Vol.  · n.º · June   e-journal ofP  H  Table of Contents Volume 16, number 1, Summer 2018

[ARTICLES]

A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood: ...... 1 The Brazilwood Trade from the Mid-Sixteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Century Cameron J. G. Dodge

Censoring Translations in 18th-Century : ...... 28 Censorship Practices Regarding the Portuguese Vernacular, 1770-1790 Cláudio DeNipoti

Portuguese Emigrant Transport to : ...... 42 Conditions and Factors of Vulnerability in Portugal’s Operation of this Business During the Military Yvette Santos

[INSTITUTIONS & RESEARCH]

Introduction ...... 58 Filipa Lowndes Vicente

The Exiled Insider: ...... 62 The Ambivalent Reception of Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824) Nicolás Barbosa López

The Past Is a Foreign Photo: ...... 75 Image and Travel Writing in the Benguela Railway. Angola, 1920-1930 Pedro Lopes de Almeida

Whose Colonial Project? Angolan Elites and the Colonial Exhibitions of the 1930s: ...... 96 Notes on the Special Magazine Edition of A província de Angola, August 15, 1934 Torin Spangler

[BOOK REVIEWS]

Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilizing Mission' of Portuguese Colonialism, ...... 117 1870-1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-137-35590-4 Fernando Tavares Pimenta

Xavier, Ângela Barreto and Cristina Nogueira da Silva. O Governo dos Outros: ...... 124 Poder e diferença no Império Português. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2016. ISBN: 978-972-671-372-2 Pedro Puntoni

História da Diocese de Viseu, 3 volumes. José Pedro Paiva (coord.)...... 131 Viseu: Diocese de Viseu and Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2016. ISBN: 978-989-98269-1-5 Maria Amélia Álvaro de Campos

Cardim, Pedro. Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica (ca. 1550-ca. 1715)...... 137 Madrid: Marcial Pons, Ediciones de Historia, 2017. ISBN: 978-84-15963-98-1 Irene María Vicente Martín

A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood: The Brazilwood Trade from the Mid-Sixteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Century

Cameron J. G. Dodge1

Abstract

The brazilwood trade was the first major economic activity of , but little research has examined the trade after the middle of the sixteenth century. This study describes the emergence of the trade and the subsequent changes that allowed it to overcome the commonly-cited reasons for its presumed decline within a century of its beginnings, namely coastal deforestation and a shrinking supply of indigenous labor. Examining the brazilwood trade on its own apart from comparisons with sugar reveals an Atlantic commercial activity that thrived into the middle of the seventeenth century.

Keywords

Brazilwood, economic , colonial Brazil, royal monopoly, Atlantic history

Resumo

O comércio do pau-brasil foi a primeira atividade econômica do Brasil colonial mas pouca pesquisa tinha examinado o comércio depois o meio do século XVI. Este estudo descreve o surgimento do comércio e as mudanças subsequentes que o permitiu superar as razões citadas para seu presumido declínio em menos de um século do seu início, a saber desmatamento litoral e diminuição da oferta de mão- de-obra indígena. Examinar o comércio do pau-brasil sozinho sem comparações a açúcar revela um comércio atlântico que prosperou até o meio do século XVII.

Palavras-chave

Pau-brasil, história econômica do brasil, Brasil colonial, monopólio real, História Atlântica

1University of Virginia, USA. E-Mail: [email protected]

Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood

In mid-July 1662, two Dutch ships arrived near the now-forgotten harbor of João Lostão in on the northern coast of Brazil. The men from the first ship disembarked and began loading the crimson logs of a tree called brazilwood onto their vessel. Meanwhile, the second ship sailed further up the coast and dispatched a separate contingent into the forest to hunt for more of the and bring it to the shore. The Dutchmen of the first ship had already loaded a substantial cargo of brazilwood onto their vessel when a large Portuguese caravel approached them. The Portuguese captain, Francisco de Morais, hailed the Dutch crew and asked what their business was in this part of Brazil. They responded that they had just finished loading a cargo of brazilwood and were waiting for more to come from their countrymen trekking in the interior. Hearing this information, Morais continued up the coast and, finding the second ship, anchored his own caravel, gathered his men, and headed into Brazil's . The Portuguese unit ventured a short ways inland and encountered the Dutchmen chopping down stands of brazilwood and gathering the logs for transport back to the coast. Morais and his men fell upon the Dutch, killing three and scattering the rest. With the opposing crew dispersed, the Portuguese burned all the brazilwood they found there to prevent the foreigners from coming back and harvesting any more (AHU CU 018, cx. 1, . 6). Brazilwood (Portuguese pau-brasil), the commodity the Dutch sailors were attempting to trade, is the common name given to the species echinata and is native only to Brazil.2 Unlike many other exotic hardwoods, brazilwood's value lay not in its uses as a variety of timber but as a source of . When soaked in water, the flesh of the brazilwood tree creates a crimson dye useful in coloring textiles. Its colorfastness surprised sixteenth-century French traveler Jean de Léry when he visited Brazil:

One day one of our company decided to bleach our shirts, and, without suspecting anything, put brazilwood ash in with the lye; instead of whitening them, he made them so red that although they were washed and soaped afterward, there was no means of getting rid of that tincture, so that we had to wear them that way (Léry, 1992: 101).

Textile producers in the industry's centers of Europe—specifically England, Italy, northern , and the Low Countries—came to value brazilwood dye for the strength

2Formerly classified as echinata, recent work on Brazilwood's taxonomic classification (Gagnon, et al. [2016]) has shown that it belongs within its own in the legume family. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 2 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood and distinctive hue noted by Léry. At the time of Pedro Cabral's landing in 1500 on the shores of what Europeans would come to know as Brazil, brazilwood grew relatively abundantly in stands up and down the Atlantic coast from Cabo de São Roque in the north through to Guanabara Bay in the south. That said, three main regions had the densest stands of P. echinata and became the foci of the brazilwood trade through the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century: the area around Cabo Frio, southern close to Porto Seguro, and . The last of these became particularly renowned for the abundance and quality of its wood (Sousa, 1978: 45-49, 53-55; Dean, 1995: 45). The trade in brazilwood was the first major economic activity of colonial Brazil. Historians of Brazil usually date the trade as lasting from Cabral's landing in Brazil in 1500 to around 1550. According to this traditional narrative,3 a number of factors contributed to the decline of the trade by the middle of the sixteenth century. Deforestation from the early decades of brazilwood harvesting and land clearance for sugar planting led to a decline in the supply of the dyewood. Furthermore, hostilities between Portuguese settlers and indigenous resulted in a decreasingly reliable labor source (Disney, 2009: 216-218, 233-236). There is also a sense that, with the rapid growth in highly-profitable sugar cultivation in the middle of the century, there was something akin to a crowding out of further investment in brazilwood commerce. The brazilwood trade was thus a primitive, extractive commercial activity that petered out after half a century (Buescu & Tapajós, 1967: 24, 32; Buescu, 44). If brazilwood really had ceased to be an important commodity by the middle of the sixteenth century, however, why did our Portuguese and Dutchmen at João Lostão come to blows over a load of this dyewood in 1662, more than a century after the trade had allegedly tailed off? Why were the Dutch willing to come on a clandestine mission from their own country on the North Sea to harvest the wood? Why was a Portuguese patrol plying the coast with the specific aim of disrupting interloping traders? And why were these Portuguese so bent on keeping control of this wood that they would burn what remained? The following pages trace the brazilwood trade in Brazil and the Atlantic through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emphasizing its continued strength through the middle of the latter when this imperial altercation took place. The trade emerged from the early voyages of Portuguese colonization and quickly became the colony's primary economic activity, attracting the attention of rival French merchants. The trade operated

3This narrative is best seen in Simonsen, 1937; Buescu and Tapajós, 1967; Boxer, 1969; and Schwartz, 1985. Buescu and Tapajoś mention the trade continued past 1550 but give no details of the trade after that date. Brief treatments of the brazilwood trade after 1550 can be found in Vianna (1972) and Sousa (1978). e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 3 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood first under a royal monopoly and then under a series of royal licenses. Brazilwood harvesting took place close to the coast with the help of indigenous labor. While the trends of deforestation and an increasing lack of willing indigenous labor are apparent starting in the middle of the sixteenth century, the brazilwood trade continued into the seventeenth century under a revived monopoly system. Portuguese colonists harvested brazilwood with the help of slaves by moving up Brazil's rivers and exploiting stands of wood further inland, thus overcoming the aforementioned trends that seemed to spell the trade's end. Far from being a primitive commercial activity, this new method of brazilwood harvesting necessitated capital investment and a high degree of coordination between the trade's various participants. Comparing this later period of the trade with the earlier, we see that, while the value of brazilwood exports did decline, they did so only after 1600, and even in the seventeenth century the trade was still a significant economic activity in the colonial Brazilian economy as evidenced by a number of measures. The brazilwood trade's longevity makes it part of narratives such as rivalries over Atlantic commerce, the trans- , and the shift in global commerce from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

The Brazilwood Trade in the Sixteenth Century

The brazilwood trade emerged from the first Portuguese voyages to Brazil in the opening years of the sixteenth century. Pedro Cabral's fleet, the argosy credited with the European discovery of Brazil, was the first to export brazilwood back to Portugal. The fleet landed near Porto Seguro in the future state of Bahia in April of 1500. After a week's stay, the bulk of the fleet continued around the Cape of Good Hope to India, the fleet's original destination, but Cabral sent captain Gaspar de Lemos and the fleet's supply ship back to Lisbon to convey reports of the newly-discovered territory to Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel. Lemos' ship bore a cargo of brazilwood, harvested by native Brazilians during the Europeans' brief stay (Guedes, 1975a: 165-172; Sousa, 1978: 56-57). With the news of Brazil's discovery and the arrival of the first shipment of brazilwood in Lisbon, D. Manuel quickly dispatched a follow-up expedition to further explore the new lands upon which Cabral had stumbled. This expedition reported “infinite quantities of brazilwood” in the territory and almost certainly brought another shipment of the dyewood back to Lisbon (Guedes, 1975b: 226-239; Vespucci, 2005: 282).

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These two early voyages revealed the quantity of brazilwood in Brazil and the colony's potential economic value to the Portuguese crown. After the return of the second voyage in 1502, the crown began to contract out the rights to control trade with the territory to private merchants who would finance brazilwood commerce in its early years. In the few decades of the trade, royal permission took the form of monopoly contracts awarded to an individual or consortium whereby that party was the only one allowed to import brazilwood from Brazil. The Portuguese crown had long doled out similar monopoly contracts for the rights to trade with territories in west Africa during the fifteenth century as Portuguese explorers gradually made their way further down Africa's Atlantic coast (Sousa, 1978: 58). The brazilwood contracts of the sixteenth century were simply an extension into the of time-honored Portuguese imperial commercial practices. D. Manuel awarded the first contract to a consortium of Lisbon merchants headed by Fernão de Loronha. For the first three years of the contract, the crown charged Loronha and his partners with a number of stipulations: sending six ships annually to Brazil to trade brazilwood, exploring 300 additional leagues of the land's coast during each expedition, and establishing and maintaining a fort. All this, including building the fort and maintaining its garrison, would be done at the merchants' own expense. In addition, the merchants owed the crown each year a portion of their gross profits: nothing the first year, one-sixth the second, and one quarter the third. As the duration of the contract progressed, the contract's aims became more strictly economic in nature and the extent of brazilwood commerce permitted more defined. Starting in 1505, the merchants were allowed to import 20,000 quintals of brazilwood annually, a privilege for which they paid 4,000 ducats a year. Crucially, the crown agreed to prohibit the importation of any competing red dyewood from Asia (Rondinelli, 2001: 270; Masser, 2001: 401).4 In essence, this stipulation meant that the brazilwood Loronha and his fellow merchants brought to Lisbon would be the only red dyewood available in Europe, except that which trickled in through the Levant. The Loronha consortium dispatched expeditions to Brazil in 1502 and 1503 that began to make good on the merchants' obligations to the king and profit from the group's monopoly rights. The first expedition charted a large swath of the coast of Brazil from

4Rondinelli's 1502 letter says the contract lasted three years while the report by Masser notes ten. Based on the three-year gap between the two sources and the vastly different contractual terms they report, the likelihood is that they refer to different contracts that were both signed by Fernão de Loronha and his partners: a three-year contract in 1502 and a seven-year contract extension in 1505. This resolution fits with our knowledge that by 1513 Jorge Lopes Bixorda had taken over the brazilwood monopoly. For a thorough discussion of the varying interpretations of the scarce source material on early brazilwood contracts, see Sousa, 1978: 60-64. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 5 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood

Cabo de São Roque in the northeast to Porto Seguro. On the way, it gathered a cargo of brazilwood and indigenous slaves for the return to Lisbon. A storm and subsequent shipwreck scattered the second expedition on the approach to the Brazilian mainland but a portion of the fleet regrouped at Cabo Frio. There, the remaining crews spent five months trading the native Brazilians for brazilwood and constructing a fort in fulfillment of the terms of Loronha's contract. The captains left two dozen men as a garrison along with a dozen cannons, weapons, and provisions for six months before returning to Lisbon in June of 1504 (Guedes, 1975b: 237-243; Serrão & Marques, 1992: 80-86; Vianna, 1972: 64-65; Vespucci, 2001: 346). These two voyages give an idea of the motivations behind the trade with Brazil in its first years. Exploration and discovery were entwined with commerce—the knowledge of new lands was as important as the goods those lands produced. Each expedition navigated large stretches of the Brazilian coast. The crews would have mapped the coast as they went and brought this valuable information with them back to Lisbon in addition to holds full of brazilwood. Moreover, these expeditions had the task of establishing commerce and a Portuguese presence in Brazil. Setting up trading factories was crucial not only to the development of trade with Brazil but also to the establishment of a de facto Portuguese claim to the territory (a de jure claim having already been established by the 1494 ). These early voyages thus served the national interests of the Portuguese crown as much as the commercial interests of the merchant monopolists. Two first-hand accounts of European travelers to Brazil help reconstruct how the brazilwood trade was conducted in the sixteenth century. Frenchman Jean de Léry and German Hans Staden both accompanied voyages to Brazil in the middle of the sixteenth century and wrote accounts that were published in Europe. Together, they paint a clear picture of the exchanges between the Europeans and the indigenous Brazilians. Brazilwood was extremely heavy and often grew some distance inland from the coast. The process of harvesting brazilwood trees was therefore quite labor intensive. The few Europeans that crewed the ships that sailed to Brazil could not harvest brazilwood in any considerable quantities and so had to rely on indigenous labor as Léry makes clear:

As for the manner of loading it on the ships, take note that both because of the hardness of this wood and the consequent difficulty of cutting it, and because, there being no horses, donkeys, or other beasts to carry, cart, or draw burdens in that country, it has to be men who do this work: if the

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foreigners who voyage over there were not helped by the savages, they could not load even a medium-sized ship in a year. … The savages not only cut, saw, split, quarter, and round off the brazilwood, with the hatchets, wedges, and other iron tools given to them by the French and by others from over here, but also carry it on their bare shoulders, often from a league or two away, over mountains and difficult places, clear down to the seashore by the vessels that lie at anchor, where the mariners receive it (Léry, 1992: 101).

In exchange for their labor, Portuguese and French merchants would trade the natives linen and wool garments, hats, knives, mirrors, combs, and scissors—essentially basic trade merchandise, tools, and trinkets (Léry, 1992: 101; Staden, 2008: 58). This type of exchange meant that the Europeans could acquire brazilwood—a valuable commodity in Europe— cheaply in the New World. For the Portuguese, these exchanges occurred at a feitoria, a fortified trade post, like the one established by the Loronha consortium's second expedition in 1503. Each feitoria had a resident factor, an agent who acted as a go-between for the ship captains who came to trade with the native Brazilians. The local tribes would bring brazilwood to the feitoria where the factor would barter for it with European goods. Only the factor was allowed to mediate the transactions between the Portuguese and the indigenous peoples (Metcalf, 2005: 60-62; Marchant, 1942: 40). The French, on the other hand, had no permanent settlements in Brazil. French merchants tried a number of times to establish trading posts on the Brazilian coast but these footholds were quickly destroyed by Portuguese patrols. The French instead established a more informal method of trading brazilwood. Certain Frenchmen, who came to be known as truchements (“interpreters”), went and lived among the indigenous groups. These Europeans fully integrated themselves into native Brazilian society: they not only learned the indigenous language, but also accumulated social status by taking indigenous wives and even participating in cannibalistic rituals. French ship captains who arrived in Brazil would seek out these men who would act as the go-between and arrange the commercial exchanges between the native Brazilians and the Frenchmen (Metcalf, 2005: 64-74). While seemingly less efficient than the more centralized Portuguese system, the French managed to cultivate strong relationships with local groups under this system.

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Two voyages in these early years demonstrate the two systems of trading brazilwood. The first is the voyage of the Portuguese ship Bretoa. In 1511, Fernão de Loronha and three of his partners outfitted the Bretoa for a yearly trade mission. In Brazil, the ship stopped first at Bahia de Todos os Santos before continuing down to Cabo Frio and landing at the feitoria established there in 1503. The Bretoa surrendered all her trade goods to the factor in Cabo Frio and he organized the trade with the natives: in the ship's ledger, the captain is quick to note that not one member of the thirty-man crew made any damaging action against the natives nor traded them any goods or weapons. The natives harvested the brazilwood from the surrounding forest and brought it to the feitoria; the crew itself, however, loaded the logs onto the ship. In addition to some native Brazilian slaves and exotic birds, the Bretoa carried back to Lisbon about 2,082 quintals of brazilwood taken from around 300 brazilwood trees (Marchant, 2005: 34-40; Dean, 1995: 372 n. 8; Baião, 1921: 343-347). The second voyage is that of the French ship Pèlerine. Bertrand d'Ornesan, Baron of Saint-Blancard, funded the expedition to trade with the natives and establish a fort in Brazil to allow further commerce. The ship sailed from Normandy in 1531 with 120 men, goods to trade, and all the necessary materials to construct the fort. When the Pèlerine landed in Pernambuco, six Portuguese and a large number of natives attacked the French crew. These Portuguese troops were likely from the garrison of the Portuguese feitoria in Pernambuco, which heard of the French landing and sent out a patrol to attack the interlopers together with their indigenous allies. The French overpowered the coalition, however, and impressed them into helping construct a fort of their own. The French then traded extensively with the indigenous Brazilians, loading a final cargo for the Pèlerine of some 5,000 quintals of brazilwood as well as smaller quantities of cotton, exotic birds, skins, hides, and gold. Despite this impressive haul, the voyage of the Pèlerine was a failure on both its intended fronts. The ship itself was taken by a Portuguese squadron in the Mediterranean on its way back to Marseilles and the fort the French crew built lasted only a few months, destroyed by Portuguese captain Pero Lopes de Sousa later that year. In the end, the goods the expedition had acquired in Brazil never made it back to France and the foothold Bertrand d'Ornesan had hoped to establish in the territory never materialized (Guenin,́ 1901: 43-47). These two voyages, that of the Bretoa and that of the Pèlerine, highlight some key aspects of the brazilwood trade in its early years. As the record of the Bretoa indicates, maintaining the integrity of the feitoria and its resident factor was crucial for the Portuguese.

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The crew of the ship was under strict orders not to leave the confines of the feitoria or do any side-trading with the local natives. All interactions between the Portuguese and the indigenous Brazilians went through the designated factor, ensuring direct, uniform relations between the two groups, and the natives' continued willingness to trade Portuguese goods for their labor and wood. The voyage of the Bretoa also demonstrates the slight shift in priorities since the earliest trade missions to Brazil. Once the first few expeditions had established the trade and charted the coast of the territory, the emphasis shifted to generating a regular profit from Brazil. Unlike the Loronha consortium's previous voyages which had explored and constructed a fort, the Bretoa visited a fully operational feitoria and the crew loaded as much cargo as the ship could hold. The voyage was fully committed to extracting profit from Brazil. The failure of the Pèlerine is indicative of the trend of repeated, ill-fated French attempts to establish bases in Brazil and challenge Portuguese dominance of the trade therewith. The French crew had no fort at which to land initially and so constructed one— one that was swiftly removed by Portuguese forces. Failures such as this left French merchants relegated to using the informal system of beach landings and interpreters to trade for brazilwood. French interest in Brazilian commerce began around the same time the Loronha consortium received its contract from the Portuguese crown. In 1503, a group from Honfleur, a small port town in Normandy at the mouth of the Seine, dispatched the ship l'Espoir for an expedition. In Brazil, the crew traded goods such as spades, hardware, mirrors, and wool for brazilwood. Like in the later voyage of the Pèlerine, the dyewood carried by l'Espoir did not make it back to France, but information regarding the riches of Brazil did. Pirates captured, pilfered, and sunk l'Espoir off the Channel Islands as she was returning to France but dropped her crew off in The Hague. When the crew arrived back in Normandy, its members spread the knowledge of the potentially lucrative trade with Brazil (Tomlinson, 1970: 31-47, 51). With this information, the floodgates opened for French merchants to tap into the brazilwood trade. In 1526 alone, at least 10 French ships made voyages to Brazil and in 1529 one expedition reportedly brought 8,400 quintals of brazilwood back to France, which would have amounted to almost half of the Portuguese contractors' annual requirement of 20,000 quintals. Normandy continued to be the hub for these expeditions with wealthy merchants such as Jean Ango from Dieppe providing financing. Captains Jean Parmentier (1520), Hughes Roger (1521), and Giovanni da Verrazzano (1522) all sailed to Brazil to harvest brazilwood with the backing of Ango. There was some institutional

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 9 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood support for Ango's efforts too, for in 1529 he received a letter of marque from king Francis I permitting him to attack the Portuguese Brazil trade. The aforementioned voyage of the Pèlerine in 1531 and an attempt to establish a trade post on Ilha de Santo Aleixo near modern-day in Pernambuco were in many ways the culmination of this early period of French attention directed towards Brazil (Serrão & Marques, 1992: 219-220; Vianna, 1972: 146-148; Morison, 1974: 588). The Portuguese crown responded firmly to the increasing French presence in Brazil and the foreigners' challenges to Portugal's monopoly on brazilwood. First Manuel and later João III dispatched seasoned captain Cristóvão Jaques on a series of coastguard expeditions to Brazil between 1516 and 1528 to attack French shipping. During these missions, Jaques patrolled almost the full length of the Brazilian coast from Pernambuco to . He also opted to close the Cabo Frio feitoria and relocate it far to the north to Igarassu on the shores opposite Itamaracá island in Pernambuco. The original trade post established at Cabo Frio by the Laronha consortium in 1503 was safe owing to its out-of- the-way location but it did little to ward off French interlopers. At its new location, the Portuguese fort would be more prominent, grant access to the higher-quality brazilwood stands of Pernambuco, and be geographically closer to Portugal. Jaques must have had a special dispensation from the crown because he was allowed to trade brazilwood during his voyages as part of his annual compensation for defending the territory. During his first expedition, he loaded three ships with brazilwood at Cabo Frio before closing the factory there and during his last expedition he loaded brazilwood at the new feitoria at Igarassu (Serrão & Marques, 1992: 95-100, 219; Trías, 1975: 257-283). While Cristóvão Jaques had some modest success combatting French shipping and made the strategic move to reposition Portugal's primary base in the territory, the crown soon realized that simply sending armed patrols to the Brazilian coast would be insufficient to thwart the French threat. The Portuguese crown thus initiated a series of efforts to colonize the coast of Brazil, the most serious of which was João III's 1534 decision to divide up the Brazilian littoral into fifteen captaincies which he gave as hereditary fiefs to members of the lesser nobility. Each noble captain had the right to the land and its produce within their captaincy and the responsibility to colonize it in the name of Portugal (Disney, 2009: 211). Brazilwood was an exception, however: its status remained as it was in the first three decades of the trade—a royal possession requiring a royal license to trade. D. João was clear in his Charter of Donation to , the captain of Pernambuco, as to the status of brazilwood:

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The brazilwood in the captaincy and any spices or drugs of any type found there shall belong to me and shall always belong to me and my successors, and neither the captain nor any other person may deal in these things nor sell them there. Nor may they export them to my realms or territories or beyond them (Schwartz, 2010: 15).

Even though he could not freely trade it, Coelho was expected as hereditary captain “to guard and preserve the brazilwood” in his domains from those who wished to trade it without a license. He had motivation to do so: D. João granted Coelho one-twentieth of the crown's gross profit from the brazilwood imported from his captaincy (João III, 1966: 40). Ensuring the trade in brazilwood continued legally was thus in Coelho's best financial interest. Under this arrangement, the brazilwood trade continued to be a closely-guarded royal possession in the mid-sixteenth century, but its profits helped the hereditary captains as well as the crown and the merchants who traded the commodity. As evidenced by Jaques's dispensation to trade brazilwood on his missions, the crown had terminated the brazilwood monopoly and began to dole out numerous licenses to trade the resource by the time of the establishment of the captaincies. With more merchants involved in the colony's commerce, the brazilwood trade became more regularized in this period. The yearly expedition sent out by the monopolists gave way to multiple journeys crossing the Atlantic for brazilwood each year. The crown appointed royal factors in the captaincies' settlements that were in charge of weighing and registering cargoes of brazilwood for export to ensure royal profit from taxation of the newly- liberalized trade (Coelho, 2010: 20-21; João III, 2010: 49). The price at which brazilwood merchants could obtain the dyewood began to rise in this period. In 1546, Coelho complained that the brazilwood licensees trading in Pernambuco

pester the Indians so much and promise them so many things that it is not right to promise… It is not simply that they supply the Indians with tools, as is the custom. Rather, to persuade them to gather brazilwood, they give them beads from Bahia, as well as feather headdresses and colored garments that cannot be obtained here. Worse still, they give them swords and muskets (Coelho, 2010: 21).

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The phenomenon was not just confined to Pernambuco and the northeast of Brazil either. In the south around Guanabara Bay, Hans Staden mentioned that French traders had given some natives guns and powder in exchange for brazilwood (Staden, 2008: 50). It thus seems that wherever Europeans traded for brazilwood along the coast, natives demanded more valuable goods in exchange. The problem became such that D. João instructed Tomé de Sousa, the first Governor General of Brazil, to “impose a limit on the barter value that [the licensees] are to pay for the goods circulating in the territory” in an attempt to reign in this inflation (João III, 2010: 49). A combination of factors contributed to the rising price of brazilwood in Brazil. First, the greater number of merchants coming to trade brazilwood in the middle of the century caused greater demand. Part of this growth came from more royal licenses, but part of it was the result of Portuguese merchants exporting brazilwood illicitly, either without royal permission or beyond the limits of their license. Coelho remarked that he could not “find anyone who does not think that he has some right to deal in brazilwood as though it were some vegetable to be sold on the market.” He reported to D. João that he tried to prevent this contraband trade as the king had ordered him when he gave him rights to the captaincy, but that the level of the illicit activity was too much for him to restrain (Coelho, 2010: 21, 33). Second, Europeans had for a few decades been bringing the same basic goods (tools, knives, simple garments, etc.) to trade. By this time, the Europeans had saturated the market for these rudimentary goods and the natives now demanded items of higher value. Coelho commented that previously “when the Indians were hungry and needed tools, they would come clear the land and do all the other heavy work in exchange for what we gave them,…but now, as they have plenty of tools,” they no longer gather wood for the Europeans (Coelho, 2010: 21). Third, years of brazilwood harvesting and clearing land for sugar plantations had thinned out the Atlantic Forest. Coelho noted that brazilwood had to be harvested further inland, having been deforested along the coast, meaning that indigenous laborers had to spend more time looking for brazilwood and carry the heavy logs a greater distance (Coelho, 2010: 20-21). Furthermore, Portuguese colonization had either killed a significant portion of Brazil's indigenous population or forced it to migrate further inland (Disney, 2009: 216-218, 233-236). The labor as well as the resource itself was harder to find.

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Brazilwood was thus becoming more expensive to obtain and the trade was becoming altogether less lucrative. The trends that Coelho reported suggest the impending collapse of the trade as the sixteenth century wore on. That collapse did not come, however, and the trade continued through a number of political changes in the middle and latter half of the century. In 1548, D. João appointed Tomé de Sousa the first Governor General of Brazil and sent him to found the colonial capital in Bahia in an attempt to centralize royal authority in the colony. The status of brazilwood remained unchanged, however: the crown reaffirmed brazilwood as royal property that could only be traded with a license from the king (João III, 2010: 49). Licensed (and illicit) trade continued through the 1550s and 1560s when the Governors General smothered the last French attempts to colonize Brazil, and beyond 1580 when dynastic crisis in Portugal unified the Portuguese and Spanish crowns. In 1594, the trade was still lucrative enough and the extent of illegal brazilwood trading so great that D. Filipe reverted the trade back to a monopoly system (Disney, 2009: 233). The trade thus came full circle structurally to the royal monopoly under which it operated at the beginning of the century. If the brazilwood trade continued through the end of the sixteenth century and was poised to carry on into the seventeenth, brazilwood traders must have overcome the declining supply of indigenous labor and increasing coastal deforestation of brazilwood stands.

The Brazilwood Trade in the Seventeenth Century

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a new method for harvesting brazilwood emerged that allowed traders to overcome these obstacles. This method is evident in a work attributed to Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, a Portuguese sugar planter who lived in in northeastern Brazil. In his 1618 Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil (Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil), Brandão lays out what he saw as the five major “industries” of Brazil: trade in general, sugar, brazilwood, cotton, and other timber. Fortunately, his knowledge was first-hand and his detail is penetrating. Brandão describes how the brazilwood trade might have continued in spite of the issues concerning indigenous labor and deforestation:

many settlers make their living simply by going into the forest and hauling the wood out with oxen to a waterway, where they sell it to persons who

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have a license to ship it… They go some twelve, fifteen, and even twenty leagues out from the Captaincy of Pernambuco in search of the greatest stands of it, for it cannot be found any closer at hand since the demand has been so great… The men who engage in this occupation take many slaves from Guinea with axes [with them into the forest]… From there they cart it in wagons, five or six logs being tied together, until they get it to storage sheds, where barges can come alongside to take it aboard (Brandão, 1987: 151).

