Contribuição Da Escola Americana a História Colonial Brasileira

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Hispanic American HistoricalReview.

http://www.jstor.org

Duke University Press

United States Scholarly Contributions to the Historiography of Colonial Brazil Author(s): A. J. R. Russell-Wood Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Nov., 1985), pp. 683-723Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2514892Accessed: 09-10-2015 15:21 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2514892?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 193.136.113.58 on Fri, 09 Oct 2015 15:21:38 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2514892

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2514892?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



Hispanic American Historical Review 65 (4), 1985, 683-723 Copyright ? 1985 by Duke University Press

United States Scholarly Contributions to the Historiography of Colonial Brazil

A. J. R. RUSSELL-WOOD*

H TISTORICAL writings on Portuguese America have reached the point, in both mass and quality, that they have become the object of critical evaluation by the

international community of scholars. In Brazil, Jose Hon6rio Rodrigues has been as preeminent as he has been prolific, but that he is not alone is evidenced by interpretive essays of Americo Jacobina Lacombe, Carlos Guilherme Mota, and Jose Roberto do Amaral Lapa.' The sole United States representative focusing exclusively on the colonial period has been Stuart B. Schwartz; but for the decade and a half preceding independence he is joined by Stanley J. Stein. It is to Russell H. Bartley that we owe much of our knowledge of Soviet contributions on the relation of plantation slavery to capital accumulation in Western Europe and colonial antecedents to independence movements.2 The long-standing interest of

* This is the revised form of a paper presented at the session "One Hundred Years of U.S. Scholarship on Colonial Latin America" at the AHA Annual Meetings in Chicago, December 1984.

The author wishes to thank Professors Dauril Alden and James D. Goodyear for suggestions based on the reading of an earlier version, and Mr. Bill Donovan for bringing to his attention recent historiographical studies by Brazilian scholars.

1. Jose Hon6rio Rodrigues, Historiografia e Bibliografia do Dorninio Holandes no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1949), Historiografta del Brasil: Siglo XVI (Mexico City, 1957), Histo- riografta del Brasil: Siglo XVII (Mexico City, 1963), Teoria da Histiria do Brasil, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Sao Paulo, 1957), "Brazilian Historiography: Present Trends and Research Require- ments," in Manuel Diegues Junior and Bryce Wood, eds., Social Science in Latin America (New York, 1967), pp. 217-40, and Hist6ria da Hist6ria do Brasil: Historiografia Colonial (part 1) (Rio de Janeiro, 1979); Lacombe, IntrodugJio ao Estudo da Hist6ria do Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1973), esp. pp. 160-203; Mota, "A Historiografia Brasileira nos fJltimos Quarenta Anos: Tentativa de Avaliagdo Critica," in Ciencia e Cultura, 27 (May 1975), 472-486; Amaral Lapa, Historiografia Brasileira Conternpordnea. A Hist6ria em Questdo, 2d ed. (Petr6polis, 1981).

2. Schwartz, "Brazil: The Colonial Period," in Roberto Esquenazi-Mayo and Michael C. Meyer, eds., Latin American Scholarship Since World War II (Lincoln, 1971), pp. 23-49; Stein, "The Historiography of Brazil, 1808-1889," HAHR, 40 (May 1960), 234-278;



684 HAHR I NOVEMBER I A. J. R. RUSSELL-WOOD

England, France, and Germany in colonial Brazil is reflected in historiographical or bibliographical essays by Charles R. Boxer and William C. Atkinson, by George Raeders and Frederic Mauro, and by Georg Thomas.3 At centers, institutes, and universities in Eastern and Western Europe there is already a corpus of scholarship on colonial Brazil, and colleagues in Japan and China are joining the field.4 In short, interest in colonial Bra- zil has become global in nature.

My purpose is to appraise and survey scholarly contributions by historians of one nation (the United States) to the historiography of one period in the history of Brazil. This requires two caveats. First, periodization and the setting of opening and concluding dates for any historical phase is an artificial exercise. Especially is this the case for Brazil. Characteristics evident in the colonial period were to remain remarkably unchanged through the political changes of independence, empire, and republic and are present today. Second, it is invidious to suggest that scholarly gains in our understanding of the Brazilian past are the exclusive achievement of any national "school." North American scholars contributed to, and built on, foundations laid by scholars of many nations, not least the Brazilians themselves. My survey will combine narrative with analysis and will seek to give historiographical context to recent writings on colonial Brazil. The following aspects will be discussed: chronology of United States scholarly contributions to the historiography of colonial Brazil; evaluation of aca-

Bartley, "A Decade of Soviet Scholarship in Brazilian History, 1958-1968," HAHR, 50 (Aug. 1970), 445-466. An invaluable contribution is by the United States scholar Francis A. Dutra, A Guide to the History of Brazil, 1500-1822: The Literature in English (Santa Barbara, 1980).

3. William C. Atkinson, British Contributions to Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, (London, 1945; rev. ed., London, 1974); C. R. Boxer, "Some Considerations on Portuguese Colonial Historiography," in Alexander Marchant, ed., Proceedings of the International Col- loquium on Luso-Brazilian Studies (Nashville, 1953), pp. 169-18o, and "Some Reflections on the Historiography of Colonial Brazil, 1950-1970," in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil: Papers of the Newberry Library Conference (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 3-15; Raeders, Bibliographie Franco-Bresilienne (155i1-1957) (Rio de Janeiro, 1960); Thomas, "Literaturbericht fiber die Geschichte Brasiliens," Historische Zeitschrift, 3 (1969), 546- 574; Mauro, "Recent Works on the Political Economy of Brazil in the Portuguese Empire," Latin American Research Review, 19:1 (1984), 87-105. Mauro follows in the footsteps of illustrious predecessors: Charles Leclerc, Biblioteca Americana (Paris, 1867), and Anatole Louis Garraux, Bibliographie Bresilienne; Catalogue des Ouvrages Frangais e Latins Relatifs au Bresil (1500-1898) (Paris, 1898), and the interesting essay to the Portuguese-language edition (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) by Francisco de Assis Barbosa, "Alguns Aspectos da Influencia Francesa no Brasil."

4. For a survey of the European experience, see Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Latin American Studies in Europe (Pittsburgh, 1979). See also R. Narayanan, "Latin American Studies in India," Latin American Research Review, 18:3 (1983), 179-184; Mark Sidel, "Latin Ameri- can Studies in the People's Republic of China," Latin American Research Review, 18:1 (1983) 143- 153, and Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Latin American Studies in Asia (Pittsburgh, 1983).



U.S. CONTRIBUTIONS TO HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL BRAZIL 685

demic vehicles used to disseminate this knowledge; identification of trends, strengths, and weaknesses. In conclusion, suggestions will be made for stimulating awareness of the potential of colonial Brazil as a field for scholarly enquiry.

The chronology of United States scholarly interest in colonial Brazil reveals three facets: first, the disregard shown in the nineteenth century by United States historians for colonial Brazil was in marked contrast to United States scholarly fascination for Spanish America; second, precisely at this very period academics in France, Germany, and England were fas- cinated by Brazil as a region for historical and scientific enquiry; third, whereas United States historiography on Spanish America dates back to William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), for colonial Brazil the time frame does not exceed half a century. Let us examine this asymmetry.

By 9goo there was in the United States a corps of scholars whose repu- tations had been made by studies of Spain in America. The first course in the United States on the history of Spanish America was offered at Berke- ley in 1894-95. Within a decade, graduate or undergraduate courses were offered at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas and at Colum- bia. Lines of academic succession were being established as illustrated by the scholarly legacy of Lewis Morgan to Charles Lummis through Adolph Bandelier, follower of the former and teacher of the latter. By 1904 there was sufficient literature for Edward G. Bourne to attempt a synthesis (Spain in America, 1450-1580). Institutional recognition of the burgeoning new field came with the appointment of Bernard Moses at Berkeley. In 1898 Moses wrote: "In order to see any portion of American history in its true light, we must stand where the whole continent lies within our horizon." The title of this piece was "The Neglected Half of American History," but, by focusing on Mexico and Spanish America, neither Moses, nor his predecessors, nor his contemporaries, remedied the neglect by United States scholars of that other half of Hispanic America, namely, Brazil.

This neglect by historians in the United States is all the more remarkable in view of major contributions to the historiography of colonial Brazil made by Europeans in the nineteenth century. Robert Southey's History of Brazil was complemented by John Armitage's two-volume history,

5. A useful survey of nineteenth-century historiography and of the role of Moses is found in James E. Watson, "Bernard Moses: Pioneer in Latin American Scholarship," HAHR, 42 (May 1962), 212-216. The quotation is from University Chronicle, 1 (Apr. 1898), 122. If there was little interest in academe, this did not reflect the North American reading public. By 1879 Brazil and the Brazilians Portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches, by James C. Fletcher and Daniel P. Kidder, was already in its ninth edition.




which, while somewhat cursory in its treatment of the Joanine era, provided insights into the First Republic, as much the fruits of residence and personal contacts as of historical research.6 In France, Jean Ferdinand Denis, who went to Brazil in i8i6 as a consular officer, and later was director of the Sainte Genevieve Library, authored books on the history, geography, and moeurs of Brazil. His contemporary, Paul L. F. Gaffarel of the University of Dijon, wrote what remained for some sixty years one of the few treatments of the French in sixteenth-century Brazil.7 Since the 1940s a group of United States scholars has taken up his legacy, with studies of the "French interlopers" and the Portuguese-French rivalry, which led to diplomatic wrangling, economic competition, and physical con- frontation.8 The Bavarian Carl F. P. von Martius chronicled his travels in Brazil in the years 1817-20 in company with Johann B. von Spix and authored the monumental Flora Brasiliensis. Of greater interest to this readership is that von Martius was the first foreigner to publish an essay on Brazilian historiography in the still fledgling Revista do Instituto His- torico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro. The German geologist Wilhelm L. von Eschwege (resident in Brazil 1808-21) wrote most perceptively on Minas Gerais and his observations on persons of African descent, demography, and mining technology are invaluable. The German answer to Southey was the Geschichte von Brasilien (Berlin i86o) by Gottfried Heinrich Handelmann, museum director of the University of Kiel.9 This interest by Europeans in Brazilian history was matched by their attraction to Bra- zil as a field for botanical, geological, and zoological research.

Why, given United States scholarly interest in Spanish America and the attraction exerted by Brazil for Europeans, did Portuguese America in general-including settlements by Portuguese-speaking persons in Cali- fornia and New England-and colonial Brazil in particular, fail so totally

6. Robert Southey, History of Brazil, 3 vols. (London, 18io- 19) has enjoyed numerous Brazilian editions and reprints in England and the United States, that of Lenox Hill (New York, 1970) being the most recent. John Armitage, The History of Brazil, from the Period of the Arrival of the Braganza Family in i8o8, to the Abdication of Don Pedro the First in 1831, 2 vols. (London, 1836) had wide divulgation in Brazil.

7. Jean Ferdinand Denis, Le Bresil, ou Histoire, Moeurs, Usages, et Coutumles des Habitants de ce Royaurne, 6 vols. (Paris, 1822), Resume de l'Histoire du Bresil (Paris, 1825), and Histoire Ggographique du Bresil (Paris, 1833). Paul L. F. Gaffarel, Histoire dii Bresil Frangais au xvi' Sikcle (Paris, 1878).

8. For dissertations, see Appendix: Kenneth H. H. Umstead (1940); Martine Emert (1944); John F. Weir (1947); John L. Vogt, Jr. (1967). Regina Johnson Tomlinson, The Struggle for Brazil: Portugal and the French Interlopers, 1500-1550 (New York, 1970); Charles E. Nowell, "The French in Sixteenth-Century Brazil," The Americas, 5 (Apr. 1949), 381-393.

9. K. F. P. von Martius and J. B. von Spix, Reise in Brasilien, 3 vols. (Munich, 1823-31); von Martius, Flora Brasiliensis, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, Tfibingen, 1829-33); and "Como Se Deve Escrever a Hist6ria do Brasil," Revista do Instituto Hist6rico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro, 6: 24

(Jan. 1845), 381-403. W. L. von Eschwege, Pluto Brasiliensis (Berlin, 1833).



