugar economy, Sanches also cited Savary’s dictionary. See “Discursos,” fol. 88. 126. Swingen, “Labor: Employment, Colonial Servitude, and Slavery,” 60. 127. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fol. 17. 128. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 153v. On the colony as a village see also [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fol. 16; [Sanches,] Cartas, 85. 129. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 152; Sanches, “Projecto,” fol. 1. 130. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fols. 9–11; [Sanches,] Cartas, 56, 84. 131. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fols. 14, 22; [Sanches,] “Apontamentos para descobrir na America Portugueza,” fol. 4; [Sanches], Cartas, 84. Sanches included in “Discursos” brief surveys of the sectors of Brazil’s economy and called attention to the promise of transplantations. See “Discursos,” fols. 74–103. “Discursos” is missing several pages, but a survey of agriculture and ranching begins on fol. 74. On agricultural economies see also [Sanches,] “Apontamentos para descobrir na America Portugueza”; and Sanches, “Sobre as lavouras,” 237–245. Sanches’s interest in natural science is suggested in a communication with Martinho de Mendonça in 1728 about Brazil’s natural resources. He was a member of scientific academies in St. Petersburg and Paris and later became a corresponding member of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa. 132. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fol. 19. Sanches wrote extensively on Russia and admired Russian efforts to limit vagrancy. See bibliographies cited above. On Da Cunha’s view of privileges and his concurring claim that Portugal was “the best” of England’s “colonies,” see “Carta de Instruções,” 281–282, 372. 133. Sanches to Luiz da Cunha [Manuel], January 26, 1757, in Lemos, Ribeiro Sanches, 342–343; Sanches to Francisco de Pina e de Mello, Paris, September 16, 1760, in Ferrão, Ribeiro Sanches, 54, 56; Mendes, Ribeiro Sanches, 61–62, 68–83. His relations with José I’s government were fraught, but from 1759 to 1761, and again after 1769, he received a royal pension. The pension’s suspension appears related to a fallout with a Portuguese royal official in Paris. See Serrão, “Pensamento económico e política económica,” 25– 26. Sanches developed and reiterated his ideas on politics and economy over the course of several decades. Some of the manuscripts were later published as Dificuldades que tem um reino velho para emendar-se. See also “Bibliographia,” in Lemos, Ribeiro Sanches, 291–310; and Catalogue des livres de feu M. Ant. Nuñes-Ribeiro-Sanchès. 134. [Sanches,] Cartas, 16, 55.
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135. [Sanches,] Cartas, 13. 136. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fols. 1153–1154; [Sanches,] Cartas, 49, 55; Sanches, “Projecto,” fol. 2. 137. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 160v. In “Considerações sobre o governo do Brasil” (1777), written as the revolution in North America was unfolding, Sanches reiterated his critique of honors, adding that in colonies there should be “less liberty, less authority and distinction than among subjects of the Mother Capital of the Nation,” and that if the English had proceeded in this way “they would not now be in a civil war with rebel Americans.” See Sanches, Dificuldades, 158–159. 138. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 153. 139. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” 16. 140. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, 159. 141. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fols. 15–16, 89; Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fols. 155v, 159. On Brazilian elite use of the Inquisition to negotiate status, see Wadsworth, Agents of Orthodoxy. 142. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fols. 85, 90, 97, 99. 143. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fol. 89; Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 167r–v. 144. [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fols. 85, 89–90. 145. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fols. 153, 156v, 168v. 146. [Sanches,] Cartas, 85; [Sanches,] “Discursos,” fols. 18, 117. 147. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fols. 156, 172r–v; [Sanches], Cartas, 85. 148. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 156v. 149. Paquette, Imperial Portugal, 23. The Overseas Council rejected a 1768 request for a medical school in Minas. 150. “Requerimento de António Isidoro da Fonseca em que pede licença para estabelecer uma imprensa na cidade do Rio de Janeiro,” Lisbon, May 25, 1750; and a copy of the “Ordem régia pela qual se mandou fazer sequestro de todas as letras de imprensa que fossem encontradas no Estado do Brasil [. . .],” Lisbon, May 10, 1747, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_017–1, Cx. 63, D. 14762–3. For a history of the press see Barros, “Impressões de um tempo.” In 1754 the crown also restricted printing in Goa. On the earliest published work by Brazilian-born writers, see Rodrigues-Moura, “A primeira obra impressa de um brasileiro.” 151. Serrão, “Pensamento económico,” 25; Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Lisbon, September 21, 1751, in Mendonça, Século XVIII, 297–298. Sanches conceded that trading companies were useful when trade was with “barbarous” leaders; Pedreira, “Mercantilism,” 357–364. 152. Alvará, January 5, 1785, in António Delgado da Silva, Collecção da legislação portugueza, vol. 3, 370–371; “Ofício (minuta) do [. . .] Martinho de Melo e Castro ao [vice-rei do Estado do Brasil] [. . .],” [Lisbon], January 5, 1785, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_017, Cx. 125,
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D. 10009. For earlier discussions of American manufacturing, see “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino [. . .] sobre os privilégios a conceder aos lavradores de algodão enquanto fornecedores da fábrica de panos daquela capitania,” Lisbon, November 3, 1756, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 41, D. 3794; Novais, “A proibição das manufacturas no Brasil,” in Novais, Aproximações, 61–85. 153. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 139. 154. Furtado, Homens de negócio, 276. 155. [Duke, Manuel Teles da Silva] to Sebastião Jozeph de Carvalho, Vienna, August 12, 1752, in “Correspondência entre o Duque Manuel Teles da Silva e Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” 327.
Chapter 5. Peoples and Colonies 1. “Ofício (3a via) do provedor da Fazenda Real da capitania do Pará, Matias da Costa e Sousa para o [secretário de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar], Diogo de Mendonća Corte Real, sobre o naufrágio de um navio de transporte de casais das Ilhas de Açores [. . .],” Pará, September 26, 1754, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 37, D. 3449; “Ofício do [governador e capitão general do Estado do Maranhão e Pará], Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, para o [secretário de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar], Diogo de Mendonça Corte Real, sobre o naufrágio de transporte dos casais das Ilhas dos Açores,” Pará, September 26, 1754, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 37, D. 3450; “Ofício [. . .] [de] Mendonça Furtado, para [. . .] Mendonça Corte Real,” Pará, October 1, 1754, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 37, D. 3458; “Ofício do Bispo do Pará, [D. Fr. Miguel de Bulhões e Sousa,] para [. . .] Mendonça Corte Real,” September 30, 1754, AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_013, Cx. 37, D. 3453. See also letters from Mendonça Furtado to Carvalho e Melo in AEP, vol. 2, 235–237, 243–244. 2. Blackmore, “Foreword,” in Brito, The Tragic History of the Sea, ix; Brito, Historia Tragico-Maritima, vol. 1; Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire. 3. “Parecer do Conde de Assumar, D. Pedro de Almeida, sobre o projeto de capitação,” September 21, 1733, in AGTMET, 508. 4. [Sanches,] Tratado da conservaçaô, x (prologue); McCormick, “Population.” 5. Furtado, Oráculos, 276–285. 6. Proença, Apontamentos, 309–310; “Appendix III: Lista de fógos, e almas, que ha nas terras de Portugal [. . .] no anno de 1732,” in Lima, Geografia historica, vol.2, 475– 710; Matos and Sousa, “A estatística da população.” 7. [Sanches,] Cartas. On Faria’s commentary on empire see Brockey, “An Imperial Republic,” 268–269. As Brockey notes, Faria’s Noticias lost currency in the later seventeenth century but was in print once again in 1740 with the edition by royal academic José Barbosa, cited here. 8. On eighteenth-century ideas of population and its management see Foucault, “The Politics of Health”; Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 68–75; McCormick,
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“Population”; Blum, Strength in Numbers; Rusnock, “Biopolitics,” 49–68; Morgan, Reckoning, 89–100; Swingen, “Labor.” 9. [António Ribeiro Sanches,] “Discursos sôbre a América Portuguesa,” [Paris,] December 3, 1763, Oliveira Lima Library, Catholic University of America, manuscript collection, ms. 84–2077, fol. 19; António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/18371 (http:// bdh.bne.es), fol. 156v. Sanches most likely referred to the Hôpital Général de Paris founded in the seventeenth century, which both confined and dispatched people to the colonies. See Williard, Engendering Islands, 71–72. 10. Rusnock, “Biopolitcs,” 51; [Silva] to Carvalho [e Melo], Vienna, November 19, 1756, in “Correspondência,” 371. 11. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” MSS/18370, vol. 1, fol. 39r–v. 12. Metcalf, Go-Betweens, 33–34. 13. Coates, Convicts and Orphans; Donovan, “Changing Perceptions”; Elbl, “‘Men without Wives’”; Rosenthal, “As órfãs d’el-Rei,” 78, 87. 14. Faria, Noticias (1740), 27; Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 72, 141–162. 15. Pedreira, “Brasil, fronteira de Portugal,” 53–57. Pedreira examines the social effects of migration from Entre Douro and Minho especially. 16. Furtado, “Lives on the Seas.” 17. Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 10; Faria, Noticias (1740), 10–15. Those who emigrated from Portugal also headed for Spain’s American territories. See also Hespanha, Filhos da terra, 59–71. 18. Machado, Triunfo eucharistico (1734), 18–19. Boxer described Ferreira Machado’s description as “palpably absurd,” yet recognized that the three thousand to four thousand men who went to Brazil during the rush drained Portugal of its male workforce. Boxer, The Golden Age, 49. 19. Monteiro, “As reformas,” 119–120; Russell-Wood, The Portuguese Empire, 59–62. Monteiro’s estimate is conservative relative to others that suggest as many as 600,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the first half of the eighteenth century. See Venancio, Cativos do reino, 13. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Portugal’s population was estimated to be 2 million. Data for the population of Brazil before the 1770s is very limited. One recent study estimates that the European population of Brazil increased by 75,000 between 1675 and 1725 and reached 482,500 by 1775. Between 1725 and 1775 the population of Africans increased by at least 800,000. See Bucciferro, “A Forced Hand,” 314. 20. Machado, Triunfo eucharistico, 18–19. 21. Gazeta de Lisboa, April 11, 1720; Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 82; Luís da Cunha, Testamento, 113. 22. Vainfas, Trópico dos pecados, 22–29; Rosenthal, “As órfãs d’el-Rei,” 86–87. On the discourses of women’s reproductive roles in settlements in Spanish America, see Poska, Gendered Crossings.