Brandão presents a number of details that directly respond to the supposed problems facing the brazilwood trade in the early seventeenth century. With regard to the dwindling supply of indigenous labor, Portuguese settlers used African slaves to harvest the wood and transported it with the help of beasts of burden. In the face of deforestation of brazilwood trees along the Atlantic coast, these European and African brazilwood harvesters went further inland, navigating Brazil's river systems. There they were able to find pristine, untouched stands of brazilwood. Brandão says that the settlers who plied the rivers sold brazilwood to the merchants with licenses to ship it. Settlers could not truly sell the product because, as Brandão himself was quick to point out, “brazilwood is His Majesty's own drug and, as such, is protected so that no one may deal in it except the king himself or those who received his license under contract” (Brandão, 1987: 51). The crown firmly maintained its rights over brazilwood in the seventeenth century as it had in the sixteenth and the settlers had no right to sell the wood that they themselves did not own. Instead, as we will see, brazilwood changed hands numerous times between the forests of Brazil and the docks of Lisbon; the money that changed hands along with it represented reimbursement for labor and transportation rather than ownership over the resource. Brandão's description of the brazilwood trade in the seventeenth century shows how the trade had become more capital intensive since the previous century. The teams that penetrated the interior had to travel greater distances to harvest and transport the wood than before, but they had a number of advantages over the indigenous Brazilians who had harvested brazilwood during the trade's earlier decades. These advantages included draft animals, wheeled carts, and barges that relieved the harvesters themselves of the physical burden. Such capital assets for brazilwood extraction were unheard of in the sixteenth century. The trade's early years saw the construction of a handful of forts, but these served as much a political purpose to strengthen Portugal's claim to Brazil as an

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 14 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood economic purpose to store brazilwood. Labor-saving investments in the seventeenth century, on the other hand, allowed Portuguese traders to overcome the inherent disadvantage of the resource's inaccessibility. Furthermore, the slaves that now did the physical harvesting were themselves a capital investment and one that gave Portuguese settlers control over labor as a factor of production. The unwillingness of the indigenous labor force to participate in harvesting was no longer an issue. Portuguese merchants could supply labor they directed to extract brazilwood. Capital investment in the trade thus allowed the Portuguese to counteract the challenges of trading brazilwood in the face of unavailable indigenous labor and deforestation. Brandão's description also points to a more sophisticated system of trading. The use of rivers to transport brazilwood created a more complex trade network than what had come before. Traders employed warehouses upstream along rivers close to harvesting activity and likely downstream at the mouth as well to hold the brazilwood until a ship would arrive. Bargemen would ferry the cut wood along the waterways, taking logs from storage depots to awaiting ships. No longer could brazilwood be harvested close to a settlement or feitoria around the time of a ship's landing. The new system involved more parties and required a high level of coordination between harvesters, fluvial and oceanic transporters, and factors. Far from being a primitive industry, the brazilwood trade of the seventeenth century had a dynamic, developed system of extraction. The contracts signed between the crown and merchant monopolists after the reversion to monopolies in 1594 reflect Brandão's presentation of the trade. One example is the agreement between D. Filipe III and Luiz Vaz de Rezende that allowed Rezende to import 10,000 quintals of brazilwood per year from 1632 to 1642 (AHU CU 017-01, cx. 1, d. 157). The contract document itself is a testament to the continued importance of the trade, having been block-printed in a Lisbon printing house and comprising 12 pages and 37 total stipulations. One of these stipulations specified that only the settlers (moradores) of the Brazilian captaincies were allowed to cut and harvest brazilwood. African slaves, while not explicitly mentioned, would have also been included under this provision as property of the settlers themselves, and reports of brazilwood harvesting during the time of Rezende's contract mention the use of slave labor in Bahia (AHU CU 015, cx. 4, d. 317). Another stipulation addressed the internal movement of brazilwood within Brazil, dictating that only those who received a license from the contractor or his factors could move the goods from the interior forests to the coast. These stipulations the goal of the monopoly system—to reduce the prevalence of illicit trading—but also support the schema

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 15 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood for the trade that Brandão presented: Portuguese settlers were the ones harvesting brazilwood and a structured system of transportation existed to extract the wood from the interior where it could be found to the coast. Coordinating the extraction and transportation of brazilwood fell on resident factors. Rezende's contract allowed him to select five factors to reside in Brazil and act as his agents there. They would take up station at major settlements in northeastern Brazil such as Ilhéus, Porto Seguro, Salvador da Bahia, and Olinda, and from there grant transportation licenses to local fluvial bargemen and arrange for the wood to be shipped back to Lisbon (AHU CU 005-02, cx. 9, d. 1067; AHU CU 015, cx. 2, d. 116). The arrival of the Santo Antônio in Porto Seguro in 1645 highlights some of the logistics managed by the factors. Paulo Barbosa, the brazilwood factor in Porto Seguro at the time, had a stockpile of brazilwood in the settlement which he transferred to captain Manuel Tomé when the ship docked. This load composed only a little over half his ship's eventual cargo of brazilwood, however. Barbosa had also arranged for additional brazilwood to be ferried from a nearby river. Perhaps he had run out of room to store any more brazilwood in Porto Seguro and so arranged for these smaller shipments to bring further loads of brazilwood from a remote location, or perhaps the timing worked out such that bargemen were bringing freshly-harvested brazilwood to Porto Seguro during the Santo Antônio's stay. Either way, the six additional loads from smaller boats completed the ship's cargo and the bargemen received 80 réis per quintal for their services (AHU CU 005, cx. 1, d. 78). Captains such as Tomé who made the trans-Atlantic voyage between Brazil and Portugal to ferry brazilwood on the longest leg of its journey also received reimbursement for their role. Rezende's contract committed the monopolist to reimburse captains upon their arrival in Lisbon. Captains maintained their own records of the brazilwood they transported and requested remuneration from the contractor. Manuel Tomé, for instance, kept diligent records of the transactions in Porto Seguro and submitted them for reimbursement in Lisbon. He listed the amount of brazilwood he received from each source (Paulo Barbosa and the additional loads from the barges) and the freight reimbursement due for each item (AHU CU 005, cx. 1, d. 78). In the first half of the seventeenth century, the common rate for transporting brazilwood across the Atlantic was 300 réis per quintal (AHU CU 015, cx. 1, d. 53; AHU CU 015, cx. 2, d. 99). That said, most captains transported only small quantities of brazilwood on each voyage. In the first two and a half years of Rezende's monopoly, 32 ships sailed from Bahia to Lisbon carrying brazilwood. Most carried 100 quintals or less with a median cargo of 85 quintals; one

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 16 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood carried just 20 quintals (AHU CU 005-02, cx. 5, d. 632). Such small quantities imply that ships carried other goods, namely sugar, the primary export of the colony at the time. Captains' records from the 1640s show that ships sailed from Porto Seguro laden with mixed cargoes of sugar and brazilwood (AHU CU 005, cx. 1 d. 37; AHU CU 015, cx. 5, d. 332). Thus, the schema for transporting brazilwood across the Atlantic had evolved greatly after a century and a half of trade. Unlike the trade's earliest years when monopolists would outfit their own expeditions to Brazil and bring back a cargo of almost exclusively brazilwood, in the early seventeenth century monopolists paid for brazilwood to be carried on other merchants' ships alongside other exports. Just as the French had been the primary challengers to Portuguese dominance over the brazilwood trade in the sixteenth century, the Dutch became the Iberians' main rivals in the seventeenth century. The Low Countries had been involved in the trade since its early years, with merchants in Flanders indirectly importing the dyestuff from Brazil through the Portuguese metropole as early as 1505 (Masser, 2001: 401). In the seventeenth century, however, Holland began asserting itself directly in the brazilwood trade as the United Provinces grew as a commercial and naval power. In 1617, the prevalence of Dutch incursions in Brazil was such that the crown dispatched admiral Martim de Sá with specific orders to prevent foreigners from harvesting brazilwood. His initial mandate covered the southern captaincies of Cabo Frio, , and São Vicente but the list quickly grew to include Espírito Santo, Bahia, Paraíba, and Rio Grande do Norte—essentially most of Brazil's Atlantic coast (AHU CU 017, cx. 1, d. 7, 10, 15, 20). Martim de Sá's patrols had some impact on Dutch trading activities but not enough to prevent brazilwood contractor André Lopes Pinto from notifying the crown the following year that Dutch attacks were inhibiting him from importing the amount of brazilwood specified in his contract (AHU CU 005-02, cx. 2, d. 170). Dutch involvement in the brazilwood trade reached its zenith during the period of Dutch occupation of northeastern Brazil (1630-1654). Under Dutch rule, brazilwood was a monopoly of the West India Company and the trade was a crucial industry of the colony: John Maurice of Nassau, the colony's first governor general, listed brazilwood second in importance only to sugar as an export of the Dutch territory (Maurice of Nassau, (2010): 246). During these years, the United Provinces controlled Pernambuco and the surrounding captaincies, giving Dutch merchants immediate territorial access to abundant brazilwood stands. Brazilwood exports started off weakly in the early 1630s, likely due to the destruction and disruption caused by the war, but grew rapidly in subsequent years

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(Sousa, 1978: 92-5). Prices for brazilwood in Amsterdam fell by 50% in the decade from 1630 to 1640 (Posthumus, 1946: 443-444). This drop, in the absence of a sharp decline in demand for the dyestuff (an unlikely trend during a period of economic prosperity in the Netherlands), indicates the large influx of brazilwood that came to Holland from newly- conquered northeastern Brazil. Dutch occupation took its toll on the Portuguese side of the brazilwood trade. Most importantly, Portugal lost control of the territory with the most abundant brazilwood stands.5 Furthermore, Dutch naval patrols interrupted Portuguese brazilwood shipments from the rest of Brazil. In 1636, contractor Luiz Vaz de Rezende complained to D. Filipe that he was having difficulties importing the wood as specified in his contract. Dutch ships prevented vessels carrying brazilwood from leaving Brazil regularly and sailing directly to Lisbon (AHU CU 017-01, cx. 1, d. 156). That said, the worst of the trade disruptions were short-lived: Portuguese forces had success reconquering lost territory in the second half of the 1640s and Dutch control of northeastern Brazil came to an end in 1654. Even after the end of Dutch occupation and without direct territorial access to Brazil, traders from the Netherlands still came to Brazil to harvest brazilwood. Two ships from Amsterdam landed at Cunhaú in Pernambuco to load the dyestuff in 1657 (AHU CU 015 cx. 7, d. 597) and in 1662 two Dutch ships encountered captain Francisco de Morais at João Lostão in Rio Grande do Norte (AHU CU 018, cx. 1, d. 6). These decades of direct Dutch imports helped make the Netherlands the center for processing brazilwood: refining the wood so it could be turned into a dye. The first stages of processing took place in Brazil at the time of harvesting to remove the bark, branches, and outer layers that did not contribute to dye-making and thus were worthless to transport across the Atlantic. In the early years of the trade and for later Dutch traders who often relied on indigenous labor where they could find it,6 native Brazilians “cut, saw[ed], split, quarter[ed], and round[ed] off the brazilwood, with the hatchets, wedges, and other iron tools” given to them by Europeans (Léry, 1992: 101). In the seventeenth century, the Portuguese moradores and slaves “remove[d] all the outer layers, for the brazil [dye itself] is in the heartwood. In this way a tree of tremendous girth supplies a piece of wood no longer than your leg” (Brandão, 1987: 151). Once in Amsterdam, these much-paired-down

5One colonial official reported in 1625 that the captaincy of Pernambuco accounted for the majority of Brazil's brazilwood exports (AHU CU 015, cx. 2, d. 113). 6Without slaves or settlers of their own, Dutch traders would have had to rely on indigenous labor for harvesting. This situation might have occurred during times the Dutch did not control territory in Brazil or when they were searching for brazilwood in sparsely colonized areas. For instance, in 1618 foreign brazilwood traders came to Espírito Santo and received help harvesting the resource from native Brazilians (AHU CU 007, cx. 1, d. 6). e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 18 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood logs were reduced to dust so that they could later be mixed with water to create the dye. The center for this stage of the process was Amsterdam's Rasphuis, or Saw House, a penal institution for the criminals of the city. Here, prisoners would rasp brazilwood in two-man teams using a type of gang saw (Pontanus, 1611). This saw was woefully heavy, consisting of a number of rough blades strapped together. Each team had a daily quota it had to produce, which could have been as much as 60 pounds of saw dust. This method, a brutal and arduous task for the inmates, was seen as an excellent correctional tool that would reform ne'er-do-wells while contributing to Dutch industry (Sellin, 1944: 53-58; Schama, 1988: 19-20). Correctional goals aside, brazilwood rasping was a booming business. The Rasphuis grew quickly from its founding in 1596 to dominate brazilwood processing in the Netherlands, thanks in part to some generous concessions. In 1599, the Amsterdam city council gave the Rasphuis the sole right to rasp brazilwood in the city and its environs. Later, in 1602, the States General of the United Provinces extended this monopoly to all of Holland and West Friesland. While existing penal institutions in other towns were allowed to retain their local monopolies on rasping, only the Rasphuis could export the saw dust to other countries, a crucial right that gave the Amsterdam institution primacy in the industry, much to the chagrin of similar institutions in Leiden and Rotterdam. Moreover, the 1602 edict banned private brazilwood rasping outside such penal institutions (Sellin, 1944: 54- 55). Between these privileges and its location at the heart of an entrepôt flush with brazilwood in the early seventeenth century, Amsterdam's Rasphuis became Europe's center for brazilwood processing.

The Brazilwood Trade across Two Centuries

The brazilwood trade, then, continued well into the seventeenth century, but just how strong was it over a century after its inception? A look at the value of brazilwood exports throughout the trade's history gives some indication of its longevity and continued strength (Fig. 1). Historians generally pay most attention to the percentage of the brazilwood trade in the colony's export economy as a whole when discussing the trade's short duration (Buescu & Tapajós, 1967: 24). These proportions indicate the significant and uninterrupted decline of brazilwood across the sixteenth century as sugar came to dominate the export market. At the beginning of the century, brazilwood represented almost all of the colony's exports, but by the century's end it represented merely a small

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 19 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood fraction. These relative values do not tell the whole story, though. In absolute terms, the value of brazilwood exports actually increased over the course of the sixteenth century, reaching its peak sometime in the century's later decades. Moreover, even after this peak, the trade did not drop off completely as some have suggested.7 Rather, the trade continued in significant volumes for the next hundred years: only by 1650 did the value of the trade's exports drop below that of the early years of the sixteenth century, the purported heyday of the trade, and only around 1700 had they dropped below 50% of the trade's peak about a century earlier. The brazilwood trade, then, continued well into the seventeenth century and certainly did not die out in the middle of the sixteenth century.

Fig. 1: A Century of Sustained Trade: Brazilwood Exports, 1510–1700 (Buescu, 1970: 43-44, 57, 167, 199)

Another way to understand the lasting importance of the brazilwood trade is by examining royal income from the trade (Fig. 2). Like the value of brazilwood exports, royal revenue from the resource increased across the sixteenth century. Revenue swelled from 1.9 million réis in 1506 to 24 million réis a century later, with particularly strong growth around the turn of the century as the crown converted the trade back to a monopoly system. Even during this period of profound growth, royal revenue from brazilwood decreased as a portion of all royal revenue from Brazil as increasing sugar exports generated more duties. That said, brazilwood continued to represent a significant portion of royal revenue from the colony. Even in the early seventeenth century when tax receipts from sugar would have hit full stride, brazilwood amounted to around a third of royal

7Buescu and Tapajós (1967: 25) posit that the brazilwood trade “fell vertically” after the end of the sixteenth century. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 20 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood income from the American colony, a far greater portion than its minuscule share of export volumes might suggest. Far from being an insignificant facet of the colonial economy, the brazilwood trade continued to profit the crown over a century after its inception.

Fig. 2: Growing the Crown's Coffers: Annual Royal Income from Brazilwood, 1506–1619 (Pedreira, 2007: 56)

Beyond the crown, other participants in the colonial economy profited from brazilwood. We have seen that ship captains and bargemen received compensation for transporting the wood and that Brandão reported that some Portuguese settlers “made their living” by harvesting trees, a reality echoed by colonial officials (AHU CU 015, cx. 2, d. 113). As for the monopolists, they too profited despite the more complex method of brazilwood extraction and transportation in the seventeenth century. Roberto Simonsen calculated that in 1602, after factoring in the price of a monopoly contract, the cost of harvesting brazilwood in Brazil, and the cost of trans-Atlantic transportation, a Portuguese brazilwood contractor could realize around six million réis net profit each year, or a 15% return on investment (Simonsen, 1937: 101). The hereditary captains continued to receive a share of royal proceeds from the brazilwood exported from their captaincies in the seventeenth century as well. Recall that D. João granted Duarte Coelho one-twentieth of the royal profits from brazilwood from his captaincy beginning in 1534. This custom prevailed into the following century: the contract between the crown and monopolist Nuno Álvares Vizeu signed in 1628 required that Vizeu pay the crown 18 million réis, of which one-twentieth would go to the captains of the captaincies from which the brazilwood came (AHU CU 015, cx. 2, d. 116). To a similar end, Duarte de Albuquerque

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Coelho (the fourth captain of Pernambuco and grandson of Duarte Coelho) received a large payment of over four million réis from D. Filipe II in 1619 for brazilwood that had come to Lisbon from Pernambuco (AHU CU 015, cx. 1, d. 64).

Conclusion: Brazilwood, an Atlantic Commodity

We see that, far from an ephemeral commercial endeavor that died out within the first half century of Brazil's colonial history, the brazilwood trade was a mainstay of the Brazilian economy for over a century and a half. The continued value of exports, royal income, and profitability to the trade's participants demonstrate its lingering importance to the colonial economy. Such continuity does not mean the trade had not changed over the course of a century and a half. The pursuit of the trade—the process by which brazilwood was harvested and transported—had changed greatly in response to the two apparent threats that seemed to signal its end: coastal deforestation and a declining supply of indigenous labor. While in the sixteenth century natives harvested brazilwood close to the coast, by the seventeenth century Portuguese settlers and African slaves trekked inland up rivers to find stands of the dyewood. The trade became more sophisticated logistically and more capital intensive in order to support the new system of the brazilwood harvesting. Factors no longer negotiated with indigenous laborers at the palisade of a feitoria but instead organized a network of harvesters, fluvial transporters, and Atlantic ship captains. The monopolist merchants in the seventeenth century ceased outfitting ships themselves and paid ship captains to take smaller quantities of brazilwood aboard their vessels along with the other goods they carried. The trade's political structure had at the same time changed both greatly and not at all. It came full circle, from a monopoly in the earliest years, to numerous licenses for most of the sixteenth century, and back again to a monopoly by the early seventeenth century. From this perspective—that of the brazilwood trade's longevity—we can make sense of the imperial altercation between Dutch and Portuguese sailors on the coast of Brazil in 1662. Over a century and a half after its inception, the trade still had the ability to generate conflict: the Dutch at João Lostão were trying to tap into a still-lucrative trans- Atlantic trade and their Portuguese adversaries were defending an imperial economic interest. The lengths to which both parties were willing to go (be it a long, clandestine voyage or burning brazilwood to keep it out of enemy hands) are a testament to the commodity's continued import.

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This same altercation points to some of the broader narratives in Atlantic history of which the brazilwood trade is now part. We have seen that brazilwood was integral to rivalries over Atlantic commerce, both between the French and the Portuguese and the Portuguese and the Dutch. Brazilwood's role in the second of these conflicts has been under-recognized due to the trade's perceived short duration. We have also seen how African slave labor replaced that of indigenous Brazilians as the trade progressed. Many studies have explored economic relations between native Brazilian and the Portuguese but this knowledge adds a new facet to discussions about the history of in Brazil. The previous pages have focused on the brazilwood trade in Brazil and the Atlantic, touching only briefly on brazilwood once it reached Europe, but there are further connections to be uncovered between brazilwood and the burgeoning textile industry on the continent. How did European merchants distribute brazilwood in Europe so that the dyestuff reached dyers and textile producers? Where outside Amsterdam was brazilwood refined? What competition did brazilwood face from rival dye sources in the marketplaces of Europe? New World , African takula, and Asian sappanwood were all alternate sources of red dye in early-modern Europe. How did the relative quality, availability, and cost of these rivals affect the trade in brazilwood? There is yet another important narrative in Atlantic history of which we now find brazilwood a part: the shift in global commerce from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Long before Portuguese, French, and Dutch vessels carried brazilwood across the Atlantic, luxuries found their way to Europe from the East. Oriental goods such as sappanwood arrived in Europe through ports like Constantinople, Venice, and Genoa, carried first by ship across the Indian Ocean. In this way, the eastern sea acted as a great sea highway that linked China, the Indian subcontinent, East Africa, the Middle East, and Europe in one large trade network. The Indian Ocean was the heart of the commercial exchanges that carried goods from east to west and the merchants who plied the ocean's waters controlled the bulk of global trade (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 170-175, 261-270). When and Portugal invested in maritime ventures of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were seeking an entrance into this center of the rich commercial web of Eurasia: they were trying to tap into the enormously profitable seafaring trade in the Indian Ocean. At the time, western Europe was a poor periphery of the Eurasian landmass, an extremity of its trade network. Europe's poverty and peripheral location, however, spurred on the expansion that eventually reversed the continent's fortunes. Europeans had few valuable commodities to exchange. They generally traded for Asian exotics with specie rather than

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 23 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood domestic goods. If Europeans wanted to obtain the commodities of the Orient, they would have to travel themselves to meet foreign merchants because there was little motivating the foreigners to come to them (Fernández-Armesto, 2006: 119-120). The two greatest results of Portugal and Spain's flurry of maritime exploration were the pioneering of a sea route to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese and the accidental European discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Spanish ships seeking a westward route to Asia. In the grand scheme of global trade, the discovery of the proved to be far more wide-reaching than the opening of a maritime route to the Indian Ocean. As Janet Abu-Lughod states, it was the European incorporation of the New World more than the takeover of the Old World that utterly transformed the dynamics of modern global commerce (Abu-Lughod, 1989: 363). What Spain and Portugal (and later England, Holland, and France) did was bring the New World into the world system of global trade. Starting at the beginning of the sixteenth century, European settlement and colonization of the Western Hemisphere led to commercial links between the Americas and other continents that did not exist previously. The colonizers exploited the Americas for their economic gain, extracting commodities and cultivating profitable cash crops to be sold in Europe and beyond. As these commercial activities grew, the Americas became inexorably intertwined with Asia, Europe, and Africa as part of a global trade network. Leading this shift was a pair of widely-traded American commodities. The first was silver from Spain's New World holdings. Silver mining in Spanish America started in significant quantities in the 1540s with the discoveries of silver lodes at Zacatecas in Mexico and Potosí in Upper Peru (modern-day ). Large-scale exports of the metal, however, did not begin until the amalgamation process of refining silver was introduced to Mexico in the 1550s and to Greater Peru in the 1570s (TePaske, 2010: 74-75). The large quantities of silver that flowed out of Spain's American mines had a profound impact on global trade. Silver was the preferred currency in China at the time and boatloads of the metal began to flow to China via the Spanish-held Philippines. Some estimates hold that up to 70 percent of the silver mined from Spanish America went to China rather than Europe. In exchange for silver, Spanish merchants purchased large quantities of silks and porcelain, which they then shipped back to America and Spain. In the end, Mexico City and Madrid became inundated with Chinese goods bought with silver mined in Peru (Mann, 2011: 123- 163). The second American commodity was sugar from Portuguese Brazil. The first attempts to sugar in colonial Brazil began as early as the 1520s but not until the 1560s

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 24 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood was sugar entrenched in the colony (Disney, 2009: 235). Sugar profoundly influenced patterns of global trade. Most of the sugar produced in Brazil went to Europe but the trade connections from the sugar industry stretched beyond those two regions. Sugar production required an enormous supply of labor and that labor came from Africa. From the late sixteenth century on, Brazilian sugar plantations fueled the Atlantic slave trade. Brazilian sugar was a commodity grown in America using African labor and shipped to Europe. Brazilwood deserves similar regard: the brazilwood trade predates the trades in both silver and sugar from the New World. The Portuguese began exporting brazilwood from Brazil as soon as Cabral landed in the territory in 1500, while Spanish and Portuguese merchants did not start exporting silver and sugar, respectively, until the middle of the century. The arrival of Gaspar de Lemos' supply ship in Lisbon in 1500 was a watershed moment. It contained the first shipment of a major commodity to cross the Atlantic, the ocean that would go on to become the center of global commercial exchange. Commerce from a list of commodities brought the Atlantic into the forefront of world-wide trade, including brazilwood, sugar, silver, tobacco, cotton, and coffee, to name some of the most prominent. Brazilwood deserves its spot at the top of this list chronologically, though not for pride of place. Brazilwood is the first American export and the first commodity in the narrative of a global shift in commerce from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 25 Dodge A Forgotten Century of Brazilwood

Primary Sources

Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal. Conselho Ultramarino (AHU CU). Brandão, Ambrósio Fernandes (1987) [1618]. Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil, ed. and trans. Frederick Hall, et al. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Coelho, Duarte (2010) [1542, 1546, 1549]. “Three Letters from Duarte Coelho to King John III.” In Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 18-33. João III (1966) [1534]. “Letter of the Grant of the Captaincy of Pernambuco to Duarte Coelho.” In E. Bradford Burns (ed.), A Documentary History of Brazil. New York: Knopf, 34-45. João III (2010) [1548]. “Instructions Issued to the First Governor-General of Brazil, Tomé de Sousa, on 17 December 1548.” In Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 37-52. Léry, Jean de (1992) [1578]. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Masser, Leonardo da Chá (2001) [1505]. “Relação de Leonardo da Cá Masser.” In Janaína Amado and Luiz Carlos Figueiredo (eds.), Brasil 1500: Quarenta Documentos. : Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 397-402. Maurice of Nassau (2010) [1638]. “A Brief Report on the State that is Composed of the Four Conquered Captaincies, Pernambuco, Itamaracá, Paraíba, and Rio Grande, Situated in the North of Brazil.” In Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 234-263. Pontanus, Johan Isaksson (1611). Rasphuis aan de Heiligeweg te Amsterdam, woodcut. Nationaal Gevangenismuseum, Veenhuizen, the Netherlands. Guénin, Eugène (ed.) (1901). “Protestation de Bertrand d'Ornesan, baron de Saint- Blancard, commandant les galères du Roi dans la Méditerranée, contre la prise du navire la Pèlerine” [c. 1532]. In Eugène Guénin, Ango et Ses Pilotes. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 43-47. Rondinelli, Pietro (2001) [1502]. “Carta de Pedro Rondinelli.” In Janaína Amado and Luiz Carlos Figueiredo (eds.), Brasil 1500: Quarenta Documentos. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 267-270. Schwartz, Stuart B. (ed. & trans.) (2010). “A Royal Charter for the Captaincy of Pernambuco, Issued to Duarte Coelho on 24 September 1534.” In Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Early Brazil: A Documentary Collection to 1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 14-18. Staden, Hans (2008) [1557]. Hans Staden's True History, ed. and trans. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vespucci, Amerigo (2001) [1502]. “Carta de Américo Vespúcio a Lourenço dei Medici.” In Janaína Amado and Luiz Carlos Figueiredo (eds.), Brasil 1500: Quarenta Documentos. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 273-283.

References

Abu-Lughod, Janet (1989). Before European Hegemony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baião, António (1921). “O Comércio do Pau Brasil.” In Carlos Malheiro Dias (ed.), História da Colonização Portuguesa do Brasil, vol. II. Porto: Litografia Nacional, 316-347. Boxer, C. R. (1969). The Portuguese Seaborne Empire: 1415-1825. New York: Knopf. Buescu, Mircea (1970). História Econômica do Brasil: Pesquisas e Análises. Rio de Janeiro: APEC Editora.

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Buescu, Mircea & Vicente Tapajós (1967). História do Desenvolvimento do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: A Casa do Livro. Dean, Warren (1995). With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Disney, A. R. (2009). A History of Portugal and the , vol. II, The Portuguese Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe (2006). Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. New York: Norton. Gagnon, Edeline, et al. (2016). “A New Generic System for the Pantropical Caesalpinia Group (Leguminosae).” In PhytoKeys 71: 1-160. Guedes, Max Justo (1975a). “O Descobrimento do Brasil.” In Max Justo Guedes (ed.), História Naval Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Marinha, Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha, 165-172. Guedes, Max Justo (1975b). “As Primeiras Expedições de Reconhecimento da Costa Brasileira.” In Max Justo Guedes (ed.), História Naval Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Marinha, Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha, 226-239. Mann, Charles C. (2011). 1493. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Marchant, Alexander (1942). From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500-1580. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Metcalf, Alida C. (2005). Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600. Austin: University of Texas Press. Morison, S. E. (1974). The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492- 1616. New York: Oxford University Press. Pedreira, Jorge M. (2007). “Costs and Financial Trends in the Portuguese Empire, 1415– 1822.” In Francisco Bethencourt & Diogo Ramada Curto (eds.), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 49-87. Posthumus, N. W. (1946). Inquiry into the History of Prices in Holland. Leiden: Brill. Schama, Simon (1988). The Embarrassment of Riches. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schwartz, Stuart B (1985). Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550- 1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sellin, Thorsten (1944). Pioneering in Penology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Serrão, Joel and A. H. de Oliveira Marques (1992). Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. VI, O Império Luso-Brasileiro, 1500-1620. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa. Simonsen, Roberto C. (1937). História Econômica do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. Sousa, Bernardino José de (1978). O Pau-brasil na História Nacional, 2nd ed. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. TePaske, John J. (2010). A New World of Gold and Silver. Leiden: Brill. Tomlinson, R. J. (1970). The Struggle for Brazil: Portugal and “the French Interlopers.” New York: Las Americas Press. Trías, Rolando A. Laduarda (1975). “Cristóvão Jaques e as Armadas Guarda-Costa.” In Max Justo Guedes (ed.), História Naval Brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Marinha, Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha, 257-283. Vianna, Helio (1972). História do Brasil, vol. I, Período Colonial. São Paulo: Melhoramentos.

Received for publication: 05 August 2017 Accepted in revised form: 18 April 2018 Recebido para publicação: 05 de Agosto de 2017 Aceite após revisão: 18 de Abril de 2018 e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 27 Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal: Censorship Practices Regarding the Portuguese Vernacular, 1770-1790

Cláudio DeNipoti1

Abstract

In the final period of the Portuguese Ancien Regime, the censorship structure established during the reign of Dom José I served as a direct and fundamental agent in defining the scholarly rules governing the . Throughout the last decades of the eighteenth century, the censors regulated texts that were printed or circulated within the Empire, and also corrected and defined spelling rules, literary styles, grammar, and, in particular, the use of “foreign” words. Having been widely documented in the written opinions expressed by the censors themselves, the effects of this normative action are especially visible in the texts translated into Portuguese at the time.

Keywords

Translations, History of the Book, Portuguese Empire, Censorship, 18th Century

Resumo

No período final do Antigo Regime português, o aparato censório montado no reinado de D. José I foi um agente direto e fundamental na definição da regra culta do vernáculo lusitano. A atuação dos censores ao longo dessas décadas regulou os textos impressos ou que circulavam pelos domínios do Império, mas também ocorreu no sentido de corrigir, regular e definir normas de ortografia, regência, estilo literário e, particularmente, a importação de vocábulos “estrangeiros.” Fartamente documentada nos pareceres escritos pelos próprios censores, esta atuação normatizadora é especialmente visível no que diz respeito aos textos traduzidos para a língua portuguesa no período.

Palavras-chave

Traduções, História do Livro, Império Português, Censura, Século XVIII

1 Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, History Department, Brazil. GCEAP—Cultura e Educação na América Portuguesa. E-Mail: [email protected] DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal

The translator of this third tome [of the medical works of Willian Buchan], Manoel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva, is also a well-known physician at this Court and I consider that, in this work, he has satisfied all the precepts of a good translation [...]2

The idea of a “good translation,” reflecting a given political or cultural context, has long been explored by historians concerned both with identity processes and the idea of cultural interchanges. Therefore, one can assess the relevance of translations in general through the amount of writing generated about how to translate (or how not to translate) any body of literary or scientific work. When we search for such relevant texts in Portugal during the late 1700s, we find a large volume of writing about translations, including editorial paratexts (any additional texts not included in the original work, such as prefaces, dedications, and letters to the reader) and epitexts (texts about the book, not included in the actual edition, such as letters to the editor, censorship documents, and catalogues) (Genette, 2009: 17). The latter include the many documents generated by the Real Mesa Censória (referred to hereafter as RMC), the censorship structure created by the Marquis of Pombal, which continued to operate under different names until the first decades of the nineteenth century (Martins, 2005; Tavares, 2014; Villalta, 1999). Throughout the period of the Ancien Regime, censorship can be regarded as having been a fundamental exercise in power that was particularly and intimately related to the world of books and writing since it meant control over the behavior and practices that books reflect, sustain, or stimulate (Jostock, 2007: 10-11). This was also true in places where the Enlightenment occurred mostly under the control of the state, such as in Portugal or Spain (Goméz, 2001; Abreu, 2007; Neves & Ferreira, 1989). However, prohibiting or allowing the publication of a book involves the very complex procedure of “permanently overcoming omissions and renewing outdated indexes […] and exercising the power to plug the legislative loopholes that oblige censors to guide themselves by subjective criteria, while often being conditioned by political, social and economic conjunctures” (Martins, 2005: 135). Such a statement can also be applied to the most famous censorship official of pre-revolutionary France, Malesherbes, who allowed free literary criticism while, at the same time, sought to limit open attacks on the Catholic religion and the monarchy (Negroni, 1995). In Portugal, censors were also concerned with protecting king and country, but theirs was a much more complex role since they were also responsible for the educational

2 RMC, cx 14, Aug. 3, 1788. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 29 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal system built after the Jesuits had been expelled from Portuguese territory in 1759. As a consequence, they were constantly concerned with the purity of the language, having debated spelling and grammar on several occasions throughout the 1760s and 1770s (Tavares, 2014: 188). In 1771, for example, there was a long debate about two texts meant to be used as school textbooks, which lasted from May until August and involved five censors and eight long handwritten documents expressing their conflicting opinions on the books under scrutiny.3 These handwritten opinions, the pareceres, are the basis for this study. They were written by the many censors who held the position over the years, expressing their opinions on a variety of books sent to the RMC for an analysis of their content based on a 1769 law outlining what was considered permissible to print in Portugal (Villalta, 1999: 213). These opinions were, therefore, also expressed about any translation into Portuguese that editors or translators wished to print and sell. Ranging from mere bureaucratic notes—a few lines saying that the book in question could be published—to entire treatises on the matters being discussed, which sometimes ended up being longer than the original work (Tavares, 2014: 432), these written pieces were the final word on the publication of any book, stating whether it was worthy (digno) or unworthy (indigno) of “seeing the public light” (Tavares, 2014: 15). In the case of translations into Portuguese, historians have demonstrated that during the eighteenth century, particularly from the 1770s onwards, there was a consistent increase in the number of books published. João Paulo Silvestre (2007: 153) states that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not see the publication of many translations, while works in Spanish and Latin dominated the Portuguese book trade, as the catalogues of libraries and Portuguese booksellers show. However, “translations from French works slowly conquered their own space as the eighteenth century progressed,” and António Rodrigues (1992) indicates that about 400 translations were published in Portugal during the second half of the eighteenth century, compared to only 266 during the whole of the previous century. In fact, we find in the documents of the RMC a great many requests to be allowed to publish translations (together with their respective answers) concerned with checking both the subject matter of the books (which should not offend either the Crown or the Catholic faith) and the form, content, and structure of the translations themselves. Today, this allows us to see what the RMC censors thought about a “good” translation, i.e. how

3 RMC, cx 7, 1771. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 30 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal they tried to shape the Portuguese language into a vernacular rule (which is also true for their writings in general, but is particularly visible in their analysis of translations). This work can be seen as a continuation of the early attempts to establish clearly defined grammatical rules (Leite, 2011: 667). Although it is difficult to determine if a parecer is a response to a translation (as it was for the censors, who often complained that the authors did not specifically identify all the translations they submitted for analysis), a total of 125 pareceres dealing with translations into Portuguese were found for the period from 1771 to 1794. We can divide these opinions into two sets. One relates to the period when Pombal was in office (until 1777), with 61 documents, and the other, from 1778 to 1794, has 64 documents dealing with changes to the censorship structure during the reign of Maria I (Martins, 2005: 58-88; Abreu, 2009), although many of the censors of the first period continued to work well into the second period. This division is used to check the idea that the first few years under Pombal might have set the tone for a vernacular scholarly rule. When accepting a good translation and allowing it to be printed, censors tended to praise the translator, particularly if he was known to them. Such was the case with Jose Caetano de Mesquita, celebrated by the censor Fr. Francisco de Sá for his translation of Massillon’s Conférences et discours synodaux sur les principaux devoirs des ecclésiastiques in 1771, stating that the translated work was as worthy as the original, since the translator had already demonstrated his “exactitude and precision” in other works. 4 This particular opinion was confirmed one month later, when another translation by Mesquita (Claude Fleury’s Les devoirs des maîtres et des domestiques) was read by Fr. Francisco Xavier de Santa Ana, who wrote that, “had the translator not already acquired among us the fame of being wise and scholarly, the present translation would suffice to establish that fame.”5 The censors used similar vocabulary when defining a good—or perfect— translation. Being clear, exact, or precise, and conserving the energy, efficiency, erudition, and elegance of the original text were characteristics often invoked to make their point that such translations should be granted the license for publication that their authors or publishers had requested. Thus, a good translation was one that did not “disfigure the eloquence of the original,”6 which was an often made judgment.