U. S. CONTRIBUTIONS TO HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL BRAZIL 687

to interest United States historians of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth? An answer may lie first in the strength of the Spanish historical and cultural legacy to the United States, and second in politics. Territories formerly under Spanish hegemony that had become part of the United States merited scholarly enquiry as part of the nation's historical patrimony. In the West and Southwest, the history, peoples, cultures, and even languages of Anglo Americans and Spanish Americans had become inextricably linked. Lines of cultural demarcation had become blurred. By extension, no less deserving of attention were territories not incorporated into the United States but sharing a common history with those that had been incorporated. Writings by Lummis on mesas, cahones, and pueblos, and by Bancroft on the Pacific states, were not merely contributions to the national historiography, but represented a scholarly response to demands by those in search of a cultural identity and heritage. Political events also kept Spanish America to the fore in the national consciousness. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) had been followed by "manifest destiny" in the seizure of Mexican territory, "dollar diplomacy" of the 189os, and a wave of sympathy for Cubans seeking independence. The explosion of the USS Maine in Havana in 1898 provoked Roosevelt's "splendid little war" and, when the United States felt secure from European intervention, the "Roosevelt corollary." Be it through direct military intervention ("big stick diplomacy") or investment by United States corporations, there was no doubt that the republics of Spanish America or Spanish-speaking territories had the greatest claim on the national attention, both within and without the academy. Brazil exerted no such leverage.

The years preceding the First World War and the war years themselves witnessed three developments that might have boded well for studies on Brazil. A new Pan-Americanism, the fostering of economic and political ties by the Carnegie Endowment with its institution of Inter- America, and establishment of depository libraries in Latin America, sought to emphasize hemispheric cooperation. In 1917 Charles Lyon Chandler could write "that the moral and material aid and example of the United States were a factor in the Latin-American wars for independence" and much written and spoken about at the time "forecasted the Pan-American movement," "embodying fundamental ideas on which the American Union is based."'1 This increasing confidence was reflected in the creation of the American Historical Review (1895), which fulfilled an intellectual as well as a psychological need by tacitly acknowledging that United States scholarship was on a par with that of Western Europe and

lo. Chandler, Inter-American Acquaintances, 2d ed. (Sewanee, 1917), p. v.




deserving of a national journal of the stature of the English Historical Re- view (i886) and European journals of which the Revue Historique (1876) was the most prestigious. The surge in academic scholarship in the United States was evidenced by the increase from some 30 doctoral dissertations in 1895 to 400 in 1918. The Universities of Texas and California were leading forces in Latin American studies. By 1918 courses in the history and politics of Latin America were offered by at least a dozen colleges and universities in the United States. The American Historical Review for January 1918 listed 8 doctoral dissertations in progress on Latin American history. "

This configuration of national mood and increasing scholarly specialization gave the impetus to the creation of the Hispanic American Historical Review in 1918. Giving his blessing to the project, Woodrow Wilson anticipated that this would "lead to very important results for scholarship and for the increase of cordial feelings throughout the Ameri- cas." This double sense of mission-scholarly and diplomatic-was re- iterated by the organizing committee, by the editor, and in reviews and articles. 2 Naming of the review called precisely for qualities of diplomacy and scholarship. The designation "Ibero-American" was not pursued. A crucial factor influencing the choice of "Hispanic" over "Latin" was the desire to acknowledge the role of Portugal in settlement and colonization of South America. The Portuguese poet, Almeida Garrett, was invoked to sustain the argument that, much in the same way as Portuguese could refer to themselves without prejudice as "Spaniards," so too would the title "Hispanic America" be equally applicable to Brazilians. The Castilian- born financial sponsor of the review, J. C. Cebridn of San Francisco, ob- served: "Let us all rest assured that there exist but two Americas, namely the Anglo-Saxon or English and the Hispanic. " 3

Here, finally, was recognition of the Portuguese contribution to the history of the Americas, acknowledgment that the study of Brazil was as worthy as that of Spanish America, and raised anticipation that the HAHR would be the forum whereby United States scholars could contribute to the historiography of Brazil. In this the United States was exercising

1 . J. Franklin Jameson, Managing Editor of the American Historical Review, commenting on "A New American Historical Journal," in HAHR, 1 (Feb. 1918), 2. For course listings, see HAHR, 1 (Aug. 1918), 342-351. For dissertations, see American Historical Re- view, 23 (Jan. 1918), 502.

12. Wilson to Charles E. Chapman, Dec. 6, 1916, HAHR, 1 (Feb. 1918), 1. See also William Spence Robertson, "The Recognition of the Hispanic American Republics by the United States," HAHR, 1 (Aug. 1918), 239-269, whose closing phrase was: "At a critical juncture in world politics the Republic of the North accordingly acted as the sponsor for the rising nations of Hispanic America."

13. For discussion of the debate, see "The Founding of the Review," HAHR, 1 (Feb. 1918), 11, 16-17, and 199-200, where Ram6n Men6ndez Pidal endorsed this usage.




leadership. The venerable Revista Trimestral do Instituto Historico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro had been founded eighty years earlier (1838), but the only European parallel to the HAHR-the Revue de l'Amerique Latine-did not appear until 1922. No journal, however, no matter how timely and commendable, could create a corpus of scholarship in an academic vacuum. During the first quarter of a century of publication, 1918-45 (lapsus of publication, 1922-26), a total of 705 articles, notes, documents, and bibliographical articles appeared in the Hispanic, as it was sometimes called. At the broadest interpretation, only fifty-four bore on Portugal, its seaborne empire, or an independent Brazil. For the most part these were a melange of Commerce Reports, notices of Brazilian and Portuguese periodicals and publications and notes on Brasiliana at the National Archives and at Duke University. The rich manuscript and printed primary holdings of the Oliveira Lima Collection received attention, but were (and still are) underused by scholars.'4 Most indicative of this absence of scholarly interest was that, of sixty-nine documents published in the HAHR, only five concerned Brazil; of these, only one-from the Library of the Ajuda Palace-fell within the colonial period.'5 If we turn to articles, only thirty of a predominantly historical nature bore on Brazil out of a total of four hundred one. Of these, thirteen focused on the national period and six on United States-Brazil relations. An article by Mary W. Williams placed President Cleveland's 1895 arbitration on Span- ish and Portuguese holdings in the historical context of lines of demarcation as defined by the Treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Madrid (1750). 6

Three articles took the European background, rather than the Americas, as their canvas: Fidelino de Figueredo's survey of Portuguese discoveries and conquests, Charles E. Nowell's suggestion that a reassessment of the achievements of Vasco da Gama was due in light of new sources, and Jodo de Bianchi's celebratory essay on the octocentennial of Portugal's nation- hood."' Percy Alvin Martin explored the general themes of Portuguese contributions to the Americas, colonization, and Brazilian "race" as the

14. James Alexander Robertson, "The Oliveira Lima Collection of Hispanoamericana," HAHR, 3 (Feb. 1920), 78-83; Manoel de Oliveira Lima, "The Portuguese Manuscripts in the Ibero-American Library at the Catholic University of America," HAHR, 8 (May 1928), 261-28o; "Documentary Collections [Oliveira Lima Collection]," HAHR, 2o (Aug. 1940), 473-474.

15. Manoel da Silveira Soares Cardozo, "A French Document on Rio de Janeiro, 1748," HAHR, 21 (Aug. 1941), 425-435

16. Mary Wilhelmine Williams, "The Treaty of Tordesillas and the Argentine-Brazilian Boundary Settlement," HAHR, 5 (Feb. 1922), 3-23.

17. Fidelino de Figueredo, "The Geographical Discoveries and Conquests of the Por- tuguese," HAHR, 6 (Feb. -Aug. 1926), 47-70; Charles E. Nowell, "Vasco da Gama-First Count of Vidigueira," HAHR, 20 (Aug. 1940), 342-358; Joao de Bianchi, "Portugal Cele- brates Eight Centuries of Existence, 1140-1940," HAHR, 20 (Aug. 1940), 336-341.




product of miscegenation and Portuguese plasticity toward race mixture. While commenting favorably on union and unity as characteristics of Bra- zil past and present, Martin extolled the presence of a cultural and intellectual environment on a par with the former metropolis.'8 In fact, a total of four articles authored by two scholars-Manoel Cardozo and Alexander Marchant-in 1940, 1941, and 1942, was the extent of the United States scholarly contribution to the historiography of colonial Bra- zil as reflected in the HAHR. 9

The asymmetry noted before World War I between United States scholarship on Spanish America and Portuguese America became even more pronounced in the postwar period and into the mid 1930s. Spanish America had come of age as a field of study. This was the generation of "great names" in United States scholarship on Spanish America: Arthur Scott Aiton, Woodrow Borah, C. H. Cunningham, Earl Hamilton, Lewis Hanke, Clarence H. Haring, Leonard A. Irving, George Kubler, John Tate Lanning, Roger Bigelow Merriman, Lesley Byrd Simpson, Philip Ainsworth Means, and Arthur P. Whitaker; and among the women, Gwendolin Cobb, Lillian Estelle Fisher, Elizabeth Wilder Weissman, and Elizabeth Ward Loughran. These years witnessed the setting of a preliminary agenda, which informed subsequent debate: leyenda negra; demographic impact on Amerind populations stemming from the European presence; encomienda, hacienda, and repartimiento; American treasure and the rise of capitalism in Europe; New Spain's "century of depression"; Las Casas; and institutions of empire.

Among this first generation of professional historians of Latin Amer- ica, not one could be regarded as a specialist on Brazil. Nor was there an agenda. Herbert E. Bolton, in his presidential address at the first meeting of the American Historical Association (Toronto, 1932) held outside the United States, lauded the importance of a synthetic view of the Americas and ensuing benefits to commerce, political harmony, and even for the writing of "correct historiography." But his vision of"The Epic of Greater America" included Brazil only as regarded discovery, race relations, slavery, the drive to the Andes, Luso-Spanish rivalry in La Plata, achievement of independence without bloodshed, and its recent role as an ABC power.20 A "knight of the round table," John Francis Bannon, has pointed

i8. Percy Alvin Martin, "Portugal in America," HAHR, 17 (May 1937), 182-21o. 19. Manoel S. Cardozo, "The Collection of the Fifths in Brazil, 1695-1709," HAHR,

2o (Aug. 1940), 359-379; "The Guerra dos Emboabas, Civil War in Minas Gerais, 1708- 1709," HAHR, 22 (Aug. 1942), 470-492. Alexander Marchant, "Tiradentes in the Conspir- acy of Minas," HAHR, 21 (May 1941), 239-257; "Feudal and Capitalistic Elements in the Portuguese Settlement of Brazil," HAHR, 22 (Aug. 1942), 493-512.

2o. Herbert Eugene Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America," American Historical Re- view, 38 (Apr. 1933), 448-474.




out that emphasis on the "Bolton thesis" and attribution to him by others of invoking a "common history" for the Americas, obscures the fact that, first and foremost, Bolton was the historian of the Borderlands. Hubert Howe Bancroft had pioneered the field, but it was Bolton who made the subject irrevocably associated with his name and, by so doing, provided another dimension and broadened Frederick Jackson Turner's concept of the frontier.2' Bolton was at his most prolific between the mid-1920s and 1930s. His personal advocacy of Borderland history, coupled with the emergence of the first generation of professional scholars of Spanish America, provided no incentive for scholars to enter the field of Brazilian colonial history. There was no "trickle down," from the Spanish frontier in the Borderlands or from colonial Spanish America, to Portuguese America.

This vacuum denied to historians of colonial Brazil the opportunity to benefit from three crucial dimensions of United States historiography on colonial Spanish America present in the 1930s. The most important was the potential for collaboration with geographers, as represented by the Berkeley School, of which Carl 0. Sauer was the prime example. United States geographers, from Isaiah Bowman down to our own days, have mostly focused on Spanish America. Among contemporary historical geographers, the example of Peter Gerhard finds no counterpart among scholars of Brazil.22 Significantly, precisely at this crucial formative stage the French, most notably in the persons of Pierre Deffontaines and Pierre Mombeig, exerted a powerful influence on geographical studies in Brazil. The former came from Lille in 1934 to establish a chair of geography in Sdo Paulo and later established the chair of human geography at the Fed- eral University of Rio de Janeiro. Deffontaines and Mombeig founded the journal Geografia (1935) and the Association of Brazilian Geographers. Second, the potential, also at an embryonic stage, for cross-fertilization was lost to students of Brazilian history in the United States. This potential was realized in the persons of the physiologist Sherburne Cook, the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, the geographer Carl Sauer, and historians Lesley B. Simpson and Woodrow Borah. The editors of the Ibero- Americana series (1932- ) were Bolton, Sauer, and Kroeber. Third, schol-

21. Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands, edited and with an introduction by John Francis Bannon (Norman, 1964). This contains a "Bolton Bibliography" up to 1950. The phrase "Knights of the Round Table" refers to the group of students and scholars who met at the large round table of the University of California, Berkeley, Library for discussions and seminars presided over by Bolton. There was much local historical writing on "Borderlands history" in regional journals, such as the New Mexico Historical Review.