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23. AGTM, 74; João V to the Count of Assumar, March 22, 1721, RAPM 30 (1979): 125–126; Almeida to João V, Vila Rica, September 28, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 95; Botelho, “A família escrava,” 455–469. 24. “Conta que dâ a S. Magestade Nicolau Antunez Ferreira, morador de Vila Rica,” August 29, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fols. 53v–54. 25. Rosenthal, “As órfãs d’el-Rei,” 74. 26. Myscofski, Amazons, 159–182. 27. “Carta dos oficiais da câmara da cidade do Rio de Janeiro ao principe regente [D. Pedro] sobre o requerimento de Cecilia Barbalho, solicitando autorização para a construção de um convento para recolher mulheres nobres deste capitania,” Rio de Janeiro, August 5, 1678, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_017, Cx. 4, D. 426; Pitta, Historia, 399–400. 28. Almeida to [João V], Vila Rica, September 28, 1721, RAPM 31 (1980): 95; Almeida to [João V], Vila Rica, April 19, 1722, RAPM 31 (1980): 110–111. 29. Luís da Cunha, “Carta de Instruções a Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho” (ca. 1736), in Cunha, Instruções, 218, 223. Da Cunha reiterated his analysis in 1742. See Testamento, 112. “Instruções régias, públicas e secretas para Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, Capitão-General do Estado do Grão-Pará e Maranhão,” Lisbon, May 31, 1751, in AEP, vol. 1, 77; Pedro Dias Paes Leme, Rio de Janeiro, July 24, 1757, in “Capitania de Rio de Janeiro: Correspondencia de varias authoridades e avulsos,” RIHGB 65, pt. 1 (1902): 72–73; Blum, Strength, chap. 3. 30. Ferrão, Ribeiro Sanches, 61. 31. “Carta de D. Lourenço de Almeida, governador de Minas Gerais, informando o Rei D. João acerca da necessidade que ha em se limitar o ingresso de mulheres em conventos [. . .],” Vila Rica, June 5, 1731, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 18, D. 40 (also in RAPM 31 [1980]: 271–272). 32. “Alvará por V. Mag ha por bem ordenar que de todo o Estado do Brasil naõ venhaõ mulheres para este Reyno sem licença [. . .],” March 10, 1732. 33. “Carta do [vice-rei e capitão-general do estado do Brasil], [. . .] ao rei [D. João V],” Bahia, August 19, 1733, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 46, D. 4074. The clarification left in place the license requirement. See “Requerimento de José dos Santos Faria ao rei [D. José] solicitando certidão de provisão que proibe a passagem de mulheres ao Reino,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 106, D. 8318. 34. Luís António de Sousa, “Ofício n. 6 do [governador e capitão-general da capitania de São Paulo] [. . .] para [. . .] Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” São Paulo, January 31, 1768, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_023, Cx. 25, D. 2380; Silva, Sistema de casamento, 48. 35. Myscofski, Amazons, 170–174. 36. “Carta do Arcebispo da Bahia, para Diogo de Mendonça Côrte Real, sobre o numero de freiras que podiam ser admittidas nos Conventos [. . .], Bahia, August 30, 1755,
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in Almeida, “Inventario,” 130–131. The governor of Maranhão argued that the white population had grown enough to warrant a convent in Pará. “Carta (cópia) do [governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão, Francisco Pedro de Mendonça Gorjão], ao rei [D. João V],” [ant. June 5, 1750], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 12, D. 1038. 37. Sousa, “Ofício n. 6.” 38. “Conta que dâ a S. Magestade Nicolau Antunez Ferreira, morador de Vila Rica,” August 29, 1743, BNP Res., Cód. 6980, fol. 83r–v. In 1715, António Rodrigues da Costa made a similar observation about “couples that could be taken from the Islands” where there were too many for a small land to sustain. See Costa, “Parecer do Conselheiro [. . .] sobre a nova fundação da Colônia do Sacramento [. . .] 1715,” in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 409–411. 39. On sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plans for settling Azoreans, see documents included in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 395–408; “Consulta [. . .] sobre a conveniência de mandarem casais das ilhas para a capitania do Pará e sobre as drogas que se decobiram nos sertões do Tocantins,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_009, Cx. 5, D. 590. 40. “Parecer de António Rodrigues da Costa, enviado a el-Rei sobre as extorsões que cometiam no Ceará,” Lisboa Occidental, October 9, 1720, in Rau and Silva, eds., Os manuscritos, vol. 2, 280. 41. “Consulta de 6 de Agosto de 1723,” in Lara, Legislação, 512–516; “Consulta (minuta) do Conselho Ultramarino sobre o inconveniente que se encontra nos casamentos entre brancos e negros que se realizam nas Minas,” December 11, 1734, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 28, D. 53. 42. Relaçam curioza, 8; Relaçam e noticia; Costa, “Parecer,” 411. On future recruits from settlements, see “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino e despacho real sobre as representações de José da Silva Pais e Gomes Freire de Andrade de que se enviassem recrutas e casais das Ilhas para Santa Catarina,” March 11 and May 6, 1744; “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino assinado por Alexandre de Gusmão e despacho real ordenando o embarque de soldados de Portugal e casais das Ilhas para Santa Catarina e Rio de S. Pedro,” March 30 and April 26, 1745, and Cartas Régias, August 31 and September 5, 1746, in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 440–444, 445–447. “Regimento para o transporte dos casais das ilhas de Madeira e dos Açores para o Brasil redigido por Alexandre de Gusmão,” August 5, 1747, AGTMAT, vol. 2, 449–451; Condições com que se arremata o assento do transporte dos cazaes desta corte, e das ilhas para o Brazil a Feliciano Velho de Oldemberg [redigidas por Alexandre de Gusmão] (Lisbon: Na Officina de Pedro Ferreira, 1747), reproduced in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 461–467; [Carta Régia] “Para o Governador e CapitamGeneral do Estado de Maranham,” May 13, 1751, in “Registo de provisões e cartas régias para os governadores e mais entidades do Maranhão e Pará, 1743–1753,” AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_Cod. 271, fols. 182–183; Coates, Convicts and Orphans, 176. 43. “Provisão régia, redigida por Alexandre de Gusmão, em nome de El-Rei D. João V [. . .], August 9, 1747, Cortesão, AGTMAT, vol. 2, 452–457.
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44. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino [. . .] a respeito do naufrágio, no rio Joanes [. . .],” Lisbon, November 29, 1757, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 134, D. 10403. 45. “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino assinado por Alexandre de Gusmão sôbre a necessidade de se curarem os novos povoadores de Santa Catarina no Hospital, por conta da Fazenda Real [. . .],” May 11, 1753, in Cortesão, AGTMAT, vol. 2, 492–493; “O governador da ilha de Santa Catarina dá conta da grande necessidade que padecem aquêles novos moradores nas duas doenças por falta de meios [. . .],” and parecer from the Overseas Council, September 27, 1754, DH 94 (1951), 252–254; Faria, Noticias (1740), 20. 46. Domingos Teixeira Telles [to the king], Rio de Janeiro, December 7, 1759, RIHGB 65, pt. 1 (1902): 100–108. 47. “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino sobre a conta que dá o Governador da Ilha de Santa Catarina a respeito da ordem que mandou dar aos filhos dos novos colonos que no primeiro ano da sua chegada casassem, terras, ferramentas, sementes e armas,” March 13, 1752, in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 490–491. The Council recommended that the five-year period for marrying and benefiting from the order should begin after settlers turned sixteen, in the case of men, and fourteen, in the case of women. 48. Cunha, Testamento, 114; “Provisão régia, redigida por Alexandre de Gusmão,” 452. According to Russell-Wood, between 1748 and 1752, 1,057 families or 5,960 persons from the Azores settled in Santa Catarina. Russell-Wood, Portuguese Empire, 62. 49. Gonçalo José da Silveira Preto, Pará, April 12, 1751, in Carneiro de Mendonça, AEP, vol. 1, 148. See also [Teles da Silva] to Carvalho [e Melo], Vienna, August 12, 1752, in “Correspondência,” 325–329. 50. Furtado, “Lives on the Seas,” 255–259. 51. “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino e despacho real sobre as representações de José da Silva Pais e Gomes Freire de Andrade [. . .],” March 11, 1744, AGTMAT, vol. 2, 440. 52. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo to Gomes Freire de Andrada, Lisbon, September 21, 1751, in Mendonça, Século XVIII, 297–298. 53. Foucault, “The Politics of Health,” 171. 54. Carvalho e Melo to Freire de Andrada, September 21, 1751, 297–298. 55. [Teles da Silva] to Carvalho [e Melo], Vienna, August 12, 1752, in “Correspondência,” 325, 327. 56. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino ao rei D. Pedro II, sobre a opiniao de António Albuquerque Coelho de Carvalho acerca das casas fortes que os castelhanos andam a construir no Maranhão,” Lisbon, December 20, 1695, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_009, Cx. 8, D. 901 (the digitized document appears to be missing a page; the consulta is also transcribed in Question de limites, 12–13); Whitehead, “Colonial Intrusions,” 97; Puntoni, A guerra dos bárbaros. On claims that Christian conversion made Natives vassals, see also Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, 72–73.
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57. Mendonça Furtado to Secretário de Estado D. Luís da Cunha [Manuel], Arraial de Mariuá, October 12, 1756, in AEP, vol. 3, 128; “Carta (cópia) do [governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão, Francisco Pedro de Mendonça Gorjão], ao rei [D. João V],” [ant. June 5, 1750], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_003, Cx. 12, D. 1038. Gorjão also claimed that the mocambo population was as large as the number of Natives who had perished in the epidemics. See Noticia verdadeyra, 2. 58. “Instruções régias, públicas e secretas,” 69, 72. 59. Carvalho e Melo to Freire de Andrada, September 21, 1751, 297–298. On the earlier legal regime see Whitehead, “Colonial Intrusions,” 96–99; Roller, Amazonian Routes, 97–98; Domingues, Quando os índios, 26–36, 38–39. 60. “Carta de Sebastião José para F.X.M.F. em resposta as que dele recebera,” Lisbon, May 15, 1753, in AEP, vol. 1, 491. Writing on the changing status of Vila Nova de Abrantes in Espírito Santo, royal officials made a similar appeal to the example of the Roman conquest and civilization of Iberia in “Consulta da Mesa de Consciência,” Bahia, December 19, 1758, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 138, D. 10697. 61. Petty quoted in McCormick, William Petty, 186; on Petty’s scheme, see chap. 5. Carvalho e Melo’s manuscripts include a translation of Petty’s Political Arithmetic entitled “Mecanismo politico, no qual se offerece á mocidade portugueza huma sufficiente instrucção pratica sobre os interesses do Estado no que pertence ao commercio e à agricultura,” [n.d.,] in “[Documentos de várias tipologias,]” BNP Res., PBA. 686. 62. Jean-Baptiste Colbert cited in Aubert, “‘The Blood of France,’” 452; Melo, Escritos económicos, 174. 63. “Carta do governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão e Pará, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, para o rei [D. José I], sobre a distribuição de casais açorianos pelas povoações do interior da capitania do Pará [. . .],” Pará, October 11, 1753, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 35, D. 3251. A later governor reiterated these same points, writing to Furtado as a secretary of state. “Ofício do governador [. . .],” Pará, October 18, 1760, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 47, D. 4312. Pagden, Lords, 150–151. 64. Sommer, “Cracking Down on the Cunhamenas”; Domingues, Quando os índios, 110–114, 309; Sampaio, Espelhos, 128. 65. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino ao rei D. José I, sobre as acções de povoamento que o governador e capitão general do Estado do Maranhão e Pará tem feito com os casais chegados das ilhas dos Açores e da Madeira,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 38, D. 3227, Lisbon, March 17, 1755. On Asia, and the shifting perceptions of intermarriage and difference, see Xavier, “Reducing Difference”; and Hespanha, Filhos, 222–226. 66. Lei sobre os casamentos com as Indias, de 4 de Abril de 1755; “Consulta da Mesa de Consciência,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 138, D. 10697. 67. Ley porque V. Magestade ha porbem restituir aos Indios do Graõ Pará, e Maranhaõ a liberdade [Lisbon, June 6, 1755]; “Carta de Sebastião José para F.X.M.F. em resposta as
