Empire in the backlands : mobility and the interiorization of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines the process of interiorization of the Portuguese colonization in Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Portuguese empire-building in the early modern era was a quintessentially maritime enterprise based on settlements established along the coast of Africa, Asia, and South America. In parallel with seaborne expansionism, the Portuguese adopted the vague spatial concept of the backlands—sertão—to refer to regions in the interior that were beyond imperial control. However, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the discovery of gold deposits in central Brazil prompted a massive spatial transformation, leading to the formation of permanent pockets of settlement in the interior. This dissertation asks how the Portuguese came to integrate vast portions of the backlands into the empire. Specifically, it examines the mechanisms that enabled movement and exchanges over long distances in this fragmented geographic setting. I argue that the mobility of imperial subjects at the margin of the empire enabled the formation of Luso-Brazilian settlements away from the coast as well as formed and maintained inter-regional linkages that made them part of the empire. These spatial practices were not extraordinary acts of pioneering nor centrally directed by the crown, but part of routinized acts carried out by colonists and often rooted in family ties to incorporate resources from the backlands, exploit indigenous labor, and unlock new economic opportunities created by the settlement of the interior. While historians tend to emphasize the transplantation of institutions and the formation of territorial jurisdictions as the primary mode of the imperial territorial extension, this dissertation reveals the practices of mobility that enabled and sustained this process of occupation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Brandão Barleta, Leonardo |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Frank, Zephyr L, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Frank, Zephyr L, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Thesis advisor | Wolfe, Mikael |
| Degree committee member | Findlen, Paula |
| Degree committee member | Wolfe, Mikael |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Leonardo Brandão Barleta. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/jr734rv5142 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Leonardo Brandao Barleta
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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