4 “[…] na tradução não perdem o merecim.to, tendo o tradutor ja mostrado em outras obras á sua exação e pontualidade [...].” RMC, cx 7, n. 28, Apr. 13, 1771. 5 “[…] O seu traductor, se não tivera ja adquirido entre nós os creditos de Sabio e erudito, bastaria a prezente traducção para lhe estabelecer este conceito.” RMC, cx 7, n. 38, May 6, 1771. 6 RMC, cx 9, n. 51, Nov. 27, 1775. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 31 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal

Referring to the translation (by the hermit Fr. Manoel da Ave Maria) of Esprit Fléchier’s Panégyriques des saints et quelques sermons de morale, Fr. Francisco Xavier de Santa Anna wrote that “the translator sustains, in our language, the elegant force, the pure style and the weight of reason of the original.”7 Evaluating the translation of the Difesa di Cecilia Faragò. Inquisita di Fattuchieria by José Dias Pereira (DeNipoti & Pereira, 2014), Fr. Jozé da Rocha happily notes “the fulfilment of the precepts respecting the purity of our language and the energy of the words.”8 One final example comes from the censor Fr. Mathias da Conceição, when expressing his opinion on the translation of Giuseppe Constantini’s Lettere Critiche, Giocose, Morali e Scientifiche ed Erudite:

The translator faithfully follows the steps of the author, translating not only the substance of the discourses, but also their spirit, force and eloquence. This translation, besides the civility it can bring to His Majesty’s subjects who are ignorant of the original language, might serve as an example for any other translator.9

As far as the examples of good translations are concerned, we cannot see much difference between the two groups of documents (those that coincided with Pombal’s “rule,” and those that came after 1778), emphasizing once again the continuity of policies and intent, despite historiographers’ insistence on a complete cultural transformation between the kingdoms of Dom José I and Dona Maria I. Censors such as Xavier de Santa Anna and Fr. José Mayne continued to value translations that closely followed the intent and organization of the original texts, commending the translators who succeeded in doing this.10 It helped if the translator was one of them. Writing about the translation of the Bible by the censor Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo, Fr. Jose da Rocha found “purity of

7 “o Traductor sustenta no nosso idioma a força da elegancia, a pureza do estillo, e o pezo das razoens que ellas tem no seu Original.” RMC, cx. 8, n. 87. Dec. 14, 1772 8 “vejo nella felizmente dezempenhados os seus preceitos, tanto pelo que respeita a pureza da nossa língua, como pela energia das palavras com q o Traductor se explica.” RMC, cx. 8, n. 23. Set. 15, 1774. 9 “O Traductor fielm.te segue os passos do Autor traduzindo não só a substancia dos seus discursos, mas tãobem o seu espirito, a sua força e a sua eloquencia. Cuja tradução além da civilidade que pode trazer aos vassalos de V. Mag. ignorantes do idioma original, pode servir de exemplar a outro qualquer traductor,” RMC cx 10, n, 97, Oct. 7, 1777. 10 RMC, cx 10, n. 48, Aug. 13, 1778; RMC. cx 13, n.20, Oct. 5, 1784; RMC, cx 14, n. 25, Apr. 18, 1788. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 32 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal expression, clarity, and the most difficult passages illustrated with many knowledgeable notes and critical analysis.”10 The censors—probably due to the secrecy in which their opinions and observations were held (Tavares, 2014: 690)—were at their most caustic when dealing with what they considered “bad” translations, consequently engaging in an “offensive”(as opposed to a “deffensive”) censorship (Tavares, 2014: 694) in the sense that they sought to define (among other things) how the Portuguese language should be used by the translators (and by Portuguese writers in general). Such was the case with a persevering translator, the priest Jacome Faria Galiza. He had published a book about visiting the ailing and the dying (Galiza, 1770) whose second and third editions were published in 1784 and 1799, respectively, and sought to obtain the necessary licenses for a number of translations he had completed. Firstly, he submitted to the RMC his French to Portuguese translation of an “Analysis of the letters of Saint Paul,” which the censor Fr. Luiz do Monte Carmello considered “interesting,” “useful,” and “necessary.” However, the same censor also considered that the translator (and his “amanuensis”) “lacked sufficient knowledge, not only in orthography, but also, and mainly, in terms and phrases of the Portuguese language.” 11 In that same year, Galiza submitted another translation for approval, “Ceremony of the Virgin Mary,” which was read by Xavier de Santa Anna. The censor pointed out that, due to his poor knowledge and inadequate use of the Portuguese language, the priest lacked “the multitude of specific, distinct terms, and an understanding of the dialect.” Thus, every work he translated was “without any elegance, almost reaching the point of indecency in some passages,” and the translation would only result in mockery of the translator.12 Needless to say, both works had their printing licenses refused by the censors. One year later, Galiza tried again, this time with a translation from Italian of Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s (a.k.a., Lamindo Pritanio) treatise on Christian devotion. Xavier de Santa Anna was again the reader of this work and pointed out two major flaws that justified prohibiting the publication. The book would be quite useful, firstly, if the translator had “a perfect knowledge of our language,” and secondly, if he did not try to

10 “[…] nesta tradução encontro pureza da linguagem, estilo claro, propriedade de expressões, e as passagens mais dificultosas illustradas com mtas notas cheias de Erudição e critica.” RMC, cx 14, n. 04, Jan, 21, 1790. 11 “[…] mas o Traductor, e o seu Amanuense, carecem de sufficiente instrucção não somente na Orthografia, mas tambem, e principalmente nos termos e frases proprias do Idioma Portuguez.” RMC, cx 7, n. 10, Feb. 15, 1771. 12 “Este Padre tendo pouco uzo e conhecimen.to do idioma Portuguez, tem excessivos dezejos de traduzir nelle algumas Obras que necessitam huma vastidão de termos especificos, e individuaes, e huma propriedade de dialecto, que elle certamente ignora: Desta falta nasce a de que tudo quanto tem querido traduzir he sem elegancia, chegando a ter algumas passagens que passam a indecencia. […]. RMC, cx 7, n. 91, Nov. 14, 1771. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 33 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal make unnecessary amendments to the original work. The first flaw implied the use of non- existent words. The second was almost a crime of lèse-majesté, since the priest expressed opposition to public charity at churches, a practice approved by the Portuguese kings.13 Another translator at odds with the censors was the priest Custódio da Silva Barbosa, who tried to obtain printing licenses for his translation of Claude Fleury’s books on the manners and customs of the ancient Christians and Israelites. The censor, Francisco de São Bento, considered the work “so full of defects and poorly translated passages that, without being corrected, it cannot be given the required licenses.” 14 Since the only published translations we found of Fleury’s books were written later by João Rozado de Villalobos e Vasconcellos, Barbosa was quite probably unable to correct his own versions. However, one year later he translated Michel Manduit’s L'Evangile analysé selon l'ordre historique de la Concorde, which was read by Antonio Pereira de Figueiredo, who refused the license (unless the work was corrected) because of the poor translation and his unwarranted use of another author’s preface as his own.15 One more refusal came from Dom Luís da Anunciação de Azevedo, Bishop of Angola, regarding Barbosa’s translation of Explication de l'épitre de Saint Paul aux Romains, by Jacques-Joseph Duguet. According to the censor, the many defects of the translation could be ignored if the translator did not have such “little knowledge of the Portuguese language.”16 In 1773, Barbosa submitted his translation of the second volume of Manduit’s book. After painstakingly correcting it, the censor Francisco de São Bento argued to the other censors that the work should not be granted a license because “of the many grammatical errors, improper words and French expressions” that would probably be present in the remaining six volumes of the work, which “he will probably continue to translate and will not find anyone willing to take on the same work of correcting them.”17 Other translators had their work evaluated by the same standards and orthography seems to have been an important issue for the censors. Fr. Joaquim de Santa Anna e Silva, analyzing the Portuguese translation of Bossuet’s Discours sur l'histoire universelle, criticized the spelling adopted by the translator, who chose to suppress the “h” in many words, not use capital letters after a full stop, “and other similar uses which one individual cannot adopt

13 RMC, cx. 8, n 67, Oct. 16, 1772. 14 “[…] está tão cheio de defeitos e de passagens mal traduzidas que sem as emendas prim.ro não se lhe pode conceder a licença que pede.” RMC, cx. 7, n. 56, 1771. 15 RMC, cx. 8, n. 26, May, 10, 1772. 16 RMC, cx. 8, n. 37, Jun., 26, 1772. 17 “[...] porq. constando esta obra de 8 volumes elle os hade continuar a traduzir e não hade achar q.m queira tomar o mesmo trabalho de os emendar [...]” RMC, cx 8, n. 4, Mar. 11, 1773. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 34 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal against the common practice of an entire nation.”18 The censor then reminded his peers that the RMC had planned to discuss the issue of a standard orthography, but had not done so until that moment. Besides spelling and grammar, most pareceres dealt with the ineptitude of translators to fully convey the meaning of the original texts, due to a lack of knowledge of the Portuguese language, or to interventions of their own. Regarding the translation of Prévost’s Elements of Politics submitted to the RMC by Lieutenant José Antonio da Silva Rego, the censor, Fr. Joaquim de Santa Anna e Silva, criticized both the poor orthography as well as the translator’s insufficient knowledge of the proper forms of addressing the different authorities in the Kingdom.19 Another translation of Prévost by Silva Rego (this time the L'art de plaire dans la conversation), was also described as particularly inept by the censor (Fr. José da Rocha), since he “did not write a phrase in which the poverty of his talents was not manifested, nor a page in which one cannot find many mistakes.”20 After 1777, the censors appear to have been less vehement in expressing their views on translations and translators, placing less emphasis on the grammatical aspects of the final works. Instead, many translated works were suppressed or redacted due to dogma. This was the reason why Fr. Francisco de São Bento prohibited the printing of the book Direção das Almas, a “work translated from the French language;” the translator needed to learn Portuguese and “the doctrine of the author [was] extremely lax and flawed.”21 It was also the main motive for Fr. Luis de Santa Clara Povoa to demand that a book called Regra do clero, also French in origin, should only be published if the corrections he indicated were taken into account, since “the translation is a rather unfortunate one, and I deem the translator [inept] since he is not versed in Sacred Theology.”22 The honorable exception might have been the very active censor—who was also a regular translator—the doctor Manoel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva. Acting within the context of changes to public health policies in Portugal during the second half of the eighteenth century, in the footsteps of his (probable) relative António Ribeiro Sanches (Pita, 2009: 93), Paiva was among the writers (and translators) devoted to disseminating modern scientific medical knowledge (Boto, 1998: 112; Araújo, 2014: 267). As a censor, he

18 “[…] e outros usos similhantes a estes, os quaes não pode por em estabelecimento hum, ou outro particular contra o commum da sua Nação inteira.” RMC, cx 7, n. 13, 1771. 19 RMC, cx 8, n. 7, May, 13, 1774. 20 RMC, cx 8, n. 11, Aug., 11, 1774. 21 “Os erros da Lingua na tradução da obra são frequentes. A doutrina do Author da pag. 7 e 8 he laxissima e falta.” RMC, cx 10, n. 53, Sep. 3, 1778. 22 “A traducção porem naõ he das mais felizes, porq. julgo o Traductor mto pouco [apto?] por nada versado na Sagrada Theologia.” RMC, cx 13, n. 21. Nov., 1786. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 35 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal evaluated medical books and translations and often focused on the mistakes made by translators. For example, although he considered that the Portuguese translation (from Latin) of Jacob Plenck’s “system of tumors” should be printed, he thought that the unnamed translator “adulterate[d] and distort[ed] the original meaning, in many places” and was also unclear and careless regarding “the new words” that such works required. The result was that the “style” was so confused that the reader would benefit very little from the book.23 The translation of William Cullen’s book on practical medicine also provoked Paiva to define his idea of a good translation:

In order to subject any language to his laconic style, one should have a perfect knowledge of the writer’s language, the equivalent terms […] and the discreet usage of alternative and didactic words, and above all, to know and understand his complete doctrine, in order to express it with equal clarity and represent his style with the same conciseness.24

According to Paiva, the translator did not possess any of the above requirements, using French or Latin words for which there were Portuguese equivalents and adopting a “barbaric air” that should be avoided in medical books. This critical tone continued in other pareceres, with translations being defined as “abstruse and unintelligible,” 25 or deserving of “Royal forgetfulness,” 26 or so full of mistakes that the censors refused to correct them due to the insurmountable work involved (and, therefore, refusing the required license for publication ).27 The one mistake that most censors vehemently condemned, however, was the indiscriminate use of foreign words in the translations: the barbarisms, Anglicisms or Gallicisms—collected together under the general (and reasonably untranslatable) term of estrangeirismos. Such was the case with the translation by Antonio José de Palma of François Genet’s Theologie Morale, which Fr. Francisco de Sá thought would be more commendable “if the author did not use

23 “[..] seu traductor, alem de adulterar e depravar em muitos lugares o sentido do original, não tivesse faltado á clareza, e discrepta adopção de termos novos, que em obras taes se requer” RMC, cx 13, n. 22, Dec. 6, 1784. 24 “[…] para sujeitar-se qualquer idioma estrangeiro ao seu estilo laconico, cumpriria ter-se alem do perfeito conhecimento da linguagem deste escritor, o dos vocabulos equivalentes da [ileg.] e da discreta adopção dos termos facultativos e didaticos, e sobretudo possuir-se, e entender-se completamente a sua doutrina, afim de exprimi-la com igual clareza, e representar o referido estilo com a mesma concisão.” RMC, cx 14, n.8, Feb., 25, 1788. 25 RMC, cx 14, n. 49, Jun., 30, 1788. 26 RMC, cx 14, n. 63, Sep., 15, 1788. 27 RMC, cx 15, n. 11A, Feb., 28, 1791. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 36 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal antiquated words and phrases, and some Gallicisms, which made it indecent, obscure, and sometimes unintelligible, particularly to the common clergyman who does not know the French words [...].”28 Fr. Luiz do Monte Carmelo confirmed this opinion, commenting that the translation by Jozé da Silveira Lara of “Instruction of a father to his daughter” was “faithful” only regarding the concepts, particularly because the translator was aware that “many Gallicisms cannot be literally reduced to our phrases.”29 The censors would sometimes offer examples of such words. In his analysis of Custódio da Silva Barbosa’s translation of Manduit, mentioned above, António Pereira de Figueiredo noted that it was a mistake common to most translators and went on to criticize the use of the word entretenimento, which, according to the censor, was a Spanish adaptation of the French word entretien, but was, as far as he knew, non-existent in Portuguese.30 Years later, another censor went to the trouble of making up a list of inappropriate words used by a translator in a book of medicine compiled from several French manuals. The list included words like bendages and cloportes, among others.31 Fr. Luiz de Santa Clara Póvoa also indicated that, in the translation of Esprit Fléchier’s Eloquence, the translator used the word “detailhe,” which was neither French nor Portuguese, but was afrancesada. 32 Still, the influence of French words—if we consider that most of the translated works were French in origin, or that the translators wrote the Portuguese version from a French translation— was the “frailty of almost every translator.” 33 However, contrary to problems with orthography, Gallicisms were not always a definite deterrent, since most censors demanded only that corrections be made in order to grant the requested licenses for publication. We might also add the concern with “barbarisms” and solecisms, or grammatical imperfections, identified by the censors in the translations, such as in Prévost’s L'art de plaire dans la conversation mentioned above, in which there was a “mixture and corruption of foreign words,” resulting “in a language unknown until this day.”34 Twelve years later, another censor (the doctor Manoel de Moraes Soares) saw the same problem in Francisco Puyol de Padrell’s translation of Domestic Medicine; or, The Family Physician, by William

28 “Esta traducção seria mais Luivavel se o Auth não se servisse de palavras e phrases antiquadas, e de alguns Francezismos, q o fazem escabroso, escuro e as vezes inintelligigel, principalm.te ao comum do clero, q ignora os termos Franceses” RMC, Cx. 8, n. 35, Jun., 29, 1772. 29 “[...] porque muitos Gallicismos não se podem reduzir Literalmente ás nossas Frazes.” RMC cx. 11, n. 21, Apr., 15, 1779. 30 RMC, cx. 8, n. 26, May, 10, 1772. 31 RMC, cx. 13, n. 29, Dec., 4, 1786. 32 RMC, cx 8, n. 14, Jul., 9, 1774. 33 RMC, cx 9, n. 51, Nov., 27, 1775. 34 “da mistura e corrupção de vocabulos estrangeiros, [...] do que rezulta o parecer esta Arte escrita em huma linguagem até aqui desconhecida.” RMC, cx 8, n. 11, Aug., 11, 1774. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 37 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal

Buchan, which had “some solecisms and barbarisms through the mutation of words,” but could be published after the suggested corrections were made.35 What, after all, should a translation have been like in the view of the many censors at work (in both of the time frames defined above)? The already-mentioned Henriques de Paiva gave us some guidelines, but other censors also specified their views on the matter. Francisco Xavier da Santa Anna insisted that the most important qualities of any translation were not only clarity and precision,36 but also a respect for the virtues of the original text, as was the case with Claude Fleury’s Histoire ecclésiastique, translated into Portuguese by Luiz Carlos Moniz Barreto in 1772. In his parecer, Xavier da Santa Anna praised the translation as being one of the “most complete,” because it maintained the “propriety, sophistication and elegance with which its author wrote.”37 Five years later, Fr. Luis de Santa Clara Póvoa, reviewing a translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, commended the translator (Pedro José da Fonseca) for his freedom and clarity, and the translation for entirely representing “the admirable thoughts found in the original, not omitting any word which might be necessary or important.”38 The same concept was often invoked when the translation was not considered by the censors to be as good as the original text. Fr. Mathias da Conceição criticized a translator (Luiz António Alfeirão) because his work lacked “the spirit and force” of the original book. According to the censor, this had happened due to the translator’s use of “antiquated words, of little or no use in political writings of the present century.”39 The same tone was adopted by Fr. Francisco de Sa when reviewing the Works of Madame de Lambert, translated by Joaquim Manoel de Siqueira in 1776. The censor considered the translation “of little merit” because it lacked the “essence of a translation, which is clarity,” for Siqueira used exotic, common, and strange words.40 That same year, the censor praised another translation for being “pure, efficient and current, without the stain of foreign or antiquated words.”41 One last example of what censors expected to find in Portuguese translations was given by Fr. José Mayne in 1788, who wrote that the translator “did not [commit any] fault

35 RMC, cx 14, Jul., 10, 1788. 36 RMC, cx. 7, n. 91, Nov., 14, 1771 37 “A prezente he certamente das mais completas, porque sendo muito fiel, conserva a propriedade, erudicção, e elegancia com que a escrevêo o seu Author.” RMC, cx. 8, n. 56, Sep. 1, 1772. 38 “[…] representa por inteiro os pensamenttos, q se admirão, e encontrão no Original, e não omitte palavra alguma, q possa ser necessaria ou importante.” RMC, cx. 9, n. 3, Jan. 10, 1777. 39 “[…] vocabulos antiquados, pouco, ou nada uzados nos escritos policos e correctos do prezente seculo [...]” RMC, cx. 10, n. 38, Apr., 20, 1777. 40 RMC. Cx 9, n. 15, Mar. 14, 1776. 41 “[...] A tradução he pura, expedita, e corrente, sem a manchar com estrangeirismos, ou palavras antiquadas [...]” RMC. Cx 9, n. 27, May 17, 1776 e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 38 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal regarding the laws of translation,” clearly expressing the original ideas notwithstanding the presence of “dry and pompous words.”42 The “laws of translation” were never made explicit by any censor, although some translators expressed their adherence to the ideas of D’Alembert (1763) in his Observations sur l'art de traduire. The Brazilian-born translator Manoel José Nogueira da Gama acknowledged this in his translation of Lazare Carnot’s Réflexions sur la métaphysique du calcul infinitésimal, when he advocated the need for more translations in order to advance Portuguese science (Harden, 2010: 273-6), as did António de Araújo (Count of Barca) in his translation of A Song for St. Cecilia's Day (Dryden, 1799), making it quite explicit in his preface that he followed all the advice given by D’Alembert. We can conclude that the censors, who were probably quite aware of such ideas, were also concerned with the establishment of some standards for the translations they reviewed. One of these standards, which coincides with D’Alembert’s ideas, was the complete and profound knowledge of both languages (Portuguese and the original language, which could be either Latin, English, Italian, German, or—mainly—French). As we have seen, this was a recurrent theme in the pareceres, often referring to the translators’ lack of familiarity with either the original language or the Portuguese vernacular rules. Demands for clarity of expression and faithfulness to the original ideas were also common among the censors. These were often accompanied by criticisms of the indiscriminate use of words of foreign origin, as well as of “antiquated” words no longer in use during the second half of the eighteenth century. In essence, the censors were laying down rules of usage when they tried to establish how, how often, and in which cases it was correct—or incorrect—to adapt French, Latin, or English words to the Portuguese translations or to resort to archaic terms, which might be re-signified, particularly in the context of new scientific or literary uses. This article focuses on the importance of the ideas or ideology of the Enlightenment for understanding what the censors and translators did in their daily work and we have shown that their efforts were aimed at attempting to shape scientific and national linguistic identities. Moreover, the main objective here was to show that what these men understood as enlightened ideas was not necessarily what philosophers and historians have defined as such in the centuries after the ideas were debated and disseminated across Europe.

42 “[…] a Traducção apparece algua coiza enfarinhada de palavras secas e amofinadas pela falta de uzo.” RMC, cx 14, n. 25. Apr., 18, 1788. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 39 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal

Translators seemed certain that their work was a practical and necessary way to engage Portugal in the debates of the Enlightenment, and that, in doing so, they were major contributors to the “glory of the Nation” (Harden, 2010). The censors—who were actually agents of the monarch with the very explicit obligation of contributing to that effort (Tavares, 2014)—seemed to agree, and, as such, there was little difference between the years under Pombal and the subsequent period, underscoring the perceived continuity of his ideas into the first decade of the nineteenth century (Villalta, 1999). Therefore, the efforts made and the attention paid towards the translations by the many agents of the printed word (translators, publishers, and censors) can show the modern historian how an “enlightened” identity was being built around the publication of the many Portuguese translations, as well as how the contact with—and the interference of—the ideals of the Enlightenment (however these may be defined) were being interpreted by those agents (Araújo, 2014). The attempts at defining grammar, orthography and the vernacular use of the language can be seen as the for these multifaceted practices.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 40 DeNipoti Censoring Translations in 18th-Century Portugal

References

Abreu, M. (2007). “O controle à publicação de livros nos séculos XVIII e XIX: uma outra visão da censura.” Fênix Revista de História e Estudos Culturais, ano IV, v. 4. n. 4, out.- dez. Abreu, M. (2009). “A liberdade e o erro: a ação da censura luso-brasileira (1769-1834).” Fênix Revista de História e Estudos Culturais, ano VI, v. 6. n. 3, jul.- set. Araújo, A. C. (2014). “Cultivar a razão, educar e civilizar os povos: a filosofia das Luzes no mundo português.” Revista de História Regional, v. 19, n. 2. Boto, C. (1998). “O enciclopedismo de Ribeiro Sanches: pedagogia e medicina na confecção do Estado.” História da Educação, v. 2, n. 4, 107-117. [D’Alembert, J. le R.] (1763). Mélanges de littérature, d'histoire, et de philosophie. A Amsterdam, chez Zacharie Chatelain & fils. Denipoti, C. & Pereira, M. (2014). “Feitiçaria e iluminismo: traduções e estratégias editoriais em Portugal no século XVIII.” Maracanan. v.10, n.10, Janeiro/Dezembro, 48-63. Dryden, J. (1799). Ode para o dia de Santa Cecília. Hamburg. Goméz, F. R. (2001). “Con privilegio: la exclusiva de edición del libro antigo español.” Revista General de Información y Documentación, v. 11, 163-200. Galiza, J. M. (1770). Nova Instrucção de visitar enfermos, e assistir aos agonizantes. Lisbon. Genette, G. (2009). Paratextos editoriais. Cotia/SP, Ateliê Editorial. Harden, A. R. de O. (2010). Brazilian translators in Portugal. 1795-1808. PhD Thesis. College of Arts & Celtic Studies, Dublin; Dublin University. Jostock, I. (2007). La censure negociée: le contrôle du livre a Genève, 1560-1625. Geneva: Livrairie Droz. Leite, M. Q. (2011). “A construção da norma linguística na gramática do século XVIII.” Alfa, v. 55 (2): 665-684. Martins, M. T. E. P. (2005). A censura literária em Portugal nos séculos XVII e XVIII. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Negroni, B. (1995). Lectures interdites: le travail des censeurs au XVIIIe siècle (1723-1774). Paris: Albin Michel. Neves, L. M. B. P.; Ferreira, T. M. T. B. da C. (1989). “O medo dos ‘abomináveis princípios franceses’: a censura dos livros nos inícios do século XIX no Brasil.” Acervo, Rio de Janeiro, v. 4, n. 1: 113-119, jan.-jun. Pita, J. R. (2009). “Manuel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva: Um luso-brasileiro divulgador de ciência. O caso particular da vacinação contra a varíola.” Mneme-Revista de Humanidades, v. 10, n. 26. Rodrigues, A. A.G. (1992). A tradução em Portugal. Lisbon: INCM. Silvestre, J. P. (2007). “A tradução do discurso enciclopédico para a língua portuguesa.” In Verdelho, T. & Silvestre, J. P. Dicionarística portuguesa. Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro:153-161. Tavares, R. (2014). Le censeur éclairé (Portugal 1768-1777). Diss. Paris, EHESS. Villalta, L. C. (1999). Reformismo ilustrado, censura e práticas de leitura: usos do livro na América Latina. PhD Thesis in History—Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo.

Received for publication: 26 March 2017 Accepted in revised form: 11 May 2018 Recebido para publicação: 26 de Março de 2017 Aceite após revisão: 11 de Maio de 2018 e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 41

Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil: Conditions and Factors of Vulnerability in Portugal’s Operation of this Business During the

Yvette Santos1

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to knowledge about the bilateral relations between Portugal and Brazil and the role played by Portuguese emigration in maintaining these relations during the Military Dictatorship. By analyzing the maritime transport of emigrants between the two countries—a business monopolized by foreign companies from northern Europe—we seek to identify the measures adopted by Portuguese shipping companies in response to this foreign competition and to explain the reasons for their failure.

Keywords

Maritime History, History of Portugal, Portugal-Brazil Relations, Migration, Shipping Companies

Resumo

Este artigo pretende contribuir para o conhecimento das relações bilaterais entre Portugal e o Brasil e do papel desempenhado pela emigração portuguesa para a manutenção dessas relações no período da Ditadura Militar. A partir da análise do projeto de exploração do transporte marítimo de emigrantes na rota entre os dois países—negócio que era monopolizado pelas companhias estrangeiras da Europa do norte—procura-se identificar os meios adotados pelas companhias portuguesas de navegação para enfrentar a concorrência estrangeira e explicar as razões do falhanço nacional.

Palavras-chave

História Marítima, História de Portugal, Relações Portugal-Brasil, Migração, Companhias de Navegação

1 Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, Portugal. This article is financed by the FEDER Funds through the Operational Program Factors of Competitiveness - COMPETE and by National Funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - within the project UID / HIS / 04209/2013. E-Mail: [email protected]

Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil

This article investigates whether the establishment of the dictatorial regime and the consequent position adopted by the State disrupted or continued the role played by the previous regime in relation to emigration, within the context of the State dirigisme that gradually became embedded in the economic sphere. This process began with the military coup of May 28, 1926 (Rosas 2000: 253; Garoupa and Rossi 2005: 429-435)2 and was later enshrined in the 1933 Constitution. We seek to ascertain to what extent the claim that the State was the only entity capable of ensuring that the national interest would be respected (Meneses 2010: 115; Baganha 2003: 2-3) is confirmed by the data relating to the number of departures of the Portuguese population and, in particular, to the maritime emigrant transport business. By analyzing the process of negotiation that led to the signing of a contract between the State and Portuguese shipping companies to operate the Portugal-Brazil route, beginning in 1928, we identify both the extent of the State’s intervention in this project and the reasons behind it, as well as the strategies adopted by the companies. We will also explore the conditions under which the emigrant transport business was operated, in addition to the first steps taken during the Military Dictatorship and their subsequent failure in a context of profound instability and both national and international political, economic, and migratory reconfigurations. I will also discuss the business strategies of the shipping companies operating on the South American route (Miller 2012: 251-258; Butel 2012: 463-497; Zolberg 2006)3.

The Impasses in Operating the Portugal-Brazil Route

When characterizing corporatist organization in the 1930s, the historian Fernando Rosas demonstrated the incoherent nature of State intervention. According to Rosas, State intervention was justified by the need to act in situations of crisis, but it was above all dependent on the “negotiating power of the partners present” (Rosas and Garrido 2012: 35), which precluded any efforts to search for a balance between the forces involved. This position formed part of the general attempt to redefine the economic principles and policies that were to guide Portugal’s new policy of national economic self-sufficiency, and it naturally included the country’s merchant navy sector. Guaranteeing Portugal’s presence

2 See also how the 1911, 1933, and 1976 Constitutions and the subsequent revisions of 1982, 1989, and 1997 progressively incorporated the economic constitution, with the 1933 Constitution being particularly important in this regard. 3 On American immigration policy during the 1920s, see, for instance, the book by Aristide Zolberg. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 43 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil on major international maritime routes was therefore one of the interests of the shipping companies and the Portuguese State. This resulted in much greater prominence being given to commercial relations with the colonies, so that Portugal’s relationship with Brazil was relegated to second place. The desire to maintain ties with Brazil, an echo from the days of the Monarchy (Leone 1902; Marques 1991:161-162), was not therefore something new on the part of the Military Dictatorship. The economic and financial advantages that emigration to Brazil brought Portugal, notably in terms of its balance of payments (Martins 1994; Pereira 1981; Baganha 1988; Lains 2003: 156-166), coupled with the presence of a large Portuguese community in that country, justified maintaining and developing political, economic, commercial, and cultural ties, as well as the maritime route between the two countries. Various attempts were thus made to strengthen these ties, fed by an ideology and a political discourse that considered emigration to be a factor that could bolster relations (Leal 2009). The efforts made, however, were sporadic and did not always achieve any concrete result, which in turn affected the maintenance of the maritime route between the two countries. In fact, strong foreign competition from England, France and Germany (Light 2013; Keeling 2012: 61-107) together with Portugal’s inability to adopt new technological standards in shipbuilding, the shortage of coal in Portugal, and the lack of any significant investment in the renewal of the national maritime fleet had all led the national shipping companies to move away from the emigrant transport business after the 1870s (Leite 1991; Alves 1994: 236-245). Instead, they committed themselves to short cabotage services and long-distance transport between Portugal and its colonies, despite the fact that the country still continued to register a significant number of departures (Serrão 1977: 33).4 Nor should Portugal’s dependence on England be forgotten. With its hegemonic power, England was the national economy’s main supplier, buyer, creditor, and investor, and had a monopoly on the transportation of goods (Rosas 1996: 75). After the end of the First World War, Portugal maintained one State-owned transport company, the Transportes Marítimos do Estado (TME), in activity (Pires 2011: 272- 282),5 which guaranteed that the maritime route to Brazil still remained operational. This was one more initiative that proved to be short-lived, since, in 1921/1922, proposals were made for the closure of both the line and the company itself due to several factors:

4 On the number of departures, see Joel Serrão. 5 Arquivo Histórico da Marinha (AHM), Marinha Mercante, 1918-1940, cx. 1389: Report from the Board of Directors to the Minister for the Navy about the activities of TME, February 20, 1922. On the creation of TME and the activities that it developed during the war, see Ana Paula Pires. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 44 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil disagreement with the Portuguese community in Brazil about the company’s operational strategy;6 the poor condition of the ships; the difficulty in obtaining supplies of fuel (which was now scarce and expensive); and especially the strong foreign competition along with the pressure exerted by the Portuguese maritime lobby to privatize this transport sector (Madureira 1998: 779).7 With the enactment of Law Nr. 1346, of September 9, 1922,8 which initiated the process by which national companies could buy and sell ships and reformulated the development plan for the national navy, a new step was taken in terms of flag discrimination in the face of economic and commercial instability (Sturmey 2009: 83-115). This involved pledging that the national merchant fleet would be owned by Portuguese shipping companies and would be duly afforded State protection provided they committed themselves to operating the maritime routes considered to be of national interest. The political will to retain the Portugal-Brazil route was not, however, consensual.9 Its profitability and sustainability, both of which were dependent on the indispensable protection of the State, were called into question. Already in 1919,10 the form of this protection had been debated in Parliament, and the suggestion of a regime that granted national companies exclusive rights to emigrant transport was defended. It had been proposed at that time to “nationalize” emigration, so as to guarantee TME a monopoly on this business, to the detriment of foreign companies. This idea was, in the meantime, placed to one side during the First Republic, for fear of triggering an adverse international reaction. The operation of the Portugal-Brazil maritime route was finally enshrined in Law Nr. 1346 as being of national interest. This was due to three key factors: firstly, the attempts at a new political rapprochement between the two countries, marked by the negotiation of a trade agreement during Bernardino Machado’s presidential visit to Brazil in 1922;11 secondly, economic and commercial pressure from both Portugal and Brazil regarding the operation of the line; and thirdly, the pretensions of some private individuals

6 Arquivo Histórico Diplomático/Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (AHD/MNE), S13.1.E12.P2/82599: Letter from Transportes Marítimos do Estado to the Directorate-General for Political and Diplomatic Affairs/Ministry for Foreign Affairs, September 13, 1921. 7 On the influence of employers and owners on the closure of public companies as from 1922, see Luís Nuno Madureira. 8 Law Nr. 1346. In Diário do Governo (DG), 1st Series, Nr. 187, September 9, 1922. 9 Law Nr. 1577, which set out the conditions for selling the TME fleet and reinforced the preference to make these ships available to commercial colonial traffic. In DG, 1st Series, April 10, 1924. 10 Senator Gaspar de Lemos. In Diário do Senado, Session Nr. 7, June 19, 1919. 11 For the negotiations that led to this agreement, see AHD/MNE, S13.E25.P4/84479. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 45 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil connected to the Port Wine trade to set up a shipping company dedicated to this route (Linha de Navegação Portugal-Brasil) if Portuguese and Brazilian capital, political support, and a State subsidy were made available.12 At the same time as the future of the Portuguese merchant fleet was being decided, measures were being adopted to protect the Portuguese ships for the transport of Portuguese emigrants, along with other measures deemed necessary to finance projects for the improvement of port infrastructures and to increase the State’s revenue. Such measures consisted of granting State subsidies and privileges in order to incentivize the transport of goods and passengers on Portuguese ships. In contrast, foreign naval fleets were swamped with taxes and tariffs, creating tensions with foreign companies and their representatives in Portugal. This tension was to last throughout the Military Dictatorship. Ships were subjected to increased control and inspections in order to check that the proper conditions for transporting emigrants were being met, and this, together with the pursuit of a firmer commitment from shipping companies to repatriate the poor and needy, made it more difficult to put into effect the legislation that regulated Portuguese emigration and set out the principles governing the new regime concerning emigration.13 This led to conflicts with the foreign companies.14

The Military Dictatorship and the Compromise between National and Foreign Interests

Although the military coup of 1926 had put an end to the First Republic, the Military Dictatorship continued the work of reconfiguring the maritime development policy begun under the previous regime by strengthening the protection offered to national shipping companies. These companies continued to concentrate their activity on the transport of goods and passengers between the colonies and the metropolis, with the colonies gaining greater importance on the national and international political scene (Castelo 2007: 61-98; Proença 2010; Ferreira 2015: 163-168). However, the world was entering a period in which the market in international trade was beginning to shrink; a

12 Letter from José Aparício dos Santos, Viscount of Povoença, to Bernardino Machado, December 10, 1924. Correspondência. Fundo DBG—Documentos Bernardino Machado, Pasta: 08044.103, Fundação Mário Soares. 13 Decree Nr. 5624. In DG, 1st Series, 6th Supplement, Nr. 98, May 10, 1919. Decree Nr. 5886. In DG, 1st Series, Nr. 117, June 19, 1919. 14 AHD/MNE, S12.1.E25.P2/76445. Folder: “Serviços Clínicos a bordo de navios estrangeiros que transportem emigrantes portugueses.” Letter from Veiga Simões to the Minister of the Interior, Nr. 390/21, Lisbon, December 5, 1921. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 46 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil period that was further characterized by a greater number of ships—both old and new—in circulation, and a general increase in their overall tonnage (Miller 2012: 246-251). In the passenger transport sector, the transportation of emigrants was no longer considered by foreign shipping companies to be such a profitable business since the restrictions imposed by America on the entry of foreigners led them to rethink their operational strategies in this sector. A move was therefore made to prioritize and to commit more resources to the business of transporting tourists and businessmen on the North American route (Miller 2012: 252-254; Butel 2012: 480-481). On the other hand, the emigrant transport business on the South American route, together with the transport of tourists and refugees, still proved to be attractive, and even allowed old ships to be used. The Portuguese economic sectors linked directly to external trade also found themselves weakened as a result of the international trade conjuncture and the national measures taken in the 1920s to increase taxes. This led medium-sized and large companies with economic interests in Portuguese industry, commerce, and agriculture to support the military coup (Telo 1980). In the area of passenger transport, the measures restricting migratory movements imposed by the receiving countries did not directly affect the Portuguese shipping companies since their traffic was almost exclusively centered on the Portugal-colonies route, which was partly subsidized by the State (Castelo 2007: 80-83). Consequently, Portuguese companies had only had a sporadic presence in the North and South American routes since 1922. The dictatorial state’s intervention in regulating national maritime activity, more specifically in establishing the principles governing the business strategies of Portuguese shipping companies, was generally accepted by these companies at that time, on the condition that the protection of the Portuguese ships was guaranteed.15 It was thus up to the State to reinforce this protection and to determine which sovereign lines and commercial routes should be nationalized.16 The progressive ‘surrender’ of these companies to the State, in its capacity as the regulator of economic interest, was not restricted to the case of Portugal, since similar situations were found in Italy, Germany, and Greece (Giulianelli 2016; Russell 2016; Manitakis 2007: 63-74). This shows the difficulty that these economic groups faced when confronted with the economic and commercial