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que dele recebera,” Lisbon, May 15, 1753, in AEP, vol. 1, 493; “Carta (cópia) do [governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão, Francisco Pedro de Mendonça Gorjão], ao rei [D. João V],” [ant. June 5, 1750]; Noticia verdadeyra, 3; Coelho, “A construção de uma lei,” 32. On earlier royal concessions to settlers’ demands for Indigenous labor, see Chambouleyron, “Escravos do atlântico equatorial,” 95–96. 68. “Alvará com força de ley, porque Vossa Magestade ha por bem renovar a inteira, e inviolavel observancia da ley de doze de setembro de mil seiscentos sincoenta e tres, em quanto nella se estabeleceo, que os indios do Graõ Pará, e Maranhaõ sejaõ governados no temporal pelos governadores, ministros, e pelos seus principaes, e justiças seculares [. . .],” Lisbon, June 7, 1755. 69. Directorio, 1. The Directorate program was ratified in May 1757. Domingues, Quando os índios, chap. 2. Writing from Bahia the same year, the royal counselor José Mascarenhas endorsed the new arrangements in similar terms. See “Parecer do conselheiro José Mascarenhas Pacheco Pereira Coelho de Melo sobre as aldeias de índios que devem se constituir em vilas,” Bahia, September 27, 1758, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 137, D. 10620. 70. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas”; [Pedro de Almeida, Count of Assumar,] “Um documento inédito,” 38; “Parecer de António Rodrigues da Costa sobre a conquista do Maranhão e os respectivos direitos do monarca,” [Lisbon, post. 1707,] AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_009, Cx. 11, D. 1098. 71. Luís da Cunha, Instruções, 368. 72. “Carta de Sebastião José para F.X.M.F.,” Lisbon, May 15, 1753, in AEP, vol. 1, 492; Monteiro, “The Heathen Castes,” 703. 73. Cunha, Instruções, 371. 74. Cardim, “Os povos indígenas,” 38; Palomo, “Jesuit Interior Indias,” 107–110; Monteiro, Negros da terra, 20–21. 75. Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, “Instrução passada ao tenente Diogo António de Castro para estabelecer a Vila de Borba, a nova, antiga aldeia do Trocano,” Borba, a nova, January 6, 1756, in AEP, vol. 3, 70–75; Directorio, 7. 76. Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez, vol. Q–Sys, 402; Cardim, “Os povos indígenas,” 33–34; Santos, “A ‘civilização dos índios’ no século XVIII.” 77. Hespanha, “As fronteiras do poder,” 64–74; On the related status of legal minors (“menoridade”), see Domingues, Quando os índios, 43. In the following decade, religious authorities continued to invoke rusticity to evaluate the specifically degraded conditions of Natives in Brazil. See Resende, “‘Da ignorância e rusticidade.’” 78. Domingues, Quando os índios, 65–66. 79. Directorio, 3–4, 6–8. On royal officials’ preoccupation with Indigenous dress, see Sommer, “Wigs.” 80. “Consulta da Mesa de Consciência,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 138, D. 10697. The counselors did not elaborate on Mirabeau’s critique of the colonial status quo. On Mirabeau see Røge, Economistes, 68–74. On the new literary academy and
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debates on Brazil’s Natives, see Kantor, Esquecidos, 219–236; Lamego, A academia brazilica dos renascidos, 90–93; José Antônio Caldas, Noticia geral, 47–50; Domingos do Loreto Couto, Desagravos do Brazil, 37–42. 81. Directorio, 36–37. 82. Directorio, 16, 34. 83. Directorio, 34–35. 84. Directorio, 15–18. 85. Directorio, 9–10; Roller, Amazonian Routes; Sampaio, Espelhos, especially chap. 7. 86. Bluteau, Vocabulario portuguez, vol. Q–Sys, 402. 87. Gonçalo José da Silveira Preto, Pará, April 12, 1751, in AEP, vol. 1, 258; “Parecer do Conselho Ultramarino sôbre a conta que dá o governador da Ilha de Santa Catarina de haverem ali chegado três navios com casais das Ilhas dos Açores [. . .],” October 26, 1750, in AGTMAT, vol. 2, 479. 88. “Instruções régias, públicas e secretas,” 71. 89. Mendonça Furtado, “Instrução que levou o capitão-mor João Batista de Oliveira quando foi estabelecer a nova Vila de S. José de Macapá,” December 18, 1751, in AEP, vol. 1, 171. 90. Directorio, 35–36. 91. Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, “Instrução passada ao tenente Diogo António de Castro para estabelecer a Vila de Borba, a Nova, antiga aldeia do Trocano,” Borba, a nova, January 6, 1756, in AEP, vol. 3, 72. 92. Mendonça Furtado to Carvalho e Melo, Arraial de Mariuá, October 13, 1756, in AEP, vol. 3, 162–163; and “A Gonçalo José da Silveira Preto,” Arraial de Mariuá, October 12, 1756, in AEP, vol. 3, 129–130. 93. “Instruções régias, públicas e secretas,” 71. 94. Sanches, “Miscellanea medica,” vol. 2, fol. 156v. See also the law that mandated that “the children of Gypsies” in Brazil be legally apprenticed in order to curtail vagrancy and criminality. “Alvará de Ley [. . .] que no Estado do Brazil os rapazes de pequena idade filhos de siganos se entreguem [. . .],” January 24, 1761. 95. Two years passed between the crown’s approval of the reform laws and their publication in the Amazon region. See the alvará and the record of its registry on August 18, 1758, in Directorio, 41. The king approved the Law of Liberties in June 1755. By 1758 another alvará confirmed that the legislation applied to all of Portuguese America. Domingues, Quando os índios, 25, 68–69. 96. Roller, Amazonian Routes, 46, 66, 93, 100, 133, 172; Moreira, “Territorialidade, casamentos mistos, e política entre índios e portugueses”; Sommer, “The Amazonian Native Nobility”; Karasch, “Rethinking.” 97. Roller, Amazonian Routes, 166–167; Domingues, Quando os índios, 124–126, 182. 98. [Teles da Silva] to Carvalho [e Melo], Vienna, February 10, 1758, in “Correspondência,” 386. On the debate, in print, over Jesuit objectives in Brazil, see Curto, “As práticas,” 454–455.
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99. “Ofício do [. . .] Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, para [. . .] Diogo de Mendonça Corte Real, sobre a administração das Missões e as formas de civilizar os índios da capitania [. . .],” Pará, February 1, 1754, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 36, D. 3323; Karasch, “Rethinking,” 465–468; Relaçam verdadeira; Relação da conquista do gentio Xavante. 100. Faria, Noticias (1740), 10; Bennett, African Kings, 58–61; Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, 12–14. 101. “Carta (cópia) do [governador e capitão-general do Estado do Maranhão, Francisco Pedro de Mendonça Gorjão], ao rei [D. João V],” [ant. June 5, 1750], AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_003, Cx. 12, D. 1038. On earlier calls to reproduce the labor regime regarded as the basis for the generation of wealth in other parts of Portuguese America, see Chambouleyron, “Escravos do atlântico equatorial,” 80–81, 90–96. 102. Noticia verdayera, 3. 103. “Ley porque V. Magestade ha porbem restituir aos indios [. . .].” 104. “Instruções régias, públicas e secretas,” 70–71. 105. See José Cardoso da Costa, “Versos a uma negra vendo-se a um espelho” (1736), cited in José Ramos Tinhorão, Os negros em Portugal, 226; “Carta dos oficiais da câmara da cidade de São Luís do Maranhão, ao rei D. José sobre a miséria generalizada da população da capitania, que não possuia dinheiro para comprar escravos [. . .],” São Luís do Maranhão, July 30, 1755, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_009, Cx. 36, D. 3568; Carreira, As companhias pombalinas, 23–34; Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil, 37–43; Silva and Ribeiro, “Amazonia and North-East Brazil in the Atlantic Slave Trade.” 106. “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino ao rei D. José, sobre a permissão que pedem os moradores da capitania do Maranhão, para irem navios ao porto de São Luís e dai retornarem ao Reino [. . .],” Lisbon, August 27, 1752, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_009, Cx. 33, D. 3321; Relaçam e noticia da gente, [6]. 107. “Provisão (minuta) do [rei D. José] aos oficiais da câmara de São Luís do Maranhão, concedendo licença aos moradores e homens de negócios das capitanias do Maranhão e Pará para envirarem embarcações de resgate de escravos na costa de Guiné [. . .],” [Lisbon,] November 22, 1752, AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_003, Cx. 13, D. 1117. See also AHU, AHU_ACL_CU, Cód. 271, fols. 218–219. The Mesa dos Homens de Negócios de Lisboa asked for a delay in the implementation of the new arrangement. “Requerimento do provedor e deputados da Mesa dos Homens de Negocios de Lisboa ao rei D. José [. . .],” [Lisbon,] [ant. December 22, 1752], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_009, Cx. 33, D. 3342. 108. Instituiçaõ da Companhia Geral do Graõ Pará e Maranhaõ. On clarifications of its jurisdiction in Africa, see Carreira, As Companhias pombalinas, 41–43; “Carta da Junta da adminstração da Companhia [. . .],” Belem do Pará, November 14, 1757, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 43, D. 3900; Sebastião José [de Carvalho e Melo] to Mendonça Furtado, Lisbon, May 12, 1755, in AEP, vol. 2, 358.
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109. Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil, 56. See also Silva and Ribeiro, “Amazonia,” 490–493. Carreira calculates that the company transported a higher number. See Carreira, As Companhias pombalinas, 51–52. Along with its monopoly in the Upper Guinea Coast, the company had a more limited presence in Angola, where exemption from export duties gave it an advantage over other traders. In 1758 the crown sought to simplify taxation on the trade from Angola and allowed for free entry into Luanda’s hinterland and for agents to contract directly with Luso-African traders. See Miller, Way of Death, 573–577; “Alvará com força de ley [. . .],” January 25, 1758. On earlier companies, see also Pimentel, Viagem ao fundo, 85–95. On the organization of the slave trade, see also Silva, “The Profits of the Portuguese-Brazilian Transatlantic Trade,” 87–92. 110. “Ofício do [governador e capitão general do Estado do Maranhão e Pará], Manuel Bernardo de Melo e Castro, para o [capitão general] Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, sobre o número de escravos pretos que chegaram [. . .],” Pará, August 6, 1759, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 45, D. 4105. 111. Domingues da Silva and Vieira Ribeiro, “Amazonia,” 492, 497. 112. Chambouleyron, “Escravos do atlântico equatorial,” 79–114. 113. [Conselho Ultramarino,] “Sobre a representação do Vice Rey do Estado do Brazil, e novo methodo que parece deve praticar-se a respeito do negocio da Costa da Mina para o resgate dos escravos [. . .],” February 26, 1751, in AGTMDB, 315. See also “Carta do vice-rei e capitãzo-general do Brasil, Conde de Atouguia [. . .],” AHU, AHU_ ACL_CU_005, Cx. 101, D. 8019. The statutes of contemporary Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba closely resembled those of the Grão Pará e Maranhão but did not include explicit provisions for the slave trade. See Instituiçaõ da Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba; Carreira, As Companhias pombalinas, 222–225. 114. Carta do [provedor-mor da Fazenda Real do Estado do Brasil], “Manuel Antônio da Cunha Sotomaior ao rei [D. José] sobre o não deferimento a Luís Nogueira da Silva do transporte de escravos desta cidade para a nova colônia,” Bahia, April 22, 1751, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 106, D. 8338. 115. “Alvará com força de Lei [. . .] que não levem negros dos portos do mar para as terras, que naõ sejaõ dos reaes dominios de Vossa Magestade [. . .],” Lisbon, October 14, 1751; “Carta do [vice-rei e governdor geral do Estado do Brasil], Luís Pedro Peregrino de Carvalho de Meneses e Ataíde, Conde do Atouguia ao rei [D. José] a informar do cumprimento do alvará [. . .],” Bahia, April 12, 1752, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 109, D. 8508; Alencastro, Trato dos viventes, 31. 116. Provisão, March 30, 1756, in Lara, Legislação, 326–327; “Representação da Mesa da Inspecção da Bahia, acerca da navegação e comércio da Costa da Mina,” Bahia, July 27, 1754, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 8, D. 1221; Count of Arcos, Marcos de Noronha to Diogo de Mendonça Corte Real, Bahia, August 10, 1756, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_005, Cx. 131, D. 10215. Kantor explains that the new Academia dos Renascidos, founded in 1759, provided a venue for elite residents of Salvador to debate the slave