2,. Peter Gerhard, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Cambridge, 1972); The Southwest Frontier of New Spain (Princeton, 1979); The North Frontier of New Spain (Princeton, 1982). One exception would be Preston E. James, whose Brazil (New York, 1942) reprinted sections from his Latin America with additions of new material.




arny collaboration, best represented by seminal studies on aboriginal populations and their decline by Cook and Simpson and by Cook and Borah, and continued into our own days by Herbert Klein and John TePaske, again finds no parallel among United States scholars of colonial Brazil who have worked individually rather than collaboratively.23

In 1933, William R. Shepherd of Columbia, who had played a major role in the founding of the HAHR as guarantor and later advisory editor, exhorted scholars in the United States to use the rich libraries and archives of Brazil. That he may have overstated his case in praising the high quality of cataloging of these holdings is undeniable; but his assertion that Brazil lacked an adequate history even in Portuguese was outrageous.24 By the mid-1930s there existed in the United States a small coterie of scholars interested in Portugal and Brazil. Mostly their interests lay in the national period, as was the case of Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., Frederic Ganzert, Lawrence F. Hill, William R. Manning, Percy Alvin Martin, and Alan K. Manchester. The ecumenical spirit of Percy Alvin Martin had long been intrigued by the role of Brazil in comparative historical studies, as shown by his introduction and notes to six lectures delivered by Oliveira Lima at Stanford in 1912 and his own essay comparing gold rushes of Minas Gerais and California.25 In 1936 Martin addressed the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association on the subject of Portugal in America, but his most lasting contribution lay in making the history of Brazil available to an English readership by his translation of Joao Pandia Calogeras' A Formaqdo Hist6rica do Brasil, and his editorship of the Brazil section for the Handbook of Latin American Studies from 1936 to 1940. 26 William Manning's monumental collection of documents and Lawrence Hill's study of diplomatic relations both revealed much of North American attitudes toward a royal court in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil's quest for independence.27 Also of this generation was Alan K. Manchester, who completed

23. John J. TePaske and Herbert S. Klein, The Royal Treasures of the Spanish Empire in America, 3 vols. (Durham, 1982).

24. William R. Shepherd, "Brazil as a Field for Historical Research," HAHR, 13 (Nov. 1933), 427-436.

25. Manoel de Oliveira Lima, The Evolution of Brazil Compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America, edited with introduction and notes by Percy Alvin Martin (Stan- ford, 1914; reprinted New York, 1966). The dedication was to John Casper Branner, "true friend of Brazil." Percy Alvin Martin, "Minas Geraes and California: A Comparison of Cer- tain Phases of their Historical and Social Evolution," Annaes do Congresso Internacional de Hist6ria da Amnerica (Rio de Janeiro, 1925-30), 1, 250-270.

26. Published as "Portugal in America," HAHR, 17 (May, 1937), 182-210. Joao Pandid Cal6geras, A History of Brazil, trans. and ed. by Percy Alvin Martin (Chapel Hill, 1939; reprint New York, 1963).

27. William R. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of the Latin American Nations, 3 vols. (New York, 1925); Lawrence F. Hill, Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Brazil (Durham, 1932).




one of the first dissertations at a United States university (Duke, 1930) on the history of Portuguese America.28 Published as British Preieminence in Brazil: Its Rise and Decline (Chapel Hill, 1933), Manchester's focus was on the nineteenth century, but he surveyed Anglo-Portuguese diplomatic relations since the treaty of 1642, British presence and concerns over the transfer of the court and Brazilian intentions in La Plata, interweaving of politics and economics of the slave trade, British pressures to abolish the slave trade, and final recognition of independence. Manchester used ar- chival sources for his dissertation, but relied on secondary sources for articles on the rise of a colonial aristocracy in late seventeenth-century Bra- zil and his presentation to a North American readership of chroniclers of colonial Brazil in general, and in particular the Paulista Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme and the Benedictine friar Gaspar da Madre de Deus.29 In 1945 a milestone was reached with the publication of Latin American Civilization: The Colonial Period (Harrisburg, 1945). The author, Bailey W. Diffie, was the first United States scholar to present a comprehensive synthesis of colonial Brazil within the broader framework of Latin America. This represented the coming of age of colonial Brazil for a North American readership. Intended as a text for college and university students, Latin American Civilization presented within the same covers as Spanish America, an in-depth and wide-ranging survey of the Luso- Brazilian experience. Two years later a collection of essays was edited by Lawrence Hill; six referred to the colonial period and were directed to an academic readership.30

A small group of United States scholars had interests more clearly focused on the period before 1822. William B. Greenlee took as his bailiwick the Portuguese background, early voyages, and the period before 1549. Charles E. Nowell, whose dissertation at Berkeley (1932) had been on British invasions of Rio de la Plata, was intrigued by the era of discoveries, and "Antarctic France. "3' The years before independence occupied Herbert Heaton of the University of Minnesota in his essay on the

28. Appendix: Manchester (1930). Announced in the HAHR, 1 (Feb. 1918) had been a dissertation in progress by E. E. Vann at Columbia University entitled "The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil"; apparently this was not completed. In 1923, also at Columbia, Donald R. Taft had completed a dissertation on "Two Portuguese Colonies in New England."

29. "The Rise of the Brazilian Aristrocracy," HAHR, i1 (May 1931), 145-168; "Some Brazilian Colonial Historians," Bulletin of the Pan American Union, 68 (Sept. -Oct. 1934), 634-647, 698-707.

30. Lawrence Hill, ed., Brazil (Berkeley, 1947). 31. William B. Greenlee, "The Background of Brazilian History," The Americas, 2

(Oct. 1945), 151- 164; ed., The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India from Contemporary Documents and Narratives (London, 1938); "The Captaincy of the Second Portuguese Voyage to Brazil, 1501-1502," The Americas, 2 (July 1945), 3-12; "The First Half Century of Brazilian History," Mid-America, 25 (Apr. 1943), 91-120. Charles E.




British role in the transfer of the court and subsequent commercial ven- tures in Brazil; more successful was his depiction of Yorkshireman John Luccock as a "merchant adventurer."32 Historiography of colonial Brazil was not an exclusively male preserve: Ruth Lapham Butler wrote about the first three governors-general of Brazil, and Jane Herrick studied the "recalcitrant revolutionist," Hipolito da Costa.33 With the exception of Manchester, all the above based their studies on printed primary and secondary sources.

This was to be the case also of one of three persons who may be considered pioneers of colonial Brazilian studies in the United States. Within a twelvemonth (December 24, 1911, Feb. 26 and Dec. i8, 1912),

Manoel S. Cardozo was born in Pico in the Azores, Robert C. Smith in Ellicott City (Maryland), and Alexander Marchant in Rio de Janeiro. All pursued graduate studies in the United States, spoke fluent Portuguese, published in English and Portuguese, and were frequent and welcome visitors to Portugal or Brazil.34 All were extraordinarily prolific as essayists or, as authors of overviews or chapters, contributed to general works on the history of Brazil, and all paid their professional dues as editors of sections on Brazil in the Handbook of Latin American Studies. 1 Marchant and Smith edited collections of essays and a guide to the art of Latin America.36 These three serve as a bridge between the interest in the United States of the 1930s in colonial Brazil and the boom years of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Marchant's example must be the envy of junior

Nowell, "The Discovery of Brazil Accidental or Intentional?" HAHR, i6 (Aug. 1936), 311-338; "The French in Sixteenth-Century Brazil," The Americas, 5 (Apr. 1949), 381-393; "Aleixo Garcia and the White King," HAHR, 26 (Nov. 1946), 450-466.

32. Herbert Heaton, "When a Royal Family Came to America," The Canadian Histor- ical Association Report of the Annual Meeting Held at Montreal May 25-26, 1939 (Toronto, 1939), pp. 48-60; "A Merchant Adventurer in Brazil," Journal of Economic History, 6 (May 1946), 1-23.

33. Ruth Lapham Butler, "Tome de Sousa, First Governor-General of Brazil, 1549- 1553," Mid-America, 24 (Oct. 1942), 229-251; "Duarte da Costa, Second Governor-General of Brazil," Mid-America, 25 (July 1943), 163-179; "Mem de Sd, Third Governor-General of Brazil, 1557-1572," Mid-America, 26 (Apr. 1944), 111-137. Janle Herrick, "The Reluctant Revolutionist: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hip6lito da Costa (1774- 1823)," The Ameri- cas, 7 (Oct. 1950), 171 i8i.

34. Robert C. Smith, Jr., "The Architecture of Joao Frederico Ludovice and Some of his Contemporaries at Lisbon, 1700- 1750" (Ph. D. Diss., Harvard, 1936). Appendix: Manoel da Silveira Soares Cardozo (1940); Alexander Marchant (1941).

35. Smith edited the section on Brazilian art, 1938-47 (vols. 3- io) and 1952-62 (vols. 15-24); Marchant on Brazilian history, 1941-49, (vols. 6-12); and Cardozo, 1950-57 (vols. 13-19).

36. Marchant, ed., Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Luso-Brazilian Studies (Nashville, 1953), and, with T. Lynn Smith, eds., Brazil: Portrait of Half a Conti- nent (New York, 1951); Robert C. Smith and Elizabeth Wilder, A Guide to the Art of Latin America (Washington, D.C., 1948).




scholars today: doctorate, publication by a United States university press, translation and publication in Portuguese, and recognition as the author of an instant classic-all within three years!37 His seminal article on the donatarios rejected the interpretation of this early enterprise in feudal terms, and emphasized capitalistic aspects of early Brazilian settlement. His article on Brazilian waystations for Indiamen has only recently been shown by the researches of Amaral Lapa to have severely understated the importance of Bahia and other ports as waystations.38 Remarkable was the fact that Marchant's dissertation and articles were based on printed primary and secondary sources. After this promising start, Marchant turned his talents to succinct overviews and editing collections of essays.

From 1938 to 1968, Robert Smith dominated that area of scholarship which he had made his own, namely, the art and architecture of Portugal and colonial Brazil. His definitive The Art of Portugal, 1500-1800 (Lon- don, 1968) resurrected and breathed life into the Portuguese baroque and his study of Aleijadinho diminished the Europacentricity incumbent in Germain Bazin's Aleijadinho et la Sculpture Baroque au Bresil (Paris, 1963). Author of some forty books published in the United States, Portugal, and Brazil, Smith ranged from landscapes by Frans Post to those of the eighteenth-century Amazon, and from Brazilian popular silver to colonial architecture (both civilian and ecclesiastical) of Minas Gerais. He made forays into economic history with an essay on the storage of Brazilwood in Recife in the late eighteenth century and into urban studies contrasting Spanish and Portuguese approaches to town and city development.39

Manoel Cardozo has demonstrated a greater breadth of interest than either of his contemporaries. A doctoral dissertation at Stanford in 1939

gave rise to a flurry of articles in the early and mid 1940s, all extensively documented, primarily from the Arquivo Historico Colonial (now Arquivo

37. From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500-1580 (Baltimore, 1942; reprint, 1966); Do Escambo a Es- craviddo. (Brasiliana, 225; Sao Paulo, 1943). In 1967 Jose Hon6rio Rodrigues recognized these early United States contributors to Brazilian historiography in his collection, ed., Es- tudos Americanos de Hist6ria do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1967).

38. Marchant, "Feudal and Capitalistic Elements in the Portuguese Settlement of Bra- zil," HAHR, 22 (Aug. 1942), 493-512; for a more recent clarification of the confusion and controversy, see Harold B. Johnson, "The Donatory Captaincy in Perspective: Portuguese Backgrounds to the Settlement of Brazil," HAHR, 52 (May 1972), 203-214. Also, Marchant, "Colonial Brazil as a Way Station for the Portuguese India Fleets," The Geographical Re- view, 31 (July 1941), 454-465, and Roberto do Amaral Lapa, A Bahia e a Carreira da India (Sao Paulo, 1968), pp. 4-12.

39. Robert Chester Smith, Congonhas do Campo (Rio de Janeiro, 1973); "The Wood- Beach at Recife. A Contribution to the Economic History of Brazil" and "More about the Wood-Beach at Recife," The Americas, 6 (Oct. 1949), 215-233, and 10 (July 1953), 75-78; "Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America," Journal of the Society ofArchitectural Historians (Philadelphia) 14 (Dec. 1955), 3-12.