15 Letter from the Association of Shipowners and Shipping Agents of the Port of Lisbon (Associação dos Armadores de Navios e Agentes de Navegação do Porto de Lisboa), Lisbon, August 5, 1926. In AHM, Companhia Nacional de Navegação, 1918-1949, cx. 1358-12. 16 Letter from the 1st Tax Office of the Companhia Nacional de Navegação—Directorate-General of Public Accounts/Ministry of Finance to the Minister of Finance, May 16, 1928. In Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Arquivo Oliveira Salazar (AOS), MA-3, cx. 349, pt. 1. Primeira subdivisão, 1928, maio 16. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 47 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil reality at both the national and the international level. According to the historians António José Telo and Fernando Rosas, it was during this period that Salazar himself managed the needs of each economic interests. He took a series of economic measures aimed at reconciling contradictory interests, which were affected not only by the national and international scenario, but also by the budgetary and financial policy adopted by the head of government and linked to the austerity program and the program designed to stabilize the escudo (Telo 1980: 111-126). The origins of the maritime sector’s demands regarding emigrant transport are to be found in the Republican period when several (and at times contradictory) demands had been made by both foreign and national companies. These demands mostly centered around a request to reduce taxes in general, including those that were levied on passengers. On one hand, foreign shipping companies demanded an end to discrimination in favor of the Portuguese shipping companies, which they considered unfair and a barrier to the freedom of international trade as enshrined in the Geneva Convention of October 31, 1922.17 On the other hand, the national merchant navy demanded an increase in State protection and a reduction in the taxes that it paid. State protection involved the traditional concession of subsidies, granted from November 1926 onwards to the three main Portuguese shipping companies—the Companhia Nacional de Navegação (CNN),18 the Companhia Colonial de Navegação (CCN),19 and the Companhia de Navegação dos Carregadores Açorianos20—in order to regularize each company’s financial situation and to help towards repairing the old TME ships that they had purchased.21 In exchange, Decree Laws Nrs. 14646 and 14647, of December 3, 1927, satisfied the foreign companies by allowing a reduction in their fiscal charges for certain shipping routes—Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Canary Isles, and the west coast of Morocco—and a fifty percent reduction in the stamp duty levied on the price of maritime

17 See the letter from Bettencourt Rodrigues to the Minister of Trade, s.d. In AHM, Pasta 5—Informações prestadas pelo Sr. Vasques de X. Fundo 27—Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante. Imposições Marítimas Gerais—Lv 288, 1922 a 1928, cota 3-XVI-7-1. 18 Decree Nr. 12605. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 248, November 5, 1926. 19 Decree Nr. 13101. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 24, January 29, 1927. 20 Decree Nr. 14623. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 261, November 25, 1927. 21 Access to the subsidy was subject to the following condition: a six percent interest rate to be amortized in 40 six-monthly payments. In addition, the companies were obliged to have a State auditor on the Board of Management of each company whose job it was to control the use of this subsidy. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 48 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil passages. They did not, however, reduce the charges on the routes between Portugal and .22 The regulations governing maritime emigrant transport continued to require the compulsory presence of a team of Portuguese doctors and nurses, although the complaints submitted by foreign companies always highlighted the pointlessness of this service, which was considered to be too expensive.23 In November, 1930, as part of the administrative reform of emigration services, a new step was taken. The State strengthened its grip on all shipping companies (both national and foreign) by imposing certain controls on the conditions under which Portuguese emigrants could be transported by sea. It made such transport conditional to the presence of Portuguese medical and other support staff, to the requirement for foreign and national companies, to repatriate indigents and Portuguese emigrants with no means of subsistence and no work in Brazil.24

The Portugal-Brazil Line: From Negotiation to National Withdrawal

With the redefinition of maritime policy in 1928, the operation of the Portugal- Brazil line by Portuguese companies once again became a matter of much discussion. The discourse about giving more value to relations with Brazil called for a joint effort by the State and the national private sector to maintain the operation of the line. Thus, although previous attempts at granting national companies the monopoly of Portuguese emigrant transport—a business dominated by foreigners at the time—had not been successful, doing so in a context of great commercial instability was seen as necessary in order to guarantee the links between the two countries and as a profitable sideline to the transportation of goods. The legislation that allowed national companies already set up or to be established with foreign capital25 to have access to State protection enabled the Sociedade Linha de Navegação Portugal-Brasil26 to present the government of Ivens Ferraz with an already

22 Decree-Laws Nr. 14646 and 14647. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 267, December 3, 1927. 23 Decree-Law Nr. 13213. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 44, March 4, 1927. 24 Decree-Law Nr. 19029. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 265, November 13, 1930. This decree also refers to the conditions governing emigrant transportation, the hiring of medical and support staff, and disciplinary actions. 25 This decree-law annulled Law Nr. 1787, of June 25, 1925, which had permitted the acquisition and purchase of TME’s ships only by incorporated companies with 49% foreign capital. Law Nr. 1787. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 139, June 25, 1925. Decree-Law Nr. 15360. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 85, April 14, 1928. 26 The representatives of the company were António Centeno, José Aparício dos Santos (Viscount of Povoença), Lieutenant-Captain José Francisco Monteiro, Jorge de Povoença and Francisco Dias Lemos. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 49 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil existing project, dating from 1924, to operate the Portugal-Brazil line. This time, the operation was primarily based on transporting emigrants using ships belonging to the company, purchased with their own capital and capable of competing with foreign ships without requiring any State subsidy.27 In this way, the two main lines that traditionally covered Brazil—one to the north and one to the south—would be guaranteed. In exchange, and to ensure the lines’ profitability, they demanded that a decree-law be passed, granting the company the exclusive right to transport two thirds of Portuguese emigrants for a period of fifteen years. Faced with this proposal, CNN and CCN also competed for the award of the contract and lobbied the government. CNN promised to make ships available to sail to the ports of Santos and Rio de Janeiro, provided certain demands were met: national and international advertising that would highlight the company’s initiative; greater care in selecting the agents who would represent the company in Brazil; and the monopoly operation of the route for a period of ten years.28 In return, CCN operated a monthly voyage, demanding the State’s protection to cover any vulnerabilities (such as the age of their ships compared to foreign ones) and shortfalls associated with the route’s operation, particularly on the return journey. The State would have to provide a subsidy and a minimum five-year contract that would guarantee CCN’s monopoly of the route. CCN also suggested that an extra tax be collected from emigrants who chose to travel with foreign companies.29 From these three proposals, the one put forward by CNN was chosen to operate the route. The decision would seem to be related to the opinion written by the Minister for the Navy, Luís Magalhães Correia, who had taken a cautious stance right from the start about the opportunity to operate the Portugal-Brazil line, on account of the lack of studies about the route’s operating conditions.30 The Minister nevertheless considered that the

27 To be specific, the following services would be made available: two boats of 10/15000 tons, for transporting cargo and first to third class passengers; three sister ships of 8250 tons each, built in 1924; four ships of 7-8000 tons each to carry coal and goods; routes established to Brazil, the Portuguese colonies and the north of Europe; regulation of maritime credit. 1928/1937. In ANTT, AOS - MA-3A, cx. 350, pt. 1-1ª Subdivisão—1928, June 14. 28 “Navegação para o Brasil” [Shipping to Brazil]. Report to be presented to the meeting of the Board of Directors of the Companhia Nacional de Navegação, of October 18, 1929, by the Director, José Augusto Cardoso Leitão. October 18, 1929. In ANTT–AOS, MA-3, cx. 349, pt. 7. 1ª Subdivisão - 5ª: 1929, October 20-29. 29 Letter from the Companhia Colonial de Navegação to the Minister for the Navy, September 5, 1929. In ANTT—AOS, MA-3A, cx. 350, pt. 1. 1ª Subdivisão - 4º. 30 On this subject, see also Theodoro da Costa to Francisco Ribeiro Salgado, Lisbon, September 9, 1929, Nr. 31 (13) 5-165. In AHM, Book 307, 1929-1930, 3-XVI-7-4. Pasta Processo da carreira de navegação para o Brasil—Correspondência—1929. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 50 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil time was right to launch this initiative, given the indispensable protection of the State, the increased number of emigrants, and the continuous protests from the export trade sector (which had great hopes for Salazar’s economic program and his promises of aid). The proposal of the Sociedade Linha de Navegação Portugal-Brasil was excluded since, although its representatives were well-known within the Portuguese financial and commercial community, Magalhães Correia doubted that the company had the capacity to make sufficient financial capital available to purchase the ships. He felt that the responsibility for operating the Portugal-Brazil route should be given to one of the two main Portuguese companies chosen by public tender, without imposing the requirement to transport a certain percentage of emigrants, so as to avoid conflict with the foreign companies, and as an alternative, requiring the emigrant to pay a variable fee as a way of financing the State’s support and the protection of the Portuguese ships. In January, 1930, CNN inaugurated its first voyages with the steamships Nyassa and Lourenço Marques. Both Portuguese and Brazilian newspapers launched an intensive publicity campaign designed to inform people of this patriotic initiative and to appeal to the Portuguese emigrants’ national sentiment, insofar as this would direct their choice towards national carriers rather than foreign ones (Silva and Santos 2014: 76-77). In the first year of operation, the outcome proved positive, although losses occurred on some voyages, namely those of the Lourenço Marques. In comparison with other maritime routes, the Portugal- Brazil line remained an important part of the company’s business, being ranked second after the African routes (Angola and Mozambique).31 In turn, CNN managed to make a profit from the emigrant transport business, achieving a better result in 1930 than it did from its charter operations. Thus, a balance was finally assured between the outward and return journeys for passenger transport in all three classes, but the profitability of this business was primarily due to the emigrants travelling third class.32 Although it had reported a slight profit, the company very quickly found itself in difficulties, which led it to demand further guarantees and greater State protection. Foreign competition was generally considered the main problem. Organized in a cartel through a ‘shipping conference,’ the foreign companies divided the international maritime routes among themselves and established the operational rules, particularly each company’s operational percentage and the expected compensations, the fares for each passage, and the commissions to be paid to the intermediary agents responsible for soliciting and organizing

31 “Mapa Comparativo.” In AHM, Correspondência, Actas, Processos, cx. 244, 1926-1951, 3-XVI-5-7. 32 “Carreira do Brasil,” Companhia Nacional de Navegação, Lisbon, October 7, 1930. In ANTT – AOS, MA- 3, cx. 349, pt. 2. 15ª subdivisão – 193? e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 51 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil passages (Deakin and Seward 1973; Yui 1980). CNN had several problems trying to keep pace with the foreign requirements for operating the route decided upon by the shipping conference, thereby exposing its weakness in defending its own interests during the negotiating process.33 As a result, in October, 1930, CNN demanded that the Ministry for the Navy—which turned down the request34—reserve a share of the emigrants for its two ships (800 for the Nyassa and 500 for the Lourenço Marques) to offset the financial losses caused by the rise in agents’ commissions decided upon by the 1930 conference. This amount increased from 150$00 to 500$00-700$00 per third-class passage. In addition to the problems associated with international competition, and although this fact is not mentioned in the sources consulted, the increasingly unstable international economic and migratory context led to a significant fall in the number of departures between 1929 and 1931, which further contributed to making the line unprofitable. The 1929 economic crisis, the political and economic instability caused by the 1930 Brazilian revolution, and Brazil’s decision of December 19, 1930 to drastically limit the entry of migrants travelling third class and to restrict access by foreigners to the national labor market (Mendes 2011: 247-248; Geraldo 2009: 175-207)35 were all prejudicial to the emigrant transport business, decreasing its profitability and increasing the number of people needing to be repatriated (Oliveira 2007: 845-847). The national companies’ obligation to guarantee transport was in fact the target of criticism from CNN, which considered itself to be overburdened with this responsibility, given the loss of profit in its emigrant transport business.36 Faced with these difficulties, in 1932, CNN asked the government for permission to cease its operation of the route. However, a commission from the Higher Council of the Merchant Navy still tried to assess its viability by studying internal documents and evaluating the accounts of the company’s last activities. The length of time that this evaluation took, the complaints received from the Portuguese community in Brazil (from the Chambers of Commerce of Pará and of Rio de Janeiro, among others) demanding that

33 Letter from the directors of the Companhia Nacional de Navegação to the government auditor at the Companhia Nacional de Navegação, Lisbon, October 8, 1930. In ANTT—AOS, MA-3A, cx. 350, pt. 1. 34 Letter Nr. 141/5-3-1931 to CNN. In AHM, Direção Geral da Marinha – Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante – Proc Nr. 322(13) 5-1, Carreiras de Navegação para o Brazil, 1930-1931 ficha 1 a 7. 35 Only in 1936 did Brazil agree to make the entry of the Portuguese into the country more flexible. Until then, the decree of December 19, 1930, was followed by the 1934 “quota law.” On the Decree of December 19, 1930, see José Saccheta Ramos Mendes, and, on the quota law, see Endrica Geraldo. 36 Letter 714/22-7-1932 from the Directorate-General for Commercial Business (DGNC)/Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MNE) to the Inspectorate-General of Emigration Services (IGSE). In AHM, Direção Geral da Marinha (DGM) – Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante – Proc. Nr. 322(13) 5-1, Carreiras de Navegação para o Brazil, 1930-1931 ficha 1 a 7. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 52 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil the line be started again,37 and the diplomatic attempts to bring Salazar and Brazil closer together once more in order to overcome these commercial weaknesses and reaffirm Portugal’s international position (Santos s.d.: 560-567; 2004: 177-209) led to the decision to provide a subsidy of one million escudos for four voyages between Portugal and Brazil with a 45-day interval between them.38 This measure was not, however, considered sufficient to overcome the difficulties, and so CNN reiterated its request that a share of emigrants be reserved especially for its operations. This request was supported by the Merchant Navy’s board of management and sent to both the Ministry of the Interior and the prime minister, Salazar. The company further proposed that emigrants pay a 500$00 surcharge if they opted to travel on foreign ships.39 In September, 1932, owing to CNN’s deficit situation,40 another request was made for an increase in the subsidy for undertaking the voyage to Brazil (rising from 250,000$00 to 500,000$00), but the company ended up abandoning the route and did not even make this last subsidized voyage.41 The initiative taken to operate the Portugal-Brazil route between 1930 and 1932 once again showed evidence of Portugal’s incapacity to keep the line both active and profitable. Although part of the justification for its failure can be found in the weight of the foreign competition and the unstable international migratory and economic context, the lack of preparation of the Portuguese parties involved also remains a crucial factor. It can therefore be seen how State protection was insufficient for ensuring the route’s profitability and that the government’s response corresponded to the conjunctural satisfaction of national economic interests. The literature that has analyzed the business strategies of foreign shipping companies has shown the importance of carefully undertaken market studies, the discovery and use of new contacts, the consolidation of knowledge networks, and the commitment of the partners to ensuring the viability and success of any maritime project (Miller 2012: 69-213; Keeling 2012: 33-51). CNN knew how to prepare

37 Telegram from the President of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in Rio de Janeiro to the DGNC/MNE, February 6, 1932; Letter from the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in Pará to the Ministry of Trade, February 15, 1932. In AHM, DGM – Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante – Proc Nr. 322(13) 5-1, Carreiras de Navegação para o Brazil, 1930-1931 ficha 1 a 7. 38 Decree-Law Nr. 21186. DG, 1st Series, Nr. 102, April 30, 1932. 39 Letter 615/1-7-1932 from the Government Commissioner at CNN to the Minister of Finance. In AHM, DGM – Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante – Proc. Nr. 322(13) 5-1, Carreiras de Navegação para o Brazil, 1930-1931 ficha 1 a 7. 40 Letter from the Government Commissioner at CNN to the Higher Council of the Merchant Navy. In AHM, Direção Geral da Marinha – Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante – Proc Nr. 322(13) 5-1, Carreiras de Navegação para o Brazil, 1930-1931 ficha 1 a 7. 41 Note 829/29-7-1933 to the 6th Division of the Directorate-General of Public Accounts/Ministry of Finance. In AHM, DGM – Conselho Superior da Marinha Mercante – Proc Nr. 322 (13) 5-1, Carreiras de Navegação para o Brazil, 1930-1931 ficha 1 a 7. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 53 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil itself to some extent, but it was only supported by the enthusiasm of the Portuguese community in Brazil, publicity, the commitment and loyalty of the intermediary agents, and, above all, the protection that the State provided in order to ensure the route’s profitability. CNN’s partially unsuccessful experience paved the way for a phased commercial and economic withdrawal from the colonies, although it still underlined the urgent need to continue with the reconfiguration of the government’s maritime development policy. This culminated in the creation of the Junta Nacional da Marinha Mercante [National Board for the Merchant Navy] in 1939. This corporative body dealt with the centralized State management of national maritime activities. Portuguese emigration, which had declined in numbers in the 1930s, temporarily ceased to be a national political priority and there were no new attempts made by Portuguese shipping companies to operate the Portugal-Brazil line during this decade. One exception to this was the transportation of refugees by CCN and CNN during the Second World War (Pimentel and Heinrich 2006: 175-188). The departure of people would again become a national political and economic issue with the start of the international migratory movements after the war. In such a favorable context, Portuguese emigration policy was redefined, culminating in the creation of the Junta Nacional de Emigração [JNE-National Board for Emigration] in 1947, for which management of the maritime transport of emigrants became a central issue (Santos 2014: 127-136). With this new initiative, we confirm a break with the practices followed previously. The strategy adopted during the Military Dictatorship for the operation of the Portugal-Brazil line had not been a break with previous experiences, however, as the operational problems and the responses from both government and business still remained in place. Although the nationalization of Portuguese emigration, which had been demanded since 1919, did not happen, the creation of the JNE went some way towards finally satisfying the Portuguese shipping companies, which, once again, had to respond to the political interest of the State in guaranteeing a Portuguese presence on the Portugal-Brazil route. A subsidy and a share of emigrant transportation was reserved for CCN as a condition for their operating the line, but the traditional participation of foreign shipping companies was not excluded from this business. Helped by the favorable context of international migrations and the progressive lack of interest displayed by foreign companies from the north of Europe (England, Germany, and France) in this type of business, which became obsolete from then on, and which primarily interested companies that sought to profit from it while it lasted (such as the Italians and the Portuguese), the Portuguese State

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 54 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil thus gained a stronger negotiating position with the companies to impose its new emigration policy.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 55 Santos Portuguese Emigrant Transport to Brazil

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Received for publication: 28 December 2017 Accepted in revised form: 06 June 2018 Recebido para publicação: 28 de Dezembro de 2017 Aceite após revisão: 06 de Junho de 2018 e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 57

Introduction

Filipa Lowndes Vicente1

These three articles written by Nicolás Barbosa López, Pedro Lopes de Almeida, and Torin Spangler began as essays written for the course I taught at Brown University in the Fall Semester of 2016-2017, as Visiting Professor at the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (FLAD/Brown Visiting Professorship). The course was titled "Travels and Exhibitions: writing, collecting and displaying the world in the 19th and 20th centuries" and addressed the entangled histories of traveling, exhibiting, collecting, writing and photographing within different geographical spaces. From Brazil to Angola and , the spaces and times explored through the thirteen weeks of the Course could be placed within the wider context of the modern colonialism.

The University, the Department, the Students

Brown is a university with a Liberal Arts college and all courses are open to all students (all fields of knowledge, be it at the undergraduate or graduate levels, even though the more advanced ones have established pre-requisites or require permission from the instructor). This openness, allowing students to explore an immense realm of intellectual interests is what makes special places of Brown and other similar North-American universities. Even if this can also mean an additional challenge to the faculty, who has to engage with heterogeneity in their classes, the overall result is enriching to all. The four graduate students who enrolled and completed my course were a very homogenous group, though, something that also facilitated the project of developing their written assignments into scholarly articles. On the one hand, they were all in the early stages of their PhDs (which, in most universities in the USA, means that they have not yet decided on the topic of their theses. At this stage, they are encouraged to explore different subjects in seminars. From the second year onwards, they also work as teaching assistants). While on the other hand, and despite the diversity of their backgrounds from literature to media studies, they all shared the same intellectual and critical engagement, which allowed for a rewarding teaching and learning experience for all of us.

1 University of Lisbon, Institut of Social Sciences, Lisbon, Portugal. E-mail: [email protected]

Vicente Introduction

Despite their different origins and first languages — English from the US, Spanish from Colombia, and Continental Portuguese — all students could read Portuguese and some used this skill in the sources they used for their final papers. Therefore, apart from the need for Portuguese scholars to engage in English-speaking conversations if they want to be heard more broadly, there are also benefits from the kind of work and approaches foreign Portuguese speakers can pursue. A Department such as the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown is a rich center for , history, anthropology and social sciences, The evaluation of the students' performance encompassed different dimensions, research tasks, reading and discussing, oral presentations and also written assignments, a shorter one that consisted of writing a review of a book of his choice (a revised version of these four reviews were published in Análise Social (nº 223, vol. LII, 2017) under the a special section titled "Travels and exhibitions in the making of national or imperial identities", and a longer one, a 25-page research paper on a subject of their choice, related to the general subject of the course which has resulted in this section for the E-jph.

The Course: "Travels and Exhibitions: writing, collecting and displaying the world in the 19th and 20th centuries"

A political, cultural and intellectual history was intertwined in the practices of circulating, collecting and display of objects, images and ideas and the practices of producing different types of knowledge, written and visual. Throughout the course we engaged in discussions related to the relationship between knowledge and colonial and national contexts; the interdependence between ideological agendas and exhibition and collecting projects; the affirmation of national and imperial identities through spaces of visual and material knowledge; the ways in which different elites were involved in colonial scientific and development projects and the public and private dissemination of knowledge; travel as metaphor and photography and exhibitions as a transgression of time and space. Torin Spengler's article, “Whose Colonial Project? Angolan Elites and the Colonial Exhibitions of the 1930s: Notes on the Special Magazine Edition of A Província de Angola, August 15, 1934”, is a good example of all these approaches, while reinforcing the need to find those "voices from the colonies", not always in tune with those "voices from the metropolis", even when belonging to privileged white settlers.

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These ideas, explored in the course, were discussed through some specific comparative and transnational case-studies: the appropriation and circulation of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira's Brazilian collections between Brazil, Lisbon and Paris from the 18th to the 19th centuries; the botanist Welwisch's natural history expedition in Angola in the mid- 19th century; photography in Angola and in Goa in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century; the European grand tours of King D. Pedro V of Portugal and of his Uncle D. Pedro II, the Emperor of Brazil within the second half of the 19th century; Portuguese participation in Universal and Colonial Exhibitions; Goa's intellectual and cultural history, in its relationships with British Colonial India as well as Portugal and Europe; Colonial comparisons between British and Portuguese African and Indian colonial territories; or travelling and travel writing by women across different frontiers. Beyond those Portuguese masculine elites and those non-Portuguese men who lived or worked in territories under Portuguese hegemony — embodied as travelers, collectors, writers, exhibition organizers, photographers — we also analysed the places and agencies of non-white, non-Portuguese intellectual producers from those spaces under Portuguese colonial governments. We were also attentive to women's public imprint within a public sphere, mainly through writing and publication, and Nicolás Barbosa López's article — “The Exiled Insider: The Ambivalent Reception of Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)” — on Maria Graham's writings and reception within various contexts, is a good example of the many women that by the 19th century were publishing books and newspaper articles. Not all writing formats were available to them, though, and travel writing became one of the most accessible genres for women. Not threatening to the male-dominated scientific fields, travel writing, with its subjective and heterogeneous character, became the ideal realm for women to leave their mark within all possible subjects. In the article, “The past is a foreign photo: image and travel writing in the Benguela Railway. Angola, 1920-1930”, Pedro Lopes de Almeida also addresses travel writing and travel photography. Through his text, he explores the ways in which visual and written knowledge production should be thought about together, as well as revealing how the frontiers between different national colonial projects have to be crossed.

The challenges of placing the Lusophone case in a broader global context, both historically and theoretically, were also addressed in all the cases studied. Having in mind that the British Imperial world dominates the historiography on such subjects, we searched

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 60 Vicente Introduction for ways of placing the Portuguese case within a broader context. Circulation, mobility, but also the crossing of frontiers between geographies that tend to remain historiographically apart, were at the center of our reflections. All three articles explore how the practices of writing, photographing and exhibiting — the production and circulation of different kinds of knowledge between different national and colonial frontiers — was intertwined with the making and unmaking of colonial and national projects.

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The Exiled Insider: The Ambivalent Reception of Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)

Nicolás Barbosa Lopez1

Abstract

Maria Graham (Liverpool, 1785 - London, 1842) was one of the few female writers whose travel writings were published in Europe with relative success among the public. This article will focus on two aspects of her Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, published in England in 1824 after Graham lived twice in Brazil during its independence process: first, the way the diary reflects many of the paradoxes, contradictions, and multifaceted perspectives of the life and work of Maria Graham; and, second, the equally paradoxical reception of European critics. Ultimately, this text intends to analyze how the ambivalent reception mirrors a type of rhetoric that, in order to survive and avoid censorship in view of the difficult political context, relies precisely on ambivalence.

Keywords

Maria Graham, Travel Writing, Brazil, Longman, England, Female Writing, Dom Pedro, independence, slavery

Resumo

Maria Graham (Liverpool, 1785 - Londres, 1842) foi uma das poucas escritoras femininas cuja escrita de viagens foi publicada na Europa com relativo sucesso entre o público leitor. Este texto centrar-se-á em dois aspectos de análise a partir de seu diário Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, publicado na Inglaterra em 1824 depois de duas estadias no Brasil durante a época da independência: primeiramente, a maneira como o diário reflecte muitos dos paradoxos, contradições e perspectivas múltiplas na vida e obra da Maria Graham; e por outro lado a recepção igualmente paradoxal por parte da crítica europeia. Afinal, este texto pretende analisar o modo como a ambivalência na recepção espelha uma retórica que, para existir e evitar ser definitivamente censurada perante a difícil situação política, tem de valer-se precisamente da ambivalência.

Palavras-chave

Maria Graham, Escrita de Viagens, Brasil, Longman, Inglaterra, escrita feminina, Dom Pedro, independência, escravatura

1 PhD student at Brown University’s Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, (Providence, RI, U.S.A.). E-Mail: [email protected]

Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider

Tracing the steps of Maria Graham (Liverpool, 1785 - London, 1842)—née Maria Dundas and later known as Lady Maria Calcott—is, beyond the mere plurality of last names, an effort of going after a multifaceted character. Her Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824), which will be the main focus of this study, draws attention to different levels of multiplicity and contradiction that mirror some of her lifelong paradoxes. Accordingly, the reception of this journal is problematic because in no way can it be considered uniform. Thus, the perplexity of British reviewers who both praised and rejected Maria Graham’s book mirrors the paradoxes of her own life and work, as well as the ambivalence of both Brazilian and British audiences following the publication of the journal on Brazil. Both subservient and defiant, Graham ultimately became a reliable insider to some as well as a treacherous outsider to others. This article will describe and analyze the paradoxes of the reception of her text, with special attention to the implications of gender in the way her work was received by her contemporaries. I will lay out some of the main contradictions in Graham’s discourse by comparing excerpts from her journal and the historical context. Ultimately, I will relate this textual analysis with specific examples of reviews that seem to manifest problematic reactions to her writings. From 1809 to 1824, Graham embarked upon a series of travels, namely to Chile and Brazil, where she produced two of her most well known journals. In their 2010 edition of the Journal to Brazil, Hayward and Caballero identify and comment on some of the key moments of the narrative that manifest paradoxical positions as well as ideas that would be potentially problematic for British and male reviewers. As certain passages of her journal reveal, she had to cunningly navigate her male-dominated environment: while overtly displaying her intellect, Graham also portrayed herself with false self-deprecation. In the introduction to the journal, we discover that she voluntarily forfeits politics, justifying her exclusion of the topic: “My opportunities of information were too few; my habits as a woman and a foreigner never led me into situations where I could acquire the necessary knowledge” (Graham 59). Yet these are precisely the topics that she quickly delves into. Moreover, Adam Smith’s impact on her political and economic ideas became not only visible throughout her journal—she was convinced that a local policy of open free trade would be beneficial to both Brazil and Great Britain—but was also a double-edged sword that estranged her from Brazilian political and social circles. Ultimately, her Scottish ancestry, which she carefully distinguished from her British nationality, became a symbol of her intellectuality as well as one of the early reasons for her problematic relationship with

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Great Britain. The relationship that Graham established between erudition and nationality would partially mirror the dilemma that nineteenth-century critics faced when writing about her work: whether or not nationality came first, above other expressions of identity such as gender. Besides her writings, Graham also produced over 200 sketches of Brazilian landscapes, architecture, and social customs, a few of which were published in the original journals and reproduced in subsequent editions. Only recently have scholars recognized the value of these sketches, although no single volume has yet published the entirety of her drawings. Since the publication of the original journals, most reviewers have completely overlooked this aspect of Graham’s work, and throughout the nineteenth century, only botanists and geologists noted the relevance of some of these sketches. More recently, this work has been retrieved by researchers such as Luciana Lima Martins, who has collected and written about Graham’s sketches of Rio. *** Graham first arrived in Brazil at one of the most crucial moments of its history— independence. Great Britain was actively seeking stronger political and commercial involvement in South America, but the nation was unable to settle on a diplomatic strategy that maintained good relations with both Portugal and Brazil. Although Great Britain did not explicitly support independence, its government backed the cause unofficially as a chance to press for abolition and access the Brazilian market. Guided by her political savvy, Graham sensed that independence was inevitable early on in 1821, before she arrived at Pernambuco: “Besides the disposition to revolution, which we were aware had long existed in every part of Brazil, there was, also, a jealousy between the Portuguese and Brazilians” (97). Later she adds: “[T]here is necessarily a great deal of anxiety among all classes of persons. Some persons have sent some of their valuables on board the frigate, for safety; ... the cause of that independence ... is now inevitable ... the only question is whether it shall be obtained with or without bloodshed” (186). Throughout both parts of the journal, she condemns slavery and advocates for both abolition and free trade, even more so when it was evident—to her and Great Britain—that independence would not necessarily bring down protectionism or slavery. In a way, Graham voiced what Great Britain’s alleged neutrality prevented it from stating officially. She supported British lobbyists who pushed for lower Brazilian tariffs and justified the “great deal of jealousy of foreigners in the present government” (139). Loyal to Adam Smith, she advocated for the mutual benefits of free trade, stressing that Britain

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 64 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider would benefit from an open Brazilian market. Moreover, she agreed with Great Britain about abolition, a cause that seems to be a priority throughout her writings. Her anti- slavery discourse is what, in fact, opens her journal, in a vivid account of Recife’s slave market that Hayward and Caballero also mention in their study:

[W]e were absolutely sickened by the first sight of a slave-market (...) about fifty young creatures, boys and girls, with all the appearance of disease and famine consequent upon scanty food and long confinement in unwholesome places, were sitting and lying about among the filthiest animals in the streets. The sight sent us home to the ship with the heart- ache and resolution, “not loud but deep,” that nothing in our power should be considered too little, or too great, that can tend to abolish or to alleviate slavery[.] (Graham 105)

This passage is significant for two reasons. It reveals both her contempt for slavery and the fact that, despite her rejection of some aspects of British identity, she admired her country’s ideals of progress under the conviction that Brazil would profit from British institutions. Similarly, and as Hayward and Caballero point out, this passage exemplifies how Graham’s journal is permeated by quotes from British writers, historians, and philosophers. In fact, her reference to the Shakespearean quote “not loud but deep” allows her to advocate for abolition while giving proof of her erudition. Although Graham’s text was not embraced by scholars until nearly a century after its publication, contemporary sources agree on the quality of her work and, as Akel points out, she has come to be mainly known “as a scholar and travel writer in academic circles” (11). At the time of publication, although her work did not garner rave reviews, critics praised specific aspects of it possibly because of its undeniable superiority to that of other English travel writers in Brazil (most of these were men, although some women such as Ida Pfeiffer and Jemima Kindersley, wrote briefly about Brazil). In the first place, Graham’s journal offers more detailed information. While this is unsurprising in passages that describe women and female-related spaces (like her accounts on family life), Akel points out that Graham’s level of detail, even in fragments related to politics and other male- dominated environments, is higher than that of her male counterparts. Given that male travel writers were probably barred from many female spaces in nineteenth-century Brazil, absence of descriptions about family life and Brazilian homes in their work is to be

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 65 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider expected. According to Hayward and Caballero, of the five male travel writers who were active around 1824—John Mawe, Gilbert Mathison, Alexander Caldcleugh, John Luccock, and Henry Koster—only Luccock and Koster had some access to female spaces (21-22). Moreover, Graham seems to be more committed to an anti-abolitionist discourse than contemporary male writers, and in that sense, her account was closer to British interests. This difference could also explain the immediate reception her work had among Brazilian political circles and British immigrants in Brazil. Graham’s vehemence, which her more diplomatic male counterparts lacked, must have turned her against the Brazilian crown, which was supportive of slave trade, as well as most of the British community in Brazil, whom Graham portrayed as avaricious, ignorant slave-holders:

The English society is just such as one may expect. A few merchants, not of the first order ... Not one knew the name of the around his own door; not one is acquainted with the country ten miles beyond ... in short, I was completely out of patience with these incurious money-makers ... Their slaves, for the English are all served by slaves, indeed, eat a sort of porridge of mandioc (...). (Graham 148)

Be it due to ideology or simply the fact that Graham’s male counterparts had deeper interests to protect, these opposing discourses highlighted the uniqueness of Graham’s work. According to Hayward and Caballero, by the time Graham arrived, Brazil was Britain’s third largest market, yet written information about the country was scarcer than in other continents such as India or Africa (18). Poet and historian Robert Southey (1774- 1843), author of a thorough historical account on Brazil, became Graham’s main source of information. This exemplifies the difficult exchange of information between Great Britain and Brazil: Southey’s work was considered the canon of Brazilian history written in English, yet there are no records that prove he was ever in South America. Similarly, most male travel writers who wrote about Brazil actually made brief stops there while heading to other destinations, in clear contrast to Graham’s experience. Such a lack of information only made Graham’s work more valuable. Though there is no evidence that she intended to inform the British crown of Brazilian affairs, it is undeniable that her information as a political insider was unique and readily available. She was close not only to the Emperor and his wife, and thus a common visitor in court, but