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trade, an earlier age of ostensible cooperation between metropolitan and American interests, rivalry with traders in Rio de Janeiro, and the creation of new companies. See Kantor, Esquecidos, 134–139. Miller argues that in the long term, the new Angola policies strengthened the position of slave traders and merchants in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. Miller, Way of Death, 570–597. 117. Alvará, September 19, 1761, in Lara, Legislação, 345–346. For analyses of the law, which tend to broadly contextualize its origins and impact, see Santos, “A abolição do tráfico e da escravidão em Portugal”; Fernando Novais and Francisco Falcon, “A extinção da escravatura”; Fonseca, “As leis pombalinas sobre a escravidão”; Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg, “Soil Free from Slaves”; Acioli and Menz, “Resgate,” 52. 118. Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg, “Soil Free from Slaves.” The authors note the 1772 Somerset case that similarly established that enslaved people who arrived in England were legally free. On the eighteenth-century slavery legislation and a contemporary “civilizing impulse,” see also Luiz Geraldo Silva, “‘Esperança de liberdade,’” 118. 119. Garcia de Resende quoted in Faria, Noticias (1740), 8: “Vemos no Reyno metter / Tantos cativos crescer, / E irem-se os naturaes. / Que se assim for, seraõ mais /Elles que nós a meu ver.” 120. Lahon, “Eles vão, eles vêm,” 74; Sweet, “Hidden Histories.” See also Venancio, Cativos do reino, 89; Tinhorão, Os negros, 232; Silva, “O tráfico de escravos,” 57, 66. Silva estimates that around half a million enslaved people were disembarked in Portugal before the mid-eighteenth-century laws, with annual numbers in gradual decline. 121. Aviso, January 2, 1767, in Lara, Legislação, 351. 122. “Alvará com força de lei,” January 16, 1773, in Lara, Legislação, 359–360. 123. Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg, “Soil Free from Slaves,” 434. 124. Pinheiro, Em defesa da liberdade, chap. 4; Lahon, “Eles vão,” 71, 82–83, 86–89; Fonseca, “As leis,” 32–35. 125. Nogueira da Silva and Grinberg, “Soil Free from Slaves.” 126. Alvará, September 19, 1761, 346. 127. “Requerimento de Narciso Martins da Costa Guimarães ao rei [D. José],” [Bahia, ant. May 24, 1766], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 156, D. 11923. The Overseas Council was also asked to review the status of two girls, described in one document as “pretas busaes,” a phrase that denoted African birth or a lack of Europeanization, in light of the 1761 law and determine guardianship. See “Carta do chanceler da Relação do Porto, Francisco José da Serra Craesbeck do Cassu, ao [secretário de estado Negócios da Marinha,] Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, referente as duas negras menores [. . .],” Porto, August 13, 1763, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005, Cx. 151, D. 11575. 128. Aviso, February 22, 1776, in Lara, Legislação, 361–362; Luiz Geraldo Silva and Priscila de Lima Souza, “Escravos marinheiros,” 49, 64–70. 129. [Anonymous], Nova e curiosa relaçaõ, 2–3, 7. Boxer drew attention to this pamphlet, which he acquired and later translated into English in Race Relations, 103–110,
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where he characterizes the 1761 law as abolishing slavery in Portugal. See also Parron, “A Nova e Curiosa Relação (1764),” for an analysis focused on Enlightened critique and reformism. 130. Nova e curiosa relaçaõ, 6–7. On the privileges granted to brotherhoods, see Lahon, O negro no coração do império, 65–69. 131. Nova e curiosa relaçaõ, 5. 132. Novo, e devertido entremez intitulado o contentamento dos pretos por terem a sua alforria, published in 1787 but, as Richard Gordon has argued, most likely written between 1768 and 1772, also reassured that slavery and manumission could be reconciled with decorum, social stability, and paternal authority in Portugal. See Richard A. Gordon, “Insights into Slavery and Abolition,” 996. Black characters had featured in Portuguese entremezes, performed and published as pamphlets, since the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century censors suppressed new and previously published works, including some with Black and enslaved characters, that did not sufficiently ridicule vice. See Camões, ed., “Teatro proibido.” 133. On the law’s publication in Brazil, see “Carta do governador e capitão-general do Estado do Pará e Maranhão, Manuel Bernardo de Melo e Castro, para o rei D. José I, em resposta a provisão de 12 de Outubro de 1761, sobre a publicação de alvará [. . .] de 19 de Setembro de 1761,” Pará, June 30, 1762, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 52, D. 4793; and “Carta dos oficiais da câmara da cidade de Belém do Pará para o rei [D. José I], sobre a recepção da ordem régia de 19 de Setembro de 1761 [. . .],” Belém, December 15, 1762, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_013, Cx. 53, D. 4872. 134. Lahon, “Eles vão”; Lima, “De libertos a habilitados,” 63–73. 135. See witness testimony included in “Ofício do [governador da capitania de Pernambuco] Manoel da Cunha Meneses, ao [secretário de estado da Marinha e Ultramar], Martinho de Melo e Castro, sobre cinco presos pardos e pretos que se acham na Junta de Justica para serem sentenciados,” Recife, January 27, 1774, AHU, AHU_ACL_ CU_015, Cx. 115, D. 8837; “Ofício do [governador da capitania de Pernambuco] Manoel da Cunha Meneses, ao [secretário de estado da Marinha e Ultramar], Martinho de Melo e Castro, sobre a repercussão que teve na Paraíba a lei que libertou negros e mulatos em Portugal,” Recife, November 15, 1773, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_015, Cx. 115, D.8816. 136. Testimony in “Oficio [. . .],” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_015, Cx. 115, D. 8837. 137. Silva, “Esperança,” 136; testimony in “Oficio [. . .],” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_015, Cx. 115, D. 8837. On the complex meaning of the term “pardo” in the eighteenth century, see Almeida and Bezerra, “Cor, qualidade, e condição.” “Língua de preto” was a term that reflected perceptions of nonnative Portuguese speakers of African descent and was dramatized in contemporary theater. See Tinhorão, Os negros em Portugal, chap. 4; and Belo, “Language as a Second Skin.” 138. Testimony in “Ofício,” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_015, Cx. 115, D. 8837. 139. Silva, “Esperança,” 141–142.
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140. Alvará com força de lei, January 16, 1773, in Lara, Legislação, 359–360. 141. Silva and Souza, “‘Sem nota de libertos,’” 43; Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 137; Mattos, “‘Black Troops,’” 22–23; Lahon, “Black African Slaves and Freedmen,” 277–279. 142. Carta de lei, constituição geral, e edicto perpetuo [May 25, 1773]. Luís da Cunha and Ribeiro Sanches had criticized the distinction, as did Alexandre de Gusmão in “Geneologia geral para desvanecer a opinião dos senhores fidalgos portuguezes, que se dizem puritanos,” in AGTMOV, 255–257; Sanches, Christãos novos; Pedreira, “Mercantilism, Statebuilding, and Social Reform,” 359, 365, 375–376. 143. “Alvará [. . .] aos 2 de Abril de 1761,” and Marquez de Pombal [Carvalho e Melo], “[Carta Régia],” Ajuda, February 10, 1774, in Costa, Goa sob a dominação portugueza, 63–70; Xavier, “Reducing Difference.” 144. Ribeiro Sanches, “Miselanea medica,” vol. 2, fols. 154v–155, 161, 164r–v. 145. [Carvalho e Melo], “[Carta Régia],” 69–70. Carvalho e Melo also suggested that the results of the reform would be more impressive in Asia, “where men are more capable and of such clear and refined judgment as those of Pará and Maranhão were wild, barbarous and distant from everything that constituted civil society and human commerce.” 146. Silva and Souza, “‘Sem a nota de libertos’”; and Souza, “Sem que lhes obsta a diferença de cor,” 344–365. See also Marquez, “Afflicted Slaves,” 15–16. 147. “Requerimento dos homens pardos da Confraria de São Jose de Vila Rica das Minas, solicitando o direito de usar espadim e cinta,” [ant. March 6, 1758], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_011, Cx. 73, D. 20. In 1731 João V rebuked the governor when he failed to acknowledge the royal appointment of a university-trained man of color to judicial office in Pernambuco. See Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 123–124; Russell-Wood, “Ambivalent Authorities,” 21; Almeida and Bezerra, “Cor, qualidade, e condição.” 148. Mattos, “‘Black Troops,’”13, 22; Raminelli, “Impedimentos de cor,” 716. See also Raminelli, “Élite negra”; Raminelli, “Da controversa nobilitação”; Figueirôa-Rêgo and Olival, “Cor da pele,” 115–145. 149. Siqueira da Gama, “Dissertações altercadas,” 66–69; Pitta, Historia, 562. 150. Nova e curiosa relaçaõ, 3. 151. Silva and Souza, “‘Sem a nota de libertos’”; Souza, “Sem que lhes obsta a diferença,” 348–365. 152. [Sanches], Cartas, 16, 55. 153. “Ofício [. . .],” AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_015, Cx. 115, D. 8816. 154. “Carta de José Dias de Figueiredo à rainha [. . .],” Vila Bela, May 21, 1789, AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_010, Cx. 26, D. 1545. See Souza, “Sem que lhes obsta a diferença,” 348–349; Russell-Wood, Slavery and Freedom, 83–94. 155. Loreto Couto, Desagravos, 138, 227. 156. Directorio, 5. On the emergence of the category of Blackness, see also Marcocci, “Blackness and Heathenism.” In 1771 the governor, the Marquis of Lavradio, rebuked
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an Indigenous man for “staining his blood” in marriage to a Black woman. See Boxer, Race Relations, 121. 157. “Alvará [. . .] de 1761,” 64. 158. Lara, Fragmentos, 268–269.
Epilogue 1. José Correia da Serra, “Discurso preliminar,” in Memórias económicas, vol. 1, 10. 2. González Adánez, “From Kingdoms to Colonies”; Burkholder, “Spain’s America”; Shovlin, “Commerce, Not Conquest.” 3. “Representação dos homens de negócios do Rio de Janeiro ao rei [D. João V] [. . .],” 1746, [ant. August 3], AHU, AHU_ACL_CU_005_Cx. 39, D. 4048. 4. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a preferência que em Portugal se deve dar à agricultura sobre as fábricas” (first published in Memórias económicas, vol. 1), in Vandelli, Aritmética política, 143. 5. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a preferência,” 143. 6. Serra, “Discurso preliminar,” 10; Vandelli, “Modo de evitar a ruína do reino ameaçado pelos ingleses com os contrabandos, e pelos franceses com as suas excessivas pretensões [1796],” in Vandelli, Aritmética politica, 294; Cardoso, O pensamento económico, 43–56. 7. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a agricultura deste reino, e das suas conquistas,” in Memórias económicas, vol. 1, 132–134. 8. Recent empirical research sheds light on the complex impact of Brazilian production on Portugal’s economy. See Silva, “The Profits of the Portuguese-Brazilian Transatlantic Slave Trade.” 9. José Joaquim Soares de Barros, “Memória sobre as causas da diferente população de Portugal em diversos tempos da monarquia,” in Memórias económicas, vol. 1, 107. 10. Vandelli, “Memória sobre o comércio de Portugal e suas colónias” (ca. 1788), in Vandelli, Aritmética politica, 171. 11. Coutinho, “Discurso sobre a verdadeira influência das minas dos metais preciosos na indústria das nações que as possuem, especialmente da Portuguesa,” in Memórias económicas, vol. 1, 179–180, 182. 12. José Verissimo Álvares da Silva, “Memória das verdadeiras causas por que o luxo tem sido nocivo aos Portugueses,” in Memórias económicas, vol. 1, 210; Cunha, “Police Science”; Cardoso and Cunha, “Enlightened Reforms.” A critique of American luxury, the gold rush, and the degradations that they produced was also featured in the anonymous pamphlet O Preto e o bugio ambos no mato discorrendo (1789). 13. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a preferência,” 143–145, 152. 14. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a preferência,” 148. 15. Vandelli, “Memória sobre o comércio de Portugal e suas colónias,” 171; Paquette, Imperial Portugal, 38; Cardoso, “From Natural History to Political Economy.”