Historico Ultramarino), on social, administrative, and economic aspects of the first gold rushes in Minas Gerais. Articles have ranged from brotherhoods to bandeirantes, from Azeredo Coutinho and the Enlightenment to United States travelers in nineteenth-century Brazil. Throughout there has been a sustained interest in bibliography, archives, libraries, and publication of documents as befits the long time curator (now emeritus) of the Oliveira Lima Library. Long promised has been a major study of the baroque conscience and a biography of Oliveira Lima. Until these appear, Cardozo's reputation must be based on articles and exquisitely crafted essays and overviews.40

Dating from the 1940S initially, and gaining momentum in the 1950s

and 1960s before emerging full force in the 1970s, were other developments that had decisive impact on contributions by United States scholars to the historiography of colonial Brazil. Here I shall focus on three such factors, which impinged on the quantity and quality of scholarly productivity. One such was the appearance, in the postwar years, of journals ac- cepting articles on the history of colonial Brazil. To HAHR (1918) and Mid-America (1918) were added The Americas (1944), Inter-American Review of Bibliography (1951), Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs (1959), Luso-Brazilian Review (1964), Latin American Re- search Review (1965) and, from London, the Journal of Latin American Studies (1969). Articles on the colony began appearing in more special- ized journals: Journal of Economic History (1941), Business History Re- view (1954), Journal of Social History (1967) and Journal of Urban His- tory (1974), as well as the venerable Political Science Quarterly (i886). The Catholic Historical Review, Jewish Social Studies, or Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society had a more defined readership, but there was a trend toward journals of a comparative nature, such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, or toward journals that might hitherto not have served as vehicles for articles on colonial Brazil, e.g., Journal of Negro History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Agri- cultural History, or Journal of African History. Studies of colonial Brazil

40. One of Cardozo's earliest writings was "Alguns Subsidios para a Hist6ria da Co- branca do Quinto na Capitania de Minas Gerais ate 1735," reprint (1938) from z Congresso da Hist6ria da Ex pansdo Portuguesa no Mundo, __ ,a Secqdo (Lisbon, 1937). Seminal articles include, "The Collection of the Fifths in Brazil, 1695-1709," HAHR, 20 (Aug. 1940), 359-379; "The Guerra dos Emboabas, Civil War in Minas Gerais, 1708-1709," HAHR, 22

(Aug. 1942), 470-492; "The Brazilian Gold Rush," The Americas, 3 (Oct. 1946), 137-16o; "Azeredo Coutinho and the Intellectual Ferment of his Times," in H. H. Keith and S. F. Edwards, eds., Conflict and Continuity in Brazilian Society (Columbia, 1969), 72-103; "The Modernization of Portugal and the Independence of Brazil," in A. J. R. Russell-Wood, ed., From Colony to Nation: Essays on the Independence of Brazil (Baltimore, 1975), 185-210.




entered the inner sanctum with Stuart Schwartz's article in the American Historical Review.4' Encouraging was dissemination of United States scholarship overseas in such Portuguese-language journals as Revista do Instituto Historico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro, Studia, Revista de Historia, Revista de Historia de America or in the French Caravelle.

A second factor was expansion of institutional capabilities for training a new generation of Latin Americanists. There now exist eleven major Title VI national resource centers on Latin America in the United States. Florida International University and San Diego State University are undergraduate centers for Latin American study. Such training programs have opened up new horizons: opportunities for Portuguese language study; and growth in other disciplines that stimulated interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives for Latin American studies. The final ob- stacle to historical studies of Brazil was removed by the infusion of funds from the Rockefeller, Ford, Tinker, and Mellon Foundations, and from Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.42

A third factor was the creation of a sense of "professional solidarity," to use J. Franklin Jameson's words of 1918. The Conference on Latin American History had been organized, and officially recognized by the AHA, in 1928. Three decades later, at a meeting held in August 1959 at Sagamore, the Latin American Studies Association came into being. Re- sponse to increasing international scholarly interest in the Portuguese- speaking world was the organization in Washington, D.C., in 1950 of the first Luso-Brazilian Colloquium and of the sixth in 1966 at Harvard and Columbia. North American scholars writing on colonial Brazil were well represented in Atas of the third and fifth colloquia held at Lisbon (1957)

and Coimbra (1963).43 Six of the papers presented at a Seminar on Latin American History at the University of South Carolina in 1967 dealt with Portuguese America before 1826. A conference focusing exclusively on the colonial period was held at the Newberry Library in 1969, and served as a forum for current research by a younger generation of North Ameri- can scholars and as a sounding board for an agenda for studies on Por-

41. Stuart B. Schwartz, "Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil," AHR, 83 (Feb. 1978), 43-79.

42. In 1960 the SSRC and the ACLS appointed a Joint Committee on Latin American Studies. The Carnegie Foundation (NY) allocated $190,000 to the joint committee, largely for postdoctoral research in the period 1960-62.

43. Alexander Marchant, ed., Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Luso- Brazilian Studies (Nashville, 1953); Luis Filipe Lindley Cintra, ed., Actas. izz Coloquio International de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1959-60); Avelino de Jesus da Costa, ed., Actas. V Coloquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros, 5 vols. (Coimbra, 1965-68). North American scholars included John A. Hutchins, George C. A. Boehrer, Mathias C. Kiernen, Bailey WV. Diffie, and Lewis Hanke.




tuguese America. In 1972 a symposium on preconditions and precipitants of the move to independence was held at The Johns Hopkins University. Increasingly a Brazilian colonial component occurred in conferences on the New World experience: for example on the Ibero-American Enlighten- ment at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1969),"4 and two conferences (1970, 1972) on persons of African descent in the New World, one focusing on roles of freedmen in slave societies and the other examining the potential of quantitative approaches to the study of race and slavery.45 There were more panels on colonial Brazil at meetings of the American Histor- ical Association and, more specifically, of the Latin American Studies Association.

Increased interest in colonial Brazil by United States scholars was manifested through doctoral dissertations and by articles in refereed journals. Since 1930 there have been 79 doctoral dissertations in United States universities that have either wholly, or partly, treated the colonial period. By decades these are as follows: 1930s-3; 1940s-4; 1950s-12; 1960s-15; 1970s-39; ig80s-to April 1985, 6. Of these, all but 22 date from the years 1955-79; in the quinquennium 1975-79 there were 23. It is of concern that, if the productivity in the years 1980-84 is any indication (total of 6), not only has the momentum of the 1970S been lost, but there is a return to the level of the 1950s. Breadth of interest is shown by the awards of these degrees by 37 different institutions. Far from being a positive factor, this underlines the individualistic nature of training in Brazilian colonial history. Depth is absent. Excepting Berkeley (8), Co- lumbia (6), New York University (5) and the University of Texas at Austin (5), no single university is identifiable as a magnet for potential students of colonial Brazil. No correlation exists between productivity of doctoral dissertations on colonial Brazil and major Title VI resource centers.46

The second indicator lies in articles appearing in journals directly ori-

44. Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley, 1973); contributors were Francis Dutra, David Davidson, Kenneth Maxwell, Stuart Schwartz, Colin Mac- Lachlan, and Harold B. Johnson, Jr. Russell-Wood, ed., From Colony to Nation (Baltimore, 1975), included essays by the following United States scholars: Stanley E. Hilton, Stuart Schwartz, Richard M. Morse, Manoel da Silveira Cardozo, and Bradford Burns. A. Owen Aldridge, ed., The Ibero-Arnerican Enlightenment (Urbana, 1971) with essays by Burns and Cardozo, who also, together with Bailey W. Diffie, Dauril Alden, Alan Manchester, and Harry Bernstein, contributed to Henry H. Keith and S. F. Edwards, eds., Conflict and Continuity in Brazilian Society (Columbia, 1969).

45. Those of the Johns Hopkins Symposium (1970) were edited by David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, Neither Slave nor Free (Baltimore, 1972). The other was at the University of Rochester in 1972; papers were edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene Genovese as Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975).

46. These are as follows: UC-Berkeley and Stanford; UCLA; Univ. of Florida; Univ. of Illinois and Univ. of Chicago; Univ. of Kansas; Univ. of New Mexico and New Mexico State University; Univ. of Pittsburgh and Cornell; Univ. of Texas; Tulane; Univ. of Wisconsin; Yale.




ented to Latin American history, namely: Hispanic American Historical Review, The Americas, Luso-Brazilian Review, Latin American Research Review, and Journal of Latin American Studies, which is published in the United Kingdom but to which North American scholars are frequent contributors (Table I). Of the first three journals, articles on colonial Brazil account for about 4.9 percent. The years 1945-84 saw a total of 8i articles, of which 43 appeared in The Americas. If we turn to the HAHR exclusively for the boom decade of the 1970s, Brazil ranked second (29)

only to Mexico (71) in the total (261) number of articles submitted on the colonial period. For Mexico the number increased modestly (34 to 37) in the second quinquennium, but for Brazil there was a sharp drop from i8 to ii. For Brazil, articles on the colony remained competitive with those for the national period and nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1971-75; 6 national, 30 nineteenth century, 19 twentieth century; July 1975-June 1980: 13 national, 24 nineteenth century, 21 twentieth century). Total submissions of all articles on Brazil for the two quinquennia were 73 and 69, respectively. In articles published for colonial Brazil there was a drop from 7 in the years 1970-74 to 4 in the years 1975-79. This reflected a decrease from 45 to 34 in overall numbers of articles on colonial Latin America. Figures for the colonial vis-a-vis other periods of Brazilian history (1971-75; 1 national, 7 nineteenth century, 2 twentieth century; 1976-80: 2 national, 6 nineteenth century, 3 twentieth century) remained about the same, but for Latin America as a whole there was increased interest in the national period.47

Productivity of United States scholars and contributions to the historiography of colonial Brazil over the half century 1935-85, has been nothing short of phenomenal. This land devoid of historical tradition in the United States prior to the 1930s, hurdles of unfamiliarity of language, physical remoteness to the United States, and absence of emotional, political, social, and economic ties to Anglo America comparable to those existing with Spanish America and the Spanish Borderlands, have been overcome. But euphoria must be tempered with words of caution. First, if figures for 1980-84 are any indication, not only have numbers of dissertations and articles appearing in the 1970S not been maintained, but there is serious erosion. Second, extraordinarily few doctoral dissertations have been published-by my count ten-representing lost opportunities to disseminate research results.48 Given the nature of the profes-

47. Five-years analyses in HAHR, 55 (Nov. 1975), 857-858; 6o (Nov. 1980), 749-750. 48. For the purpose of this paper I do not count University Microfilm editions as pub-

lications. Alan K. Manchester, British Preeminence in Brazil: Its Rise and Decline (Chapel Hill, 1933); Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Por- tuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500-1580 (Baltimore, 1942); Richard P. Momsen, Jr., Routes over the Serra do Mar: The Evolution of Transportation in the High-



-4 1 co~ " tO

4-J

4-1 '~~t~ coc t-

0 ~~~~~Q CK c0 cv

C) - ~ ~I

5

= a ? n ~~~~~~~t CO 1

0 <~~~~~~~~~~0t

IZ N

g~~~~~~. It Itt o 10 - c

C' S0 1?0 co go o- 00 t- to

m 0 cqc u: oNr

0 .

C)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Q

0 -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-

- 0 -) to C> 1 - t -.