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 66 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider also to Lord Thomas Cochrane, a British officer of the Royal Navy who provided military support to the leaders of Brazil’s independence. Graham had the privilege to witness a military battle fought on 12 June 1823 in Bahia, which she thoroughly registered in her journal (256), and hers is the only first-hand account of the battle written by a woman. As a business insider, Graham also arrived at a pivotal moment for trade relationships between Great Britain and Brazil and she denounced practices that affected British interests that no one else wrote about. For instance, she criticized the Brazilian Ministry of Finance for what she considered a reckless fiscal policy after the government had “taken upon itself to refuse payment” of debts owed to Great Britain (139). Not only was this type of information unique, but it was also published months prior to an important trade agreement renegotiation: “[T]he 1810 Commerce and Trade Treaty signed between Portugal and Britain would expire and be renegotiable in the middle of 1825. If Portugal had no interest in extending its trade relationship with Britain, dealing directly with a British-recognized, independent Brazil would be necessary to ensure Great Britain economic privileges in Brazil” (Hayward and Caballero 38). If not used to make a stronger case for the British prior to this negotiation, Graham’s journal was at the very least useful in that it helped the spread of Brazil’s bad political reputation abroad. As we have seen, Graham’s alignment with British commercial ambitions coexisted with an animosity toward the English community in Brazil. Opposing stances on free trade and abolition provoked major disagreements, but when it came to her views on social customs, she initially agreed with the British elite in Brazil. In fact, the first part of her journal shows a much more prejudiced Maria Graham, one who thought that Brazilian homes were “disgustingly dirty” and that local gentlewomen were “indecently slovenly after very early youth,” “ill combed,” with an “unwashed appearance” and a “manner of talking” that is “as disgusting as their dress” (135-136). Graham’s belief on the superiority of British manners and style may have unintendedly generated a writer-reviewer complicity in which gender was overlooked in favor of a shared sense of national values. However, her views are not consistent throughout the entire journal. In some passages of the second part, Graham dismisses the superiority of Great Britain’s gaze and defends the reputation of Brazilians. Her aversion to the British seems to grow in proportion to her liking of Brazilians. *** The way in which Maria Graham’s journals evade a homogenous categorization was detrimental for their contemporary reception as it opened the door to criticism from all

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 67 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider fronts. The period of 1809-1824 is relevant not only for the timeframe of her work in Brazil and her total stay in South America (1821-1824), but also because during these years she became a published author at Great Britain’s renowned Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green. Sources agree that, overall, her first publications Journal of a Residence in India (1812) and Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome during the year 1819 (1820), both published by Longman, were “well-received books” (Hayward and Caballero 17 and Akel 221). In fact, her journal on India was broadly reviewed, and in three years, more than ten literary magazines in Europe, most of them British but also German and French, had written about her work.2 Nonetheless, some early reviews prove that it was, at best, a rather tepid reception, at times marked by dismissal more than praise. The British Critic, and Quarterly Theological Review, for instance, dismissed the Journal of a Residence in India but notoriously claimed gender did not interfere with their opinion (which, in turn, reveals an understanding that this was the case with many critics): “We have never been at all inclined to depress the hopes, or mortify the ambition of female authors, but we cannot conscientiously allow that this publication has any very strong claims to our commendation” (652). In other cases, such as the critique published in the Quarterly Review, repudiation and praise came both at the same time: “The Journal of a Residence in India, by a young lady who probably went thither, like most young ladies, to procure a husband instead of information, is a literary curiosity which we are not disposed to overlook” (406). As analyzed by Ellen Jordan, women in the first decades of nineteenth-century Great Britain lived the industrial transformation that accentuated the opposition between work (the male public sphere) and the household (the female private sphere). Jordan mentions that “the prohibition against women entering the public sphere was extended” (35) to the point that women were discouraged from occupying (and mistrusted if they did) any professional positions, regardless of how ancillary or subordinate these were:

While it was becoming possible for men to earn an upper-middle-class income in the increasingly bureaucratised areas of business and government, there was no possibility of their wives participating… Even in situations, such as in professional households, where home and work had not yet been separated, there was a similar exclusion of wives and

2 See Nottingham Trent University’s “Maria Graham Project,” an online initiative that, since 2007, has sought to re-evaluate Graham’s legacy and centralize information about her work: http://www4.ntu.ac.uk/apps/research/groups/22/home.aspx/project/154085/overview/maria_graham_pr oject. This project identified and enumerated the literary magazines that reviewed Graham’s work. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 68 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider

daughters. Professional practice was increasingly regulated … so that even if a professional man still worked from home, there was strong pressure against his wife or daughter acquiring his skills by acting as his assistant. (30)

Thus, unsurprisingly, gender became the first obstacle in Graham’s reception and critics viewed her debut with distrust. Her work was taken more seriously as she began publishing more and, despite the gender-based skepticism, critics overall agreed on her strong narrative skills. On the other hand, being a woman proved to be the cause of rejection as well as the key that allowed her to garner some of the best praise, since Graham—as a woman—had access to spaces that fellow male travel writers had been unable to explore, and critics of her two-part Journey of a Voyage to Brazil and her Journal of a Residence in Chile (published at the same time in 1924 in a co-edition by Longman and Murray) valued these contributions. It is also worth pointing out that most of her books sold well: her journal on India managed to get a second edition while those on Chile and Brazil had print runs of 750 copies each, an amount high enough to pay off her royalties (Hayward and Caballero 55). The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal Enlarged and the Quarterly Review were the two journals that reviewed Graham’s work the most. Her relationship with the latter was particularly complicated due to the publication’s insistence on the gender issue as well as its derisive approach to her work, especially when William Jacob authored the reviews. At first, the publication avoids the overt sexism expressed in the review of her work on India by limiting its criticism to a strictly technical aspect of her book—the inaccurate dates of the introduction meant to provide readers with a context of Portuguese and Brazilian history: “Mrs. Graham, who has conveyed to the public her account of Brazil during two visits to that country, has thought proper to introduce it with a hasty and ill-arranged abridgement of Mr. Southey’s valuable history of that country” (Jacob 13). The reviewer refers to Robert Southey, previously mentioned as Graham’s main historical source and regular contributor of the Quarterly Review. What seems initially to be an inimical review becomes more complex as derision begins to build: “As she boasts to have performed the Herculean task of having ‘read nearly all that are to be found in print of [Southey’s] authorities, and some that he does not mention,’ it would have been as well to take care to be correct in her quotations” (Jacob 13). Although the critic seems bothered by Graham’s thorough references to Southey’s

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 69 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider work, rancor against her erudition per se cannot be gleaned from this quote alone. Overall, the issue of historical inaccuracies takes up most of the first part in the review, with legitimate and detailed corrections of her mistakes:

Villegagnon did not convey the young queen of Scotland to France in 1648, for both he and that unfortunate female happen to have been dead many years before. Henry II, king of France, was killed in July 1558, the year in which Villegagnon went to Brazil, and could not therefore, “on his return to Europe,” have given him the command of two ships. Henry IV, king of France, was assassinated in May, 1610, and therefore could not “send Daniel de la Touche, shortly after 1611, to examine Brazil in order to form a permanent colony.” (Jacob 13-14)

Yet the belittling tone escalates thereafter: “Thus, from page 16, it must be supposed that Mary of Guise retained her activity when 140 years old; and, from page 6, that Christian Jaques was an able commander at a more advanced age,” until gender oddly becomes, for the reviewer, the source of these mistakes:

If Mrs. Graham had copied nothing from the newspapers, and had been sensible that, with her slight knowledge of the characters with whom she mixed, her ignorance of the language in which they conversed, and her imperfect acquaintance with the customs and manners of the people, she was unqualified to write political disquisitions of Brazil, she might have presented to the public a small volume that would have been read with a considerable degree of interest. Her descriptions of the parties to which she was introduced are probably accurate. (Jacob 14)

Evidently, although the reviewer seemed to have initially tried to temper his gender-driven disregard, his conclusion represents the typical response to writings by women that attempted to cross from the private into the public sphere. He is evidently bothered by the fact that she has entered the field of politics and suggests she limit her scope to that of female spaces—the only ones in which her accuracy could be assured. Jacob also uses gender to explain positive aspects of the book, such as Graham’s masterful narrative: “The description of the residences, their internal appearance, and that

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 70 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider of the inhabitants of Bahia, is sketched in a manner that only a lady seeing them without the parade which usually accompanies the public exhibitions of the females, could have successfully executed” (Jacob 17). In another passage, he even praises her narrative skills in a fragment that does not belong to the private sphere to which he relegates her: “One of the most interesting events, however unusual with female adventurers, was an excursion from the city of Pernambuco, then in a state of siege, to the camp of the insurgents who had invested it; and is extremely well told” (Jacob 14). Graham reacted to many of the negative reviews she received. In her second edition of her journal on India, for instance, she commented on the Quarterly Review’s 1812 critique by clarifying that she “did not go to India in search of a husband” (qtd. in Gotch 142). Similarly, her correspondence with her own publishers is significant because it allows us to see not only more reactions but also her ability to form business networks and negotiate. She also managed to form a close friendship with Scottish editor John Murray, with whom she worked as a translator and editorial assistant in the decade of 1810. Coincidentally, he was also a co-founder of the Quarterly Review. Graham’s letters to Murray, available at the National Library of Scotland and partially transcribed by Hayward and Caballero, reveal her uncensored thoughts regarding the way the publishing industry was treating her work. Graham and Murray seem to be so close that she even turned to him after reading William Jacob’s reviews in Murray’s own literary gazette. In a letter to him of 28 April 1824 she writes:

I wrote you a note yesterday requesting you to lend me the literary gazette in which I have been attacked. I like to see what is said. I am told it is malicious—but I really cannot bring my self to care about it… I have little doubt of Messrs Longman being the instigators of the crying down of Brazil for the sake of their other friends—but I shall know better when I have seen the thing. (qtd. in Hayward and Caballero, 56)

Two elements stand out: the fact that despite Murray’s involvement in the Quarterly Review, Graham blames Longman for the negative review; and the fact that she seems to imply—though it remains unclear—that Longman’s conflict of interests kept him from officially defending her material. In other words, fighting for a book that Longman’s own company was publishing may have seemed less important to him than maintaining good relations within some sectors in Great Britain, many of which were not only criticized by

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Graham but also at odds with the Brazilian crown. That same year, on December 19, she writes a more outraged letter to Murray:

Tories as your writers in your Quarterly Review generally are, I did not think that you would ever have come to such a pitch of spite for I can call it nothing else as to print a long article solely for the purpose of ridiculing any people who should try to be free… It is quite evident the reviewer has not read me. That however no woman need be surprised at till we have been dead fifty or a hundred years. Men never find out that we are entitled to think or speak our minds—and then the only chance we have is, if we have been profligate mistresses to coarse princes—then indeed there is a chance of having our characters whitewashed and our talents admired in the Quarterly Review. (qtd. in Hayward and Caballero 56-57)

This is perhaps one of the few instances in which Graham abandons the twofold narrative of self-deprecation and boastfulness, and vehemently condemns the sexism to which she has been subjected. Many factors may explain why, in some moments, reviews went past her gender despite the ambivalence. On the one hand, the political context may have coincidentally made her work valuable, and, on the other, the quality of the journal stands out, especially when compared with that of her fellow travel writers. Despite the evident utility of her information, reviewers were never explicit about the political value of her journals. Their subtle praise implies they momentarily jumped past the gender issue, tangentially focusing on other pieces of information from which public officials could profit. More perplexing is the fact that it took decades before the value of her work was studied and acknowledged by scholars and critics, and more contemporary reception has not been ambiguous about her quality. It took almost a century for her work to be translated to Portuguese and revitalized by scholars in Brazil, and, in fact, the initial translations published in the first half of the twentieth century were all fragments of her journal. The first was Alfredo de Carvalho’s translation of a passage on Pernambuco, published on the 11th issue of the Revista do Instituto Arqueológico e Geográfico Pernambucano in 1904. Two decades later, Brazilian zoologist Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão resumed efforts to resuscitate part of Maria Graham’s work and translated various fragments in two

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 72 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider of his books: Visitantes do Primeiro Império (1934) and O Brasil visto pelos inglêses (1937), both published by Companhia Editora Nacional in São Paulo. Graham managed to attract the attention of fields outside history and politics, and she was first taken seriously, at a scholarly level, in the fields of biology and geology,3 in part because of her botanical drawings. Her complete journal was published in Brazil in 1956, translated by Américo Jacobina Lacombe and edited by Companhia Editora Nacional in São Paulo. In his foreword, Lacombe indicates that “[a] personalidade da autora está a exigir de brasileiro estudo carinhoso e digno” (11) and refers to previous publications on her life and work: Gotch’s previously mentioned biography from 1937 and José Valenzuela’s Spanish translation of her journal on Chile, published in two volumes in 1902 and 1909. Although the reasons behind a gap of almost fifty years between the corresponding translations of journals on Chile and Brazil are not explained, it is highly possible that this difference responds to the political environment in each country. Graham’s journal on Brazil—always supportive of the nation’s independence—was not even taken into account for Rio’s exhibition celebrating the independence centennial in 1922. Not only were Graham’s critics ambiguous when they wrote about her, but she was also subject to diverse and at times contradicting opinions. Her work, now given the academic status it long deserved, remained forgotten for almost a century in part due to her gender, but also as a result of her unwillingness to pay heed to the interests of powerful groups. This aspect of her writing and her personality—which buried her work for decades—is now also the cause of her uniqueness: “knowing that no human good can be attained without a mixture of evil, [the writer] trusts that a fair picture of both has been given, although it has cost some pain in the writing” (Graham 6).

3 Graham’s account on the 1822 earthquake in Chile was quoted in The American Journal of Science and Arts, 28, New Haven: pp. 236-247, and it was presented as evidence of coastal rise produced by earthquakes. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 73 Barbosa Lopez The Exiled Insider

Bibliography

Akel, Regina. Maria Graham: A Literary Biography. Amherst: Cambria Press, 2009. British Critic, vol. 41, January-June, 1813, London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1813, p. 652. Lacombe, Américo Jacobina. “Advertência do Tradutor.” Diário de uma Viagem ao Brasil e de uma estada nesse país durante parte dos anos de 1821, 1822 e 1823. Trad. Américo Jacobina Lacombe. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1956. Graham, Maria. Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823. London: Longman and John Murray, 1824. Hayward, Jennifer and M. Soledad Caballero. Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil. Anderson: Parlor Press, 2010. Jacob, William. “Travels in Brazil.” The Quarterly Review. n.º 31, March, 1825, London: John Murray, 1825, pp. 1-26. Jordan, Ellen. The Women’s Movement and Women’s Employment in Nineteenth Century Britain. London: Routledge, 1999. Quarterly Review, n.º15, September, 1812, London: John Murray, 1812, pp. 406-421. Thompson, Carl. “Reviews of Maria Graham’s Published Works.” Maria Graham Project. Last accessed: December 12, 2016. http://www4.ntu.ac.uk/hum/document_uploads/75923.pdf

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The Past Is a Foreign Photo: Image and Travel Writing in the Benguela Railway. Angola, 1920-1930

Pedro Lopes de Almeida1

Abstract

The introduction of railways in Europe throughout the 19th century is the origin of a new perception of space defined by the “annihilation of the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology” (Schivelbusch 36). In the Portuguese colonial spaces in Africa, however, these changes would not occur until the early 20th century, thus resulting in the conflation of the narratives of colonization, territorial occupation, and modernization. However, this design is frequently at odds with the superposition of the railway line and the commercial tracks historically used for the trade of enslaved human beings, as was the case with the Katanga-Benguela Railway in Angola. In this paper, I examine three travelogues written between 1922 and 1933 by British travelers in Angola—Through Angola, A Coming Colony, by Colonel J. C. B. Statham, London 1922; Angolan Sketches, by Alexander Barns, London 1928; and A Fossicker in Angola, by Malcolm Burr, London 1933. Reconstructing their journeys, I intend to explore the tensions between text and photography as they shape colonial relationships.

Keywords

Angola; Benguela Railway; travel writing; colonialism; temporalities; speed.

Resumo

A introdução de linhas ferroviárias na Europa ao longo do século XIX encontra-se na origem de novas modalidades de percepção do espaço definidas pela "aniquilação do tradicional contínuo espaço-tempo que caracterizara as antigas tecnologias de transporte" (Schivelbusch 36). Nos espaços coloniais portugueses esta transformação só viria a ocorrer no princípio do século XX, resultando daí a sobreposição das narrativas de colonização, ocupação territorial, e modernização. Esse projecto, porém, encontra-se em permanente tensão pela coexistência, no mesmo espaço, de linhas ferroviárias e antigas rotas de comércio de seres humanos escravizados, tal como se verifica na Linha de Caminho de Ferro Katanga- Benguela. Neste artigo analiso três narrativas de viagem escritas entre 1922 e 1933 por viajantes britânicos em Angola: Through Angola, A Coming Colony, de J. C. B. Statham (Londres, 1922); Angolan Sketches, de Alexander Barns (Londres, 1928), e A Fossicker in Angola, de Malcolm Burr (Londres, 1933). Através da focalização de cenas críticas testemunhadas pelo texto e pelos registos fotográficos das expedições

1 Brown University. Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, (Providence, RI, U.S.A.). E-Mail: [email protected]

Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo

procuro explorar as tensões entre ideias de atraso e modernização enquanto elemento estruturante de relações de tipo colonial.

Palavras-chave

Angola; Caminho de Ferro de Benguela; escrita de viagens; colonialismo; temporalidades; velocidade.

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Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Time and Speed in Colonial Travel Narratives

In 19th-century Europe, the construction of railway lines allowed for an unprecedented interconnection of distant spaces in short periods of time, thus determining deep changes in the perceptions of space and time. As Schievelbusch pointed out in his groundbreaking The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, it meant the “annihilation of the traditional space-time continuum which characterized the old transport technology” (Schievelbusch 36). In Portuguese colonial spaces it was not until the early decades of the 20th century that railway started replacing traditional roads and paths (Esteves 50). While this brought about a considerable change in the representation of these colonial spaces, the challenge was now to replace the narratives of backwardness associated with peripheral territories for the discourses of modernization and integration into the wider capitalist networks and the flow of international trade. This challenge would pose poignant questions to all the interested parties, and also to the travelers who experience first-hand the conflicting nature of colonial spaces undergoing an accelerated process of change, recasting them as belated travelers whose discursive practices, according to Ali Behdad, are “split, for they are inscribed within both the economies of colonial power and the exoticist desire for a disappearing Other” (Behdad 14), while witnessing, all along, the transformation of these spaces into extractive territories in a global interconnected economy. The haunting presence of imperialistic formations casts a shadow over the physical presence of the railways (and their time/speed effects), determining what Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Oppen described as the “significant ambivalence toward the experience of the new transport technologies” (Heintze and von Oppen 11). In this sense, travel narratives—and the photographic records that are often published alongside them—offer a particularly interesting insight into how, at a given moment, certain bodies see and react to each other, how their presence in the imperial space is disputed, in a context of change and negotiation of identity: not from the official point of view, but from the perspective of the one who sees (and, hopefully, the one who is seen) and might resist the “cultural cartography” that assigns fixed identities to the body of the other (Porter 20-21).

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Railways promised new perspectives for the economical exploitation of areas removed from the networks of global trade and not yet under a strong direct colonial control. In West Africa, complex systems of railway lines for passengers and cargo brought about a new stage for the Atlantic trade, creating new dynamics between European and North American markets and the Global South. These relationships are generally characterized by the structural imbalance at their core, with the African colonies being used as suppliers of cheap labor and raw materials and the imperial economic clusters benefiting from this far-from-fair trade. Specters of slavery roam through these territories. Foreign travelers such as John Statham, Alexander Barns, or Malcolm Burr—the authors of the travelogues that will be discussed here—signal, even if inadvertently, the traces left behind in the landscape by the slave trade in Angola. However, strikingly more real is the material dimension of the relationships between the railway company officials and the locals hired to work on the tracks. The instances of travel writing analyzed here echo systemic imbalances of power, and the exploitation of the labor force under the politics of contracts in effect in the Portuguese colony. While developing a philological or anthropological inquiry lies beyond the scope of my investigation, this paper is a critical examination of the evolution of social imaginaries: how ideas concerning speed and time, manifested at singular encounters, collaborate in the creation of a socio-political reality. What I intend to track here is how some of these ideas are created through these encounters, how more-or-less fortuitous collaborations shape a political space and a sense of regulation of interactions, and how these travel and are subject to change but also might be disrupted and challenged by these very encounters. It is, then, a matter of what Mary Louise Pratt saw as the domain of the imperial gaze and the resistance of the subaltern (Pratt 10) that will be at stake here. I believe this critical engagement with travel narratives to be all the more important when one considers that they are not yet widely known. This fact alone can account for their practical exclusion from the canonical archives of colonialism. The focus on English-language travelogues adopted here allows for a closer look at interactions informed by economic interests and framed around the circulation of technology surrounding railway lines, mostly imported from England. Typically published in major cities, these books tend to be short lived, even if the number of publications and printing volumes indicate a broad readership. In this paper I examine specific sites of interaction and explore social spaces of circulation as they frame the relationships between agents in divergent positions of power.

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I would like to address these spaces by thinking through scenes, as settings collectively produced by the interaction of individuals, "set within the fabric of everyday life but also function[ing] as an imagined alternative to the ordinary, work-a-day world" (Woo, Rennie & Poyntz 287). Such scenes can be perceived as ephemeral and elusive units of research, given the limited access we have to what exactly took place. While there is not much we can do to offset the ever-present voice of the traveler as narrator, looking at these scenes over the course of the longue durée has perhaps the advantage of highlighting continuities and repetitions that may shed some light on what Ricoeur would call a “surplus of meaning.” (Helenius 149)

Colonial Photography and the Construction of a Colonial Visual Regime

As a key component of travel books aimed at a broad audience, photographic records play a central role in most of the travelogues published in the period after 1900, creating an intimate relationship between colonial spaces and photography. James R. Ryan pointed out how the camera became part of the apparatus of compilation and circulation of images of the colonial space, not only depicting the colonial economy, but also constructing and framing the colonial modes of seeing the world and, more often than not, showing more than intended by the photographer (39). In this sense, one can interpret the imagery of travel narratives against the grain, using the material condition of photography, oscillating between image and object, as the grounds for a dispute about the colonial gaze: in the words of Nuno Porto, “in their efforts to create a temporary illusion of control over a broad history” they depict the “very instability of the colonial regime” (129). The space of indefinition that is opened up by the problems of adherence of the referent. This concept was coined by André Bazin in 1945 when referring to photography as a technique akin to the mummification of relics, and defined by Sontag as the traces of the real that are transferred to the domain of the photographic reproduction and that bear some resemblance to the death masks, and that Barthes compared to the windowpane that retains in itself the landscape outside. Such space of indefinition creates new possibilities of interpretation of the problematic content of colonial travel photography. It conveys an inherently excessive content, or what William Mitchell labeled the “representational commitments” of photographs: “they record certain kinds of things and not others, and they record some kinds of things more completely and accurately than others” (Mitchell 1992, 221). These commitments challenge us to engage in a critical reappraisal of the uses

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 79 Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo to which colonial photography lends itself. W. J. T. Mitchell proposes a method for performing this engagement based on the task of “showing seeing,” that is, “to make seeing show itself, to put it on display, and make it accessible to analysis” (Mitchell 2002, 166), rendering possible research on the “intersubjective vision”: to ask not only what these pictures are about or what they mean or do, but also what do they want from us as viewers (176). The tasks of decoding or recoding this visual archive, however, cannot be restricted to a straightforward and universalizing postcolonial program of dialectical interpretation. It has become necessary to engage with the photographs as contested sites of encounters and intersections of gaze, and in order to do so the reader/spectator must complicate the photographic narrative and allow space for indigenous agency and indigenous experiences of the encounter to emerge from the points of fracture of the image (Morton and Edwards 4). Ariella Azoulay offers a daring model to engage with these images on the premise that no single agent in the photographic act has the capacity nor the power to contain the effects of the photograph and determine its sole meaning, hence requiring from the observer participation in the space of political relations negotiated by the photograph, assuming a role in the “civil contract” summoned by the mere existence of it:

The photographed person’s gaze seriously undermines the perception that practices of photography, and watching photographs taken in disastrous conditions can be described and conceptualized as separate from the witnessed situation. (Azoulay 20)

The contract, therefore, is one between the participants in the act of photography and its various users, exploring “the hypothetical, imagined arrangements regulating relations within this virtual political community.” (23) In addressing a very small sample of the photographic archive contained in the travelogues, this paper engages with scenes created by narrative and photographic records in a critical manner that approximates the notion of civil contract formulated by Azoulay.

John C. B. Statham: A Problem of Time(lines) and Speed

On July 27th, 1920 John Charles Baron Statham, an officer with the British army and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, arrives at the Port of Luanda onboard the

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 80 Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo steamer Mossamedes, sailing from the Island of . Statham was on a hunting expedition in search of the giant sable antelope, a rare and almost mythical prize at the time. The officer, who became acquainted with the Angolan fauna thanks to some remarks made by his comrades while fighting with the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front during the 1914-1918 war, was a lifelong admirer of his fellow countryman David Livingstone. During the war in Europe, Statham befriended Mr. Frank Varian, an Irishman serving in the Royal Engineers attached to the Fourth Army on the Somme. Varian met Cecil Rhodes while working on the Beira Railway in Mozambique and, before being drafted, was in charge of the construction of the Benguela Railway in Angola. The engineer Frank Varian had become famous for being credited with the first sightings and descriptions of the giant sable antelope. The primary purpose of Statham’s trip was to capture specimens and take photographs of the animal while following Livingstone’s footsteps. Statham’s extensive notes from the field would give origin to the book Through Angola: A Coming Colony (London, 1922), a travelogue describing in detail several aspects of the wildlife, plants, geography, stock produce, insects, diseases, native customs and religion, and, for several chapters, dealing with the railway line from Benguela to Katanga, in the Belgian Congo. Upon his arrival in Luanda, Statham's first impressions of the city impose a divide over the landscape between past and present, pointing out the railway as one of the symbols of the modernization of the country and signaling a cut with the past: “down by the beach the little sixteenth-century fort of San Francisco reminds us of Luanda’s past; the railway station and a wireless mast speak for the present and future” (33). Statham was received by the Governor-General who, according to him, felt relieved when he realized that the sole purpose of Statham’s trip was to hunt and photograph, and not to request a concession for economic exploration, as had become increasingly frequent. In Malange, Statham hires carriers to accompany him on the expedition. He ostensibly favors what he perceives as the need to develop the infrastructures and communications in the area, even if that implies the use of violence (45). The author seems aware of the modalities of forced labor practiced in Angola, adding that the Portuguese administration would be unable to afford the wages the British government paid in its colonies. The existence of “hut taxes” in the Portuguese provinces being nothing but a legal device for the imposition of forced labor, Statham favors this practice over the British system of wages, considered to be expensive and hard to control.

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The journey inland starts on August 7th, with a detailed inventory of weapons, ammunition, photographic machinery, and film. Statham takes with him two domestic servants and twenty carriers, of whom several were children. They walk southeast from Malange, toward Cangandala. In Belmonte (Kuito), Statham was forced to stop because his carriers refused to go on without seeing their wages increased. He notes that the city will certainly expand once the Railway is completed. From there they go to Chinguar, where Statham provides a brief account of the history of the Bihé people, making reference to the slave trade routes that passed through the Bihé plateau:

Today, a motor track is where the old slave path ran; and beyond Chinguar, westwards, the steel rails run over 300 miles; while to the east and centre of Africa they are pushing their way, a sign to all men that the peace of civilization has come at last and to stay. (113-114)

Whatever the author means by “the peace of civilization,” it becomes clear that it has to do with the introduction of heavy machinery produced in Europe and managed by the colonial government, with the purpose of expanding the global networks of commerce for the benefit of the metropolis. This same idea is embedded in the framing and composition of Statham’s photographs (see image 1). In a panel composed of two juxtaposed photos meant by the author to illustrate the contrast between the past (the ox wagons and the predominance of agriculture) and the present (the railway), stress is placed on the paths opened along the landscape, central to both images. The latter features a locomotive being set in motion and pulling several crowded carriages in the midst of a cloud of steam. In the foreground, the viewer can observe two human figures. The one to the right, a white male, wears a white robe-like vest, girded at the waist, and appears to have a long beard. Possibly a missionary, this person walks toward the photographer while the other body, on the left side of the picture, merges with the darker tones of the locomotive in the background. This second figure, a black man in white trousers, is barefoot and holds a stick in his hand. We cannot see his face, as he seems to be looking backwards. While the figure in white is highlighted by the bright sky, and his body is in direct contact with the compositional central subject of the photograph (the steel rails), the black figure is decentered and barely visible in the dim corner of the photo.

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Image 1: “The Old Transport Method - Ox Wagons;” “And the New - Benguella-Katanga (Central Angolan) Railway,” in Statham, John Charles Baron.

In a chapter entirely dedicated to the central Angolan railway, the author compares the mythical founder of the Bihé people to the contractor of the railway, Robert Williams. Williams, a Scottish engineer, went to South Africa in 1881 to assist Cecil Rhodes and worked with the controversial explorer on the Cape to Cairo railway project (Hutchinson and Martelli 141). When this project proved unfeasible due to local resistance, Williams played a pivotal role in diverting the line to the Belgian Congo, an advantageous alternative due to the rich Katanga territory. Shortly afterwards, however, the costs became too high, and the project was halted. It was then that he obtained the license from the Portuguese government to implement a railway line even more favorable for his financial purposes. Decisively cheaper than a connection to the Beira in the Eastern coast of Africa, and shorter than a route to Cape Town, the Benguela-Katanga railway was an avenue to one of the richest sources of minerals (including diamonds, uranium, cobalt, and the world’s largest copper deposit), connecting the mines to the Atlantic and providing an easy and fast route to the British steamers. In 1902, Robert Williams was commissioned with planning and developing the Benguela-Katanga line. By 1920, the line ran along the coast from Lobito to Benguela and

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 83 Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo inland up to Chinguar. Statham takes the train from Chinguar to Lobito on October 1st and arrives at his destination two days after. In Lobito, the railway station is staffed both by the Portuguese and the British, and Statham mentions “the Machados,” father and son, the British officials, and “Messrs. Varian, Clark, and Johnston, who are the technical experts” (121). Frank Varian, the Chief Construction Engineer for the Benguela Railway, was an old friend of Statham, the one who mentioned to him the giant sable and by now almost a celebrity among circles of hunters worldwide. The way Statham describes the city of Benguela suggests a concealed tension between the slavocratic and tumultuous past and the present, somehow mediated by the railway line:

Benguella lies dormant, but jealous; as a woman who seems a younger rival growing to fame and power by her side. She cannot compete with Lobito; Nature itself forbids it. The harbour is worthless, the deadly mosquito is here, and the fever it brings; but the town has several thousand inhabitants, of whom some 3000 are whites, and the Governor’s palace and such society as the district boasts are still at Benguella. The line passes through the Benguella plantations, and is moving now due east over the foot-hills to the valley of the Lengue.” (123-124)

Statham seems to tap into this implicit tension between the landscape and the history of slave trade, using it to frame adaptation to modern times and the decline of the historical sites. On more than one occasion, the reference to the slave trade is a disruptive element to the narrative: there seems to be a continuity of the memory of slavery and the description of the conditions under which the natives carried out the infrastructural works for the colonial administration. Railway lines offer a chance to restructure the territory in accordance with the interests of economic exploration, hunting, and the implementation of an effective colonial presence. In regards to what concerns Statham, the railway line serves as a map of the big game in the country, a conception with deep implications concerning the landscape. The activity of hunting and the incremental speed in transportation are interestingly correlated. While big-game hunting demands very wide areas that need to be carefully scouted (thus taking up a substantial amount of time), the railway makes the distances shorter, rendering the hunting locations interconnected and friendlier to foreigners. In a way, speed tames

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 84 Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo geography. Nature and technology come together to satisfy the need of the cosmopolitan man who finds in Africa the stage of his recreational activities. At the same time, railway lines allow for technology to bridge the gap between the territory and the visitor and, in doing so, they make the intermediation of Angolans more and more peripheral, preempting their role as guides, carriers, or trackers, and thus decreasing the level of dependency on the locals.

Alexander Barns: Memory and Landscape

A few years later, Alexander Barns, author of Angolan Sketches (London, 1928), traveled from Cape City to Katanga, via Elisabethville, on his way to Benguela. Mr. Barns compares the Rouashi Copper Mine in the Katanga basin to “some old rock temple in old Peru:” the excavation, being the starting point of the Katanga-Benguela railway line, reminded Barns “of some vast Inca temple-dwelling of ancient Peru, or terraced catacombs of some titanic race long since dead” (64). This seems to be the subject of one of the photographs taken by Barns and published in his travelogue (see image 2). The train tracks are featured in the center of the photo, leading the carts to the underground mines. Barns compares this structure to ancient tombs. The network of metaphors he employs here ends up summoning more than what were likely his intentions, and the vicinity of the slave trade routes cannot but assign new meaning to these allusions. Opening his narrative, Barns retells the history of the Portuguese maritime expansion from the 15th century onwards, centered on the figure of Henry the Navigator. He then analyzes the decline of the Portuguese Empire and the partition of Africa, highlighting the role played by King Leopold and Cecil Rhodes. From them, he turns to Robert Williams and the construction of the Benguela-Katanga railway:

(...) in 1903 there was still time for King Leopold, Robert Williams, and his colleagues to take stock of their surroundings! They found themselves in a fabulously rich country, surrounded by wealth only guessed at then, but still a very, very long way from the sea. But with a trunk line so slowly coming towards them why not take time by the forelock and push out a lateral line to shorten the way? Why not? An old slave and caravan route lay ready to their hands—a via dolorosa of enslaved humanity, already partly surveyed by the faltering feet of a million black people. As has happened before in East

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Africa and elsewhere, an old slave route, being the shortest, was selected, in this case, its outlet the now new and improved port of Lobito. (27-28)

While attempting to overcome that past, however, not only does Barns repeat the prejudice against the locals, but his travelogue also echoes the kind of racism at the origin of the slavocratic societies. The association between the domestication of the territory and the subjugation of the local structures of power appears to be closely related to the expansion of the railway. Speaking of the Walunda people who live in the highland country between Angola and the Congo, Barns describes them as “truculent” and “harbor[ing] untamed elements amongst them,” and points out the recent findings of diamond fields in the region as a decisive factor for “the advancement of the district and the taming of the inhabitants” (34), managing to dovetail the narrative of economic development and racist aggression. If the colonial presence in the region of the Walunda is embodied by the discourse of modernization and economic exploration encompassing the narrative of the “civilizing mission” of the white man, the railway serves these purposes as it identifies the territory with an order at odds with the “untamed elements.”

Image 2: “The Ruashi Copper Mine. A fine example of the modern miner’s craft resembling some great rock temple of old Peru,” in Barns, Alexander.