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16. Cardoso, “From Natural History to Political Economy,” 783. On the critical scrutiny of Carvalho e Melo’s policies in the early years of Maria I’s reign, see Paquette, Imperial Portugal, 35–39. Criticism of the two trading companies and the Overseas Council’s deliberations on their future focused on their practices rather than on monopoly per se. See petition (1777) and report (1778) reproduced in Carreira, As Companhias pombalinas, 330–354; “Discursos sobre a decadência em que se acha a nossa Amêrica relativa aos seus estabelecimentso e comércio,” n.p., [ca. 1777,] ANTT, PT/TT/CORL/ M15/00018. 17. João de Loureiro, “Da transplantação das árvores mais úteis de países remotos,” in Memórias económicas, vol. 1, 126; Dean, With Broadax, 118–119; Dias, “Aspectos,” 112– 114; Vandelli, Aritmética política, includes several reports on natural resources. 18. Silva, “Memória das verdadeiras causas,” 211. 19. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a preferência,” 145; Vandelli, “Memória sobre a agricultura,” 130, 132–133; Vandelli, “Plano de um lei agrária,” [1788], in Vandelli, Aritmética politica, 109–130. 20. Alvará, Ajuda, January 5, 1785, in Silva, Colleção da legislação portugueza, 370–371. 21. Vandelli, “Memória sobre a agricultura,” 131. 22. Lisboa, “Carta interessante,” 502, 505. On the transatlantic administrative and scientific exchanges of which Vandelli and the Academia were a part, see Raminelli, Viagens ultramarinas. 23. Røge, Economistes, 83–85. 24. Vandelli, “Memória sobre o comércio de Portugal e suas colónias,” 172, 176–178, 180. 25. Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine, 26; Marquese, Administração e escravidão. 26. Lisboa, “Carta interessante,” 501. 27. Paquette, Imperial Portugal, 38–39. 28. Coutinho, “Memória sobre o melhoramento dos domínios de sua magestade na América,” (1797 or 1798), in Coutinho, Textos políticos, vol. 2, 49. 29. Coutinho, “Memória,” 48–49, 53–54. 30. João da Costa Cordeiro, “Obra de aplicações técnicas e literárias ofercidas a dom Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho,” n.p., n.d. [ca. 1800], BNB, Ms. I-29,16,9, fols. 12–15. Cordeiro both recognized the success of earlier trading companies and argued for freer trade between metropole and colony. 31. Coutinho, Ensaio economico, 106–109. Published first in French in London in 1798, Azeredo Coutinho’s Analyse sur la justice du commerce du rachat des esclaves de la côte d’Afrique (London: D’ l’Imprimerie de Baylis, 1798) underscored the Ensaio’s arguments about empire. Although his defense of the slave trade included injunctions against enslaver violence, in contrast to Vandelli’s less thorough treatment, it rankled the Academia’s leadership, who declined to sponsor its publication. 32. Silveira Xavier quoted in Maxwell, Conflicts, 135; Figueiredo, “Derrama.”
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33. Pasquinades reproduced in Tavares, História da sedição, 22–32; Childs, “Secret and Spectral,” 41–42. 34. On Souza Coutinho’s reckoning with the transfer of the court, see “Manifesto ou exposição fundada, e justicativa do procedimento da corte de Portugal a respeito da França, desde o princípio da revolução até à época da invasão de Portugal [. . .],” May 1, 1808, in Souza Coutinho, Textos políticos, vol. 2, 335–343.
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Index
Italic page numbers indicate illustrations. Acioli, Gustavo, 186 administrative information, acquisition and organization of, 70–71, 74–77, 90, 105–111, 117, 231n88. See also censuses administrative structure, for Portuguese America, 3–11 Afonso V, King, 4 Afonso VI, King, 84 Africa, 45–46; Portuguese-Dutch rivalry in, 27 African enterprise, 4, 44, 210n15; historiography of, 31–39 Africans, 90; women, 103, 194–195. See also enslaved labor (African); enslaved persons (African) agrarianism, 200–201, 203 agricultural economy, 153. See also sugar cultivation agriculture, 12, 15–16 Alegrete, Marquis of, 33 Alencastro, Luiz Felipe, 13, 185 Alexandre, Valentim, 12–13 Almada, André Álvares de, 33
abolition: in Portugal, 277n129; prospect of, in Brazil, 202 abortion, 172 Abrantes, Marquis of, 36, 66, 99, 159 absolutism, 84. See also royal authority Academia Brasílica dos Esquecidos (Brazilian Academy of the Forgotten), 40–55, 59, 123, 176, 194; motto of, 50–51 Academia das Ciências de Lisboa (Academy of Sciences of Lisbon), 197–204, 264n131 Academia dos Anónimos (Academy of the Anonymous), Lisbon, 40 Academia dos Renascidos, Salvador, 220n78, 275n116 Academia Real da História Portuguesa (Royal Academy of Portuguese History), 25, 59, 75, 84, 159, 215n21, 218n51, 236n131, 262n121; Collecçam dos documentos e memorias, 36; and the Esquecidos, 40, 53; “Memoria das Noticias,” 35; “System of History,” 34–39 academies, in Portugal, 215n21
319
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Almeida, Lourenço de, 63–65, 99, 132, 165, 248n91 Almeida, Luís Ferrand de, 83 American enterprise, historiography of, 31–39 Andrada, Gomes Freire de, 58, 67, 76, 78–79, 82, 85–86, 113, 118, 173, 232n94, 247n76, 252n120 Andrien, Kenneth, 23 Anglo-French commerce, 144 Anglo-Portuguese trade, 144–146 Anglo-Portuguese treaties, 139–140. See also Methuen Treaty (1703) Angola, 28, 275n109 Antonil, André João, 1–2, 57, 59–60, 103, 127; Cultura e opulência, 97 Aquinas, Thomas, 47–48 Arcos, Count of, 185 arrátel, arrates (unit of measurement), 227n49 Asia and Asian enterprise, 27, 44–46, 50–51, 145, 192, 260n105, 278n145; historiography of, 31–39 assimilation, concept of, 173–174 Assumar, Count of. See Portugal, Pedro de Almeida, third Count of Assumar Atlantic, in global empire, 27–31. See also slave trade Atouguia, Count of, 258n73 Aula de Comércio, Lisbon, 146–149, 200 authority: Indigenous potential for, 178; new structures of, in Minas, 102; paternal, 95–97, 101; of slave owners, 95–97, 109, 111–112. See also royal authority authority, local, 80–82. See also representation, issues of; town councils Azores, the, 158–159, 161, 167, 169, 169–170
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Bahia, 49, 69, 126–127, 188; Maneta revolt (1711), 54, 57–58 balance of trade, Portuguese quest for, 138–154 Bandeira, Domingos Álvares Telles, 79 bandeira expeditions, 91 banishment, punitive, 160–162 baptism: of enslaved people, 96; forced, 161 Barbosa, José, 25–26, 34, 84, 216n33 Barros, Inácio de, 89, 116 Barros, João de, 9, 33, 49 Barros, José Joaquim Soares de, 199 Barros, Martinho de, 228n53 Barrozo, Domingos Antunes, 235n112 bateia tax, 62, 71, 105 bearing of arms, royal restrictions on, 98, 137–138, 242n40 Belém, 131, 142 Benci, Jorge, Economia cristaã no governo dos escravos, 97 Benedictines, 127–128, 195 Bennet, John, The National Merchant . . . , 147 Bennett, Herman, 17 bequests to the church, limits on, 153 Bergad, Laird, 69, 106 Bicalho, Maria Fernanda, 13, 51, 86 biometrics, of capitação, 106–111 biopolitics, 160 birth, illegitimate, 104, 164 Blackmore, Josiah, 158 Blackness, conflated with bondage, 108. See also enslaved persons (African); hierarchies of color; slavery Bluteau, Rafael, 139; Vocabulario portuguez e latino, 9, 125, 177, 180 Board of Commerce (Junta de Comércio), 146
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bodies, African, 212n55; and politics of dress, 129–138; production of knowledge about, 106–111 body metaphor, 97, 113, 136, 152, 173–174, 257n65 Boerhaave, Herman, 262n121 borders, intra-American, 172 botanical science, 200–201 Boxer, C. R., 14, 66, 159 Braga, archbishopric of, 215n22 Braganza dynasty, 4, 27, 29, 31, 50, 83–84 branding, of fugitive slaves, 95 Brasil Colônia, 3 Brazil, 2–4, 8, 49, 59, 87, 121, 124, 148, 198, 200; administrative structure for, 3–11; ban on manufacturing, 155, 201; consumption in, 125–138; historiography of, 40–55; lack of focus on letters, 49–50; political independence of (1822), 12; reception of laws reforming slave trade, 190–192; Rocha Pita’s history of, 25–27; specificity of, 15–16. See also colonies; Minas Gerais; names of places “Brazilican War,” 44–45 brazilwood (pau-brasil), 49, 224n14 Bremeu, António Cortez, 136 Britain/British, 18, 150; military vessels barred form Portuguese ports, 29; and sugar cultivation, 28; writings on commerce, 144, 147 British East India Company, 260n105 British-Portuguese trade, 144–146 British-Portuguese treaties, 139–140. See also Methuen Treaty (1703) Brito, Bernardo Gomes de, 34; Historia Tragico-Maritima, 158–159 Brito, Francisco Xavier de, 122 Brochado, José da Cunha, 32, 37, 66 Bryant, Sherwin, 22
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Bulhões, Pedro de Alcântara de, 191 Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 3, 44–45, 48–49, 161 Cabral, Sebastião da Veiga, 64 caçadores do mato (bush hunters), 97 Caetano, Felix, 191, 193 calico trade, 145, 147, 261n111 Camões, Luís Vaz de, Os Lusíadas, 36 Campos, Manuel de, 38–39 Cañizares, Jorge, 43 capitação (head tax), 58, 69–76, 77, 78, 85, 89–91, 105–121; abolition of, 23, 85–88, 119–121, 143, 237n139; collection of, 76–77, 107, 233n97; rebellion against, 78–79; registration process for, 71, 89 capitães do mato (bush captains), 97 capital punishment, for fugitive slaves, 95 Cardim, Pedro, 4 Cardoso, José Luís, 147 cartography, 38–39 Carvalho, António de Albuquerque Coelho de, 61, 80, 98 Carvalho, José Vaz de, 134 Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de, 33 “castle women,” 162 Castro, André de Melo e, Count of Galveias, 67–68, 76, 155, 245n63 Castro, João Couceiro de Abreu e, 37, 219n61 Catarina, daughter of João IV, 27 Catas Altas, 89 Catholic faith, 170; and Portuguese sovereignty, 36–37. See also Benedictines; Christianization; Christian morality; Inquisition; Jesuits; missionaries Cavalcante, Paulo, 65–66 Ceará, 167
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censuses, 159; of enslaved adults and other productive individuals, 71, 106, 117; of freed people and people of color, 245n63 Charles II, King of England, 27 Chaturvedula, Nandini, 126 Child, Josiah, 147, 150 childbearing, 165 children: Jewish, forced baptism and resettlement of, 161; of mixed ancestry, 103, 187 Christian history, and Portuguese America, 41–43 Christianization, 176–177 Christian morality, 163–164, 174 chronicler of the State of Brazil, post of, 216n34 city/village metaphor, 150 civilizing enterprise, 177, 180–181; Directorate and, 176–183 Cleland, John, 260n105 clergy, 61, 72, 154, 176, 250n102. See also Benedictines; Jesuits; missionaries coartação (quartação), 101 Code Noir, French, 202 Coelho, Felipe, 167 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 200; Testament politique, 174 Colônia do Sacramento, 28, 39, 78, 117 colonial system (colonial pact), 11–19, 124, 148, 211n41 colonies: of commerce, 144–152; and conquests, 3–11; education in, 153–156; as sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, 10, 147, 150–151, 154–155, 157, 197; types of, 148, 150 colonos. See settlers commercial education, 146–149 Companhia do Grão Pará e Maranhão, 146, 184–185, 262n119, 275n109