H *: Uic D s Q

1- - 5 J nn n n 0') ~




sion and inordinate importance placed on publication, this is an instance where dissertation advisers should, without impugning the intellectual integrity of a proposed dissertation field, ask themselves whether the final product will be publishable. By default, junior scholars have turned to journals to publish research findings. Some articles reflect the rework- ing of a chapter of a dissertation, but, increasingly, junior scholars-de- spairing of publishing a dissertation on which employment or promotion depends-are synthesizing in one or two articles research findings and interpretations of an entire dissertation. David Davidson's dissertation on the Guapore-Mamore-Madeira route to the Brazilian west (535 pages) resulted in a 45-page article. Other examples are David Tengwall's study of the role of the sargento mor in Portugal and Brazil, Patricia Mulvey's dissertation on Black lay brotherhoods, and James Goodyear's fascinating inquiry into the linkages between the emergence of tropical disease as a cultural concept and the socioeconomic heritage of colonialism in the Por- tuguese seaborne empire.49 One final aspect of the journal literature mer- its comment. While it is encouraging to note large numbers of individual scholars as authors, it is discouraging to report that the predominant pattern is of one or, at the outside, two articles per author. One unfortunate repercussion has been the loss to the profession of such scholars as Patricia Aufderheide, David Davidson, John Kennedy, Arnold Kessler, and Susan Soeiro. That depth is lacking is further illustrated by the fact that over the last fifty years United States authors with more than a dozen contributions to the historiography of colonial Brazil can probably be counted on two hands.

lands of Rio de Janeiro and Sdo Paulo (Rio de Janeiro, 1964); Dauril Alden, Royal Govern- ment in Colonial Brazil with Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of La- vradio, Viceroy, 1769-1779 (Berkeley, 1968); Billy Jaynes Chandler, The Feitosas and the Sertdo dos Inhamuns: The History of a Family and a Community in Northeast Brazil, 1700-1930 (Gainesville, 1972); Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750-1808 (Cambridge, 1973); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609-1751 (Berkeley, 1973); Roberta Marx Delson, New Towns in Colonial Brazil: Spatial and Social Planning of the Eighteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979); Mathias C. Kiemen, The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Region, 1614- 1693 (Washington, D.C., 1954), William Joel Simon, Scientific Conditions in the Portuguese Overseas Territories (1783-1808): The Role of Lisbon in the Intellectual-Scientific Community of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lisbon, 1983). Kit Sims Taylor published his M.A. thesis as Sugar and the Underdevelopment of Northeastern Bra- zil, 1500-1970 (Gainesville, 1978), of which four chapters treat the colonial period.

49. David M. Davidson, "How the Brazilian West Was Won: Freelance and State on the Mato Grosso Frontier, 1737-1752," in Alden, ed., Colonial Roots, pp. 61-106; David Tengwall, "A Study in Military Leadership: The Sargento Mor in the Portuguese South At- lantic Empire," The Americas, 40 (July 1983), 73-94; Patricia Mulvey, "Slave Fraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial Society," The Americas, 30 (July 1982), 39-68; James D. Goodyear, "The Sugar Connection: A New Perspective on the History of Yellow Fever," Bul- letin of the History of Medicine, 52 (1978), 5-21; and "Medical Thought and Slavery in Co- lonial Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review (forthcoming).




Lack of depth is also illustrated by the fact that there are fewer than a score of book-length monographs by United States scholars on colonial Brazil. This dearth is nowhere more telling than as regards general histories. Of four such histories by United States scholars, only one-written by a sociologist-is devoted exclusively to the colonial era. Justifying a comparative approach by resorting to Durkheim in pursuing a problem through a greater range of variation, James Lang takes as his social unit Portugal's American empire. Critical to his thesis is formation of an export economy controlled by the crown, which profited from Brazil's development without incurring the costs of elaborate bureaucracy. This depen- dent relationship was political, spiritual, and economic, and changed over time. Lang is less successful in attempting to trace the social implications behind this export economy. Using secondary sources, Lang succeeds in placing Brazil within an international context. Rollie Poppino and Bradford Burns give reasonable coverage to the colonial period. The former takes the reader on a conducted tour of the new world in the tropics: Indians, Africans, Europeans; cultural exchanges; and the cyclical nature of economies in Brazil. Burns focuses on the national period but, while taking the reader over much the same ground as Poppino, places more weight on social amalgamation, political evolution, and economic fluctua- tions. The fourth such volume is Donald Worcester's Brazil: From Colony to World Power, whose treatment of the colonial period sets the scene for proto-independence movements and independence itself. Many, however, will now turn to the work of synthesis by James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (1983). This opens and closes by examining phenomena shared by Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking peoples respectively in the Iberian Peninsula and later in the proto-independence and postindepen- dence eras. Changes in political and economic realms found no counterpart in societies that preserved many colonial characteristics. The four chapters specifically on Brazil-the dyewood phase, the sugar age, geo- politics on the fringes of the colony, and an eighteenth century characterized by mining, royal absolutism, and Pombaline reforms-serve as a forum for coverage of all aspects of colonial society. This is a broad canvas covered in wide sweeps both spatially and chronologically, and Schwartz has placed the Brazilian experience not only in the context of Latin Amer- ica but of a world system. Should the powers that be who determine

50. James Lang, Portuguese Brazil: The King's Plantation (New York, 1979); Rollie E. Poppino, Brazil: The Land and People (Oxford 1968; 2d ed., New York 1973); E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil (New York, 1970); Donald C. Worcester, Brazil: From Colony to World Power (New York, 1973); James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (Cambridge, 1983).




publishing policies of the Cambridge University Press decide to publish in a single volume those essays on colonial Brazil appearing in the Cam- bridge History of Latin America (2 vols., 1984), there is every likelihood that such a volume would become the standard text for the foreseeable future.

Reference has been made to collections of essays stemming from symposia. To these should be added Bradford Burns's invaluable collection of essays on Brazilian historiography by Brazilian historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5' Burns has also made a major contribution by translating documents on Brazilian history and here has been joined by Richard Morse, translator from Portuguese of writings on the bandeirantes, and Ruth E. Jones, who translated Juan Lopes Sierra's fu- neral eulogy for Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendoniga, which opens a window onto mentalites and mnoeurs of baroque America.52 In the translation of contemporary narratives, United States scholars were pre- empted by the British, but William Brooks Greenlee, Bertram Lee, Charles E. Nowell, Paula Spurlin Paige, and Donald Weinstein served North American scholarship well by their contributions.53 Finally, homage should be paid to Alfred Knopf, who took as his mission dissemination of knowledge about Brazil in the United States through translations and who, in the Borzoi series, made available to students sources for Brazilian history. As translator and publisher of Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio de Ja- neiro, 1933) Samuel Putnam and Knopf presented to North American readers what, for many, still is the only readily identifiable book on Bra- zilian history by a Brazilian, and one that was to be cornerstone, and

51. E. Bradford Burns, ed., Perspectives on Brazilian History (New York, 1967). Other North American scholars writing on nineteenth-century Brazilian historians' interpretations of their past include Stuart B. Schwartz, "Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen: Diplomat, Patriot, Historian," HAHR, 47 (May 1967), 185-202, and two essays on Capistrano de Abreu by Robert Conrad, Revista de Historia de America, 59 (Jan. -June 1965), 149-164, and Katherine Fringer, Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs, 13 (Apr. 1971), 258-278.

52. Burns, ed., A Documentary History of Brazil (New York, 1966). See also his "Intro- duction to the Brazilian Jesuit Letters," Mid-America, 44 (July 1962), 172- 186 and extracts in "The Sixteenth Century Jesuit Letters of Brazil," Historical Records and Studies (New York), 49 (1962), 57-76. Richard M. Morse, ed., The Bandeirantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders (New York, 1965). Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil: The Funereal Eulogy of Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonqa by Juan Lopes Sierra, trans. by Ruth E. Jones (Minneapolis, 1979).

53. William Brooks Greenlee, ed., The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India from Contemporary Documents and Narratives (London, 1938); Donald Weinstein, ed., and commentator, Ambassadorfrom Venice: Pietro Pasqualigo in Lisbon, i50. (Min- nesota, 1960); Antonio Pigafetta, The Voyage of Magellan: The Journal of Antonio Pigafetta, trans. by Paula Spurlin Paige (Englewood Cliffs, 1969); Jos6 Toribio Medina, The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents, trans. by Bertram E. Lee (New York, 1934).




whipping post, for discussion over four decades on slavery and race relations among United States scholars.54

The third part of this essay, namely assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and directions of United States scholarly contributions to the historiography of colonial Brazil, may be phrased in the context of three developments in historical scholarship in general, which roughly coincide with the surge in United States scholarly interest in Portuguese America. The first is cross-fertilization between social sciences and history as regards new methodologies, research strategies, use of sources, and directions of scholarly enquiry. The second concerns expanding fields of enquiry in social history and increase in numbers of social historians. The third is the burgeoning field of comparative history, that is, systematic comparison of aspects of two or more societies selected from different geographical regions as interpreted in the historical literature.

In his introduction to the first volume of the Handbook of Latin American Studies (1935), Lewis Hanke stated that Latin America was an ideal area for study because "conventional academic divisions" could be ignored, and there could be more "peering over fences."55 For colonial Brazil, this influence has been markedly less pronounced than for colonial Spanish America. In contrast to immediate and sustained interest in pre- Columbian archaeology in Spanish America, archaeology on pre-Cabralian Brazil has been slow to develop. The three leading United States archaeologists, Betty Meggers, Clifford Evans, and Helen Palmatary, have focused on the Amazon, Amapa, and lower Tapajos. Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans are conscious of what they refer to as "the historical after- math" of European contact. Palmatary has posed the specific question as to whether the Portuguese introduced the bowl pipe into the Tapajos region. Unfortunately, few historians-one exception being David Sweet in his dissertation on the Solim6es and Rio Negro valleys-have conducted

54. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Bra- zilian Civilization, trans. by Samuel Putnam from the 4th ed. (New York, 1946; 2d Eng. lang. ed., revised, 1956). An abridged edition, also published by Knopf, appeared in 1964. See also Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation published by A. A. Knopf in 1945. The Borzoi series included Burns, ed., A Documentary History; R. A. Humphreys and John Lynch, eds., The Origins of the Latin American Revolutions, 1808-1826; Richard Morse, ed. The Bandei- rantes; Charles Wagley's Amazon Town: The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America, edited by Magnus Mdrner. The translation of Moyses Vellinho's Capitania d'el Rei [Brazil South] introduced North American readers to the southern expansion of Portuguese Brazil, trans. by Linton Lomas Barrett and Marie McDavid Barrett (New York, 1968). See also the Borzoi Reader in Latin American History, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), ed. by Helen Delpar. Valuable to an understanding of the Portuguese contribution to the intellectual growth of Brazil was Jodo Cruz Costa's A History of Ideas in Brazil, trans. by Suzette Macedo (Berke- ley, 1964), which, while focusing on the years 1868-89, has much of importance on the colonial period.

55. Handbook of Latin American Studies, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. xiii.




research on these regions and the questions have gone unanswered. The virtual absence of archaeology on the colonial period has ruled out so far an immensely promising collaboration between archaeologists and historians.56 Nor has the opportunity been realized for combined anthropologi- cal-historical interpretations of communities of the colonial era. Here again, anthropologists Charles Wagley on the Tenetehara and Tapirape and his ethnology of Ge kinship, Robert Lowie on the Cariri, Tarairiu, Timbira, and Bororo linguistic group, or Curt Nimuendajui, who spent forty years researching the Ge under the auspices of the University of California Department .of Anthropology, were all strongly conscious of the historical dimension.57 Another anthropologist, David Maybury-Lewis, has modified some of Nimuendaju's ethnography and destroyed the hoary myth that the Tapuia of central Brazil were culturally inferior to the coastal Tupis.58 United States historians have not responded to the challenge to write about Indian peoples of the colonial period, but have focused on Portuguese Indian legislation and Indian labor. 9

56. Evans and Meggers completed their dissertations at Columbia in 1950 and 1952,

respectively, and collaborated on Archeological Investigations at the Mouth of the Amazon (Washington, D.C., 1957). See also Meggers, "The Archeology of the Amazon Basin," in Julian H. Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians, 7 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1946-59), III, 149- 166. Palmatary, "The Archeology of the Lower Tapaj6s Valley, Brazil," in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 50: Pt. 3 (1960), 1-243. Ceramics from the Altamira region along the Trans-Amazonian highway collected by Nigel Smith (1972-74) are discussed by Warren DeBoer in El Dorado (the Museum of Anthropology of the Univer- sity of Northern Colorado, Greeley), 2:2 (July 1977), 1-9. The broader perspective sug- gested by Alan Lyle Bryan, ed., Early Man in Anmerica front a Circurn-Paci c Perspective (Edmonton, 1978) fails for Brazil. David Graham Sweet, Appendix (1974). See also Meggers, "Environment and Culture in Amazonia," in Charles Wagley, ed., Man in the Amazon (Gainesville, 1974), pp. 91 - 110.

57. Charles Wagley's Welcome of Tears: The Tapirape Indians of Central Brazil (New York, 1977) is the culmination of almost forty years of field research; Charles Wagley and Eduardo Galvao, The Tenetehara Indians of Brazil: A Culture in Transition (New York, 1949); Robert Lowie, "The Cariri," "The Tarairiu," "The Northwestern and Central Ge," "The Southern Cayap6," "The Boror6," all in Steward, ed., The Handbook of South Ameri- can Indians, vol. i. Curt Nimuendajii, The Eastern Timbira, trans. by Robert H. Lowie (Berkeley, 1946), The Serente, trans. by Lowie (Los Angeles, 1942) and innumerable articles in the Handbook.

