Produção Nacional
Revisado por pares
Imaginary wars in the wilds of Portuguese America
2010; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1645-6432
AutoresDenise Aparecida Soares de Moura,
Tópico(s)Brazilian History and Foreign Policy
ResumoThe southeastern, central and southern areas of Brazil have shared a common regional history ever since the period when they formed part of the Portuguese Empire. From the end of the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, it is possible to identify many contexts and situations of tension, conflict, negotiation and agreement between the various parts of this territory, such as the movement of independence, in 1822, the installation of a republican governor in 1889 or the various crises of the first republic, in 1910, 1922 or 1930, as well as at other crucial times in Brazilian history (see the best two syntheses and overviews of the period of the republic: Penna, 1999; Ferreira & Delgado, 2003) Over the last decade or so, there have been great theoretical and methodological advances made in the historical research being conducted into modern oceanic empires (see Boxer, 1965 and 2002; Furtado, 2001; Monteiro, 2005; Elliot, J. H., 2006), or into more contemporary periods (see Hobsbawn, 1992, 1999, 1977, 1995), so that is no longer possible to make locally based reflections about the subject or to undertake monographic research of a purely local character. One way of coping with the difficulties involved in research with such a broad territorial scope is to decrease the time span of the research, and with this strategy we can create favorable conditions for the empirical investigation of documents and literature from different regions. Research carried out into a region such as the southeast-center-south region of Brazil during certain periods of the Portuguese Empire cannot be broken down into separate fractions. For instance, it is not possible to interpret the society of Rio de Janeiro or that of southern Brazil without also including that of Sao Paulo, at least when the research relates to the late seventeenth or eighteenth century. Classical synthesis and current historiography have also followed this form of interpretation (Prado Jr; 1942; Gouvea, 2001; Fragoso, 1998), in the case of research conducted into both political and economic history. From the moment when mining areas were effectively established within the territory of Brazil, or from the moment when the Portuguese Crown became aware that the innermost reaches of this territory should be protected against Spanish invasion, this part of the country clearly began to think together as a whole under a form of realpolitik. Furthermore, one of the greatest challenges faced by historiography in recent years is to understand how modern empires tended to spread into the interior of the continents that they occupied or where they simply had business interests. The extensive hinterland of American territory was late in its colonization. Many human and physical barriers impeded access to its remotest regions, such as the Allegheny Mountains in the (then still British) colony of North America. Only in 1747 was the region beyond those mountains settled with the support of the Ohio Company of Virginia. In order to secure its control of this region of North America, the British Empire had to establish alliances and different schemes for cooperation with the local rivals of the groups of Indians. The price paid for this initiative was a longstanding dispute for control over the fur trade
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