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Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba, 275n113 Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil, 28 Companhia Geral do Grão e Maranhão, 185 confiscation, of slaves, 90, 105, 115, 249n96 conquest/conquests, 26, 53–54; and colonies, 3–11, 49, 151–157; historiography of, 31–39 consular jurisprudence, 152–153 consultation practice, and royal authority, 82–85 consumption, 23, 123–125; excessive, 125–138; and imperial economy, 138– 151; “plebeian,” 153–156; regulation of, 147; in transimperial debates, 199–200. See also luxury; sumptuary laws contraband trade, 12, 145, 155–156, 198, 202, 211n41 Convent of Santa Clara do Desterro, 49 convents, 164–165 convicts, as settlers, 53 Cordeiro, João da Costa, 280n30 Correia, Diogo Álvares (Caramuruassu), 53 correição (audit/inspection), in capitação plan, 71, 74, 108–109 Corte-Real, Diogo de Mendonça, 37 Cortes, Portuguese, 57, 84, 236n131; Cortes of 1653 and 1673, 236n132; Cortes of Lamego, 215n22 Cortesão, Jaime, 32, 39, 56, 70, 164 Costa, André, 59, 109, 112 Costa, António Rodrigues da, 7–8, 21, 25, 31, 35, 38, 51, 54, 66, 69, 81, 86, 123, 139, 167–168, 176, 216n26, 269n38; “testament” of, 56–58 Costa, João Alvares da, 74
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Costa da Mina (Africa), as source of slaves, 106–108 counterfeiters, 68, 76, 232n94 couples settlement, 159–162, 167–171, 180–181, 269n38 Coutinho, José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo, 10–11; Ensaio económico . . . , 204 Coutinho, Marco António de Azevedo, 145 Coutinho, Rodrigo de Souza, 24, 199, 203–204 Coutinho, Vicente de Sousa, 151 Couto, Diogo de, 33 Couto, Domingos de Loreto, 127–128, 131–132, 195 Craig, Russell, 147 credit, used in slave purchases, 74 crime, 97–102 Cuiabá, 69 Cunha, Luís da, 29–31, 39, 121, 140, 149, 159, 163, 165, 170, 201, 278n142; “Carta de Instruções,” 176–177 cunhamenas (male in-laws), 174 Curto, Diogo, 40, 217n45 Cururupeba, 45 Davenant, Charles, 147, 150 “defect of color,” 192 Defoe, Daniel, 147, 261n111 degredados, 161 Delamare, Nicolas, Traité de la police, 141 Delisle, Guillaume, 39 denunciations, 71, 96 dependency, colonial, 10, 150, 154, 156 Deringer, William, 144 derrama (tax collection), 85, 87, 204–205 diamond mining, 66–68, 93, 108, 199, 227n48, 247n85
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Dias, Henrique, 194, 222n110 difference, American, 23, 43, 53–54, 87–90, 156, 193–195 diplomacy, Portuguese, 29–31 Directorate, and governance of Native people, 176–183 discoveries, mineral, 1–3, 57, 60; diamonds, 66–68, 199, 227n48; gold, 1–2, 6, 60, 65, 90, 163, 199. See also diamond mining; gold Discurso histórico e político . . . (anonymous), 94, 224n7 documentation. See administrative information, acquisition and organization of; licenses; passports; receipts, in capitação plan domestic labor, 110–112, 114–115, 119, 248n91 Domingues, Ângela, 177 “donation” tax, for marriage of heir to throne, 105, 250n102 donatory captains, 3–4 double-entry bookkeeping, 146 dowries: of king’s daughter, 27–28; for “orphans of the king,” 162; provided by crown to settlers marrying Native women, 181; women lacking, 49, 166 dress, 128–138, 178. See also consumption; luxury; nudity, Native people and Duclerc, Jean-François, 7 DuPlessis, Robert, 126 Dutch, 27–31, 194 Dutch West India Company, 27 Eacott, Jonathan, 20 education: in colonies, 153–156; commercial, 179, 262n113; of Natives, 177–179; town councils and, 245n64 education reform, 149–151, 153–156 elderly enslaved people, taxation of, 111
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elites: American, 8, 10, 13, 19, 26, 68, 126–127, 136, 190–191, 205, 275n116; Portuguese, 19, 51, 98, 124, 126, 192 Emboabas, 60–61, 98 empire: changing concept of, 3–11; geography of, 158–196, 203; global, 27–31 Encyclopédie (Diderot and d’Alembert), 149 enslaved labor (African), 66, 92–94, 105, 114, 127, 183–196, 201–202 enslaved persons (African), 17, 75, 90, 93, 109, 183–196; demand for, 106–108; head tax on, 62; in Portugal, 185–189; production of knowledge about, 106–111; punishment of, 94–96; and settlement, 160–161; as slave owners, 100; and transgressive dress, 129–138. See also capitação; formerly enslaved persons; manumission; slavery; slave trade enslaved sailors, 188–189 enslaved women, 103, 110, 129, 162, 187, 259n94 enslavement: hereditary, 186; illicit, of Native people, 173, 175, 182 enslavement, African: Esquecidos on, 222n110; and Native settlement, 47–48. See also enslaved persons (African); slavery enslaver idleness, 180–181, 201–202 entremezes, 277n132 Epanfora festiva, 253n6 epidemics, and Native communities, 172–173 Ericeira, Count of. See Meneses, Francisco Xavier de, fourth Count of Ericeira escravos de ganho (enslaved laborers for hire), 99
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Espírito Santo, 271n60 Espírito Santo da Pedreira, brotherhood of, 257n67 Esquecidos. See Academia Brasílica dos Esquecidos estrangeirados, 18 European women, lack of, in Brazil, 102–103, 164 evangelization, of Native peoples, 42– 43. See also missionaries; missions families, 102–104. See also children; intermarriage; marriage family names, new, for Native persons, 178 Faria, Manuel Severim de, 34, 160, 162–163, 170, 183, 186, 201; Noticias, 266n7 Ferreira, Luís Gomes, 114, 212n55 fertility, 160 fifth, the (quinto), 58–59, 76, 81, 90, 105; collection of, 60, 62–66, 87, 246n72; pau-brasil fifth, 224n14; reduction of, 67–68 Figueiredo, Caetano de Brito e, 40–43, 46, 50 Figueiredo, Luciano, 80 finta, 70 forasteiros (outsiders), 60 Forbonnais, François Véron Duverger de, 147–148, 150 formerly enslaved persons (negros forros): in Lisbon, 240n24; as slave owners, 100, 116. See also freed persons, eligibility for offices and honors; manumission Fortes, Manuel de Azevedo, 38, 219n61, 219n63 Foucault, Michel, 160, 171 Fragoso, João, 12–14, 19
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Franca, Gonçalo Soares da, 40–43, 46, 49, 222n110 France/French, 7, 28, 144–145, 150, 174, 205 fraud, 87, 90, 106, 109–110 freed persons, eligibility for offices and honors, 191–192 free people of color, 116, 129–138, 245n63, 251n109. See also formerly enslaved persons; mixed ancestry, problems of; mulattos free soil debates, in France and England, 186 fugitive slaves, 17, 71, 94–96, 112–113, 234n109, 240n21 Furtado, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça, 127, 146, 158, 172–174, 176–177, 180–182, 184 Furtado, Júnia Ferreira, 13, 30, 39, 63, 126, 156, 162 Galveias, Count of. See Castro, André de Melo e, Count of Galveias Gama, Luís Siqueira da, 40–42, 46–48, 51, 123, 176, 194, 221n103 Gandavo, Pero de Magalhães, 3 Garrido, João Antonio, Taboada curiosa, 262n113 Gazeta de Lisboa, 4, 163 gender imbalance, in Portuguese America, 102–103, 164 gender issues, in taxation of enslaved persons, 109–111 geography, 219n61; Academia Real and, 38–39; of empire, 158–196, 203 Gharala, Nora, 118 Goa, 6, 27, 51, 67, 145, 186, 265n150 Godin, Robert, 140 godparenting, 101 Goiás, 69, 181
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gold: circulation of, 69, 72–73, 77–78, 87; discovery of, 1–2, 6, 28, 60, 90, 163, 199; untaxed, 65–66, 72–73, 98. See also wealth, production and circulation of gold dust/nuggets, prohibition of circulation outside Minas, 63 goldsmiths, 141 Gordon, Richard, 277n132 “Gothic monarchy,” 151–153, 156 Gouvêa, Maria de Fátima Silva, 4, 13–14 governance: of enslaved persons, 14, 95–98, 113; of Native people, 47, 176–183; of Portuguese America, 7, 10, 21–23, 56–57, 60, 62, 64, 152–153 governor, office of, 4. See also names of governors Grafe, Regina, 19 Grão Pará and Maranhão, State of, 127, 159, 172–173, 176, 193 Grinberg, Keila, 186–187 guardianship, 276n127 Guedes, Alexandre, 193 Guimarães, Narciso Martins da Costa, 188 Guimarães, Pascoal da Silva, 64–65 Gusmão, Alexandre de, 9, 18, 22–23, 32, 37–38, 58, 87, 123, 132, 140–141, 154–155, 167, 198, 201; and Academia Real, 35; “Cálculo” (“Apontamentos discursivos . . .”), 120–121, 140; “Geneologia geral . . . ,” 278n142; new system of taxation, 22–23, 68–76, 89–91. See also capitação Gusmão, Bartolomé, 69 Habsburgs, 4, 27, 29, 38, 83, 215n22 Hawthorne, Walter, 184 head taxes, 110. See also capitação Henriques, Afonso, 37
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Hespanha, António Manuel, 13–16, 213n67 hierarchies of color, 91, 117–118, 129–138 historiography, of Portuguese conquests, 31–39 homelands, of enslaved Africans, 106. See also “Mina” slaves, demand for honors and rewards, 58, 61, 75, 84, 86–87, 152–153, 179, 192–195, 203, 265n137 Hont, Istvan, 20 households, Portuguese, and enslaved labor, 114–115 Hunt, Alan, 125 imperial administrative systems, examination of, 198–205 imperial archive, Academia Real and, 35–36 imperial economy, 11–12, 20, 124, 138–151, 154, 199 imperial history, and Portuguese America, 43–46 incorporation, of lands, 203 India, 6–7, 45, 126, 152 Indies piece (peça de Índias), 108 Indigenous people. See Native peoples inheritance rights, 131–133, 153, 256n54 Inquisition, 8, 149, 151, 153, 155, 162, 174, 215n21 integration, settler-Native, 178–179 intendant, post of, 71, 77, 82, 86, 89, 106, 108, 251n108–251n109 intermarriage: of Native people with European settlers, 24, 160–161, 173–175, 178–179, 181; of Portuguese and foreign settlers, 170. See also marriage Itacolomi, 114
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Jequitinhonha River, 66 Jesuits, 69, 112, 125, 163–164, 172, 174, 184, 192–193, 200, 224n7; displaced by Directorate, 176; expulsion from empire (1759), 154, 182; and “settlement” of Natives, 46–48 Jewish children, forced baptism and resettlement of, 161 João I, King, 37 João III, King, 45, 59 João IV, King, 2, 4, 27 João V, King, 3, 8, 31, 61, 83–85, 131, 139, 146, 170, 183, 213n67, 278n147; death of, 8, 85, 122; and founding of Academia Real da História Portuguesa, 31–39 José I, King, 23, 119, 146, 264n133; and end of capitação, 85–86 judicial personnel, lack of, 97 judicial system, in Portuguese America, 97 justice: of capitação plan, 71–72; of Portuguese rule, 45–46 just taxation, 118–119 just wars, 91, 151, 175 Kantor, Iris, 37, 137, 220n78 King, Charles, The British Merchant, 147, 260n102 Kuethe, Allan, 23 Kwass, Michael, 72 labor, 91–105, 158–196; domestic, 110–112, 114–115, 119, 248n91; enslaved (African), 66, 92–94, 105, 114, 127, 183–196, 201–202; Native, 172, 175–176, 180, 185, 238n5; settler, 180–181, 201–202 labor regime, Directorate as, 180–182 lacemakers, 141