58. David Maybury-Lewis, ed., Dialectal Societies, The Ge and Boror6 of Central Brazil (Cambridge, 1979), based on the 1968 symposium on the GC held at the 38th Interna- tional Congress of Arnericanists. Cf. Lowie, "The Tapuya," in Steward, ed., Handbook, I, 553-56.

59. The exception is the Britisher, John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, 1978). United States scholarly contributions on legislation, in addition to those by Mathias Kiemen (cited in n. 77) are Dauril Alden, "Black Robes versus White Settlers: The Struggle for 'Freedom of the Indians' in Colonial Brazil," in Howard Peckham and Charles Gibson, eds., Attitudes of Colonial Powers toward the American In- dian (Salt Lake City, 1969). Indian labor has received excellent analysis by Stuart Schwartz, "Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil," American Historical Review, 83 (Feb. 1978), 43-79, and Colin Mac- Lachlan's essays on the Indian Directorate in The Americas, 28 (Apr. 1972), 357-387, and in




As regards studies of the African in colonial Brazil, the agenda was not set by historians but by sociologists or anthropologists. Gilberto Freyre, trained at Baylor and, more critically, at Columbia under Franz Boas, found an early admirer in Percy Alvin Martin; and Freyre's views on race and plantation society were to inform much of the historical debate in the United States for the next thirty years. In the mid-1930s the anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits were beginning their research into people of African descent in Brazil. A contemporary was the sociologist from the University of Chicago, Donald Pierson, working on racial and cultural contacts in Bahia. Two decades removed, the Frenchman Roger Bastide wrote his classic study of African religions. More recently sociologists of Sao Paulo (Florestan Fernandes, Octavio lanni, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso) have set contemporary studies within historical con- texts. In the United States, the anthropologist Marvin Harris has incorporated the Brazilian dimension into his broader studies of race in the Americas.60 While North American scholars have written much about race relations and slavery, there are few historical (let alone interdisciplinary) studies on African communities, kinship, religions, family structures, social organization, and culture. A notable and welcome exception is the work of Robert Kent and Stuart B. Schwartz on the political systems, governance, and social organization of quiloinbos. The latter has collaborated fruitfully with the anthropologist Stephen Gudeman, resulting in an interdisciplinary approach to analysis of historical data (264 baptismal records in four parishes of the Reconcavo of Bahia) and concluding that in the slavocratic regime of colonial Bahia there is no evidence that god- parenthood reinforced slave-owner relationships.6'

Techniques borrowed from economic and social history have had an impact on United States scholarly contributions to the history of colonial Brazil, although here again to a much lesser degree-both in terms of

Alden, Colonial Roots, pp. 199-230. See also Alden, "Indian versus Black Slavery in the State of Maranhao During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Bibliotheca Ameri- cana, i (Jan. 1983), 91-142.

6o. Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964); Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941) inter alia; his earliest contribution was to the first Afro- Brazilian Congress in Recife. Both Herskovits and Pierson made contributions to the second such congress in Bahia, and the latter was to report on his research in Salvador, June 1935-March 1937, in HLAS (1935), 235, and (1940), pp. 463-470, and "The Negro in Bahia, Brazil," American Sociological Review, 4 (Aug. 1939), 524-533.

61. R. K. Kent, "Palmares: An African State in Brazil," Journal of Social History, 6 (1965), 161-175; Schwartz, "Buraco de Tat6: The Destruction of a Bahian Quilombo," Ver- handlungen des XXXVIII Internationalen Anterikanistenkongresses, III (1971), 429-438. The paper on godparents was presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., 1980.



U. S. CONTRIBUTIONS TO HISTORIOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL BRAZIL 707

sophistication and application-than for Spanish America. One immediate result has been to look beyond such "traditional" sources for Brazilian colonial history as royal correspondence and gubernatorial edicts, to notarial archives, parish and court records, wills, inventories, and census materials. Furthermore, rather than restricting themselves to manuscript collections of Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, or the Public Record Office, researchers are turning to district or regional archives, or to depositories beyond the Luso-Brazilian world, such as the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Vatican, Simancas, and the Archivo General de Indias. Use of new source materials and new methodological approaches is well illustrated by Schwartz's pioneering (for Brazil) use of prosopography in his study of the desembargadores of the high court of Bahia. Sophistication of analysis and interpretation enabled him to move from individuals, to career samples, and finally to delineate a social process. Frank Colson has also employed this approach to analyze strengths and weaknesses of Paulista families whose fortunes are traceable to the 1750S and who came to dominate the economy, society, and polity of Brazil. Rae Flory, studying Bahian society, also employed techniques of collective biography and representative case studies.62 Schwartz and Flory used notarial records, the former with con- spicuous success in his study of manumission practices, a theme and tech- nique followed by James Kiernan for the late colonial period in Paratif. Elizabeth Kuznesof and Alida Metcalf have used similar blendings of sources, the former in her study of the impact on household composition of the transition from domestic production for subsistence to market exchange in Sdo Paulo from 1765 to 1836; the latter in her analysis of"strategies for survival" by families in Parnaiba, 1720- 1820.63

Quantitative approaches, Richard Morse's fulminations notwithstand- ing, have stimulated innovative use of source materials.64 Much of this has centered on the slave trade itself, and on persons of African descent in colonial Brazil. Statistics of the actual trade have occupied Herbert Klein and Philip D. Curtin (and the latter's successors).6 Demographic studies

62. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil, which used twenty-seven archives in four countries. See Appendix: Colson (1979); Dell Flory (1978).

63. Schwartz, "The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684-1745," HAHR, 54 (Nov. 1974), 603-635. Appendix: Kiernan (1976), Kuznesof (1976) and the latter's article in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22 (Jan. 1980), 78-108; see Appen- dix: Metcalf (1983).

64. "The Strange Career of 'Latin American Studies,"' Annals of the American Acad- emny of Political and Social Science, 356 (1964), lo6- 112, "The Care and Grooming of Latin American Historians, or: Stop the Computers, I Want to Get Off," in Stanley R. Ross, ed., Latin America in Transition: Problems in Training and Research (Albany, 1970), pp. 27-40.

65. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969) and "Mea- suring the Atlantic Slave Trade," in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene Genovese, eds., Race




for Rio de Janeiro by Mary Karasch have enhanced our understanding of the composition of the Black population, mortality rates, and manumission practices. Richard Graham's analysis of an inventory of 1,347 slaves on the Fazenda Santa Cruz modified our views on family composition, sta- bility of the family, and marriage ages. Donald Ramos's detailed demographic analyses for Minas Gerais in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide data on structure and size of housefuls and households, age, occupation, and sexual, marital, and racial status. His results have modified the traditional view of the Brazilian family as patriarchal and extended.66 General demographic studies for the colonial period are still limited to Dauril Alden's "preliminary"' survey, although an exciting new collaboration places an economist and a demographer together in the persons of Thomas W. Merrick and Douglas H. Graham. Their observations on trends in population growth and demographic aspects of slavery are of interest to historians of colonial Brazil, although the emphasis is on the later period.6 Absence of census data for what Frederic Mauro has referred to as the "protostatistical" period has been a severe hindrance to demographic research on colonial Brazil. Incursions are being made by French scholars or those trained in France, such as Maria Luiza Marciflio.68 Should data become available on mortality, fertility, morbidity, and population growth rates, a whole new dimension may be added to studies of women in the colony-to date a subject largely neglected, be it for whites or Blacks. One branch of quantitative history, lexiconometrics, so ably used by Daniel Teysseire in his analysis of the vocabulary of the pamphlet literature of the Taylors Conspiracy of 1798, has found no adherents in the United States.

Growing interest in colonial history by economists seeking structural

and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975), pp. 107- 128; Herbert Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, 1978); Klein, "The Portuguese Slave Trade from Angola in the Eighteenth Cen- tury," The Journal of Economic History, 32 (Dec. 1972), 894-918, and "The Trade in African Slaves to Rio de Janeiro, 1795-1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages," Jour- nal of African History, lo (1969), 533-549.

66. Appendix: Karasch (1972); Richard Graham, "Slave Families on a Rural Estate in Colonial Brazil," Journal of Social History, 9 (Spring 1976), 382-402. Donald Ramos, "Mar- riage and the Family in Colonial Vila Rica," HAHR, 55 (May 1975), 200-225; "Vila Rica: Profile of a Colonial Brazilian Urban Center," The Americas, 35 (Apr. 1979), 495-526; "City and Country: The Family in Minas Gerais, 1804-1838," Journal of Family History, 3 (Winter 1978), 361-375.

67. Dauril Alden, "The Population of Brazil in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Prelimi- nary Survey," HAHR, 43 (May 1963), 173-205; Thomas W. Merrick and Douglas H. Graham, Population and Economic Development in Brazil: 18oo to the Present (Baltimore, 1979).

68. Maria Luiza Marcflio, La Ville de Sdo Paulo. Peuplement et Population 1750-1850

(Rouen, 1972); "Evolucdo da Populacdo Brasileira atraves dos Censos ate 1872," Anais de Hist6ria, 6 (1974), 115-137. Frederic Mauro, ed., L'Histoire Quantitative du Bresil de 18oo a 1930 (Paris, 1973), report of the 1971 colloquium in Paris.




roots of economic backwardness has had little repercussion on colonial Brazil. Dauril Alden's seminal studies on different aspects of the colonial economy remain in a class by themselves. Two of particular significance because of wealth of quantifiable data are his study of cacao production in the Amazon and his recent study of sugar output of Jesuit estates in the seventeenth century and first half of the eighteenth. This second serves as a companion piece to Schwartz's study of the production, income, and expenses of Benedictine sugar mills in Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro. To the best of my knowledge, the only person to indulge in economic model building for colonial Brazil is Matthew Edel on Dutch investment in Brazil and the Caribbean. David Denslow also adopted an economist's approach to the treatment of slaves in Cuba and Brazil. A significant contribution was made by Harold Johnson. From 15,000 individual prices, he reconstructed a series for eighteen commodities in Rio de Janeiro from 1760 to 182o and posited a dual economy rather than merely one of subsistence for Rio. Even Johnson, however, could not overcome the problem that the value of such prices is limited by the absence of a full history of money supply taking into account credit as well as currency.69

It is in the field of social history that United States scholars have made their greatest contribution to the historiography of colonial Brazil. A broad subtheme is the history of the disinherited or underprivileged: persons of African descent, women, Indians. As regards the first, much of the contribution has centered around the debate, often phrased in terms of "harshness" and "'mildness," over slavery in Brazil vis-a-vis other Euro- pean colonies in the New World, and the English North American colonies in particular. In 1947 Frank Tannenbaum provided the stimulus for

69. Dauril Alden, "The Significance of Cacao Production in the Amazon Region during the Late Colonial Period: An Essay in Comparative Economic History," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (Apr. 1976), 103-135; "Sugar Planters by Neces- sity, Not Choice: The Role of the Jesuits in the Cane Sugar Industry of Colonial Brazil, 1601-1759" in Jeffrey A. Cole, ed., The Church and Society in Latin America (Tulane, 1984), pp. 139-170; Stuart B. Schwartz, "The Plantations of St. Benedict: The Benedictine Sugar Mills of Colonial Brazil," The Americas, 39 (July 1982), 1-22; Matthew Edel, "The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of West Indian Competi- tion," Caribbean Studies, 9 (Apr. 1969), 24-44. David Denslow presented his paper, "Eco- nomic Considerations on the Treatment of Slaves in Brazil and Cuba" at the Rochester Con- ference on Slavery in 1972, but it was not included in the edited volume. Harold B. Johnson, Jr., "A Preliminary Enquiry into Money, Prices, and Wages in Rio de Janeiro, 1763- 1823," in Alden, ed., Colonial Roots, pp. 231-283. An overview is found in Stanley J. Stein and Shane J. Hunt, "Principal Currents in the Economic Historiography of Latin America," Journal of Economic History, 31 (Mar. 1971), 222-253. The most challenging thesis recently presented on slavery for the late colonial period in Brazil, making use of estimates of slave imports based on hypothetical rates of natural growth and numbers of slaves employed in gold production is Amilcar Martins Filho and Roberto B. Martins, "Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited," HAHR, 63 (Aug. 1983), 537-568 and comments by Robert Slenes, Warren Dean, Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese.




