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

Kirsten Schultz

nov. 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Lu par Alex Picard

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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.

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Kirsten Schultz teaches Latin American history at Seton Hall University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, and others. She lives in New Jersey.

Alex Picard brings a lifetime of work in the theater as an actor and director to her work in front of the mic. With a background in Shakespeare, she excels at connecting listeners to the author's world. A Boston native, she records from her home studio, is an accidental gardener, and once ran a marathon on purpose.