The decay of Amboim (Old Benguela) is juxtaposed with the promising benefit of the railway lines running inland from that area, assisting the exploration of palm oil, coffee and nuts: the products for which slave labor had been employed (Barns 41). The fact that the author refers to the modern city of Huambo—founded in 1912 by General Norton de

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Matos and strategically placed on the railway line—as the likely future capital of the colony, instead of the “unhealthy and not so central” Luanda (42) only testifies to this representation of a break with the past while projecting a shadow over the historical process of exploitation of the resources. On the other hand, Alexander Barns backs the option for the trade with Congo, repeatedly underscoring the advantages of the use of black labor from Angola in the Katanga region. After Luacano and Busaco, he finally gets to Villa Luso. Barns is introduced to Mr. Frank Varian, the Chief Engineer who, as we saw, met John Statham in Lobito. Varian came from Huambo on an inspection trip and the two set out together for the railhead, about forty miles from Villa Luso. There, he is met by “over a thousand natives”—the plate-lying Angolan workers. They are barely visible in Barns’s account, and the focus is placed on the British origin of the materials they are handling. After lunch with the workers, Barns returns to Villa Luso and heads south to the Cuanza. References to the slave routes in this area of the “Hunger Country” (Upper Zambezi to Bihé) occur sporadically: “the day before yesterday the slave gangs passed along it; yesterday the wagon transports of copper from the mines to the sea; today the railway and the motor!” (84). It is not far from here that Barns meets Malcolm Burr and Mr. Nazaroff, two prospecting agents working for the company and encamped beside the railway. Burr invites Barns for lunch, and they remain together for several hours by the line, discussing the wildlife of the country and the potential of the railway. Barns continues his journey toward Lobito, passing through Munhango, Kohemba, and the western Cuanza valley, visiting several farms on his way before arriving in Benguela. Similar to Colonel John Statham, he also shows repulsion for the Old Benguela and is likewise haunted by images of the past city (125). Like Statham, Barns rapidly continues his trip toward Lobito where he finishes his railway trip praising the achievements of Robert Williams:

So I had come down the 770 miles length of Africa’s newest and in some ways most important railway—a line of immense potentialities with a great future. (...) Truly Sir Robert Williams, the good genius loci of Angola— R.W. or Bob Williams, as he is called by his followers or friends—may sleep well o’ nights. As a benefactor to thousands of human beings his task is

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already accomplished and success comes out to grasp him by the hand as he turns the last corner of his great railway project. (126-127)

Malcolm Burr: Temporalities under Prospection

The two men with whom Alexander Barns had lunch by the line are the protagonists of another travelogue, published shortly after Angolan Sketches. In fact, Captain Malcolm Burr’s journey had started just before we spotted him in the Cuanza Valley, at the exact point where Barns’s came to an end: the bay of Lobito. The maintenance of the railway lines demanded hiring highly specialized staff in England and elsewhere. Burr, author of A Fossicker in Angola (London, 1933), was one of them. Like Statham, Burr was a veteran of WWI, stationed in the Macedonian Front. Malcolm Burr became notorious for his linguistic skills, being able to communicate in more than five languages in Salonika. A Fossicker in Angola is published with eight illustrations and a map of Angola. Burr was sent to Villa Luso to prospect for fuel destined for the railway line after rumors had gone forth that there was a coal basin in that area. He travels in the company of the Russian naturalist and geologist Pavel Stepanovitch Nazaroff. The two take the train in Lobito and travel up the plateau. They disembark in Huambo (Nova Lisboa) where they meet Frank Varian, who hosts them. They proceed to Silva Porto, where Burr claims to have seen “their first sample of the naked savage:”

Wearing nothing but a flap of bark, they were of a dull, sooty complexion, not shining black, and mostly unprepossessing. The children had huge tummies, probably due to cramming them with mealies, or perhaps to hookworm, and protruding navels are common. (Burr 22)

Burr does not fail to recognize here the conversion of the slave trade landmarks into symbols of the modernization of the territory: “Today the once redoubtable slave mart is a station on the Benguela Railway” (23). They go further to Chindumba and eventually reach Villa Luso. While hiring the carriers for their journey, they are confronted with the brutality of the social relations between servants and the staff of the company:

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The native staff made a good impression on us. Fine upstanding men with pleasant smiling faces, they looked smart in the red or blue and white singlets and length of white material for skirt with which we provided them. (...) “No need to stand in ceremony with the boys,” explained Neezer and, going up to one, forced open his lips to show us his teeth, just as though he were a horse, without so much as “by your leave.” (27)

In what seems to be a demonstration of ease toward the natives, destined to appease the newcomers, the guide, Neezer, repeats a repertory of gestures inextricably embedded in historical meaning, activating a body language modeled after the practice of enslavement. They were travelling with a party of about one hundred and fifty men, among them carriers, cooks, and servants. The conditions were clearly not adequate for that expedition, and it became evident that the hired Angolans were not being compensated for their work, having to eat “grubs, termites and caterpillars” along the journey. Once more, the imbalance between the visitors and the locals suggests something more than the face-value of this encounter, revealing ambiguous layers of meaning beneath the surface of the interaction. The high death rates among Burr’s company documented throughout the travelogue speak to this reality: poor nutrition, paired with severe weather conditions, resulted in a debilitating context for most of the black people serving the two foreigners.

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Image 3: “First Train into Villa Luso, chief town of the huge District of Moxico, in the interior of Angola, opened up by the Benguella Railway,” in Burr, Malcolm.

The fossicker tends to assume a patronizing attitude towards the natives, but at no point acknowledges that their conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation are tied to the politics of the company. Instead, Burr diverts his attention to what he perceives as the naivety of the contracted locals:

(...) I was in a yielding mood when the servants waited on me in a body to ask for an advance of pay to enable them to buy some coats that were on sale in the store. Foolishly, I consented, but then I was still green to Africa, but I had my reward at the sight which later presented itself. They filed by in procession to show off their finery, led by Chutungu [chief of one of the

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groups among the contracted], his breast puffed with pride under his smart grey town overcoat with black velvet collar, with a grey Homburg on his head at a rakish angle. How was he to know that it looked odd to see his naked legs and feet beneath? The rest were dressed in a similar way. (80-81)

The traveler fails to understand the potentially ironic mimetic character of this demonstration, as well as the political intervention of the protest. The porters, unable to buy adequate clothing and shoes fit for work, might have borrowed what was available from the nearby stores. The articles available in such a remote area would be suited for the white population and more likely than not consisted of expensive imported clothes, targeting the local elites and occasional travelers. By using that attire, the porters may have engaged in a demonstration of the shortcomings of the regime of exploitation of their labor force by rendering evident that their needs were not taken into account, and thus possibly engaging in a demonstration of colonial mimetism. Michael Taussig explored the notion of “colonial mirror” as a practice of imitation of the colonizer’s otherness that “reflects back onto the colonists the barbarity of their own social relations, but as imputed to the savagery they yearn to colonize,” noting that “the power of this colonial mirror is ensured by the way it is dialogically constructed through storytelling” (Taussig 134). At the same time, the “procession” created a moment of destabilization of the dynamics of power and authority in the camp, recasting the relationship between the engineers and the servants who might have used the fancy urban overcoat and the Homburg hat as devices for a parody of the foreigners. One might even ask to what extent this intervention echoes Taussig’s remarks on the critique, by indigenous populations in South America, of what Karl Marx portrayed as “commodity fetishism.” In more than one way, the procession implicitly questioned the self-proclaimed “civilizing mission” of European colonialism, bringing up what Ricardo Roque described as a threat to such a project by confronting it with the possibility of its annulation through the dissolution and destruction of the differences upon which it was predicated, comprised of a set of borders (moral, symbolic, and cultural lines that ought not to be crossed) and therefore interpellating and disrupting colonial hierarchies (Roque 106). Burr, however, seems to be completely oblivious of the intention of this performance. Immediately after that, the workers gathered and addressed the engineers to demand a raise in their pay from thirty to a hundred escudos, or else they would desert. Burr refused to meet their demands and, with the intervention of the local Portuguese Governor, the servants were deterred from their designs.

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Burr and his company march from the basin of the Zambezi to the basin of the Congo river, toward the village of Busaco, and then back to Villa Luso. On their way back, when approaching the township, they reach the newly laid railway, one that was not there at the time they crossed the same path days before. Here, Burr gives an account of the astonishment of the locals and how they were confounded by the sight of the railway tracks. He uses his knowledge of the artifact to exert reassuring authority over “the unsophisticated Wachokwe, Waluena and Waluchase, [who] stopped dead at this uncanny manifestation of the white man’s magic, wondering whether it were safe to cross it” (102). During their stay in Villa Luso, a major event takes place in the city—the arrival of the first train (see image 3). The contractor’s engine came riding slowly through the streets, “bedecked with flags and received with champagne and appropriate ceremony (...) it was worth it, for it was impressive for what it implied. It was the head, the first feeler, creeping steadily forward, of this last of the great pioneer railways of Africa” (104). Burr takes a photograph to celebrate that moment. In the picture, there is a man wearing a light-colored suit and a hat, apparently welcoming the train by the side of the road, while several others cover the front of the machine, holding on to the large metal structure. On both sides of the train and in the background, small bodies are barely distinguishable from the darker tones of the bushes, but one can recognize black men probably running after the train as it entered Villa Luso. On his last day in Villa Luso, Burr decides to parade the locals on the train for his own amusement (107).

Times out of Joint: Railway Lines, Historical Memory, and the Longue Durée

These documents constitute an archive of interactions highlighting the structural continuities of imperial relationships at the level of everyday life in Angola between 1920 and 1930, in a way that we might describe through Ferdinand Braudel’s concept of the longue durée of imperialism(s). It is this complex hierarchy that manifests itself in the travelogues and becomes notably visible in the points of contact between them: real life characters circulating through the scenes, local leaders, government authorities, and repeated practices that give us a dense picture of this space and time. Photography plays an important part in these three travelogues. Mobile and relatively lightweight photographic equipment was, at the time, a fairly recent possibility. Considered in a colonial context, photographic records allow the reader to see things that may not be obvious in the written narrative and that might exceed the amount of

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 92 Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo information that the author desired to convey. People, in particular, are an constant presence in colonial photography, even when their place is disputed by the very framing or subject of the photograph. Black people are blended with the bodies of the machinery. Their presence is collateral to the subject of the pictures and the mass of dark metal absorbs their bodies, which are rarely individuated, but rather an extension of the railway itself. There seems to be, indeed, the temptation to recast colonial photography, entirely replacing the presence of the black natives with that of the imported machinery of the railway. Despite the narrative constraints inherent to the genre, the travelogues with which we established a dialogue here served as platforms for the negotiation of meanings and the regulation of colonial otherness in encounter scenes between individuals under different regimes of power. The white male foreign traveler and the black colonial subject meet around a site of technological development with the potential to change the spatial reality of the landscape, disrupting previously held ideas of space and time through the critical intervention of speed. Paul Virilio’s foundational work on speed as the driving force of modern political rationality explores possibilities that I would like to further consider in future research. For now, it suffices to note that his concept of dromology, as the logic of speed, being critical to the understanding of modernity, has deeply influenced some of my own readings of colonial encounters. It has been my contention here that railways create a political territory whose potential force and expansive power are related to their condition of “places of intense circulation, on the path of rapid transportation” (Virilio 30) while bringing the human bodies closer to a dictatorship of movement exerted through the metabolic bodies of transportation machines (83). I believe that my critical engagement with some travel narratives may, by focusing on micro-moments of encounter, open up new spaces of discussion about the mediation of colonial relationships through the technologies of railway transportation. These narratives are often haunted by photographic and discursive presences of the past. As it emerged in specific scenes, mediations are often performed through a language shared with the spectral presence of slavery and forced labor. The narrative and visual excesses contained in the books explored here, however, challenge these presences, allowing space for critical reappraisals of these moments. Such ghostly presences intersect the imperial gaze of the traveler, as it is described by Pratt, and they seem to be highly disturbed by the vicinity of fast machines and what they represent: a certain instability of the colonial regime surfaces from the fractures opened by a longing for a past of seemingly

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 93 Almeida The Past is a Foreign Photo stable fixed identities and the relentless advancement of speed throughout the landscape. As a result, travelogues from this period bear witness to a certain trouble articulating the intersubjective hierarchies of the present temporality. In his celebrated The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal showed how the practices of memory in the public space tend to derive from an urge to cut ties with the past and lead to a kind of preservation of such past, undertaken as a gesture of reascribing meaning and reframing the grammar of the encounter, imaginatively displacing and refashioning the inherited codes (Lowenthal 192). I hope I have been able to point out that something of the same nature can be found in the material collections constituted by the travelogues studied here.

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Bibliography

Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Barns, Thomas Alexander. Angolan sketches, with 20 illustrations and 3 maps. London : Methuen, 1928. Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Burr, Malcom. A Fossicker in Angola. London: Figurehead, Pioneer Series, 1933. Christopher, A., and Edwards, Elizabeth (eds.). Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Esteves, Emmanuel. “O caminho de ferro de Benguela e o Impacto Económico, Social e Cultural na sua Zona de Influência (1902–1952)”, Africana Studia (Porto) 3, 2001, pp. 49-72. Heintze, Beatrix and von Oppen, Achim (eds.) Angola on The Move: Transport Routes, Communications and History / Angola em Movimento: Vias de Transporte, Comunicação e História. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2008. Helenius, Timo."'As If' and the Surplus of Being in Ricoeur’s Poetics," in Études Ricœuriennes / Ricœur Studies Vol 3, No 2 (2012). Hutchinson, Robert and Martelli, George. Robert’s People: The Life of Sir Robert Williams, Bart. 1860-1938. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Mitchell, William J.. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Mitchell, W. J. T.. “Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture,” in Journal of Visual Culture (vol. 1, issue 2), 2002. Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Porto, Nuno. “‘Under the gaze of the ancestors’ — photographs and performance in colonial Angola,” in Photographs, Objects, Histories, org. by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart. London/New York: Routledge, 2004. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 2007. Roque, Ricardo. “Mimetismos coloniais no império português,” in Etnográfica, vol. 18 (1), 2014. Ryan, James R. “Fotografia colonial,” in O Império da Visão: Fotografia no contexto colonial português (1860-1960), org. by Filipa Lowndes Vicente. Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Statham, John Charles Baron. Through Angola, a coming colony, With 138 illustrations, 2 maps and 4 charts. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1922. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. A study in terror and healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics, an essay on dromology (translated by Mark Polizzotti). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2006. Woo, Benjamin; Jamie, Rennie & Poyntz, Stuart R. "Scene Thinking", in Cultural Studies, 2015 (Volume 29, 2015 - Issue 3: Scene Thinking).

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 95 Whose Colonial Project? Angolan Elites and the Colonial Exhibitions of the 1930s: Notes on the Special Magazine Edition of A província de Angola, August 15, 1934

Torin Spangler1

Abstract

A major objective of early exhibitions during the Estado Novo was to project an image of universal support for the newly reformulated colonial project in both the metropole and the colonies. Although recent research has shed new light on the 1930s exhibitions from a metropolitan perspective, accessing voices from within “colonial” spaces can often prove more difficult. This article examines the specific case of the Angolan white settler community and the local independent press, observing the complexities of their involvement in, and reactions to, exhibitions in Angola and Portugal. In this context, the special edition of the newspaper A Província de Angola (August 15, 1934), published on the occasion of the Exposição Colonial do Porto, will be used as a central vehicle of intertextual exploration in an effort to uncover the complex interplay between “local” collaboration in colonial exhibitions and resistance to hegemonic control of discourses and images within the empire.

Keywords

Colonial exhibitions; Angola; Portugal; press; imperial identities

Resumo

O presente artigo examina as reações de colonos angolanos à 1ª Exposição Colonial Portuguesa (Porto, 1934), utilizando o “Número Extraordinário” do jornal A Província de Angola (15 Agosto, 1934) como veículo central de exploração intertextual. Nesta análise, destaca-se a forma como se combinam, nas páginas do jornal, sentimentos pró-imperialistas com uma resistência subtil ao controlo hegemónico de discursos e imagens pela metrópole. O documento em análise representa uma tentativa única e curiosa de celebrar o império e, simultaneamente, defender os interesses e a identidade local de um grupo que se via atacado pelas novas políticas do Estado Novo.

Palavras-chave

Exposições coloniais; Angola; Portugal; imprensa; identidades imperiais

1 PhD Student, Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University (Providence, RI, U.S.A.); E-Mail: [email protected] Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

Over the past two decades, we have begun to gain a clearer understanding of the role played by colonial exhibitions in the early years of the Estado Novo (1933-1974).2 Inspired by the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition of Seville and the 1931 International Colonial Exposition of Paris (Vargaftig 2016: 63-98), Portuguese officials such as Armindo Monteiro (Minister of the Colonies, 1931-1935) and Henrique Galvão (director of the exhibitions) set out to produce their own colonial exhibitions, beginning with the 1934 Exposição Colonial Portuguesa (ECP) in Porto. Such exhibitions represented a “meeting of worlds,” meant to glorify the colonial project and show unity between “colonial” and “metropolitan” peoples. “Indigenous” peoples from Africa and Asia were put on display, colonial entrepreneurs exhibited goods, and a host of institutions from both colonies and metropole came armed with statistics and samples to impress visitors to their stands. While new light has been shed on metropolitan perspectives on the exhibitions, voices from the colonies remain difficult to retrieve. This study examines a unique Angolan perspective on the 1934 ECP through the lens of a single publication: the Número extraordinário (NE) of the newspaper A província de Angola, published on the occasion of the exhibition.3 This special magazine edition presents a curious counterpoint to “official” views on the 1934 event. While it is a product of a colonial elite, it is nonetheless written from a decidedly local viewpoint. It is a testament to the supposed achievements of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, but one which emphasizes the settlers themselves and which often reads as a dialogue with metropolitan Portuguese visitors to the ECP, encouraging them to look beyond the surface of the images and information on display in Portugal. When analyzed against the backdrop of early-twentieth century colonial Angolan history—with particular attention to the tensions between Angolan “white autonomist” movements and the nascent Estado Novo—the NE provides a window through which to glimpse Angolan colonists’ involvement in the 1930s exhibitions staged in both Portugal and Angola.

2 See, for example: Acciaiuoli 1998; Matos 2006;Vargaftig 2016. 3 Número Extraordinário dedicado á Exposição Colonial Portuguesa e em honra da Restauração de Angola em 15 de Agosto de 1648, special issue of A província de Angola. Luanda, 15 Aug. 1934. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 97 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

Figure 1: Cover of the guide to Angola published to accompany the colony’s section at the 1929 Ibero- American Exposition of Seville: Angola: breve monografia histórica, geográfica e económica elaborada para a Exposição Portuguesa em Sevilha. Luanda: Empresa Gráfica De Angola, 1929.

Figure 2: Frontispiece of the publication Angola: breve monografia histórica, geográfica e económica elaborada para a Exposição Portuguesa em Sevilha. Luanda: Empresa Gráfica De Angola, 1929.

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Figure 3: Image of Western European countries with a combined surface area equivalent to that of Angola (Angola: breve monografia histórica, geográfica e económica elaborada para a Exposição Portuguesa em Sevilha. Luanda: Empresa Gráfica De Angola, 1929)

Figure 4: Cover of the special magazine edition of A província de Angola. Número Extraordinário dedicado á Exposição Colonial Portuguêsa e em honra da Restauração de Angola em 15 de Agosto de 1648, special issue of A província de Angola ([Luanda] 15 Aug. 1934).

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Figure 5: “Portugal não é um país pequeno”: image created by Henrique Galvão on the occasion of the Exposição Colonial Portuguesa (1934). Source: Hemeroteca Digital de Lisboa (http://hemerotecadigital.cm- lisboa.pt/EFEMERIDES/exposicaocolonial/Portugalnaoeumpaispequeno.jpg).

“Angola não é um país pequeno”

In the Angolan case, local involvement in colonial exhibitions began even before the ECP. For the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition of Seville, colonists from Angola created a booklet4 on the colony to accompany the exhibit, images from which can be seen above (Figures 1-3). In 1932, Luanda played host to the Feiras de Amostras de Produtos Portugueses. The Feiras (held first in Luanda and afterwards in Lourenço Marques) were organized by Henrique Galvão, who would then go on to direct the ECP, where he was responsible for the creation of one of the most infamous pieces of Estado Novo propaganda, “Portugal não é um país pequeno” (“Portugal is not a small country”) (Figure 5) (Serra 2016: 50). Galvão’s “map” has come to epitomize the Estado Novo’s obsession with projecting an image of imperial might.5 Few may be aware, however, that similar maps were made in 1929 (Figure 3) and 1934 (Figure 4), showcasing the territorial extent of Portugal’s largest colonial possession, Angola. The 1934 image, “Angola, a maior parcela do Império” (“Angola, the largest portion of the Empire”), is from the cover of the very magazine that is the focus of this article.

4 Angola: breve monografia histórica, geográfica e económica elaborada para a Exposição Portuguesa em Sevilha. Luanda: Empresa Gráfica De Angola, 1929. 5 For further information, see Cairo 2006. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 100 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

At first glance, the image seems to be a mere appropriation of the colonialist spirit manifested in “Portugal não é um país pequeno.” Indeed, “A maior parcela” likely dialogues with Galvão’s “map” considering the latter’s appearance in a photograph in the magazine which shows a stand at the ECP belonging to the Empresa Gráfica de Angola (EGA): the parent company of A província de Angola, and also the publisher of the 1929 booklet from the Seville event. What is notable here is not simply the establishment of a direct lineage between the 1929 image and “A maior parcela” in 1934, with a likely intermediation of Galvão’s map; the remarkable fact is that the images’ connection to the EGA means that they were published by a company whose founder and director, Adolfo Pina, was a fervent advocate of Angolan autonomy. Given Pina’s political views, we may never know to what extent the designers of “A maior parcela” intended the image to be an exaltation of empire or a sly retort to Galvão’s message of imperial unity and grandeur. Perhaps it is both; in which case it can be held to be emblematic of the complex relationship between Angolan colonial elites and metropolitan officials during the early 1930s. The 1934 ECP and the earlier Feiras de Amostras were seen by organizers as a means of strengthening economic ties between the colonies and the metropole. These events also came at a time of particular tension in the Angolan capital. Luanda had recently been the site of an uprising of military officers and local political elites against High-Commissioner Filomeno da Câmara (March 20—April 10, 1930), which was followed by a series of measures aimed at dismantling power structures in the colony and reorienting the Angolan economy towards total dependence on Portugal (Pimenta 2005, 2012; Torres 1997). Hostility to metropolitan control over colonial economic and political affairs could not possibly have evaporated by the time of the first colonial exhibitions in Angola and Portugal. However, the existence of publications such as the NE shows that Angolan colonial elites were nonetheless active participants in those events. Angolan companies and organizations, including the EGA, were present at the 1932 Feira de amostras de Luanda and at the 1934 ECP, and entities based in the colony would go on to put together Angola’s first locally organized public exhibitions: the Exposição Provincial de Benguela (1935) and the Exposição-Feira de Angola (1938). This analysis of the NE will look at the themes that most characterize the document and its insertion into the historical context under examination. First, however, we should look at the story of the man whose name appears on the cover of the magazine

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 101 Spangler Whose Colonial Project? and understand how his life came to be intertwined with the history of the group Pimenta has termed the “Euro-African nationalists” of Angola (Pimenta 2008).

Adolfo Pina and Angola’s White Settler Community

What little information can be gleaned about Adolfo Pina from the NE is found in the director’s opening remarks in which he explains the purpose of the special edition, stating:

[…] dedicado á 1ª Exposição Colonial Portuguesa […] editamos o presente Número extraordinário que, na sua modéstia, representa o máximo que os nossos recursos gráficos até agora conseguiram realizar e, incontestavelmente, o melhor que tem sido publicado na Colónia. A tanto nos abalançamos para, aos materiais magníficos que levantaram êsse monumento ao valor do Império, que é a Exposição Colonial Portuguêsa, juntarmos a nossa contribuição, dentro do que as possibilidades próprias permitiram.6 (Número extraordinário 1934: 5) 7.

Pina likens the challenges of producing such a technically audacious publication to those faced by the colonists, whose struggles might be difficult for metropolitan Portuguese to understand. Although he praises the ECP, Pina also implies that the metropole should have greater sympathy for complaints voiced by colonists in the midst of hardship:

Esta a desculpa das suas impaciências, de suas reclamações e queixas por vezes enervantes […] para quem as ouve, fóra do meio trepidante em que se produzem. Que ela lhe seja levada em conta, pelo muito que moureja, sofre e concorre para a grandêsa da Pátria. Não se limitando a ser mero e anónimo orgão criador ou distribuidor de riquezas, vinca sua individualidade como colaborador

6 “[…] dedicated to the 1st Portuguese Colonial Exhibition […] we have published this Special Edition, which, in its modesty, represents the greatest achievement that our printing resources have thus far been able to produce, and, undeniably, the best publication yet produced in the Colony. To the extent that present conditions permit, we have put forward our best effort to add our contribution to the magnificent materials that have gone into the making of that monument to the value of the Empire that is the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition.” 7 The original spelling in all quotations has been left unaltered. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 102 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

apaixonado do progresso da maior parcela do Império.8 (Número extraordinário 1934: 6-7, my emphasis).

Because of his oscillation between praise for the Empire and solidarity with Angola’s settler community, it may be hard to see where Pina’s sympathies lie. To read the subtext in Pina’s words, one must understand more about who he was and what sort of “complaints” he was most likely referring to when discussing the plight of Angolan colonists. Adolfo Pina was born in Porto in either 1889 or 1890,9 and emigrated to Angola in 1910 (Torres 2012: 21). In 1913, he helped to organize the 1º Congresso Provincial de Benguela, where he first expressed his support for Angolan autonomy (Pimenta 2005: 111). Pina’s early activities in Angola are relatively obscure. It is helpful, however, to provide some historical context on early twentieth-century Angola. Pina arrived in the colony at a moment in which power relations between different groups—whites, mestiços and indígenas (blacks)—were changing rapidly.10 Until the late nineteenth century, the Portuguese presence in Angola had been largely restricted to a few coastal settlements such as Luanda and Benguela. The interior of the territory remained controlled by mostly Bantu African peoples and virtually untouched by white settlers, with the notable exception of Sá da Bandeira (Lubango), founded in 1884 (Castelo 2007: 54). Between 1900 and 1930, however, the white settler population increased from 9,000 to 30,000 (Pimenta 2012: 178). While this number remained minuscule in comparison with the black population, estimated at 3.3 million in 1930 (Pimenta 2005: 191), the growth of the settler population was significant enough that the newcomers began to assert themselves as a distinct social group and to form their own press and institutions, while, at the same time, the once highly active “mestiço” press was being pushed aside and suppressed (Pélissier and Wheeler 2009; Corrado 2010). These transformations went hand-in-hand with a renewed post-Berlin Conference drive towards “effective occupation” and heightened divisions between racial groups under the influence of theories on the “perils” of racial mixing, such as those espoused by Norton de Matos, Governor-General of Angola (1912-1915) and High- Commissioner of Angola (1921-1924) (Castelo 2007: 66-69).

8 “This excuse for their [the colonists’] impatience, for their complaints, which are sometimes irritating […] to those that hear them outside of the atmosphere of trepidation from which they spring: may it be taken into account, given how much they toil, suffer and fight for the greatness of the Fatherland, not wishing themselves to be limited to mere anonymous generators or distributors of wealth, and staking their claim to individuality as passionate contributors to progress in this greatest portion of the Empire.” 9 Torres (2012) dates his birth to 1890, but the Biblioteca Municipal do Porto (bmp.cm-porto.pt/) has a date of 1889 on titles listed with Adolfo Pina as the author. 10 See: Pélissier and Wheeler 2009; Castelo 2007. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 103 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

This period also saw discussions in metropolitan and colonial circles over the desired nature of the colonial project in Angola. One point of disagreement was whether or not imperial interests would be best served by increasing white settlement of the colonies. Even where officials agreed to promote settlement, they argued over what kind of colonization to encourage: that of skilled immigrants or that of poor laborers, such as the Madeirans who first settled Sá da Bandeira (Castelo 2007). Norton de Matos was an advocate of the latter type of colonization and his views and personal relationship with Angola’s white communities earned him allies, such as Adolfo Pina, who defended the High-Commissioner’s economic policies in 1922 (Fonseca 2014: 154). On the other hand, the High-Commissioner’s stance against the use of forced labor also gained him enemies in the colony and his disastrous financial policies contributed to the strengthening of autonomist movements among settlers during the 1920s (Pimenta 2005: 98-100). Adolfo Pina’s activities in the 1920s were closely tied to the development of the autonomist movements. Pina created the Empresa Gráfica de Angola and its main newspaper, A província de Angola, in 1923. A província focused on issues of “political autonomy in the colony, the problem of indigenous labor, colonization and infrastructure” (Fonseca 2014: 148) and was one of the outlets through which colonists expressed their political demands during the 1920s (Pimenta 2012: 179). In addition to his journalistic activities, Pina was a member of the Freemasons, like many of Angola’s colonial elites.11 In the events surrounding the aforementioned 1930 uprising against High-Commissioner Filomeno da Câmara, Angola’s Freemasons—noted for their autonomist and republican sympathies—came under attack. The uprising came as a result of Câmara’s temporary delegation of authority to his right-hand man, Morais Sarmento, who seized the opportunity to “arrest and deport hundreds of opponents of the new fascist Portuguese regime” (Torres 1997: 10). During the ensuing chaos, Salazar threatened to send a warship to Luanda to enforce Portuguese authority, eliciting calls for independence from some colonists, including Adolfo Pina, who stated:

Angola terá o destino de todas as colónias […] em todos os tempos se sente o formidável desejo e a invencível aspiração dos povos à independência. A hora de Angola ainda não chegou, mas ela chegará.12 (Qtd. in Torres 1997: 11)

11 One should recall, of course, that the Freemasons were major political targets of Salazar’s regime during his rise to power and throughout the formative years of the Estado Novo. See, for instance, Rosas 2012. 12 “Angola will have the same destiny as all colonies […] all times have borne witness to peoples’ great desire for, and invincible aspiration towards, independence. Angola’s time has not yet come, but it shall arrive.” e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 104 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

The outcome of the March 1930 uprising saw Sarmento killed and Filomeno da Câmara recalled to Lisbon. Pina and his fellow autonomists, however, would have no better luck. Following a series of autonomist attacks against colonial authorities in the months from June to October of that year, the Portuguese government deported a number of the rebels and introduced measures to prevent further insubordination (Pimenta 2005: 111-112). Among the laws enacted was the Lei das Transferências (May, 1931), which, in principle, was meant to ensure repayment of Angola’s debts by placing control of its currency reserves in Lisbon’s hands (Ibid.: 113). The law was also a means of protecting Portuguese exports by limiting Angola’s ability to import from other sources. In the wake of this decree, many of Angola’s economic associations issued a letter of complaint to Lisbon, drafted by Adolfo Pina himself (Ibid.). Nonetheless, Lisbon continued to nationalize the Angolan economy and the autonomist movements lost their impetus with the dismantling of local power structures and elimination of the Masonic order (Ibid.: 114). Furthermore, the tightening of press censorship beginning in 1932 meant the gradual elimination of opposition voices from the colonial press, which only those publications willing to align themselves with the new regime were able to avoid (Fonseca 2014: 216). A província de Angola was one such survivor, remaining in print until 1975 and existing to this day through its successor, the Jornal de Angola. Pina may have had to make compromises in order for his newspaper to survive, but he continued to express his opposition views in subtle ways up until his death in 1935. One instance of Pina’s “insubordination” occurred during the 1932 Feira de Amostras. Although the exhibition garnered considerable interest among colonial elites, not all colonists present could have been happy with the premise of the event. The Feira was a show of Lisbon’s strength following the recent centralizing measures; one in which Portuguese products were ironically showcased to prospective buyers from the colony, as if they had a choice in their consumption habits following the government’s recent decrees. Such irony may not have been lost on Adolfo Pina, whose flagship newspaper created a stand at the event under the banner “Por Angola”, eliciting the following comment from fellow Luanda newspaper, Última Hora:

Em lugar de destaque, na Feira de Amostras, encontrava-se um enorme, disforme stand que poderíamos classificar de ‘Stand-Enigma’, visto que, de princípio, desconhecíamos a sua utilidade […] não obstante gigantescas letras dizerem ‘Por Angola’. Como mais

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tarde nêle vimos expostas colecções de jornais do nosso prezado colega ‘A Província de Angola’ ficámos sabendo ao que êle se destinava e achávamos de mais efeito ter-se crismado êsse stand, mudando-lhe o nome para ‘Pró… Angola’ porque, afinal, ‘para’[sic] e ‘pró’ têm, relativamente a mesma significação.13 (Qtd. in Galvão 1933: 118)

When one realizes that “Pró-Angola” was the name of an autonomist group from the 1920s, the episode emerges as an inside joke among the local press, which, perhaps surprisingly, found its way into a section on positive reviews of the Feira in Henrique Galvão’s official report on the event. Upon Pina’s death three years later, Elmano Cunha e Costa—lawyer, ethnographic photographer and undercover PVDE14 agent in Moçâmedes—wrote to Salazar that although the “New State [had] not arrived to [sic] Angola,” at least Angola was rid of Adolfo Pina, who was “the most dangerous individual that Angola [had] ever seen,” due to his ownership of much of Angola’s free press and his links to the Freemasons (Faria 2013: 105). Angolan researcher Paulo Faria believes that Cunha e Costa’s remarks on Pina were most likely exaggerated (Ibid.). Nevertheless, given Pina’s political position, it is clear that the newspaper director’s words in the NE are a veiled criticism of metropolitan ignorance of colonial realities. The words are couched in a language that glorifies imperial unity on the occasion of the ECP, but, by the end of Pina’s introduction, the writer’s greater sympathy for his fellow settlers is clear.