three decades of historical enquiry by his Slave and Citizen, which so in- fluenced Stanley M. Elkins. Interest spurred by Tannenbaum and Elkins in slavery as an institution and in relations between Blacks and whites in the colonial period resulted in a flurry of scholarly activity in the United States. The foundations and conclusions of the Tannenbaum-Elkins thesis were called into question. Marvin Harris took the criteria (institutional intervention, manumission, cultural norms) adopted by Elkins and re- interpreted them to reach diametrically opposed conclusions. Historians David Brion Davis, Arnold Sio, and Carl Degler moved the debate away from the exclusive focus on owner-slave relationships and contacts between persons at the poles of the racial spectrum to raise a less pub- licized, but no less critical, issue that had been integral to Tannenbaum and Elkins: namely, the role of the freedman of African descent and of the mulatto. To Degler we owe the theory of the "mulatto escape hatch" to explain quintessential differences between race relations in Brazil and the United States.70

Historians have attempted to cast light on what it meant to be a slave or a freedman of color in colonial Brazil. Their task has been complicated by the nature of the sources, few of which represent the Blacks' view on colonial existence. Quilombos have attracted scholarly attention, but Stuart Schwartz has discovered an unusual-possibly unique-document that describes the slaves' view of slavery and a peace treaty proposed by runaways. Melvin Prince established a typology of slave revolts for early nineteenth-century Bahia, but little significant work has been done for the earlier period with the exceptions of the essays of Schwartz and Kent already noted.7' One aspect of African societies in the New World that has received attention has been the lay brotherhoods, although the sources have a certain sameness which has precluded radically new interpreta-

70. The extensive literature by North American scholars includes: Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1947), and Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Arnold A. Sio, "Interpretations of Slavery: The Slave Status in the Americas," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 7 (Apr. 1965), 289-308; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), esp. pp. 223-288; Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971). See, too, the essays in Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Ur- bana, 1971); Sidney Mintz, review of Elkins in American Anthropologist, 63 (June 1961), 579-587, and Donald Gray Elder, "Time Under the Southern Cross: The Tannenbaum The- sis Reappraised," Agricultural History (University of California Press), 50 (Oct. 1976), 600-614. Eugene Genovese wrote a devastating critique of Harris, Patterns of Race, entitled "Materialism and Idealism in the History of Negro Slavery in the Americas," Journal of Social History, 1 (Summer 1968), 371-394.

71. Stuart B. Schwartz, "Resistance and Accommodation in Eighteenth-Century Bra- zil: The Slaves' View of Slavery," HAHR, 57 (Feb. 1977), 69-81. See Appendix: Prince (1972).




tions.72 Donald Ramos has touched on household composition of persons of African descent and women as heads of households. The most successful attempt to provide a total view of persons of African descent is the forthcoming book (from Princeton) by Mary Karasch on Rio de Janeiro in the late colonial and early independence periods. While much scholarly ink has flowed on the major entrepots of colonial Brazil, Spencer Leitman and Billy Jaynes Chandler have provided a corrective in studies of Af- ricans in the social and economic life of Rio Grande do Sul and Ceara, respectively. Mary Karasch also discusses occupations of Africans in Rio de Janeiro and shows convincingly the great range of occupations open to slaves as well as freedmen, and how these could serve as means by which slaves could gain freedom.73 Colin MacLachlan is one of the few authors to write about the import of slaves into the Maranhdo-Para region in the eighteenth century, and recently authored a fascinating article on the impact of ideas on institutional change and slavery and weakening support for the institution.74 The freedman of color has been described by Herbert Klein in the context of mobility. Francis Dutra took a different angle on the same theme in his study of persons of African descent in search of memberships in Portuguese military orders.73

If persons of African descent have received scholarly attention, not the same holds true for women, despite widespread interest in the sub- jects of dowries, inheritance, head of household, role in the economy, and recognition of the need to go beyond white upper- and middle-class fe- males and study women in a variety of ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds. Ann Pescatello emphasizes that factors of race, class, and religion,

72. Manoel Cardozo, "The Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Bahia," The Catholic Histor- ical Review, 33 (Apr. 1947), 12-30; Patricia Mulvey, Appendix (1976) and her spinoffs, "Slave Confraternities in Brazil: Their Role in Colonial Society," The Americas, 39 (July 1982), 39-60, and "Black Brotherhoods and Sisters: Membership in the Black Lay Brother- hoods of Colonial Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review, 17:2 (Winter 1980) 253-279.

73. Spencer Leitman, "Slave Cowboys in the Cattle Lands of Southern Brazil, i8oo- 1850," Revista de Hist6ria de Sdo Paulo, 51 (Jan.-Mar. 1975), 167-177; Billy Jaynes Chandler, "The Role of Negroes in the Ethnic Formation of Ceara: The Need for a Re- appraisal," Revista de Ciencias Sociais, 4, 1 (1973), 31-43.

74. Colin MacLachlan, "African Slave Trade and Economic Development in Amazonia, 1700-i8oo," in Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, 1974), pp. 112-145 and "Slavery, Ideology and Institutional Change: The Impact of the Enlightenment on Slavery in Late Eighteenth-Century Maranhdo," Journal of Latin American Studies, ii (May 1979), 1-17.

75. Herbert Klein, "The Colored Freedman in Brazilian Slave Society," Journal of So- cial History, 3 (Fall 1969), 30-52, and "Nineteenth Century Brazil" in Cohen and Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free, pp. 309-334; Francis Dutra, "Blacks and the Search for Re- wards and Status in Seventeenth Century Brazil," Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 6 (1977-79), 25-35.




together with legislation, diminished roles open to women in colonial Bra- zil, but her stress on the patriarchal family as creating a web of ties and obligations, "the pawning of women," may be modified in light of Ramos's findings. Stuart Schwartz and Susan Soeiro have stressed the importance of widows and nuns, respectively, as lavradores de cana and investors in plantation economies of the northeast. Soeiro has also studied the religious houses of colonial Bahia, focusing on the social background of admit- tants, reasons for entry, daily routines, and the degree to which convents preserved class lines and reinforced the colonial elite.76

Studies of the Indian by United States scholars have focused exclusively on Portuguese legislation and Indian labor. A theme running through the latter is the manner in which Indians were "reorganized" to meet demands of white colonists. For the northeast of Brazil, Schwartz has illustrated the evolution over fifty years from an Indian labor force, through a mixed one, to virtually exclusively African slave labor. If this exchange were true for the northeast, it was not for the Amazon. Colin MacLachlan has traced the transition from the mission system to the Directorate under Pombal, which forced the acculturation of Indian peoples.77 No less than for people of African descent, historians have tried to make the most of a dearth of historical sources to breathe life into some personages of the past. Two such attempts of a more anecdotal nature concerned Indian women in the eighteenth century, who were "survivors" through collective struggle or individual accommodation. One was the Caiapo, who, by her Christian name Damiana da Cunha, became a missionary and expedi- tion leader; the other was Francisca, brought as a slave from the Rio

76. Ann Pescatello, "Ladies and Whores in Colonial Brazil," Caribbean Review, 5 (Apr. - June 1973), 26-30, and Power and Pawn: The Female in Iberian Families, Societies, and Ctl- tures (Westport, 1976); Stuart B. Schwartz, "Free Labor in a Slave Economy: The Lavra- dores de Cana of Colonial Bahia," in Alden, ed., Colonial Roots, pp. 147-197, esp. pp. 178- 179; Susan Soeiro, Appendix (1974), and "The Social and Economic Roles of the Convent: Women and Nuns in Colonial Bahia, 1677-1800," HAHR, 54 (May 1974), 209-232, and "The Feminine Orders in Colonial Bahia, Brazil: Economic, Social, and Demographic Im- plications, 1677-i8oo," in Asunci6n Lavrin, ed., Latin American Women, Historical Per- spectives (Westport, 1978), pp. 173-197.

77. Mathias C. Kiemen, The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Region, 1614- 1693 (Washington, D.C., 1954) and "The Conselho Ultramarino's First Legislative Attempts to Solve the Indian Question in America, 1643-1647," The Americas, 14 (Jan. 1958), 259-271. Schwartz, "Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and In- dian Responses in Northeastern Brazil," American Historical Review, 83 (Feb. 1978), 43-79, and Colin MacLachlan, "The Indian Labor Structure in the Portuguese Amazon, 1700-i8oo," in Alden, ed., Colonial Roots, pp. 199-230, and "The Indian Directorate: Forced Acculturation in Portuguese America (1757-1799)," The Americas, 28 (Apr. 1972)

357-387. Sue Ellen Gross, "Labor in Amazonia in the First Half of the Eighteenth Cen- tury," The Americas, 32 (Oct. 1975), 211-221.




Negro to Belem do Para, where she served for twenty years before plead- ing her case for freedom.78

Other sectors of Brazilian society have brought forth contributions by United States historians. Patricia Aufderheide used court records in an imaginative manner to draw a profile of "innocent bystanders," the working citizenry of a community called to testify in criminal cases in the Reconcavo.79 At the other end of the social scale are biographical studies of the Pais Barreto family of Pernambuco and of Matias and Jorge de Al- buquerque.80 Robert White has written the only "life and times" of a colonial governor, Gomes Freire de Andrada.8' The first governor of Rio Grande do Sul and later of Santa Catarina found his biographer in Charles Dorenkott, and Ross Little Bardwell has done a career biography of candi- dates for the post of governor in Portugal's South Atlantic Empire.82 Mer- chant communities on both sides of the Atlantic have been the focus of considerable attention by United States scholars. David Grant Smith and Rae Flory both used collective biographies to cast light on the mercantile communities of Lisbon and Bahia respectively and to emphasize that merchants gained prominence without, in the case of Bahia at least, causing marked lessening of planter influence. Much the same point was made by John Kennedy when he referred to one "cohesive socio-economic entity" during the last half of the eighteenth century. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof has broken new ground in her studies of the role of merchants in the economic development of Sao Paulo in the later colonial period.83 Although our knowledge of the senhores de engenho and planters of the northeast is extensive, little work has been done on the landed gentry in areas other

78. Mary Karasch, "Damiana da Cunha: Catechist and Sertanista," and David Sweet, "Francisca" in David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash, eds., Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 102-120, and 274-291.

79. Patricia Aufderheide, "Upright Citizens in Criminal Records: Investigation in Cachoeira and Geremoabo, Brazil, 1780- 1836," The Americas, 38 (Oct. 1981), 173- 184.

8o. Dwight E. Peterson, "Sweet Success: Some Notes on the Founding of a Brazilian Sugar Dynasty. The Pais Barreto Family of Pernambuco," The Americas, 40 (Jan. 1984), 325-348; Francis Dutra, Appendix (1968), presumably providing material for the first of a three-volume biography, of which vol. 1 has appeared: Matias de Albuquerque: Capitdo- Mor de Pernambuco e Governador-Geral do Brasil (Recife, 1976); also "Notas sobre a Vida e Morte de Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho e a Tutela de Seus Filhos," Studia (Lisbon), 37 (Dec. 1973), 261-286.

8i. Robert White, Appendix (1972). 82. Appendix: Dorenkott (1972), Bardwell (1974). 83. Appendix: Smith (1975), Flory (1978). John Kennedy, "Bahian Elites, 1750-1822,"

HAHR, 53 (Aug. 1973), 415-439; see also Rae Flory and David Grant Smith, "Bahian Mer- chants and Planters in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," HAHR, 58 (Nov. 1978), 571-594, Catherine Lugar, Appendix (1980), Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "The Role of the Merchants in the Economic Development of Sao Paulo, 1765-1850," HAHR, 6o (Nov. 1980), 571-592.




than the coastal enclaves. This lacuna has been partly filled by Lawrence James Nielsen's study of rural society in Sabard and its hinterland. One class that has been surprisingly neglected is the military, be it in terms of troops of the line or the militia. David Tengwall and, to a much lesser degree, Robert Hayes, have sought to remedy this deficiency.84

This emphasis on social history should not leave the impression that United States scholars have ignored the commercial activities of the colony. Various facets of colonial agriculture have occupied Kit Sims Taylor (sugar), Dauril Alden (indigo), and Catherine Lugar and Carl Hanson (tobacco). Rollie Poppino has treated cattle-raising. Recently Gregory Brown has concluded a dissertation on small property agriculture in southern Brazil from the mid-eighteenth century to independence. Alden is the only writer on fishing and whaling, and John Vogt is the only scholar to join Alexander Marchant in an examination of the early period of the dyewood trade and the feitoria system. Rivalries between sugar planters and cattlemen were particularly fierce in Paraiba do Sul for 20oo years, according to Bill Harrison. Two very different studies, focusing on a region and a city, are Sue Gross's of the Maranhdo and Grao Para, which reached a state of self-sufficiency by 1751, and Rudolph Bauss's emphasis on Rio Grande do Sul as playing a major role in the economic fortunes of Brazil between 1777 and the arrival of the Portuguese court in i8o8. This covers the same period as his dissertation on the rise of Rio de Janeiro as the major commercial emporium of Brazil.83

If these have been major areas of strength in United States scholarly contributions to the historiography of colonial Brazil, there are other

84. Nielsen, Appendix (1975), David Tengwall, "A Study in Military Leadership: The Sargento-Mor in the Portuguese South Atlantic Empire," The Americas, 40 (July 1983), 73-94; see also, Robert A. Hayes, "The Formation of the Brazilian Army and the Military Class Mystique, 1500-1853," in H. H. Keith and Robert A. Hayes, eds., Perspectives in Armed Politics in Brazil (Tempe, 1976).