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Lacerda, Gonçalo Galvão de, 84–85, 248n91 Lahon, Didier, 186–187 Land of the Holy Cross, 161 Lara, Silvia, 134–136 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 42 Lavradio, Marquis of, 278n156 Lavre, Lopes, 111 law, in mining region, 91–105 laws and law codes, 91; Directorio que se deve observar nas povoações dos Indios do Pará, e Maranhão, 176–183, 195; Law of Liberties, 175, 182–183, 273n95; Law on Marriages with Indians, 175; law on transport of gold to Portugal (1736), 232n95; law regarding enslaved persons entering Portugal, 185–196; Lei da Moeda (1719), 63; Ordenações Filipinas, 59, 96, 130; Pragmática (1749), 124, 133–138, 140–144; “Regimento das terras mineraes do Brazil” (1603), 59–60, 91; “Regimento dos superintendentes, guarda-mores, e officiaes deputados . . .” (1702), 92. See also sumptuary laws learning, in Portuguese America, 49–50, 222n118. See also Academia Brasílica dos Esquecidos Lencastre, João de, 130–131 letras (bills of exchange), 72–73 libraries, 215n22, 216n33; Carvalho e Melo’s London library, 147, 174 licenses: to leave kingdom, 163; for women to travel from Brazil to kingdom, 166 Lima, Luís Caetano de, 38–39; Geografia historica, 159 Lima, Manuel Dias de, 33–34, 38 lineage, inquiries into, 153
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língua de preto, 277n137 língua geral, 177–178 Lisboa, Domingos de Abreu, 81–82, 234n109 Lisboa, José da Silva, 202 literacy, 191 local conflicts, 54 local labor crises, 92 local leaders, 58, 60–63, 76, 78, 164, 181, 223n123; eligibility limited to married men, 164; men of mixed ancestry prohibited from serving as, 104; paternal authority of, 168–170. See also royal officials; town councils longitude, 39 Louisiana, 95 Loureiro, João de, 200–201 Luanda, 28, 275n109 luxury, 125–138, 145, 156, 199–200, 254n28 Macedo, Duarte Ribeiro de, 138–139 Machado, Diogo Barbosa, 33, 36, 216n33 Machado, Inácio Barbosa, 40–41, 44, 46, 49; Fastos politicos, e militares, 45 Machado, Simão Ferreira, 163, 267n18 Maciel, Filipe, 84 Madeira, 161, 167 Madrid, Treaty of (1750), 23, 30, 31, 69, 121, 160, 170 Magalhães, Romero, 85–86 mamelucos (people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry), 78, 103 maneio (tax on individual earnings), 69–70, 72, 74–75, 111, 117 Maneta revolt (Bahia, 1711), 54, 57–58, 128 Manuel, Luís da Cunha, 151, 263n124 Manuel I, King, 34, 38
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manufacturing: in colonies, 154–156; in Portugal, 125, 138–145, 151, 201; in transimperial debates, 199–200 manumission, 17, 71, 90, 96, 100–103, 112, 115, 186, 188, 190, 244n54, 247n84, 248n91. See also coartação Maranhão, State of, 4, 142–143, 183, 238n144. See also Grão Pará and Maranhão, State of Maria I, Queen, 194, 197, 262n119 Mariana (formerly Ribeirão do Carmo), town council, 131, 133 markings, on African bodies, 106, 242n32 Marquese, Rafael de Bivar, 95, 202 Marquez, John, 96 marriage, 102, 162, 164; Directorio and, 178–179; regulation of, 132–133, 153, 167–168, 256n58; settlers and, 166– 167, 173–175, 181. See also couples settlement; orphan schemes Mascarenhas, José Freire Monterroio, 9, 272n69 mastership, Thomist concept of, 47–48 mastery, aesthetic of, 135, 135–136 maternal metaphor, 204 Mato Grosso, 194 matrilineality, 133 Mazagão, 171 measurement, of African bodies, 106 Melo, Sebastião José de Carvalho e, Marquis of Pombal, 23, 86–87, 128, 131, 144–151, 155, 157, 160, 171, 173, 175, 184–185, 192–193, 200, 203, 238n144, 261n110, 278n145; London library of, 147, 174, 261n111; “Relação dos Gravames,” 142–143, 149, 259n96; on settlers and Natives, 171–172; translation of Petty’s Political Arithmetic, 271n61
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Melon, Jean-François, 150; Essai politique sur le commerce, 147 Memórias económias (Academia das Sciências), 199–200 Mendonça, Martinho de. See Proença, Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Meneses, Dom Luís Carlos de, fifth Count of Ericeira, 216n26 Meneses, Dom Luís de, third Count of Ericeira, 139, 215n22 Meneses, Francisco Xavier de, fourth Count of Ericeira, 31–33, 38, 69, 201, 215n22 Meneses, Vasco Fernandes César de, Count of Sabugosa, 92, 223n123 Menz, Maximiliano, 186 mercantilism, 9, 20–21, 124, 147, 173, 183, 195–198, 203 merchants, 54, 98, 128, 131, 138, 142, 149, 188–189, 192 Meridian of Tordesillas, dividing Spanish and Portuguese territory in South America, 39 Mesa do Bem Comum, Lisbon, 136–137, 141–142, 146, 257n67 mestiços, 167–168 Methuen Treaty (1703), 18, 29, 139, 144–145 migration, 91–95, 159–163, 168, 183, 267n19. See also settlement; settlers military, Portuguese, 63–64 military hospitals, 169 militias, 98, 111, 191, 193–194 Minas Gerais, 56–88, 90, 127; demographics of, 94, 102–104; economy, 69, 74, 90. See also discoveries, mineral; mining enterprise “Mina” slaves, demand for, 106–108 mineral deposits, Brazilian. See discoveries, mineral
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mining enterprise, 1–3, 60, 66, 69, 90, 99; in transimperial debates, 199–200 Minister of the Navy and Conquests, office of, 4 mints, royal, 81 Mirabeau (Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau), L’ami des hommes, 178, 263n123 Miranda, Susana Münch, 4 missionaries, 61, 163–164, 176. See also Jesuits missionary enterprise, 172, 180, 182. See also Christianization missions, 46–49, 172 Mississippi, 95 mixed ancestry, problems of, 103–104. See also mulattos mobility: of enslaved persons, 99, 188; of Native persons, 181–182; of pardos and mulattos, 193–195. See also migration; social mobility mocambos (free communities), 172 Molina, Luis de, 47–48 monopoly system, rejection of, 12 Monteiro, John Manuel, 22 Monteiro, Nuno Gonçalo, 29, 62, 236n133 Monteiro, Rodrigo Bentes, 3, 8, 28, 62 Montesquieu, 151, 199 More, Anna, 43 Moreira, Gomes, 116–117 mortality, 160, 172–173 Mota, Fernando da, 234n109 mulattos, 103–104, 116, 129–138 Mun, Thomas, 147, 150 musicians, 120, 127 Napoleonic invasion of Iberia, 211n41
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Native communities, fiscal obligations of, 180 Native labor, 172, 175–176, 180, 185, 238n5 Native peoples, 43, 91, 160, 163, 172, 177–178, 181; evangelization of, 42–43; perceived nature of, 46, 48, 176, 221n94, 221n103; resistance of, 172–173; and settlement, 160–161; and settlers, 171–183; status as free persons, 47–48, 175, 182–183; subjugation of, 16, 45–46, 91; supposed origins of, 42; ways of life, 53, 161; women, 163–164, 167, 172 Native-Portuguese warfare, 46, 172, 181 Netherlands. See Dutch networks of exchange, 59, 139, 142, 197–205 New Christians, 149, 153, 192 “New Mazagão,” 171 nobility, Portuguese American claims to, 51–53. See also honors and rewards Nóbrega, Manuel de, 42, 164 Nova e curiosa relação de hum abuso emendado, 189–190, 194 Novais, Fernando, 11–12, 211n41 Novo, e devertido entremez . . . , 277n132 nudity, Native people and, 163, 177–178 Occidentalization, 177 old regime, and colonial system, 11–19 Olinda, 27, 54; town council, 143–144 orphan schemes, 162, 164 Ourique, apparition of Christ at, 215n22 Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino), 6–7, 29, 32, 62, 73, 82, 86, 123, 130, 133, 139, 143, 172, 180, 216n26, 250n102, 257n73; and Azorean settlement, 167, 169–170;
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Overseas Council (continued) and European-Native intermarriage, 175; and trading companies, 280n16 Pacheco, Bishop, 69–70 Pagden, Anthony, 9 Pais, José da Silva, 171 Paiva, Eduardo, 100–101 Palmares, 94–96, 102 Panama, 95 Paquette, Gabriel, 203 Pará, 146, 174, 184 Paraguaçu (Catarina), 53 Paraíba, 190–191, 193 Paranaguá, 69 Paranapanema, 69 Pardinho, Rafael Pires, 67 pardos (men of color), 78, 191, 277n137 partus sequitur ventrem doctrine, 136, 187 passports, 117, 163, 188 paternalism, official, 168–170 Paulistas (from São Paulo), 60–62, 92 Pedreira, Jorge, 12–13, 137, 192 Pedro II, King, 8, 54, 130–131 Penamacor, 149 Pereira, Antonio Guedes, 78 Pereira, José Manuel Ribeiro, 149, 262n119 Pereira, Nuno Marques, 99; Compendio narrativo do peregrino da America, 128–129 Pereira, Paulo Barbosa, 118–119, 233n98 Pernambuco, 7, 27–28, 54, 127–128, 191, 278n147 Pernambuco, Bishop of, 131 Pétau, Denis, 32 Petty, William, 21, 75, 147, 159, 229n65, 259n98; Political Arithmetic, 173–174, 261n110 Philip of Anjou, 29
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physiocrats, 149, 203 Pinheiro, Fernanda Domingos, 188 Pita, João da Rocha, 223n129 Pita, Sebastião da Rocha, 8, 29, 40, 42, 49, 92, 102, 127–128, 164, 194, 219n67, 220n70, 221n90, 221n94, 222n110; Historia da America Portugueza . . . , 5, 25–26, 41, 45, 49–54, 52 plantation economy, 49, 202 plebeian, 133, 154–155, 181, 201 poll taxes, 229n65 Pombal, Marquis of. See Melo, Sebastião José de Carvalho e, Marquis of Pombal Poovey, Mary, 147 population, 159–160; of Brazil, 94, 105–111, 171, 267n19; of Portugal, 163, 183, 267n18; surplus, 160, 167. See also administrative information, acquisition and organization of; censuses ports, Brazilian, opening of (1808), 12 Portugal, and the Atlantic, 27–31. See also royal authority; royal counselors; royal governance, issues of; royal revenue; sovereignty, Portuguese; names of rulers Portugal, Pedro de Almeida, third Count of Assumar, 32–33, 58, 63, 66–67, 73–74, 79, 82, 88, 98–102, 124, 159, 164–165, 176, 202, 216n26, 224n7, 230n85; on mulattos, 103–104; and revolt of 1720, 63–64, 98; and slavery, 94–95 Portuguese America. See Brazil Portuguese language, Natives and, 178 Postlethwayt, Malachy, 147 Poti (Tobijara chief; Antônio Felipe Camarão), 194
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poverty: Black, 118; of Portugal, 139–140; of settlers, 81, 115, 169–171, 184 Prado, Caio, Jr., 12 pragmatic laws. See sumptuary laws “Prince of Brazil,” as title for Portuguese heir, 4, 50 printing, prohibited in Brazil, 155 private remittances, 78 Proença, Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e, 21–22, 58–59, 75–76, 78–79, 103, 116, 118–119, 126, 131, 133, 149, 152, 159, 202, 231n89, 236n134, 241n32, 251n108; Apontamentos . . . , 75, 83; and capitação plan, 74–75; on royal authority, 82–85; on settlement, 79–80; and slavery, 94–95, 98 pronatalism, 162, 167–171, 178, 195 prostitution, 162, 259n94 public whippings, 104, 132, 134 Puntoni, Pedro, 4, 16 purity, 153, 192–195 quilombos (free communities), 16, 94–95, 98, 102, 112–113 rape, 162, 187 receipts (bilhetes), in capitação plan, 71, 105–106, 109 Recife, 27, 54 Reddy, William, 148 reexporting, 145 regimentos: “Regimento das terras mineraes do Brazil” (1603), 59–60, 91; “Regimento dos superintendentes, guarda-mores, e officiaes deputados . . .” (1702), 92 registration process, for capitação, 71, 89, 105–111 registry of enslaved population, 105–111, 247n76 religious brotherhoods, 187–188, 193
