From Conquest to Colony: Empire, Wealth, and Difference in Eighteenth-Century Brazil

A new history of Brazil's eighteenth century highlights debates about wealth, difference, and governance. Kirsten Schultz argues that the Portuguese crown defined and defended Brazil as a "colony" to reinvigorate Portuguese power, reckoning with dynamic societies and regulating social relations to ensure it complemented and supported metropolitan ways of producing and consuming wealth.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 26 September 2023
Publisher: Yale University Press

The discovery of gold in Brazil's hinterland and the subsequent settlement of its hinterlands led to significant transformations in both Portugal and Brazil. While earlier conquests and evangelizations had incorporated new lands and peoples into the monarchy, royal officials now argued that the extraction of gold and the imperatives of rivalry and commerce demanded new approaches to governance to ensure that Brazil's wealth flowed to Portugal and into imperial networks of exchange.

To understand how the eighteenth-century Portuguese crown came to define and defend Brazil as a "colony," Kirsten Schultz examines archival records of royal and local administrations, as well as contemporary print culture. Making Brazil a colony entailed reckoning with dynamic societies that encompassed Indigenous peoples, Africans, and Europeans; the free and the enslaved; the wealthy and the poor. It also involved regulating social relations defined by legal status, ancestry, labor, and wealth to ensure that Portuguese America complemented and supported, rather than reproduced, metropolitan ways of producing and consuming wealth.

Schultz's work sheds light on the complex and multifaceted processes that shaped the eighteenth-century colonial world, and provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of Brazil as a colonial entity.

Weight: 638g
Dimension: 163 x 243 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300251401