Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World
Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World

Author: Erik Lars Myrup

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0807159824

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Encompassing numerous territories across four different continents, Portugal's early modern empire depended upon a vast and complex bureaucracy, yet colonial power did not reside solely in the centralized state. In a masterful reconceptualization of the functioning of empire, Erik Lars Myrup's Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World argues that beneath the surface of formal government, an intricate web of interpersonal relationships played a key role in binding together the Portuguese empire. Myrup draws on archival research in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, and China to demonstrate how informal networks of power and patronage offered a crucial means of navigating-or circumventing-the serpentine paths of the governmental hierarchy. The decisions of the Overseas Council, which governed Portugal's imperial holdings, reflected not only the merits of the petitions that came before it, but also the personal and institutional affiliations of the petitioner. In far-flung areas such as São Paulo and Macau, where the formal bureaucracy was weak, local cultural and economic factors held as much sway over the agents of the colonial state as did the dictates of the imperial court at Lisbon. Populated by a host of colorful characters, from backland explorers to colonial magistrates, Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World demonstrates how informal social connections both magnified and diminished the power of the colonial state. If such systems contributed to corruption and fraud, they also facilitated effective cross-cultural exchange and ensured the survival of empire in times of crisis and decline. Myrup has produced a truly global study that sheds new light on the influence of interpersonal networks on the administration of a vast overseas empire.

The Iberian World
The Iberian World

Author: Fernando Bouza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-09

Total Pages: 1314

ISBN-13: 1000537056

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The Iberian World: 1450–1820 brings together, for the first time in English, the latest research in Iberian studies, providing in-depth analysis of fifteenth- to early nineteenth-century Portugal and Spain, their European possessions, and the African, Asian, and American peoples that were under their rule. Featuring innovative work from leading historians of the Iberian world, the book adopts a strong transnational and comparative approach, and offers the reader an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the interactions, entanglements, and conflicts between the many peoples that were part of it. The volume also analyses the relationships and mutual influences between the wide range of actors, polities, and centres of power within the Iberian monarchies, and draws on recent advances in the field to examine key aspects such as Iberian expansion, imperial ideologies, and the constitution of colonial societies. Divided into four parts and combining a chronological approach with a set of in-depth thematic studies, The Iberian World brings together previously disparate scholarly traditions surrounding the history of European empires and raises awareness of the global dimensions of Iberian history. It is essential reading for students and academics of early modern Spain and Portugal.

The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire
The Routledge Handbook of Science and Empire

Author: Andrew Goss

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-05

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1000404854

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The focus of this volume is the history of imperial science between 1600 and 1960, although some essays reach back prior to 1600 and the section about decolonization includes post-1960 material. Each contributed chapter, written by an expert in the field, provides an analytical review essay of the field, while also providing an overview of the topic. There is now a rich literature developed by historians of science as well as scholars of empire demonstrating the numerous ways science and empire grew together, especially between 1600 and 1960.

Creolised Science
Creolised Science

Author: Dorit Brixius

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1009200453

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This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.

Latin America in Colonial Times
Latin America in Colonial Times

Author: Matthew Restall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-06-14

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1108265537

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Few milestones in human history are as momentous as the meeting of three great civilizations on American soil in the sixteenth century. The fully revised textbook Latin America in Colonial Times presents that story in an engaging but informative new package, revealing how a new civilization and region - Latin America - emerged from that encounter. The authors give equal attention to the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors and settlers, to the African slaves they brought across the Atlantic, and to the indigenous peoples whose lands were invaded. From the dawn of empires in the fifteenth century, through the conquest age of the sixteenth and to the end of empire in the nineteenth, the book combines broad brushstrokes with anecdotal details that bring the era to life. This new edition incorporates the newest scholarship on Spain, Portugal, and Atlantic Africa, in addition to Latin America itself, with indigenous and African views and women's experiences and contributions to colonial society highlighted throughout.

The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: Volume 1, The Enlightenment and the British Colonies
The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: Volume 1, The Enlightenment and the British Colonies

Author: Wim Klooster

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-09

Total Pages: 639

ISBN-13: 1108691625

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Volume I problematizes the concepts of Enlightenment and revolution, revealing how the former did not wholly cause the latter. The volume also provides a comprehensive analysis of the American Revolution, making it essential to American historians and scholars of the Atlantic World.

They Called It Peace
They Called It Peace

Author: Lauren Benton

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-02-13

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0691248478

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A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order.

From Conquest to Colony
From Conquest to Colony

Author: Kirsten Schultz

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0300274785

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A new history of Brazil’s eighteenth century that foregrounds debates about wealth, difference, and governance Transformations in Portugal and Brazil followed the discovery of gold in Brazil’s hinterland and the hinterland’s subsequent settlement. Although 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. Using archival records of royal and local administrations, as well as contemporary print culture, Kirsten Schultz shows how the eighteenth-century Portuguese crown came to define and defend Brazil as a “colony” that would reinvigorate Portuguese power. 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.

Adrift on an Inland Sea
Adrift on an Inland Sea

Author: Hal Langfur

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2023-01-03

Total Pages: 531

ISBN-13: 1503633977

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From 1750 until Brazil won its independence in 1822, the Portuguese crown sought to extend imperial control over the colony's immense, sea-like interior and exploit its gold and diamond deposits using enslaved labor. Carrying orders from Lisbon into the Brazilian backlands, elite vassals, soldiers, and scientific experts charged with exploring multiple frontier zones and establishing royal authority conducted themselves in ways that proved difficult for the crown to regulate. The overland expeditions they mounted in turn encountered actors operating beyond the state's purview: seminomadic Native peoples, runaway slaves, itinerant poor, and those deemed criminals, who eluded, defied, and reshaped imperial ambitions. This book measures Portugal's transatlantic projection of power against a particular obstacle: imperial information-gathering, which produced a confusion of rumors, distortions, claims, conflicting reports, and disputed facts. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of ethnohistory, slavery and diaspora studies, and legal and literary history, Hal Langfur considers how misinformation destabilized European sovereignty in the Americas, making a major contribution to histories of empire, frontiers and borderlands, knowledge production, and scientific exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.