Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Donatary Captaincy in Perspective: Portuguese Backgrounds to the Settlement of Brazil

1972; Duke University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-52.2.203

1527-1900

H. B. Johnson,

History of Colonial Brazil

LTUSo-BRAZILIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY has never managed to achieve a very satisfactory understanding of the donatary captaincy, the institution above all others that provided the framework for the initial settlement of Brazil. Certainly Carlos Malheiro Dias contributed little, back in 1924, by expounding at some length on the feudal nature of the grants made to the donataries.1 That nothing in his description remotely conformed to any viable definition of feudalism, or that medieval Portugal never experienced an identifiable feudal tradition, seems not to have perturbed him at all.2 Roberto Simonsen further built on Dias' misinterpretation when he cast the question in terms of capitalism vs. feudalism.3 This pervasive interpretative dichotomy, from which few subsequent commentators have been able to escape, makes little sense except in a Marxist framework. Only for historians of the latter persuasion do feudalism and capitalism describe the same order of things-social systems based upon a certain type of economic exploitation. But Simonsen, whose inspiration seems to have derived from Gustav Schmoeller, not Marx, failed to give feudalism an economic definition; and when Alexander Mar-