The Angolan Settler in the Número Extraordinário

Pina’s colleague and fellow NE contributor, Norberto Gonzaga, published a eulogy for the journalist in the special edition of the Voz do planalto (also owned by Pina) dedicated to the Exposição Provincial de Benguela (EPB) (1935). Gonzaga’s praise for his newspaper’s former director was not particularly controversial, as he limited himself to listing Pina’s

13 “Centrally placed in the Feira de Amostras, there was a huge, oddly shaped stand, which we might classify as an ‘Enigma Stand,’ given that, at first, it was unclear what purpose it served […] despite the fact that giant letters read ‘For Angola.’ As we later noticed the stand’s collections of newspapers from our dear colleagues at ‘A Província de Angola,’ we understood what it was for, and felt it might have been more effective to christen it ‘Pro-Angola,’ since, after all, ‘for’ and ‘pro’ have essentially the same meaning.” 14 Polícia de Vigilância e de Defesa do Estado—the Portuguese security agency that preceded the infamous PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado). e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 106 Spangler Whose Colonial Project? qualities as a journalist and businessman (“Exposição Provincial” 1935: 19). However, in exploring Gonzaga’s comments on the EPB, we see parallels with Adolfo Pina’s earlier exaltation of Angolan settlers. Gonzaga writes:

O homem indomável […] virado à terra, seu berço e esperança, que canta a nostalgia dos pátrios lares, fica-se sem revoltas, abate-se ao infortúnio quando a desgraça baixa, e caminha de alma afeita de novo ao sacrifício […] Que se diga bem alto nas colunas do nosso jornal—foi com gente desta que o Alto Comissário Norton de Matos contou, foi com gente desta têmpera, dêste quilate, que se fez o Huambo e foi com gente tam valente […] que hoje se leva a efeito a 1.ª EXPOSIÇÃO PROVINCIAL DE BENGUELA! […] E nêste momento que recordamos a data da fundação da cidade não podemos deixar de saudar […] a rude gente do planalto […] A êsses bravos, a muitos dos seus que nestas terras tombaram mordendo o pó, impõe-se prestar-lhes a devida homenagem.15 (Ibid.: 11)

Detectible in Gonzaga’s words is a concern with defending the image of Angola’s white settlers. As Pimenta has pointed out, even white Angolan colonists were the subject of discrimination by metropolitan Portuguese, and as more Portuguese immigrants entered the colony, divisions appeared between settlers born in Angola and those new arrivals, who were seen as having certain privileges (Pimenta 2012: 181-183). This prejudice was also visible in discussions surrounding colonization policies, which were often influenced by deep-rooted theories on the “tropical degeneration” and “cafrealization” (adoption of “indigenous” habits by Europeans) that were thought to affect whites in Africa. These discussions were also marked by criticism of the low social status of most older generations of Portuguese immigrants to Angola (Castelo 2007: 43-124). Thus, when Gonzaga writes of the “rude gente do Planalto” he may also be turning the tables on preconceived notions of the “degeneracy” of the colonists by glorifying the

15 “These indomitable men […] turned towards the land, their birthplace and their hope, who sing nostalgically of their native land: they do not revolt. They are momentarily knocked down when misfortune befalls them, only to march forth again with their souls hardened by sacrifice. Let it be said loud and clear in the columns of our newspaper: it was people like these that High- Commissioner Norton de Matos counted on, it was with men of this Caliber that Huambo was founded and it was with such valiant people […] that we have been able to bring to fruition the 1st Provincial Exhibition of Benguela! […] And in this moment when we commemorate the date of the founding of this city, we cannot forget to salute […] the rough-mannered men of the plateau […] We must pay due homage to these bold men, to the many of their like who have bitten the dust in this land.” e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 107 Spangler Whose Colonial Project? first generations. He goes on to write of Angolan colonists as agents of progress, insinuating that this is something metropolitan Portuguese knew little about (“Exposição Provincial” 1935: 13). Gonzaga also expresses concern over new waves of immigration:

Não perderemos de vista a colonização estrangeira. Mas […] antes da vinda de novos colonos […] urge pensar na vida daquêles que já por aqui mourejam. Quais são os alicerces da colonização nestas paragens? A terra e a família. […] Aos colonos, pois, já estabelecidos, a primazia. Os outros virão depois metòdicamente e consoante o apetrechamento. Portugal não é um país pequeno. Se deseja viver e prosperar, não o pode fazer alheando-se da vida das províncias ultramarinas […]16 (Ibid.: 47, my emphasis)

Gonzaga’s glorification of the Angola’s white settler community is also visible in his story “A vida de um raio de sol,” included in the NE. The “ray of sunshine” in question is the unborn child of Natacha Maria, the Portuguese wife of Fritz, a Boer settler who lived near Sá da Bandeira. Fritz is impaled by an elephant’s tusks, but his desolate widow discovers that “as suas entranhas, agora despertas, guardavam a herança do morto”17 (Número extraordinário 1934: 83). Natacha kisses her husband’s corpse, happy in the realization that her future child represents the continuation of her community. Here it is helpful to recall that Sá da Bandeira was one of the first white settlements in the Angolan interior, having been colonized simultaneously in the 1880s by Portuguese settlers from the island of Madeira and by South African Boer trekkers.18 Oddly enough, a young Henrique Galvão spent most of his time in the region in Angola, getting to know both communities; Madeirans and Boers. He described them as “white tribes,” and was particularly depreciative of the Madeirans, whom he believed had suffered a process of “africanization” (Pimenta 2005: 47).

16 “We will not lose sight of foreign immigration. But […] before new colonists arrive […] we must think of the lives of those who already toil here. What are the bedrock of colonization in this part of the world? Family and the land […] Let priority be given, then, to those colonists who are already established. Others will come in a measured way and according to the resources available. Portugal is not a small country. If it wishes to live and prosper, it cannot do so by turning its back on the overseas provinces […]” 17 “Her womb, newly awakened, guarded the dead man’s legacy.” 18 In fact, the Madeirans had been sent to the region precisely to block colonization by the Boers, whom the Portuguese government mistrusted as unpredictable foreign agents whose culture was incompatible with Portuguese values (Pélissier and Wheeler 119-120). Considering that, when these efforts failed, some hoped the Boer population would be assimilated into the Portuguese community, perhaps Natacha’s pregnancy, followed by Fritz’s death, represents a successful pact between the two communities, with the ultimate longevity of the Portuguese element. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 108 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

Aware of the negative image that individuals such as Galvão held of Angola’s older settler communities, contributors to the NE sought to turn settlements such as Sá da Bandeira into emblems of the successful colonization of Angola. Reference to the town is also made in “Carta de Longe e de Perto,” by José Licínio Rendeiro. The writer, addressing metropolitan readers, complains that “Angola é uma terra caluniada como tantos outros florões do nosso querido Império.”19 He emphasizes the mild climate of the plateaus and lists the modern achievements of the colony: trains, cinemas, and newspapers. Moreover, Rendeiro stresses the “Portugueseness” and “whiteness” of the colony. He writes:

Nunca lhes disseram, meus amigos, que uma das maiores riquesas de que se pode orgulhar Portugal, são as cinco mil crianças da nossa côr que, na região de Sá da Bandeira, pedem a Deus pela Pátria-Mãe?20 (Número extraordinário 1934: 55)

Rendeiro closes with the following:

Angola é uma terra incompreendida por nós, mas demasiadamente conhecida pelos estrangeiros. Nela habitam 60.000 brancos da Metrópole que, pela lei e pela grei, honram o nome da Pátria longínqua. Só lastimamos que vocês não nos conheçam melhor e não abandonem aquele cepticismo e aquela indiferença que manifestam quando se fala de Angola. Terra de condenados? Terra de pretos? Terra de féras? Não meus amigos! Terra de gente honrada, terra de brancos, terra de Portugal.21 (Ibid.)

Writing from Afar

“Carta de Longe e de Perto” expresses sentiments shared by Galvão and Monteiro who, in putting together the ECP, hoped to put an end to popular misconceptions

19 “Angola is a much maligned land, just like so many other flowers of our cherished Empire.” 20 “Have you not heard, my friends, that one of the greatest treasures of which Portugal can boast are the five thousand children of our color who, in the region of Sá da Bandeira, pray to God on behalf of the Motherland?” 21 “Angola is a land that we misunderstand, but which is all too well known to foreigners. There reside 60,000 whites from the Metropole who, for God and country, honor the name of the far-off Fatherland. We only regret that you do not know us better and that you do not abandon that skepticism and that indifference you display when talking about Angola. A land of exiles? A land of black people? A land of wild beasts? No my friends! A land of honorable people, a land of white people, a land that belongs to Portugal.” e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 109 Spangler Whose Colonial Project? regarding the colonies. The notion of writing from “afar,” on the other hand, is one that is present in many articles in the NE and underscores the personal nature of colonists’ concerns over being misunderstood by those back in Portugal. This theme manifests itself in multiple ways. In “Carta ás mulheres de Portugal,” D. Maria Amélia Dias d’Almeida Teixeira writes of the rich social life and quality facilities to be found in Luanda and stresses how pleasantly surprised she was by the quality of life to be had in the colony. Teixeira’s letter is a call to the women of Portugal to follow her example, but, like Rendeiro’s “Carta de Longe,” it is also meant to bridge the knowledge gap between mother country and colony. The appeals from afar in the NE are also often related to a perceived lack of economic support for the colony. Francisco Borja do Nascimento writes that the ECP is an opportunity to reawaken the spirit of discovery among modern Portuguese and open their eyes to the possibilities offered by the colonies. In a seeming reference to the recent strangling of Angola’s economy by harmful policies, Nascimento states:

Da estrutura do sistema de administração do nosso Império Colonial não pode deixar de resultar sempre […] um grande desequilíbrio económico entre todas as partes do todo a favor da Metrópole, como aliás é justo e natural […] Mas para que então a vida das colónias se não estiole, convém, é imprescindível, que se não esqueça nem se deixe de atender a necessidade de compensar […] aquele mesmíssimo desequilíbrio, não por via de empréstimos ruinosos e vexatórios, mas com a construção de portos e caminhos de ferro […] Povo Português! Fadado desde remotos séculos para povo colonizador e civilizador, acarinhai as vossas colónias […] recuperai com sofreguidão a pura essência da vossa tradicional MENTALIDADE COLONIAL!22 (Número extraordinário 1934: 108)

Nascimento is not the only one to request railroads. Carlos Alves (perhaps the only “non- white” contributor to the NE)23 describes the agricultural potential of the Congo region

22“The administrative structure of our Colonial Empire must always lead to […] a great economic imbalance between all parts in favor of the Metropole, as is, of course, fair and natural […] But so that life in the colonies does not stagnate, it is essential that we not forget to compensate for […] that same imbalance, not via ruinous and humiliating loans, but through the construction of ports and railways […] People of Portugal! Destined throughout the centuries to be a colonizing and civilizing people, cherish your colonies […] you must eagerly recover the pure essence of your age-old COLONIAL MENTALITY!” 23 Judging from sparse photographic and biographical information on the contributors. Photographs of Alves show him to be most likely mestiço, but no direct confirmation of this has been found. Alves published a e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 110 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

(current Uíge province) of northwestern Angola and dispels myths about the region’s poor climate and diseases. After listing the area’s numerous positive qualities, however, Alves finishes with an appeal:

Sua Ex.ª o Ministro das Colónias, Dr. Armindo Monteiro, quando passou no Uíge pela sua visita à Colónia em 1932, teve ocasião de vêr […] alguns cafésais em frutificação. […] Quando Sua Ex.ª vir em exposição o café do Uíge, que se lembre dos seus produtores amarrados implacavelmente às consequências fatais da monocultura […] Que se lembre do território enorme formado pelo Zaire-Congo, que não tem uma via de penetração que lhe garanta uma troca eficiente com o exterior dos géneros variados da sua produção […] Que se lembre, enfim, de dar o impulso que há muito o Congo-Zaire espera para a construção do seu caminho de ferro […] que guarda a ‘chave’ que há de abrir as portas da riqueza, da prosperidade e do bem estar.24 (Ibid. 1934: 99)

What is fascinating about Alves’s article is the dialogue he opens with Armindo Monteiro. Clearly, Alves knew of Monteiro’s 1932 visit to Angola, which coincided with the Feira de amostras, and he was also aware of his region’s representation in the Angolan section of the ECP, using it as an opportunity to press Monteiro on the delivery of real progress to accompany the flash and rhetoric of the exhibition. Alves’s knowledge of the exhibitions is also made clear by the fact that he contributed to writing the “Opúsculo de Propaganda” entitled Uíge, Songo e Bembe: A Circunscrição Civil do Bembe, na Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, 1934, published under the sponsorship of the Angolan Government’s delegation to the ECP. As a final example of the dialogue between the NE contributors and visitors to the ECP, special attention should be given to Ralph Delgado’s article “A Riqueza Indígena de

number of works (see listings on http://memoria-africa.ua.pt/) and was later involved in politics as Mayor of Carmona (Uige) and deputy for Angola in the National Assembly (see http://app.parlamento.pt/PublicacoesOnLine/DeputadosAN_1935-1974/html/pdf/a/alves_carlos.pdf) 24 “His Excellency, the Minister of the Colonies, Dr. Armindo Monteiro, when he passed through Uige during his visit to the Colony in 1932, had the opportunity to see some fruiting coffee bushes. […] When His Excellency sees Uige’s coffee on display at the exhibition, may he remember the coffee growers who are cruelly tied to the fatal consequences of monoculture. […] May he remember the enormous territory of the Zaire-Congo region, which has no commercial route to ensure the efficient export of its various products […] May he remember to provide that impetus that the Congo-Zaire has long awaited to begin construction of its railway […] which holds the key to opening the doors to wealth, prosperity and well-being.”

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Angola.” The article contains what initially reads as a somewhat “progressive”—albeit paternalistic—criticism of Portuguese exoticizing and objectification of Angola’s indígenas:

Para os portugueses que andam distanciados, por falta de conhecimentos, da nossa obra colonial, os negros boçais do nosso património ultramarino são taxados de elementos primitivos exóticos […]; para os escritores, para os poetas, que se não dediquem, também, à causa colonial, os indígenas são fontes de caprichos de retórica, de barbarismos fantasistas, aproveitados, na generalidade, por uma nudez lamentável, adjectivada de artística,—pedaços humanos dignos de registo, não pelo que façam ou possam vir a fazer, mas pelo que valem como antiqualha rara, preciosa, de museu […]25 (Número extraordinário 1934: 95, my emphasis)

Although Delgado was probably aware of the fact that visitors to the ECP were being exposed to the “lamentable nudity” of Africans who were part of the exhibition’s “living museums”26—hence the article’s inclusion in this special issue—the article seems out of place in a magazine that itself contains pictures of semi-nude African women, such as the one titled “Venus Negras de Angola.”27 In any event, the writer does not dwell on the issue of the objectification of black (mainly female) bodies,28 since his main point regards what he considers to be the “true indigenous wealth of Angola,” of which only the colonists are aware:

Só para os comerciantes que têm relações com o ultramar, para os colonialistas, para os estudiosos, eles [os indígenas] são considerados elementos superiores de actividade, colaboradores incansáveis e dirigidos da nossa obra colonizadora, personalidades

25 “Among those Portuguese who, due to their lack of knowledge, are far removed from our colonial issues, the uncultured blacks of our overseas territories are considered to be exotic and primitive beings […]; for those writers and poets who also are not dedicated to the colonial cause, the indígenas are a source of fanciful rhetoric and fantastic barbarisms, and are often taken advantage of for their lamentable nudity, labeled as “artistic” – human bodies worthy of record, not for what they do or what they may come to do, but rather for what they are worth as rare, precious antique pieces for museums […]” 26 For more on this topic, see: Blanchard, Pascal (2008). Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. 27 Very probably a reference to Sara Baartman (1790 – 1815), a Khoikhoi woman known as the “Hottentot Venus” who was put on display as a freak-show attraction for her allegedly abnormally large buttocks and images of whom fed into discourses on scientific racism over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. See, for example: Lindfors, Bernth (2014). Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa's First Olympians. Madison: U of Wisconsin. 28 The circulation and consumption of images of nude African women by a (male) European public was a widespread and disturbing feature of visual culture in the Portuguese Empire and others. For more on this topic see, for instance, Vicente 2013. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 112 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

conscientes, acessíveis ao progresso, cujas portas lhes rasgâmos, com paciência e com interesse inegualáveis […]29 (Ibid.)

The rest of Delgado’s article amounts to a series of statistics on the productivity of Angola’s indigenous workforce. It is a call for investment in healthcare facilities and other infrastructures that will transform the indígenas into even more productive members of colonial society. As such, the article’s message is not so different from that of the advocates of “indigenous” labor in metropolitan policymaking circles. The key difference here—and the main feature that this article shares with others in the NE—is that it stresses, once again, that it is the colonists who know what the colony needs. Whether they emphasize the past exploits of the colonists, the fruits of modern living, or the economic imperatives of the future, the writers of the NE make it clear that their proximity to Angolan affairs gives them a unique right to speak from and for the colony. In retrospect, it is abundantly clear that such elite voices could hardly claim to speak for any but a tiny minority of the colony’s population. Yet the emphasis on local perspectives is clear and omnipresent throughout the publication and stands in marked contrast to the voices heard in metropolitan publications on the ECP.

Conclusions

More remains to be said on Angolan involvement in the colonial exhibitions of the 1930s. Nevertheless, the examination of this one magazine reveals a side of the colonial exhibitions that is not often visible, bringing to light unique agencies and views—in this case, those of the colonists themselves—which contest one of the exhibitions’ main intended purposes: to demonstrate unity and singularity of thought among imperial citizens and subjects. One might think that colonists would be happy to be represented in the metropole as agents of civilization, thus aligning themselves with the organizers’ ideological aims. Adolfo Pina and the contributors to the NE show us that although pride in the Empire and its “civilizing mission” was certainly a pervasive characteristic of those colonists’ writings

29 “Only for those traders who do business in the overseas territories, for the colonialists, for those who study [colonial matters], they [the indígenas] are considered superiorly active, tireless directed collaborators in our colonizing mission: conscious personalities who are capable of progress, the doors to which we open wide for them, with unparalleled patience and interest […]”

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 113 Spangler Whose Colonial Project? on the 1ª Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, they also were greatly concerned about who was speaking for them in the metropole and how they were being perceived. On the eve of the first colonial exhibitions in Angola and Portugal, the tensions between the metropole and certain Angolan colonial elites came to a head following the repression of the autonomist movements, elimination of the free press, dismantling of local power structures, and enactment of harsh economic policies. Despite whatever economic benefits and cultural pride colonists might have derived from the exhibitions, many of them—especially those involved in what once constituted the colony’s opposition press— would not have forgotten their disputes with Lisbon. Thus, even in times of censorship, the contributors to the NE found subtle ways to promote their own agendas between the lines of imperialist rhetoric. They may have genuinely believed in the imperialist ideals being exposed, but they wished to see them translated into real respect and material benefits for themselves, for their fellow colonists, and, in some limited respects, for Angola as a whole. Thinking back to the colorful cover image “A maior parcela do império,” and taking into account Adolfo Pina’s words that the Número extraordinário was “the greatest achievement” thus far of Angola’s printing industry, one can see that the magazine was an outlet for expressing pride in more than just the colonial project on display at the ECP. It was about articulating a particular type of local identity and making the colonists’ voice heard, both in Angola and in the metropole.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 114 Spangler Whose Colonial Project?

References

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Angola: breve monografia histórica, geográfica e económica elaborada para a Exposição Portuguesa em Sevilha (1929). Luanda: Empresa Gráfica De Angola. Boletim Geral Das Colónias. Ano VIII, nº 83. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, Maio de 1932. Boletim Geral Das Colónias. Ano VIII, nº 84. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, Junho de 1932. Boletim Geral Das Colónias. Ano VIII, nº 85. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, Julho de 1932. Boletim Geral Das Colónias. Ano VIII, nº 86. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, Agosto/Setembro de 1932. Boletim Geral Das Colónias. Ano VIII, nº 85. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, Julho de 1932. Boletim Geral Das Colónias. Ano XIV, nº 153. Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, Março de 1938. Coimbra, V. and Leitão, M. (1934) O Império português na 1ª Exposição colonial portuguesa. Album-catálago oficial: documentário histórico, agrícola, industrial e comercial, paisagens, monumentos e costumes. Porto: Agência Geral das Colónias. Exposição Provincial de Benguela e Feira de Amostras no Huambo. Nova Lisboa: Voz do Planalto, 1935. Feira de Amostras de Produtos Portugueses em Angola e Moçambique. Catálogo. Lisbon: Ministério das Colónias, 1932. Galvão, H. (1933) As feiras de amostras coloniais 1932, relatório e contas. Lisbon: Ministério das Colónias. Martins, J. R., Afonso, J. and Alves, C. (1934) Uíge, Songo e Bembe: A Circunscrição Civil do Bembe na Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, 1934: Opúsculo de Propaganda. Luanda: Imprensa Nacional. Número Extraordinário dedicado á Exposição Colonial Portuguesa e em honra da Restauração de Angola em 15 de Agosto de 1648, special issue of A província de Angola [Luanda] 15 Aug. 1934.

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Acciaiuoli, M. (1998) Exposições do Estado Novo, 1934-1940. Lisbon: Novo Horizonte. Cairo, H. (2006) [2017] “‘Portugal is not a small country’: Maps and Propaganda in the Salazar Regime”. Geopolitics 11 (3) 367–95. Castelo, C. (2007) Passagens para África: O Povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com Naturais da Metrópole (1920-1974). Porto: Afrontamento. Corrado, J. (2010) [2017] “The Fall of a Creole Elite? Angola at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Decline of the Euro-African Urban Community”. Luso-Brazilian Review 47 (2) 121-49. Faria, P. C. J. (2013) The Post-war Angola: Public Sphere, Political Regime and . Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Fonseca, I. (2014) [2017] A Imprensa e o Império na África Portuguesa, 1842-1974. Diss. Universidade De Lisboa. Hohlfeldt, A. and Carvalho, C. (2012) “A imprensa angolana no âmbito da história da imprensa colonial de expressão portuguesa”. Intercom – Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação 35 (2) 85-100.

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Lopo, J. C. (1962) Para a História da Imprensa de Angola. Luanda: Centro de Informação e Turismo de Angola. Matos, P. F. (2006) As cores do império: representações raciais no império colonial português. Lisbon: Instituto de Ciências Sociais. Melo, D. (2016) [2017] “A censura salazarista e as colónias: um exemplo de abrangência”. Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura (16) 475-496. Pélissier, R. and Wheeler, D. (2009) História de Angola. Lisbon: Tinta da China. Pimenta, F. T. (2012) Angola’s Euro-African Nationalism: The United Angolan Front. In E. Morier-Genoud, (org.) Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea- and Mozambique. Leiden: Brill. Pimenta, F.T. (2008) Nacionalismo Euro-Africano em Angola: uma Nova Lusitânia?. In Comunidades Imaginadas: Nação e Nacionalismos em África. Coimbra: University Press. Pimenta, F.T. (2005) Brancos de Angola: Autonomismo e Nacionalismo (1900-1961). Coimbra: Minerva Coimbra. Pinto, A. O. (2013) Representações literárias coloniais de Angola, dos angolanos e das suas culturas, 1924-1939. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/FCT. Pomar, A. (2013) [2017] Luanda: Exhibition-Fair Angola 1938. Buala. Rosas, F. (2012). Salazar e o Poder: A Arte de Saber Durar. Lisbon: Tinta da China. Serra, F. (2016) [2017] Visões do Império: a 1ª Exposição Colonial Portuguesa de 1934 e alguns dos seus álbuns. In Revista Brasileira de História da Mídia (RBHM) 5 (1). Torres, A. (1997) [2017] Angola: conflitos políticos e sistema social (1928-1930). Estudos afro-asiáticos 32: 163-183. Torres, S. (2012) Guerra colonial na revista Notícia: A cobertura jornalística do conflito ultramarino português em Angola. Thesis. Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Vargaftig, N. (2016) Des Empires en Carton: les expositions coloniales au Portugal et en Italie (1918- 1940). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez. Vicente, F. L. (2013) [2017] ‘Rosita’ e o império como objecto de desejo. Buala. Zilhão, P. (2006) [2017] Henrique Galvão: prática política e literatura colonial (1926-36). Thesis. Universidade de São Paulo.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 116 Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission' of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870-1930. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-137-35590-4

Fernando Tavares Pimenta1

Portugal formally abolished slavery in its African colonies in 1878, but the legal termination of slavery did not result in a system of free wage labor in the Portuguese Empire. On the contrary, compulsory native labor was one of the pivotal features of the Portuguese colonial system in Africa, a practice championed by the Portuguese legislators regardless of the nature of the political regime that existed in Portugal. For the Portuguese State, work was part of the natives’ civilizing process, whereby the authorities had the right and even the obligation to force natives to work. The natives had the legal and moral obligation to work so as to “improve their material and moral condition,” and, if not performed voluntarily, it would be imposed by the State. As such, special labor laws were introduced, stipulating that natives had to work; with the law on its side, the State could force the natives to work not only in public works, but also for private enterprises.2 It is precisely in this context that we need to understand Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo’s approach in The Civilising Mission of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870-1930. In this book, Jerónimo proposes a critical historical analysis of how the doctrine of a “civilizing mission” in Portuguese colonialism was formed and developed, between 1870 and 1930, focusing in particular on the question of native labor. Jerónimo explores the policies adopted for the recruitment, employment, organization, and distribution of native labor in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, demonstrating the presence of a labor system rooted in multiple forms of forced or compulsory labor targeted at native workers. Jerónimo shows, quite relevantly, that the labor system was legitimized by a number of racialized perspectives in favor of forced or compulsory labor, which formed an essential part of the doctrinal corpus of the “civilizing mission” of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Work, it was believed, was the foremost instrument in the process of raising the native population to the

1 PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute of Florence. Researcher at the University of Coimbra—Centro de Estudos Interdisciplinares do Século XX da Universidade de Coimbra (CEIS20-UC), as well as at Nova University of Lisbon—Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais (IPRI/NOVA). E-mail: [email protected] 2 From a legislative point of view, attention is drawn to the importance of the General Regulation on Native Labor, of November 9, 1899, enacted by decree of the Secretary of State for Naval and Overseas Affairs and promulgated by Government Decree no. 262 of November 18, 1899. Pimenta Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission' accepted standards of civilization. Moreover, Jerónimo also draws attention to the international and transnational dimension of the debates that took place on some aspects of Portuguese colonialism, in particular the persistence of forms of forced labor—similar to slavery—in the Portuguese colonies. He further examines the impact that such debates had on the definition of Portuguese foreign and colonial policy in the period immediately before the end of the monarchy and during the First Republic. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, “The Civilisation Guild: Native Labour and Portuguese Colonialism,” Jerónimo deconstructs the doctrine of the “civilizing mission,” showing that it was not based on the education or Christianization of Africans, but rather on creating the necessary conditions to prepare and induce the “bodies and souls” of natives to work, in a compulsory fashion if necessary. As such, colonial authorities had “the duty to force natives to work,” paring down the civilizing process of natives to an “education for and through work.” This position was favored by a significant number of Portuguese colonial thinkers and administrators, among whom were António Enes, Eduardo da Costa, and Paiva Couceiro. Behind the rhetoric of the “civilizing mission,” there lay a ruthless labor system that exploited the native population, reduced to a mere “work machine” acting in the economic interests of private companies and the colonial administration. The case of São Tomé, meticulously described by the author, is a particularly striking and enlightening example of the labor system centered on the brutal exploitation of native workers—the so-called serviçais (servants)—“hired” to work on the roças (cocoa plantations) on that island. In the second part of the book, “Colonialism Without Borders,” Jerónimo addresses, in a very pertinent way, the role of transnational powers and dynamics in the definition of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. He gives as examples the action of humanitarian anti-slavery movements, missionaries, and progressive and modernizing movements focused on colonial problems and contexts, as well as the . Particular attention is paid to a report by the American sociologist Edward Ross3 on native labor in Portuguese Africa, especially in Angola and Mozambique. Jerónimo examines the conditions under which the document was produced, its purpose and contents, and analyzes the academic, civic and political background of the sociologist. The author thus makes it clear that an international and transnational perspective is required in order to understand the colonial phenomenon in the Portuguese Empire.

3 Ross, Edward A., Report on Employment of Native Labor in Portuguese Africa. New York: Abbott Press, 1925. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 118 Pimenta Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission'

Having said this, the book does not sufficiently explore certain aspects of the colonial phenomenon directly related to the question of native labor—and, consequently, to the “civilizing mission”—in the Portuguese colonies. Firstly, not enough attention is paid to the issue of the native workers’ agency and the author fails to present (at least in any significant number) what would have been useful direct testimonials from those workers. To do so, the author would have had to use other types of methodologies, such as those of so-called oral history (particularly significant in the mostly illiterate African context4) or those used by subaltern studies.5 One case which the author could have easily tackled in greater depth was that of the railway and port facilities of Mozambique, where white workers and a significant number of African workers were paid to work under very harsh conditions.6 It would have been useful to search the archives of the colonial railway or port administration companies and to examine the Mozambican working-class press, in particular the socialist-minded newspaper O Emancipador. Furthermore, the few references made by the author to the Grémio Africano in Lourenço Marques—the owner of the newspaper O Brado Africano—are perhaps not ideal for understanding the agency of native workers in Mozambique, since that association represented the interests of the mestizo and black Europeanized petty bourgeoisie of the Mozambican capital. On account of its somewhat privileged position in the colonial society, this petty bourgeoisie enjoyed an economic, social, cultural, political, and legal standing that was different from that of most of the natives.7 This brings us to another important matter that is also not sufficiently developed by Miguel Jerónimo: class divisions in colonial society, in particular among the African population. In fact, the book tends to overemphasize the racial factor to the detriment of the class factor, highlighting the differences between Europeans and Africans, but, to some extent, blurring the schisms between different classes within both the white population and the black population. In the urban space, in particular, but also in some rural areas, class often took precedence over racial affiliation, creating divisions within the same racial category and developing forms of solidarity between individuals of different races. This is

4 Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History. London: James Currey, 1985. 5 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988, pp. 271-313; Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 6 Penvenne, Jeanne Marie, “De 1900 a 1930: lutas operárias no porto de Lourenço Marques,” Tempo, nº 499, 1980, pp. 16-21, nº 500, 1980, pp. 30-36. Penvenne, Jeanne Marie, African Workers and Colonial Racism. Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877-1962. London: James Currey, 1995. 7 Neves, Olga Iglésias, “Moçambique,” in Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa (Dir. A. H. Oliveira Marques). Lisbon: Estampa, 2001, pp. 469-584. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 119 Pimenta Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission' why, in towns such as Luanda, Lobito, Benguela, Lourenço Marques, or Beira, the interests of native workers and those of the African petty bourgeoisie were not in alignment with one another.8 On the contrary, there is much documentary evidence of the relationship of cooperation, and even of some promiscuity that existed between the African petty bourgeoisie of Luanda and Benguela and the white bourgeoisie living in the main Angolan towns, all of whom were involved in the same process exploiting native labor.9 The same consideration applied to the cases of solidarity between white and black workers, especially in Mozambican ports and railways.10 Miguel Jerónimo similarly does not pay sufficient heed to the experiments at economic modernization conducted by the Portuguese in Africa, particularly by those who sought to change the labor system. Above all, I am referring to the plan for socio-economic and administrative modernization directed by Norton de Matos in Angola, during the First Republic.11 Norton de Matos’s aim was to modernize the Angolan economy, administration, and society by creating fundamental infrastructures and communication routes, backed by public and private funds, through the institutionalization of an accessible credit system and the creation of an integrated domestic market, as well as by extending the circulation of money to the entire colony. The imposition of a free wage labor system was one of the cornerstones of the plan for the modernization of the Angolan economy and society, regarded as essential for integrating the natives into the monetarized economy. Moreover, Norton de Matos intended to form a class of African landowners and farmers capable of contributing to the development of a capitalist-based agriculture, instead of a system that was concerned with subsistence alone. This was a means of fostering agricultural development, already geared towards the export of raw materials, and also of creating a native domestic market that would be capable of absorbing the products from

8 Pimenta, Fernando Tavares, “Identidades, sociabilidades e urbanidades na África Colonial Portuguesa: Angola e Moçambique” in Tra due crisi: urbanizzazione, mutamenti sociali e cultura di massa tra gli anni Trenta e gli anni Settanta (a cura di M. Pasetti). Bologna: Archetipolibri/Quaderni di Storicamente, 2013, pp. 183-200. Dias, Jill, “Uma questão de identidade: respostas intelectuais às transformações económicas no seio da elite crioula da Angola portuguesa entre 1870 e 1930,” Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, n.º 1, 1984, pp. 61- 94. Oliveira, Mário António Fernandes de, Reler África. Coimbra: Instituto de Antropologia da Universidade de Coimbra, 1990. 9 Pimenta, Fernando Tavares, Brancos de Angola. Autonomismo e Nacionalismo, 1900-1961. Coimbra, Minerva, 2005. Santos, Maria Emília Madeira (ed.), A África e a instalação do sistema colonial (c. 1885–c. 1930). Actas da III Reunião Internacional de História de África. Lisbon: Centro de Estudos de História e Cartografia Antiga, 2000. Oliveira, Mário António Fernandes de, A formação da literatura angolana (1851-1950). Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1997. 10 Capela, José, O Movimento Operário em Lourenço Marques, 1898-1927. Porto: Afrontamento, 1981. 11 Dáskalos, Maria Alexandre, A política de Norton de Matos para Angola 1912-1915. Coimbra: Minerva, 2008. Neto, Sérgio, Do Minho ao Mandovi. Um estudo sobre o pensamento colonial de Norton de Matos. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2016. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 120 Pimenta Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission' mainland Portugal. This is why Norton de Matos sought to impede the families of white farmers from hiring native workers, a measure that was also applied in the white settlements during the period of the Estado Novo. Thus, the legislation enacted between 19 April and 21 December 1913, while Norton de Matos was the Governor-General of Angola, required payments to be made in money to all laborers, regardless of how they had been recruited, and stipulated a minimum wage, working hours, and rest periods. Norton de Matos also took measures to limit the arbitrariness in labor recruitment for the cocoa plantations in São Tomé, pursuing this policy to modernize the Angolan economy and society while he was the High Commissioner in the 1920s and sparking strong protests from some sections of the white settler community.12 Another issue that should also have warranted greater attention from Miguel Jerónimo was the relationship between white colonization and native labor in the Portuguese Empire. This was a central issue in all European settler colonies in Africa, where the settlers—given their demographic limitations—were never able to do without African labor.13 In Angola, settlers were actively engaged in the discussion about native labor and they put forward concrete proposals for defining both the native labor system and the Estatuto do Indigenato. In this particular regard, the case of the Congresso Distrital de Benguela (District Congress of Benguela) should be emphasized, as it is one of the most relevant examples of the white settlers’ political agency in Angola. The Congresso Distrital de Benguela was held in July 1913 and was attended by about one hundred and fifty delegates—mostly white, but also some assimilated mestizos and blacks—from Central Angola. This event ultimately defined the political views of white settlers on the colony’s crucial problems, in particular the native issue. In addition to defining the criteria to be followed in the civilization of natives, the congress members sought to prepare the basis for a possible regulation on native labor. Thus, the proposal was approved to enact a code or a general law on native labor, which was to enforce compulsory labor for natives on the grounds that the aim was to avoid vagrancy and crime. The principle of compulsory labor entailed a number of orders: the realization of a census of the native population that was capable of working; the introduction of an identity card for the natives; and the “the repression of vagrancy” by the colonial police. Another decision was to impose the obligation on all natives to send their children to school or to

12 Matos, J. M. Norton de, A Província de Angola. Porto: Edição Maranus, 1926; Torres, Adelino, O Império Português entre o real e o imaginário. Lisbon: Escher, 1991. 13 On this subject, see Pimenta, Fernando Tavares, “Colonialismo Demográfico Português em Angola: Historiografia, Identidade e Memória,” Revista de Teoria da História, vol. 17, n.º 1, Julho 2017, pp. 219-246. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 121 Pimenta Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission' the homes of Europeans or assimilated Africans to “learn domestic or agricultural work.” In addressing the question of the temporary emigration of native workers from Angola to the cocoa plantations in São Tomé, the Congress decided that the district could still supply manpower to São Tomé but not to the island of Príncipe, which was known to be affected by the sleeping sickness (doença do sono). However, the economic associations of the Benguela district, the city councils, and the municipal commissions were also to have their say in the definition of the maximum number of workers to be sent to São Tomé, as well as on the duration of their contracts. In order to “protect the rights of native workers,” the congress members felt that the future general law should consider two principles on native labor: the payment of the full salary in cash was made mandatory while the employer would also have to cover the medical expenses of the worker if the contract lasted for more than one year.14 Undoubtedly, the aim of the Congress was to secure the promulgation of a general labor law that would force the natives to work in the economic enterprises of the settlers (and assimilated Africans). As such, the settlers were interested in maintaining a labor system based on the exploitation of native manpower. Therefore, Norton de Matos’s plan to promote a system of free wage labor was not welcomed by a substantial number of white settlers, many of whom were greatly lacking in funds and considered the use of forced labor essential for ensuring the accumulation of wealth via their income from farming. Thus, they were not ready to assume the economic modernization proposed by Norton de Matos, particularly concerning the question of native labor. The most vehement protests against Norton de Matos’s labor policy came from the white settlers in Southern Angola, due to the shortage of native manpower in that region of the colony. One of the most outspoken settlers opposed to Norton de Matos was Venâncio Henriques Guimarães, a major landowner in Huíla.15 Guimarães criticized the native labor laws introduced by Norton Matos, as he felt they were damaging to the economic interests of the settlers, claiming it was prejudicial to withdraw the mechanisms that penalized natives who failed to comply with the moral and legal obligation to work. Nor did he accept the idea of transforming the natives into free peasants and landowners, as he feared this would bolster the economic independence of African populations, which in turn could foreshadow the threat of a future political independence for the blacks. Júlio

14 Jornal de Benguela, Ano II, n.º 29, de 16 de Julho de 1913, p. 5. 15 Guimarães, Venâncio, Angola. Uma administração ruinosa. Para a história do reinado de Norton. Lisbon: Imprensa Lucas, 1923. Cf. Clarence-Smith, Gervase, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola, 1840-1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 122 Pimenta Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The 'Civilising Mission'

Ferreira Pinto, the president of the Associação Comercial de Benguela (Benguela Trade Association), was, in some respects, of the same opinion.16 Nevertheless, Norton de Matos’s policy in Angola shows that, within the Portuguese colonial administration, there were several perceptions of the “civilizing mission,” particularly in regard to the question of native labor. Thus, irrespective of a legal system of forced labor, tangible steps were taken to promote free wage labor among the native population, at least in Angola. Clearly, there were tensions within Portuguese colonialism regarding the issue of native labor. Moreover, side by side with an archaic perspective that defended forced labor there was also a more modern perspective present from the outset in the policy of Norton de Matos that, later, in the 1940s was continued by the Governor-General of Angola, Álvaro Freitas Morna.17 All this shows the need for adopting a more comprehensive perspective on the question of the “civilizing mission,” especially in regard to native labor, while also taking into consideration certain factors that were inherent in the colonial situation and not only those of an international or transnational nature. However, these are facts that Miguel Jerónimo will certainly expand upon in upcoming works, with this book being an interesting starting point for future in-depth research on the relationship between native labor and the “civilizing mission” within the framework of the Portuguese Colonial Empire.