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religious instruction, for enslaved people, 96 religious life, in Brazil, 164–166 Repartição do Sul (Southern District), 4, 225n20 representation, issues of, 57, 76–85, 152. See also town councils Resende, Garcia de, 186 Restoration, 83–85. See also Braganza dynasty; names of rulers rewards for service. See honors and rewards Reynell, Carew, 147 Ribadeneira, Pedro de, 42 Ribeiro, Alexandre Vieira, 185 Richelieu, Cardinal, 74 Rio das Mortes, 100, 102 Rio de Janeiro, 7, 10–11, 28, 76, 78, 127, 155, 165–166; French attacks on, 29, 31, 54 Rio de Janeiro, Bishop of, 130 Rio de la Plata, 28 Rocha, Manuel Ribeiro da, 136 Rodrigues, Aldair, 107, 147 Røge, Pernille, 202 Roller, Heather, 181 Romeiro, Adriana, 61, 80 Rosenthal, Olimpia, 164 royal authority, 60, 62, 76–85, 90, 151, 185–188. See also consultation practice, and royal authority; representation, issues of; royal counselors; royal officials; sovereignty, Portuguese royal botanical garden (at Ajuda Palace), 200 royal counselors, 55–59, 62, 85–88. See also royal officials; names of individuals royal court, as supreme enclave of social distinction, 254n16
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royal courts, 160, 188 royal governance, issues of, 54–55 royal grace, 57, 81, 170, 173 royal mercy, 78 royal officials, 81, 156–157; concern for religious life in colonies, 164–166; concern over luxury, 127; concern over social order, 163–164, 185–196; critiques of Gusmão’s tax plan, 73–75, 78; in Minas, 66, 72, 90–91; and mulatto problem, 103–104; and settlement issues, 159–161; and settler-Native relations, 171–183; views on town councils, 81–82; and writings on commerce, 149. See also representation, issues of; names of individuals royal power, display of, 8, 59 royal remittances, 78 royal revenue, 51, 57, 67–68, 74, 232n96; and capitação, 70, 77–78; schemes for increasing, 63, 73, 91. See also fifth, the; tribute royal rights, 57; in Minas Gerais, 59–68. See also fifth, the royal treasury (Erário Régio), 146 Russell-Wood, A. J. R., 132 Russia, 262n121 rusticity, 177–180, 272n77 Sá, Artur de, 2 Sá, Manuel da Cruz e, 104 Sá, Manuel de, 34 Sá, Mem de, 44–45, 47 Sá, Salvador de, 28 Sabará, 81, 100, 233n97; town council, 113, 115 Sabugosa, Count of. See Meneses, Vasco Fernandes César de, Count of Sabugosa
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Saint-Domingue, 202–203 Saint Petersburg Academy, Russia, 262n121, 264n131 Sales, Alberto Jaqueri, 147–149, 262n119; Diccionario do commercio, 147–149; “Notícia Geral do Comércio,” 147 Salvador, Archbishop of, 166 Salvador da Bahia, 5, 18, 27, 50, 127, 166, 205, 275n116; cathedral, 122; Convent of Santa Clara do Desterro, 164–165; town council, 131, 185 Sampaio, Patrícia Maria Melo, 19 Sanches, António Ribeiro, 10, 126, 149–157, 160–161, 192, 200, 262n121, 264n133, 267n9, 278n142; “Apontamentos para descobrir . . . ,” 263n124; Cartas . . . , 149–151, 160, 263n121; “Considerações sobre o governo do Brasil,” 265n137; “Discursos . . . ,” 150, 152, 263n124, 264n131; Dissertation, 149; journals, 263n123–263n124; “Projecto do Doutor Sanches . . . ,” 263n124; Tratado da conservação . . . , 149, 159 Santa Catarina, 170, 180 Santos, Felipe dos, 64 São Francisco hinterland, in rebellion of 1736, 118 São Francisco River, 78 São Gião, Bonaventura de, 26 São João del Rei, town council, 113, 122 São José, town council, 115 São Luís, 143; town council, 184 São Paulo and Minas, captaincy of, 61, 225n20 São Tomé, 134, 161 Sarmento, Jacob de Castro, 259n96 Sarzedas, Count of, 67
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Savary, Jacques, Le parfait negociant, 147, 150 Savary des Bruslons, Jacques, 150; Dictionnaire universel du commerce, 147, 261n111 Schwartz, Stuart, 101 Sebastião, King, 221n90 senhores, 12, 212n47 Serra, Abbot José Correia da, 198 Serra, José da, 259n94 Serrão, José Vicente, 149, 154–155 settlement, 158–196; of Native peoples, 46–48. See also couples settlement; migration settlements, new, 60, 62, 69 settler labor, 180–181, 201–202 settler productivity, ideal of, 72 settlers (colonos), 14–16, 152, 160–161, 169; and Natives, 163–164, 171–183; poverty of, 81, 115, 169–171, 184; and pursuit of wealth, 48–49 shelters (recolhimentos), for women, 165 shipwreck, 158–159, 169 Silbert, Claude, 140 silk manufacturing, Portuguese, 139–140 Silva, Bernardino Nogueira da, 191 Silva, Cristina Nogueira da, 15, 17, 186–187 Silva, Daniel B. Domingues da, 185 Silva, João da Mota e, 127, 131, 140, 261n110 Silva, José Verissimo Álvares da, 199 Silva, Luiz Geraldo, 191, 193–194 Silva, Manuel Teles da, 157, 160, 172, 182 Silva, Nicolau Francisco Xavier da, 134 Silva, Soares da, 37 Silva, Wenceslao Pereira da, 127–128 Silveira, Balthasar da, 62, 66, 94
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slave ownership, 90, 100–101, 243n49; and governance of enslaved persons, 14, 95–98, 113 slavery, 14, 16, 88, 90, 183–196; abolition of, in Portugal, 277n129; prospect of an end to, in Brazil, 202. See also enslaved labor (African); enslaved persons (African); enslavement, African slave trade, 13, 24, 27, 63, 73, 113, 142, 161, 183–196, 202, 230n76, 239n11, 275n109, 276n120, 280n31 Sloane, Hans, 259n96 Smallwood, Stephanie, 107 smelting houses, royal, 63–65, 67, 81, 252n122 smuggling, 65–66, 76, 98. See also gold; tax evasion Soares, João Alváres, 50 Soares, Manuel de Azevedo, 236n131 social disorder, in mining region, 91–105, 163–164 social mobility, 162–163 social order, 14–17, 91, 160; of enslavement, 97–102; and excessive consumption, 125–138; and production of wealth, 105–121; regulation of, 185–196 sociopolitical order, proposed, for Portugal and colonies, 152–153 Soll, Jacob, 20 Sousa, Alexandre Gomes de, 114 Sousa, António Caetano de, 34–35, 123 Sousa, Francisco de, 32 Sousa, Manuel Caetano de, 219n63 Sousa, Manuel de, 31 Sousa, Tomé de, 4, 43–44 South America, Dutch penetration of, 27–28 Souza, Laura de Mello e, 15, 19, 126
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Souza, Priscila de Lima, 193–194 sovereignty, Portuguese, 26, 31, 51–59, 152; historiography of, 31–39 Spain/Spanish, 29, 151, 172, 185, 203. See also War of Spanish Succession “spirit of conquest,” 9 sterilization, voluntary, 172 Stukeley, William, 259n96 subterranean resources, as royal right, 59. See also fifth, the sugar cultivation, 27, 54, 92, 183, 202–203. See also agrarianism; agricultural economy sumptuary laws, 23, 123–138, 140–145, 254n16, 254n20; Pragmática (1749), 124, 133–138, 140–144 superintendent of the mines, post of, 60 surplus population, 160, 167 Swingen, Abigail, 150 Tambaú, 190 Tapuias, 160, 173, 176–177. See also Native peoples Tarouca, Count of, 29–30 Taubaté, 2 taxation, 11, 57–58, 74–75, 89–121; Gusmão’s new system, 68–76. See also capitação tax collection, 76–77. See also capitação tax evasion, 63, 72, 90, 105, 109–110, 114, 116. See also gold tax reform, 68–76, 78. See also Gusmão, Alexandre de Teles, Tomás da Silva, 87 textile manufacturing, prohibited in Brazil (1785), 155 Thomas, apostle and saint, 42–43 tithes (dízimos reais), 59, 75 town councils, 14, 50, 57–58, 62, 67, 86, 105, 126, 212n44, 216n34,
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236n134, 238n144, 245n64; archives of, 217n44; and capitação, 74–75, 113–114, 233n97; eligibility for, 102, 104, 191–192; in Portugal, 236n134; and representation, 81–82; and smelting-house plan, 65; visitation to new governor, 80. See also names of towns traders, itinerant (comissários volantes), 146 trading companies, 146, 184, 265n151, 280n16, 280n30 tradition, invention of, 80 transatlantic voyage, rules of conduct for, 168 transimperial debates, 197–205 transportation infrastructure, in Minas, 65, 67 Trás-as-Montes, Portugal, 168 treasury boards, in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, 146 tribute, 57, 75, 79, 81, 85–86, 228n53, 229n68 Trocano, 177 ultramarine conquests. See conquest/ conquests ungovernability, American, 89–91 universal history, and Portuguese America, 41–45 university, Bahians’ request for, 222n118 University of Coimbra, Portugal, 40, 126, 149, 200, 219n67, 254n20 uti possidetis doctrine, 121 Utrecht, Treaty of, 29–31, 37 vagrants/vagrancy, 162, 170 Valença, Marquis of, 34 Valle, Antonio da Costa, 216n33 Vandelli, Domenico, 198, 200–202; “Portugal and Its Colonies,” 199
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Vasconcelos, Simão de, 42, 221n103 vassals and vassalage, 3–11, 57, 61, 79, 163, 191–193, 198; Mendonça on, 79–80; Natives and, 178–179 Viana, Manuel Nunes de, 60–61, 98, 225n20 viceroy, office of, 6–7, 137–138 Vieira, António, 125, 184, 221n90, 221n93 Vila do Carmo, 78, 114 Vila do Cayté, 81 Vila do Principe, 161, 233n97; town council, 132 Vila do Ribeirão do Carmo (Mariana), 63–64; town council, 122, 131, 133 Vila Nova da Rainha, 81, 233n97; town council, 116 Vila Nova de Abrantes, 271n60 Vila Rica, 64, 71, 75–76, 95, 98, 137, 230n83, 251n109; Church of Our Lady of the Pillar, 122; smelting house, 65; town council, 120, 122, 250n102 villages, Native, building/rebuilding of, 178–179 violence, unofficial, in slavery system, 97–102
War of the Barbarians (1651–1704), 46, 172 Wars of Restoration, 69 wealth, display of, 125–138. See also consumption; dress; luxury wealth, production and circulation of, 51–53, 89–90, 105–123, 147, 153, 155–156, 160, 183, 195, 197–205 weapons, possession of, 98, 137–138, 242n40 Westphalia, Peace of, 37 widows, 169 Wolff, Christian, 263n121 women: African, 89, 103, 194–195; “castle women,” 194–195; enslaved, 89, 103, 110, 129, 162, 187, 259n94; European, in Brazil, 102–103, 164; and excessive consumption, 128–138, 135, 142; and migration, 162–163; Native, 163–164, 167, 172; prohibited from traveling from Portuguese America to kingdom without license, 166; and pursuit of religious life, 165–166; trafficking of, to settlements, 162. See also dowries
Walker, Tamara, 135–136 War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), 7, 29–31, 84, 144
Županov, Ines G. V., 26 Zurara, Gomes Eanes de, 33
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Xavier, Ângela, 15, 17, 26
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