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This original and challenging book seeks to reexamine Brazil's colonial status in the eighteenth century by studying the changing governmental policies and the intellectual analyses and project proposals that accompanied or promoted those changes. This is a theme that since the 1960s has generated a rich historiography, but Kirsten Schultz, having kept abreast of the more recent debates about the nature of “negotiated empires” of local interests and powers versus the idea of centrally directed imperial authority, provides a new reading and interpretation. Her study is based principally on the developing statecraft and mercantilism that emerged during Brazil's age of gold and continued to flourish thereafter. It is an analysis not of the economy per se but of thought about it. The result is a cogent study of eighteenth-century political writing in defense of colonialism and mercantilism, but done with a sensitive attention to social and cultural effects and responses to such policies in the slave-based colony that was Brazil.The book is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. After first using the introduction and parts of the first chapter to set the stage of Brazil as a secondary Portuguese “conquest,” far less important than Portugal's Asian outposts, Schultz views the emergence in the 1720s of academies in Lisbon and Bahia concerned with the history and status of overseas possessions as evidence of Brazil's growing significance, principally because of the discovery of gold. She then examines in detail in the next two chapters royal taxing policies in gold-producing Minas Gerais, especially the capitação, or head tax on slaves. The enforcement of these taxes provoked evasion, contraband, and a persistent local resistance by the slave-owning miners, who saw their imposition by a succession of royal governors as a violation of the customary contract between sovereign and subjects and as an abuse of royal authority that even threatened the stability of slavery itself by punishing tax evaders with the liberation of their slaves. The final two chapters discuss the period after 1750 as the concept and theory of colonial dependency matured in Portugal, as it did elsewhere in Europe. This is a history that other authors have already traced, but Schultz's integration of matters such as sumptuary legislation, limitations and discrimination based on race, and the manner in which various social categories responded to their situation or were affected by the enforcement of metropolitan policies is a novel and valuable contribution to the existing literature. The rich endnotes to her analysis are extensive and reflect a broad knowledge about the currents of recent research on Brazil as well as those on contemporaneous Spanish America. In addition, some of her best writing centers on a close reading of the reports of royal administrators and the texts of late eighteenth-century metropolitan and Brazilian officials and theorists of colonialism.This reader felt a certain chronological dissonance in the author's emphasis on the discovery and administration of gold in Minas Gerais as the key element in the recognition of Brazil's importance as a colony, and in the later development of a pro-colonial discourse. Privileges such as Brazilian representation in the Cortes of Portugal and the title “Prince of Brazil” for the royal heir apparent had already been created in the 1640s in recognition of Brazil and its sugar's importance to the empire. After the 1760s, when the colonial theorists began to flourish, gold production was already in decline, and even at its summit in the preceding decade, it had never exceeded the value of Brazil's agricultural exports. Although various mercantilist measures introduced by the Marquess of Pombal had not resolved Portugal's negative balance of trade during his time in office (1750–77), he had recognized that agriculture, not mining, was the key value of the colony. Eventually, Brazilian products, especially cotton reexported from Portugal to Great Britain, reversed the trade balance so that from 1785 to 1795 gold was flowing not from but to Lisbon. Schultz's study does not take up that period. It ends not with a conclusion but with an epilogue that discusses commentators like the Italian academic Domenico Vandelli and the so-called enlightened Brazilian-born bishop José Joaquim da Cunha de Azeredo Coutinho, who wished to intensify Brazil's role as a slave-importing producer of agricultural goods, which he thought would enable Portugal's empire to thrive.Finally, while the author attempts to find an interpretive middle ground between the historians who emphasize local exercise of power and the importance of the internal economy of this ancien régime in the tropics and those who underline instead the coloniality of Brazil's relations to Lisbon, much of the evidence that this book presents, perhaps unintentionally, underlines the ability of the crown to enforce its will and, by the 1780s, a growing elite conviction that Brazil's society and economy were different than Portugal's and that, as a colony, such difference was appropriate and beneficial to the empire as a whole.
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