Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3484450

1527-1900

Christoph Rosenmüller,

History of Colonial Brazil

In March 2015, almost a million demonstrators protested in various Brazilian cities against corruption, while across Latin America scandals over the abuse of power make the headlines every day. Erik Lars Myrup explores these two themes, power and corruption, at an auspicious time when interest among global historians in these topics is on the rise again. Myrup starts his story roughly with the Portuguese restoration and the end of Spanish Hapsburg rule, when noblemen stormed the royal palace in Lisbon on December 1, 1640. They deposed the Spanish vicereine and killed the secretary of state. Officials suspected of sympathizing with Spain fell from office. The trajectory of the Brazilian viceroy, Dom Jorge de Mascarenhas, reflected this rapidly turning wheel of fortune. His wife and children fled to Madrid, exhorting Mascarenhas to do the same, and he returned from Bahia to Lisbon as a prisoner. Mascarenhas professed loyalty to King João IV and soon after presided over the newly created Overseas Council. Myrup argues that the establishment of this council, modeled on the Spanish Council of the Indies, was part of a longer process of bureaucratic centralization, supported and sometimes thwarted by the myriad personal ties of clientage crisscrossing the empire. These social networks intertwined the various councils, captaincies, and corporations, a social and political landscape that Mascarenhas navigated until his own connections to Madrid caused fortune to abandon him again. Cast into prison in the old Saint George castle overlooking Lisbon, he died in 1652.Another fascinating episode illustrates the transimperial negotiations over justice and power. The subprefect of Qianshan (China) wielded jurisdiction over Portuguese Macau. The Chinese magistrate eyed the natives there who converted to Catholicism as a threat to the Middle Kingdom, and he tore down the Jinjiaosi temple (known to the Jesuits there as the Church of Nossa Senhora do Amparo), from where the converts proselytized their compatriots. In 1748, Subprefect Zhang Rulin was back knocking at the gates of Macau to investigate the fate of two Chinese men who had vanished after a night on the town. The subprefect issued a chapa ordering the Macau city council to state its knowledge about the case. While the council claimed that it had no notice of the case, as it could not track all Chinese residents, the subprefect's informants alleged that a Portuguese lieutenant and a soldier had apprehended and interrogated the two men. As the subprefect had previously executed a Portuguese sailor for slaying a Chinese man in a drunken stupor, the local governor ushered the two military men off to Portuguese Timor. The scandal evolved into a transimperial embarrassment. The Chinese viceroy in Canton deplored that the governor had tried the emperor's patience, and the Portuguese viceroy in Goa (India) arrested the governor to placate the Chinese. The viceroy found the Chinese demands very reasonable and insisted that he could not defend the city if it came to blows. All parties then agreed on the version of the story in which the Portuguese soldiers had surprised two burglars. One of the offenders died when resisting arrest, and the other perished when refusing to eat. Ultimately, Lisbon sent an emissary to Beijing to settle the case.Myrup has a talent for retelling the case of the missing men as a complex cross-cultural encounter. Myrup breathes new life into the genre of imperial politics by tracing the lives and intricate interactions of politicians and bureaucrats who zigzagged across four continents. Specialists will find this global approach appealing, and undergraduates will appreciate the accessible introduction to the Portuguese empire. Historians of the Iberian empires, such as Juan Luis Castellanos, Jean-Pierre Dedieu, and Bernd Hausberger, have since the 1990s analyzed the role of social networks in politics and trade, and the literature is now vast. At the same time, scholars such as J. B. Owens, for example, have resuscitated the institutional history of the great councils. Myrup contributes with his analysis of historical actors to these innovative currents by drawing on archival material from Brazil, Portugal, and Macau. He uses the framework that Sharon Kettering devised in the 1980s. According to her, whether early modern corruption was seen as an offense depended largely on circumstances. Latin American historians generally accept this view, and perhaps Myrup could have summed up just a little more how the particularities and development of corruption and power in the Portuguese world differed from other empires. Beyond these quibbles, this splendid book entertains, enlightens, and educates, and students and scholars will find it tantalizingly insightful.