16 Pinto, Júlio Ferreira, Angola. Notas e comentários de um colono. Lisbon: J. Rodrigues, 1926. 17 Álvaro de Freitas Morna, Problemas económicos da colónia. Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1943; Morna, Álvaro de Freitas, Angola. Um ano no Governo-Geral. Lisbon: Livraria Popular de Francisco Franco, 1944. e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 123 Xavier, Ângela Barreto and Cristina Nogueira da Silva. O Governo dos Outros: poder e diferença no Império Português. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2016. ISBN: 978-972- 671-372-2.

Pedro Puntoni1

O Governo dos Outros: poder e diferença no Império Português [The Government of Others:

Power and Difference in the Portuguese Empire], organized by historians Ângela Barreto Xavier and Cristina Nogueira da Silva, brings together a series of texts that summarize the results of a project developed by researchers from ICS-Ulisboa (Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon) and CEDIS (Research Center on Law and Society, Faculty of Law, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) with the collaboration of colleagues from other research centers. The goal of the project was to conduct research on a long time span (1496-1961), looking at how “the government of different populations of the Portuguese empire was thought about, debated, legally framed, and realized in narrative terms.” The research was closely linked to a number of other studies that also examined the political and institutional history of the Portuguese metropolitan and colonial space, involving a constant review of the terms of analysis of the historical processes of its government and administration. The studies adopt an almost Foucauldian approach to the question of power, looking for the structural indicators, beyond the individuals, that define action and discourse in history. The time span chosen for the project and which, broadly speaking, guided the preparation of the texts, runs from the date of the decree ordering the expulsion of the Jews from the (1496) until the abolition of the political, civil, and penal sanctions contained in the statute governing indigenous workers (1961). It is a period of almost five hundred years. The choice of this time span is one of the book’s most daring moves. Could it mark the beginning of long-term historical trajectories in the study of politics and power structures: “big is back?” The book goes far beyond merely grouping together related essays. It is a cohesive work with a clear guideline—proven by the excellent synthesis written by the coordinators

1 Researcher at the University of São Paulo, CNPq (Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) and CEBRAP (Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning), Brazil. E-Mail: [email protected] Puntoni O Governo dos Outros in the first essay of the book, which, rather than being a simple introduction, constitutes an autonomous collaboration in its own right, composed in the form of a cohesive narrative. The book proposes a transverse reading of the issues identified with the government of others: the management of diversity and difference in the Portuguese imperial experience. Where required, some authors engage in a comparative, or rather analytical, study of other imperial contexts, without which the Portuguese Empire could not be understood. The Spanish case, which is the most evident and the closest to the Portuguese one, is frequently referred to in all the texts—most notably in those concerned with the modern era. For the organizers, there are three main concepts that serve to structure the book: government (understood more precisely as the management of peoples); the “other,” representing “the recognition of difference,” and its “transformation into a legal and socially operative otherness,” (p. 22) (applied not only to colonized peoples, but also often to the settlers and colonists themselves); and citizenship, which relates to the processes of inclusion and exclusion (i.e. the attribution of rights by a central power). The government of others is thus defined not in opposition to the government of oneself (ethics), but as the government of peoples that are beyond the “Portuguese identity.” This identity is established precisely through the processes of confrontation, encounter, and mixture, referring here to a tradition that had Gilberto Freyre as its great exponent. To define the other, therefore, is to define oneself. Governing the other, however, is identified here with the processes of domination and control of peoples under Portuguese sovereignty, which represents the power of a monarchy in new areas of conquest. Colonization, seen as the process of the conquest, settlement, and development of new territories, includes the anticipatory experience of a sovereignty centered on domination. Power is the fact of domination and to rule others is to dominate them. In this sense, I believe that, underlying these three central concepts (government, the other, and citizenship), there are two others that serve as their foundations, but which are not explicit: empire and colonization. For this reason, we must consider the two opening chapters of the book as decisive: the article by Antonio Manuel Hespanha on “how to make an empire with words” and the article by Giuseppe Marcocci on the links between slavery and the empire. The first allows us to understand one of these constants of governing others in Portuguese imperial experiences. António Hespanha paints the picture of a discontinuous and heterogeneous empire, based “on a more pragmatic and economic logic, founded on the autonomy of its parts, on modular architecture, and cost-saving strategies” (79). Legal pluralism, rather than monism and universalism, would have allowed for the production of

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“differentiated statutes,” capable of transforming difference into alterity; that is, transforming the peoples placed within the limits of the expanding sovereignty into categories to be appropriated. In other words, one of the central axes of the book is precisely the understanding of this process of the creation of the other as an entity destined to be governed, which in terms of the language of the empires means the construction of citizenship (a category of belonging) to the imagined political body. The reference, which is evident here, is to the Edict of Caracalla (212), the starting point of the chapter written by Jane Burbank and Frederik Cooper, devoted to the study of citizenship in the context of twentieth-century empires. It is an enlightening text, since it shows how the concept of citizenship in the context of an empire (quite different from what we understand today as citizenship in the nation-state) presupposes different populations belonging to a political community, with distinct rights, and being governed in an unequal way. 2 What António Hespanha reveals to us was expressed in the context of the Old Regime under the institutional framework of naturalness. The empire was the place of de facto domination and we must understand it (according to Hespanha) not as a perfect machine or a codified system, but as a flexible, heterogeneous set of configurations of power, hierarchies, and spaces of collaboration. It must not be forgotten, however, that this domination includes the conquest, and sometimes the destruction, of the “others.” The chapter by Giuseppe Marcocci refers to another kind of confrontation with reality: the link between empire and slavery, between the domination of peoples and their exploitation (by means of this institution, i.e. this specific form of property and violence). This link “influenced, and partly structured, the forms assumed over time by the ‘Government of Others’, that is, through the inclusion of the non-Portuguese in a system of multicontinental domination, which extended from Africa to America, and to South and East Asia” (127). The book then speaks of a place in history—which is in fact our history from the beginning of the modern era until the present day—defined by this tension between legal plurality, the institutional ways of approaching power, the place of the people, and the harsh violence involved in the conquest, submission and domination of peoples. These “others” were forced to work, sacrificed to the creation of mercantile gains and tax rewards, as well as to the construction of forts and the machines required for a war that was escalating and therefore needed their improvement to guarantee the expansion of this

2 The text was originally published in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 3, 495-531 (2008). In 2010, the authors published a book offering a comparative perspective on how empires govern dispersed and diverse populations: Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, Princeton UP, 2010.

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“European world.” Also, we must never forget the destruction and the complete elimination of many of those who did not even manage to transmute to the status of “others.” After all, indigenous is a structural fact of America’s colonization process. Whether in Paraguaçu or in the mountains of the during the sixteenth century, in the sierras and wilderness of Brazil in the seventeenth century, or even today in southern , in the tragedy that the Guarani Kaiowás are currently experiencing... There is an evident continuity here. A structure perceived in the long term. As already stated, the option for this long period of study (1496-1961) is undoubtedly one of the book’s most daring moves. It is fulfilled only within a few chapters, but it is mainly noted in the sequencing of themes. The dangers of working with such a long time scan are the dangers of traveling at high speed. We might, at times, apprehend the whole picture but we always miss something; not just a small detail, but something that could be essential. I think the authors understand this well and, like us, were distressed by what was not done as much as by what could still be done. However, history is precisely this very territory of the unfinished in which there is always something to be revealed, new landscapes to be built, buried rocks that might help us—like geologists—to understand the formation of mountains and plains, deserts, and forests. Nevertheless, there are also other determinants to be noted; some coming from afar, some that might escape us. In the historiography of empires, the interest in extended periods of time has never disappeared, as one can see in the works of historical sociology or in those linked to the theory of world-systems. Indeed, even going beyond a Marxist perspective, there is still the understanding of the explanatory power of the role of capital in the formation of the modern world; the impact of mercantile exchanges on the planning of the modernization process, which justified this approach based on a long time span. Another justification for this long-term approach, as demonstrated by David Armitage and Jo Guldi, is undoubtedly the chance that it offers to view events from a global perspective. In a different book, written in collaboration with Armitage,3 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, one of the authors of The Government of Others, had already spoken of the approach of “connected histories” leading towards a “transitive global history:” a decentralized history conceived from different equivalent points looking at the connections between similar phenomena. Subrahmanyam participates in this book with a comparative study (over the long period) of the Mughal, Iberian, and Ottoman empires. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me that the eyes of the

3 Armitage, David and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, 1760-1840, 2009.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 127 Puntoni O Governo dos Outros other authors are focused on this global perspective. Instead, what they attempt to do is to formulate a narrative that focuses on the historical process of an empire understood in terms of its peculiarities. The longer time span serves more as an interpretive key that can help to reveal the permanencies and the continuities. For the reader, the dates are useful beacons. The first one, 1496, derives from the understanding that the expulsion of the Jews was, in the words of the organizers, a “critical event for the configuration of relations with the otherness developed in the Iberian empires of modern times” (32). The excellent chapter by Jean-Frédéric Schaub (“Reflections regarding a political history of racial categories in the West,” my translation), shows us how the dissolution of difference, the search for integration through conversion, and the erasure of marks of distinction—a violent and radical act—led, contradictorily, to the emergence of new forms of differentiation. According to the French historian, in the Peninsula and in the areas of colonization, “two crucial discriminatory processes for the emergence of racial categories in the Western world converged and came together: not only the Jewish and the Muslim questions, but also slavery” (32). The narrative explores the period of time that extends until the extinction of the indigenous statute, in 1961, in the post-war context, when Luso-tropicalism challenged racist policies, encouraging a new legal-political turning point. Claudia Castelo’s texts about the settlement model set up in the 1950s by the Estado Novo in Angola and Mozambique and the texts of José Pedro Monteiro on the changes in policies that organized native labor in the early 1960s reveal this new framework. As is always the case in history, the choices are sometimes quite arbitrary. They are not fully justified and there will be some who question the chosen time frame. However, what is important is to note the defense of a view that stretches further in time, enabling the search for comparisons that could reinforce a constant, identify elements of continuity, or, conversely, present moments of rupture or the emergence of a new structure or configuration. With regard to the question of citizenship, for example, the book helps us understand how there came about a time when legal pluralism, moderated by the force of Christian universalism, was predominant. A second moment, in the eighteenth century, marked the consolidation of a collective imagination, leading to the assimilation of peoples through their belonging to the same political contract, but which also allowed for the confirmation of a process of acculturation, Europeanization and the elimination of differences. The “other,” (previously Gentile or Pagan, Moorish, Jewish, the contrary or negative infidel, or the unredeemed, in other words [namely those of St. Thomas]) will no

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 128 Puntoni O Governo dos Outros longer be a part of the prevailing order because he has been converted, but rather because he has been assimilated. At the end of their journey, readers will note the omission of some of the places of this multicontinental empire. They will miss the nineteenth century, which is relatively underrepresented here (even though it is very well represented in Ricardo Roque’s study about the voice of the gangs and their appropriation by Timorese elites and in Sandra Lobo’s essay on citizenship in Goa in the nineteenth century). I believe readers will mostly miss the economics and war among the processes that mainly underlie the creation of this political space, a space of domination and violence. After all, colonizing does not only mean conquering and dominating, but also producing (or controlling what is produced). The market is both the means and the purpose of such domination. The economic dimension of this empire (and of all modern empires from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century) cannot be neglected. The taxation dimension, so deeply embedded in the flows of commodities, currencies, and capital, is crucial for our effective understanding of the construction of the mechanisms of power and the sustenance of government technologies. The administrative machinery, the church structures, and the military apparatus (which is expensive, and includes the costs of soldiers, armaments, forts, and prisons) all require a government dimension which is that of managing the taxation machinery: the Treasury House, income, and expenditure. Therefore, we must realize that what is sometimes understood as negotiation with the local elites is in fact flows of political communication within the state machinery itself. Nevertheless, I do not want to go to the other extreme, looking for an economic determination. We know full well that social phenomena and the forms through which power was institutionalized, seen from the viewpoint of its economic control and conditioning, must be analyzed (and this, once again, was a precept of Weber’s writing) in a prudent way and freed of all dogmatism. Finally, the importance of this book should once again be noted: it deals with a long time span, and an area the size of the globe, in terms of its structures of power and of exclusion, domination, and assimilation. Therefore, for this very reason, it suggests a very rich path for the renewal of historiography. Due to the quality of individual contributions and the interest that each of the themes addressed in the chapters can arouse, but especially due to the strength of this joint approach, the book displays an uncommon importance in the territory of history. We should also note that the team coordinated by the two researchers were careful enough to provide access to a digital archive on a website. This new archive brings together

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 129 Puntoni O Governo dos Outros the basis of historical sources of the Portuguese law (going further with the Ius Lusitaniae project, coordinated by the two authors and Pedro Cardim), gathering together the Boletim do Conselho Ultramarino (Bulletin of the Overseas Council) and the Legislação Novíssima do Ultramar (New Overseas Legislation) collections. This archive is available to all researchers and to all those who are interested in viewing the main legal sources underlying many of the studies assembled here. Furthermore, there is a useful webpage showing a list of other websites containing important documents for the study of the territories of the Empire (http://www.governodosoutros.ics.ul.pt/).

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 130 História da Diocese de Viseu, 3 volumes. José Pedro Paiva (coord.). Viseu: Diocese de Viseu e Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2016. ISBN: 978-989-98269-1-5.

Maria Amélia Álvaro de Campos1

Published by the Diocese of Viseu and the Coimbra University Press, this work results from the ambitious endeavors of a team coordinated by José Pedro Paiva, a Coimbra University professor who is among the foremost Portuguese experts on Religious History. The ecclesiastical circumscription in question is studied over a 1400-year time span in a work that goes beyond the parameters of local history and which—in the words of its coordinator—seeks to observe “on a global scale, the perspectives opened up by so-called micro-history (…) bearing in mind the concept of connected histories.” The História da Diocese de Viseu comprises three volumes, organized in a chronological-thematic way. The first volume (600 pp.) deals with the diocese from its documented origin (569 AD) until the beginning of the Early Modern Age in Portugal, the period to which the second volume (682 pp.) is dedicated, covering events from 1505 to 1819. The chronology of the third volume (713 pp.) covers the period from to the end of the Estado Novo (1820-1974). Each volume is divided into five chapters: The Territory; Normative and Doctrinal Context; Agents and Forms of Institutional Organization; Diocese Governance and Relations between Powers (this chapter is subdivided into two in the first volume only); and Christianity and the Faithful: the Christian Sacred Experience. Departing from the approaches used in the study of other Portuguese dioceses in books written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose authors and discourses had a commitment to the Church, the main purpose of this work is to account for the construction of the Diocese of Viseu and understand the ways in which this institution shaped the territory and population of its area of implantation. Thus, a history that was apparently intended to be institutional in nature involved the convergence of methodologies of Territorial History and Archaeology, Social History, History of Mentalities, History of Spirituality, and Religious Sentiment. In this way, it was possible to link together different studies of the territory, the Church’s personnel and its norms and

1 Researcher at CHSC-UC, University of Coimbra and CIDEHUS-UÉ, University of Évora, Portugal. FCT post-doctoral researcher (SFRH/BPD/100765/2014). E-Mail: [email protected] Campos História da Diocese de Viseu directives—providing the basis for religious and pastoral service—as well as the Church’s moral control over lay persons. The Diocese of Viseu is analyzed with the use of several documentary collections, housed in over 40 institutions, archives, and libraries, at home and abroad. In Portugal, the most important sources of such documents include the Torre do Tombo National Archive, the Viseu Historic Archive, and the Viseu District Archive. Abroad, we should mention, in particular, the information retrieved from the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. Listed at the end of the third volume are the indexes of sources (manuscript and printed) and a bibliography supporting the research. Finally, the work is enriched with the inclusion of an onomastic index of the persons and places studied, which simultaneously enables and encourages future research. Subjecting diverse chronologies to similar methodologies and research surveys enables the reader to comprehend the diocese’s history over a long time span. It also allows us to view different historical facts and events concerning the country and the Catholic Church through the contextualizing reflections offered by several authors—whether by framing the subjects and time periods that they study or by making in-depth analyses of their reflections and consequences at the diocesan level. The territorialization of the Church (structured at the outset through its parishes, archdeacons, and dioceses) and its gradual complexification have stimulated academic debate within the most recent European historiography. Linked to this debate is the first chapter in the História da Diocese de Viseu, which explores the establishment and evolution of the Diocese of Viseu in its territory, as well as describes the material expression of that presence, from the see of the diocese to each of its parishes. To this end, the various authors analyzed data relating to geography and historical demography, identifying patron saints, their appearance, and their spatial distribution, while also revealing the networks of influence and power spread across the diocese by studying the right of patronage. In this sense, the contribution of archaeology was essential to the first volume, in particular for studying the period before the diocese’s definitive restoration in 1147. Equally valuable was the Crown’s production of administrative documents, such as the list of churches in the kingdom dating from 1320. For the early modern and modern periods, the detailed analysis of the parochial network was preceded by a study of quantitative demographical data, using specialized sources already available for these periods.

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In turn, art historians look at the material evidence of the Church’s implantation in this diocese. From the Romanesque and Gothic stylistic programs of the Middle Ages, to the transformations of temples, to the restoration initiatives promoted by the Direção Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais in the 1930s, what stands out in particular is the study of the buildings’ structural features in accordance with an analysis of the context and the initiatives of the commissions that were made for the building and decoration of churches, as well as the conjunctural and pastoral motivations behind them. In the field of painting, a thorough analysis of the works of art commissioned for the cathedral made it possible to observe Viseu—especially in the days of the painter Grão Vasco—within the context of a vast international landscape of artistic models and programs. Using knowledge and approaches from several fields of research, the study of the territory processes a variety of data and results in a rich, multi-disciplinary analysis. Nevertheless, the collaboration of a great number of authors—especially in the first volume—gives rise to an excessive fragmentation of the information, making for difficult reading. The inclusion of a critical synthesis at the end of each chapter in each volume would have favored a more global, integrated, and problematizing grasp of the data previously presented—of which a large part was previously unpublished, coming from sources never before explored—using a predominantly descriptive and demonstrative approach. The following chapters start by placing this diocese in the context of the evolution of the Church’s normative parameters, proceeding from there to present its local administrative structures and, next, to analyze the men who were a part of them. Among other things, the authors study the following subjects in particular: the agents and forms of institutional organization; the episcopate and the prelates; the chapter, the canons, and the canonical dignities; and the parishes and their pastors. To better understand the profile and behavior of the clerical actors, stress is placed on analyzing the clergy’s background and preparation, beginning with the diocese’s early days. In this way, we are provided with an outline of the first chapter school, the creation of the post of Schoolmaster within the Chapter, the foundation and workings of the Seminary, the difficulties it encountered in the last few centuries, and its sociocultural role in this region of the country. Careful attention is also given to the monastic network of Viseu by studying the foundation and institutional history of each monastery and reflecting on the pastoral influence that these exerted on the territory either in parallel with, or as part of, the parochial network.

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In Volume I, the period before the diocese’s definitive restoration, which is practically devoid of sources, is studied through a detailed analysis of the Church’s conciliar canons, produced between the fourth and twelfth centuries. The participation of representatives from the Viseu clergy in the Iberian councils is only documented from the sixth century onwards. After 1147, the study turns to a reliance on documents which are diverse in the origin and context of their production, allowing us to capture the inner workings of the diocese as well as the multiple outside influences on the diocesan dynamics of Viseu. As an example, we have an analysis of the interference by the Portuguese king and Coimbra’s Santa Cruz Monastery in the restoration and restructuring of the diocesan administration. The evolution of the diocese in the Late Middle Ages reveals different trends, resulting from varying national and European historical conjunctures. We see, for instance, the weakening of the Portuguese Crown’s influence and control, yielding to the centralizing Papacy of Avignon. The clarity of this analysis comes from an examination of diocesan and pontifical documentation in detail, combined with a deep and thorough knowledge of the international context. In relation to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it would, however, have been innovative to problematize in greater detail the implications of the Lateran councils for this territory—since we are speaking of key moments in the Church’s territorialization, in the context of the Gregorian Reformation latu sensu, occurring simultaneously with the process of construction and emancipation of the kingdom of Portugal, in which the Church played a very important part. The second volume turns its attention to the contextualization and analysis of the Tridentine Councils, the major subject of a series of productive academic discussions held at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in 2013 with the participation of some of the authors of this volume. Here we can read the results of these recent debates and their application to the territory of the Diocese of Viseu. We can follow the response of Viseu to the guidelines issued by the Council of Trent and the transformations that these brought to the lives of laymen and clerics through such significant aspects as regulating the celebration and register of the sacraments, the action of prelates in controlling the parochial network, and the renovation of the churches, among many others. We should note that the records of episcopal visitations produced within this context were fundamental sources at various stages in the compilation of this volume. In turn, the chronology dealt with in the third volume shows the way in which this diocese adapted to the difficult circumstances of the liberal republican anticlericalism of the

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 134 Campos História da Diocese de Viseu nineteenth and twentieth centuries, analyzing and problematizing such measures as the extinction of civil and lay patronages (excluding royal patronage) and the suppression of tithes. An effort is made to interpret some landmark laws in the history of Portugal at the local level, such as the Law of the Separation of Church and State (1911), although these are not always particularly well analyzed. What is more, it is very stimulating to read the pages dedicated to the regular clergy of Viseu, which allow us to view the birth, life, and, in some ways, the death of the whole monastic network. Saul Gomes’s very detailed analysis of each monastery in Viseu—from the time of their foundation until the Liberal period—is further enhanced by Jaime Gouveia’s reflection on the various phases of liberal and republican anti-congregationalism, debating the sociocultural and economic impact of the measures adopted in the context of both Viseu and Portugal. To this end, Gouveia focuses on the consequences of those impacts on this city and region, including, for instance, the processes of returning property to common law in various monasteries and the different steps taken in the extinction of the religious orders, resulting in the closure of their convents. Despite the relative silence of this period’s ecclesiastical sources, this historian manages to extract some names belonging to the extinct communities and to trace their later careers in the secular world. The diocesan institution is thus characterized through its different administrative instances, outlining the history of its foundation, its functioning, and the tax structure that ensured its funding. This portrait of the diocese’s central apparatus and of its extension to the whole district is based on the study of such relevant sources as the general laws of the Church and the kingdom, the correspondence received in Viseu from the papal curia and the royal court, the conciliar canons, the synodal constitutions, the statutes of the chapter, and, of course, the ecclesiastical institutions’ archives. This is then followed and completed by a study directed more towards the lay world, the laypeople’s religious experience, and the resulting artistic manifestations. It would be impossible to comment on all the impressively novel analyses made in this work, the data revealed, the ambition of their epistemological premises, and, above all, the way in which they examine the inner workings of the whole diocesan structure. Attention is, however, drawn to the prosopographical method used to reconstruct the careers of the various ecclesiastical actors, namely the prelates. Particularly notable are the studies by Mário Farelo in his critical introduction to the 27 prelates (1147-1505), as well as the one by José Pedro Paiva, which reconstructs the process of accession to the cathedra of Viseu and the ecclesiastical careers of 24 bishops (1505-1819), and Paiva and Sérgio Ribeiro

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Pinto’s analysis of nine prelates (1820-1974). Although this is characterized by an almost complete absence of sources, we should not forget the work undertaken by Catarina Tente in identifying and framing the prelates of Viseu from 572 to 982. The application of the prosopographical method to such a large structure covering such a long time span allows us to understand the role of Viseu’s episcopate within a landscape of ecclesiastical and secular, as well as national and international, influences. We obtain a close-up view of both the human and the political sides of Viseu’s bishops over the centuries, as well as their family backgrounds, the composition of their entourages, and the networks of sociability and favors which supported them and which they in turn supported. Case by case, the intervention of outside powers—namely the Portuguese Crown and the Holy See—is identified over the centuries in the appointments of clergymen to their leading positions, confirming the interference of both secular and ecclesiastical powers in the administration of the diocesan jurisdiction. The results of this effort to identify, reconstruct, and interpret the careers of the prelates of Viseu, from 1147 to 1974, represent a truly extraordinary advancement for the historiography of the Portuguese Church. In this regard, we note only the lack of a systematic, chronological list of all those individuals, which would help in carrying out future studies. Nonetheless, given the dimension of the whole work, the decision not to include such a list is understandable. From our reflection on this work, we conclude that, henceforth, it will be almost impossible to conduct any study in Portugal about the History of the Church without quoting from this text. This is due to the diverse range of subjects that it covers, as well as the wealth of sources, the depth of the research, and the novelty of the information it gives us. The large team who made it a reality and José Pedro Paiva must be congratulated. Furthermore, it is to be hoped that other Portuguese ecclesiastical sees will also be subjected to this type of research, using the same high standards.

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 136 Cardim, Pedro. Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica (ca. 1550– ca. 1715). Madrid: Marcial Pons, Ediciones de Historia, 2017. ISBN: 978-84-15963-98-1

Irene María Vicente Martín1

Historians have displayed a renewed interest in the Spanish Monarchy over the last two decades, beginning to re-examine the historical differences in the political organization of the territories and people subjected to its rule, amongst which were Castile, Aragon, the Americas, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Their discoveries about the political capacity of these territories’ institutions for dealing autonomously with different situations have greatly revised certain outdated notions regarding the Spanish Monarchy. Consequently, multiple research studies have identified the limits of royal power, as well as highlighted the importance of a large number of decision-making centers beyond the Spanish Habsburg court. In asking how the Spanish Monarchy managed to remain relatively stable for two centuries, historians have focused their attention on the political and social relationships between the different territories that formed part of the greater whole. The book reviewed here, Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica (ca. 1550–ca.1715), is an example of this historiographical debate. Throughout its more than four hundred pages, Pedro Cardim seeks to place emphasis on the relationship between the Spanish Monarchy and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book consists largely of republished articles, with the author recovering much of his past work and using it to reflect on the relationship between these two entities before, during, and after the period known as the Iberian Union (1581–1640). The reason for revisiting his earlier research, he tells us, is the need to systematically re-assess certain central issues that seem to have been forgotten by many academics currently studying the subject. Pedro Cardim is a researcher at the Portuguese Center for Global History (CHAM—Centro de História de Além-Mar), Universidade Nova, in Lisbon, where he also works as an associate professor. Since completing his PhD about the importance of love and friendship in early modern politics, his main areas of interest have been the history of Portugal, its relationship with the Spanish Monarchy, and the role that the two monarchies played in the development of the early modern world. The book reviewed here is designed

1 Postdoctoral researcher, European University Institute, Department of History and Civilization. Florence, Italy. E-Mail: [email protected] Vicente Cardim, Pedro. Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica to be, firstly, an illustration of Cardim’s academic and professional career and, secondly, a comprehensive study of the political meaning of Portugal within the Spanish Monarchy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The volume is divided into eight chapters, preceded by a brand-new introduction, but provides us with no conclusion or final comments. As mentioned earlier, all the chapters are either articles or extracts from books published over the last two decades in various international journals, textbooks, and compilations of different studies. Nevertheless, this new format, the consequent organization and ordering of the texts within the volume, and the fact that all these articles and chapters have been translated into Spanish create the impression of a united whole. The new introduction also gives us the feeling that we are reading a newly-published work that sets out to pursue entirely fresh purposes, something that it actually achieves. The first chapter, originally entitled “Portugal’s Elites and the Status of the Kingdom of Portugal within the Spanish Monarchy,” was recently published as a chapter of the collaborative book Monarchy Transformed (Cambridge 2017). In it, the author analyzes how the Portuguese elites negotiated with the three monarchs of the Habsburg dynasty during the period when both kingdoms shared the same king. The distinct nature of each of these kings greatly influenced the behavior of the Portuguese elites, who had to adapt their longstanding customs and behavior in order to continue to enjoy the graces and favors of the Crown. The second chapter, published as “As Cortes de Portugal e a dinâmica política da época moderna,” first appeared in Os Municípios no Portugal Moderno (Colibri 2005). Continuing to delve into the previous chapter’s idea of negotiation between the Portuguese elites and the kings, Cardim offers us a new view of the early modern Cortes or parliament, seeing this as the setting where the decisions of all the actors involved in politics were agreed upon. The third chapter, “Las Cortes de Portugal y la dinámica política en la época moderna” was originally part of the well-known book La monarquía de Felipe III (Fundación Mapfre 2008). In this chapter, the author analyzes Portugal’s loss of its central role on the European political stage from the 1610s onwards, considering the journey of Felipe III to Lisbon in 1619 as a useful case study for understanding this process of change. With this chapter, the emphasis of the book shifts from its focus on the political actors (i.e. the elites and the Cortes) and moves to a more theoretical definition of the functioning of the Spanish Monarchy, placing heavy emphasis on its progressive identification with Castile and the consequences that this notion had for Portugal. Going

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 138 Vicente Cardim, Pedro. Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica deeper into this topic, the fourth chapter, “Todos los que no son de Castilla, son yguales” (Pedralbes, Revista d’Historia Moderna 2008), reflects on the delicate concept of “foreigner” within the Spanish Monarchy and Castile. More concretely, the author studies how some Portuguese manuscripts tried to show the Spanish kings that the Portuguese could be considered much closer to Castile than to other communities, in order to receive better advantages. In the fifth chapter, “A corte régia e o alargamento da esfera privada,” published in História da Vida Privada em Portugal (Círculo de Leitores 2011), Cardim brings the royal court back into the book, now studying this institution from the point of view of the everyday lives of those who were involved in it. In the pages of this chapter, the author explains the changes in the lives, aims and, practices of the people who were close to the king, especially when the Spanish monarchs introduced their own rituals inherited from the Habsburg dynasty. In the sixth chapter, the author jumps to the topic of the American colonies. In “Political condition and identity” (2014), he deals with the political configuration of Spanish America, considering it to be the result of different political traditions, namely those originating from Portugal and Castile. In the following chapter, “La aspiración imperial de la Monarquía Portuguesa”, published in Comprendere le Monarchie Iberiche (Viella 2010), Cardim returns, once again, to Portugal’s political status within Spain, stressing the hegemonic aspirations and imperial behavior of the Portuguese Crown. In analyzing the use of imperial attributes to represent the king, together with the use of the words “imperium,” “kingdom” and “monarchy” well before and long after 1640, Cardim explains the hegemonic aspirations of Portugal largely in relation to the Spanish Monarchy. This chapter is the only one in which Cardim includes the Portuguese overseas empire, especially while talking about the difficulties that the Portuguese kings had in using the word Empire afterwards to refer to Asia or Brazil. In the last chapter, “Portugal en la Guerra de Sucesión de la Monarquía Española,” published in La Guerra de Sucesión en España y la batalla de Almansa (Sílex 2009), Cardim continues with the development and definition of Portugal after its independence from the Spanish Monarchy. More concretely, he studies the participation of the Bragança dynasty in the War of Spanish Succession (1700-1714), understanding this episode as one of the most crucial events in the history of Portugal, since it led to the international recognition of the new ruling dynasty as well as consolidated the Atlantic character that Portugal was acquiring. As the reader might have noticed, Pedro Cardim underscores four topics throughout the book: the status of Portugal within the Spanish Monarchy; the importance

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018 139 Vicente Cardim, Pedro. Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica of the local powers in explaining the governance of Portugal and its overseas empire; the relevance of the Christian faith in the development of early modern politics and the shaping of identities; and the progressive shift towards the Atlantic (especially towards Brazil) that Portugal made from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. All of these represent the main themes worked on by the author but the strategy of bringing them together in this new book offers the reader fresh insights into the political configuration of the Spanish Monarchy as well as its relationship with Portugal. These four points can easily be used to summarize both of these ideas and to offer new understandings of their fundamental importance in Portuguese and Spanish history. Parallel to these achievements, there are three points that also need to be commented on. Perhaps the most evident of these is the varying length of the chapters, reflecting the different nature of each text. There are at least four chapters (originally journal articles) with less than thirty pages, while the other four are more than twice that length. This sometimes makes the reading of the book rather difficult and unbalanced. This point is closely connected with the second one, which is the different nature of the texts when they were written. These papers have been collected together into this volume without taking into account the manifest differences between journal articles (much more analytical and theoretical) and book chapters (more descriptive and narrative). This imbalance is aggravated even further when considering the order chosen for the chapters, since the two different kinds of texts are not interwoven with one another throughout the book, a strategy that could have given it a more balanced feeling. The third and final aspect relates to the fact that there is neither a conclusion nor a final comment at the end of the volume. Returning to the main aim of the book and taking all of this into consideration, it is possible to conclude that this work is not only an interesting synthesis of the research that Pedro Cardim has carried out during the last decade, but also a book about the latest insights into the political and social relationship between Spain and Portugal as well as their identity-definition processes in the early modern period, a topic about which, according to the author, there still remains a great deal to be written.

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