85. Kit Sims Taylor, "The Economics of Sugar and Slavery in Northeastern Brazil," Ag- ricultural History, 44 (July 1970), 267-280, and Sugar and the Underdevelopment of Northeastern Brazil, 1500-1970 (Gainesville, 1978); Dauril Alden, "The Growth and De- cline of Indigo Production in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Comparative Economic History," The Journal of Economic History, 25 (Mar. 1965), 35-60; Rollie Poppino, "Cattle Raising in Colonial Brazil," Mid-America, 31 (Oct. 1949), 219-247. Gregory Girard Brown, Appendix (1978). Alden, "Yankee Sperm Whalers in Brazilian Waters, and the Decline of the Por- tuguese Whale Fishery (1773-18o0)," The Americas, 20 (Jan. 1964), 267-288; John Vogt, Appendix (1967); William Fredric Harrison, Appendix (1970); Sue Ellen Gross, Appendix (1969); Rudolph William Bauss, Appendix (1977) and his "Rio Grande do Sul in the Por- tuguese Empire: The Formative Years, 1777-1808," The Americas, 39 (Apr. 1983), 519-535; Catherine Lugar "The Portuguese Tobacco Trade and Tobacco Growers of Bahia in the Late Colonial Period," in Alden and Dean, eds. Essays Concerning the Socioeconomic History of Brazil and Portuguese India (Gainesville, 1977), pp. 26-70; Carl Hanson, "Monopoly and Contraband in the Portuguese Tobacco Trade, 1624-1702," Luso-Brazilian Review, 19 (Winter 1982), 149-168.




areas that would be weak were it not for individual scholars who have built up a corpus of publications. Despite the resurgence of interest among Brazilian scholars in Jews and New Christians, no United States scholar, with the distinguished exception of Arnold Wiznitzer, has attempted a comprehensive treatment of this supremely important group.86 The standard against which writings on administrative history will be gauged is Dauril Alden's magisterial study of the viceroyalty of the Mar- quis of Lavradio (1769-79), which places emphasis on administrative, diplomatic, and military aspects of the colony. To date he has had no emu- lators or challengers. Histories of bureaucracies are few, yet one can turn to Schwartz for the Rela~io of Salvador and to Joseph Newcombe Joyce for the Conselho da Fazenda.87 Urban studies have generally been neglected, yet Richard Morse set the agenda for, and has been the major conceptual force behind, such studies of Latin America. More recently the theme has been pursued by Roberta Marx Delson for the late colonial period.88 The activities of the Society of Jesus have occupied Schwartz and Alden, but have otherwise evoked little interest among North American scholars.89 Robert Smith and George Kubler stand virtually alone in their contributions to the history of the art and architecture of Portugal and Brazil.90 This is a theme to which one returns time and again, namely, the individu- ality of the United States scholarly contribution to Brazilian historiography and the absence of any person or institution that has had the funds, intellect, or charisma to attract a following of graduate students who would make up a critical mass of scholars and who collectively would produce a corpus of research and publications.

Let me conclude this review by echoing some of the wishes of my predecessors for further scholarly enquiry into the colonial period. High on my list are biographies of viceroys, governors, archbishops, bishops, and missionaries. It is nothing short of incredible that there is no full-

86. Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (New York, 1960); The Records of the Earliest Jewish Community in the New World (New York, 1954), and articles.

87. Joyce, Appendix (1974). 88. Richard M. Morse, "Brazil's Urban Development: Colony and Empire," in Russell-

Wood, ed., From Colony to Nation, pp. 155- 181; "Some Characteristics of Latin American Urban History" American Historical Review, 67 (1962), 317-338. Roberta Marx Delson, Appendix (1975); "Planners and Reformers: Urban Architects of Late Eighteenth-Century Brazil," Eighteenth Century Studies, io (Fall 1976), 40-51; "Land and Urban Planning: As- pects of Modernization in Early Nineteenth Century Brazil," Luso-Brazilian Review, 16 (Winter 1979), 191-214; and, with John P. Dickenson, "Perspectives on Landscape Change in Brazil," Journal of Latin American Studies, 16:1 (May 1984), 101-125.

89. In addition to the works cited, Alden, "Economic Aspects of the Expulsion of the Jesuits from Brazil: A Preliminary Report," in Keith and Edwards, eds., Conflict and Conti- nuity, pp. 25-65.

go. George Kubler, Portuguese Plain Architecture: Between Spices and Diamonds, -1521-1706 (Middletown, 1972).




length study in English of Antonio Vieira, Manuel da Nobrega, Jose de Anchieta, Dom Pedro de Almeida Portugal, or the multifaceted Vasco Fernandes Cesar de Meneses. Nor would I limit this to the ecclesiastical, military, or administrative realms. Biographies of Manuel Nunes Viana, Jodo Peixoto Viegas, and other poderosos would be invaluable. A second area is economic history. In terms of export economies, already colonial Brazil is being integrated into works of synthesis on the south Atlantic, but this cannot belie the fact that basic monographs on local and regional economies are absent.9' Nowhere is this more apparent than in the economic infrastructure and regional interaction in the colonial period. Ad- ministrative history, especially fiscal administration, has found few adherents. Thus, although we are well informed about bureaucracy and kinship in the judiciary, we know little about the politics, politicking, and decision-making process of administrative organs of empire. Ecclesiastical administration, and indeed the religious orders and secular clergy in general, have fared badly. Nowhere is this more apparent than as regards the Carmelite and Benedictine orders. It comes as a surprise to learn that there are few historical studies of Indian communities for the colony, and our current historical knowledge jumps from the pre-Cabralian period to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Medicine, science, technology, and the fine arts have failed to attract the attention of United States scholars of colonial Brazil.

This brings me to my final point concerning the relationship between scholarly enquiry, controversy, and critical mass. Elsewhere concern has been expressed at the imminent decline in Iberian studies in the United States, in part emanating from scholars leaving the profession or not being replaced on death or retirement.92 There are indications that United States scholarship on colonial Brazil is on the wane without having really enjoyed its heyday. One aspect of the profession distinguishes scholarship in Brazilian history from that of Spanish America. For the latter, identification of major issues, together with a larger number of scholars actively engaged in research, has meant that hypotheses have provoked scholarly challenge and interaction. Retractions, amendments, or revisions have resulted before a consensus of scholarly opinion has been reached. Some fires still smoulder. For Brazil, the pattern has been different; articles that, through lack of a sufficient corpus of scholars on the one hand or high degree of specialization on the other, become seminal almost by default. Differences of scholarly opinion there have been for example,

91. The most recent addition to the growing literature is Peggy K. Liss, Atlantic Em- pires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713-1826 (Baltimore, 1983).

92. Douglas L. Wheeler, "State of the Society," Bulletin of the Societyfor Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 9 (Oct. 1984), 7-12.




over manumission, planter-merchant relationships, the patriarchal nature of the family, or slave productivity but debate has been limited to a small number of "experts."

This is neither the time or place to launch a program to reinvigorate studies of colonial Brazilian history in the United States, but under the broad rubrics of teaching, research, and publication I make seven suggestions.

First, it is essential that there be available a single-volume history of colonial Brazil comparable to Eccles for France in America or Charles Gibson for Spain in America. Not only does this void undermine effective classroom instruction, but colleagues teaching other parts of the colonial experience in the Americas have no text to which to turn to suggest comparative readings.

Second, it is highly desirable that there be anthologies of documents translated from the Portuguese and focusing on a single theme. A model of the genre is Robert Conrad's Children of God's Fire: A Documentary His- tory of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton, 1983).

Third, in an increasingly visually oriented world, visual aids for teaching colonial Brazilian history must be assembled and widely disseminated.

Fourth, there is the matter of visibility. Scholars of, and sessions on, colonial Brazil should not be limited to the annual American Historical Association or to the Latin American Studies Association meetings. Schol- ars must aggressively pursue a policy of seeking inclusion of papers or sessions on colonial Brazil at conferences where a historical dimension is lacking or to inform colleagues in other disciplines of a Brazilian perspective.

Fifth, the numbers of traveling exhibits of Brazilian materials often art touring the United States, have diminished over the last decade. While the "trickle up" or "trickle down" nature of such exhibits is open to question, it is undeniable that they increase the visibility of Brazil for the United States public.

Sixth, it is disgraceful that the number of symposia in the United States on colonial Brazil in the last two decades can be counted on one hand. Two strategies may be invoked in connection with such symposia: the "piggyback principle," or linking a Brazilian component to an interest already there: for example, the bicentennial of the American Constitu- tion. The second strategy lies in anniversary celebrations. Full centen- nials in the near future include publication of Gabriel Soares de Sousa's Tratado Descritivo (1587), Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the "age of conspiracies" (Beckman, 1684; Minas, 1789; Bahia, 1798), death of Antonio Vieira, S.J. (1697), and Cabral's landfall in 1500. Semi-centennial celebrations could be proposed for 1991 (Orellana's voyage down the Amazon, 1541), 1987-94 (Johan Maurits's governorship of Dutch Brazil, 1637-44),




1999 (foundation of Salvador and governor-generalship, 1549), and 2ooo

(Treaty of Madrid, 1750). Seventh, there must be radical changes in practices of publication and

hiring and promotion. University presses must assume moral responsibility for publishing dissertations found worthy of doctorates. Deans and chairs must find positions for junior scholars who have the courage and tenacity to make the study of Portuguese America their chosen field of study. Currently, many are discriminated against, not on grounds of scholarship or intellect, but because of their choice of an area perceived to be of secondary importance. It must be impressed on boards of selec- tors that, far from being a remote outpost, Brazil was a vital and important part in a series of linkages across time and space, which extended to Eu- rope, Africa, North America, Asia, and Oceania. Responsibility also de- volves on historians to demonstrate how their discipline contributes to understanding of contemporary events in Latin America and the so-called Third World, be they religious movements, peasant unrest, migration, labor conditions, land distribution, role of the military, urbanization, distribution of income, noninstitutionalized networks of power, role of women, and the family. Such "presentism" in no way impugns the integrity of the professional historian.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of historical scholarship on colonial Brazil in the United States, much has been achieved. But I am reminded of the words of Johan Huizinga, who viewed the Renaissance as the last stage of the Middle Ages. By so doing he must have been conscious of the fact that the last stages of cultures are usually characterized by decline. Huizinga compared this last stage to seasons of the year when leaves change. Not yet apparent was whether this was the falling of the leaves in the autumn or the creation of new life in the spring. To remove any such ambiguity, it is incumbent on us, to paraphrase the words of Antonil, "to make Brazil known in the four corners of the world."

Appendix

Doctoral Dissertations in the United States on the History of Colonial Brazil, 1892- 1984 *

* Sources: Dissertation Abstracts International (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1938-); Carl A. Hanson, "Dissertations on Luso-Brazilian Topics: A Bibliography of Dis- sertations Completed in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, 1892-1970", The Americas, 30:2 (1973), 251-267 and 30:3 (1974), 373-403. Inclusion in the list is based on field of study and place of graduate training, and does not exclude foreign nationals who completed graduate studies in the United States.




Bourne, Edward Gaylord, "The Demarcation Line of Pope Alexander VI" (1892, Yale)

Manchester, Alan K., "The Foundation of British Pre-Eminence in Bra- zil" (1930, Duke)

D'Ega, Raul, "A History of the Conflict and Settlement of Boundaries Be- tween Brazil and the British, Dutch and French Guianas" (1936, George Washington)

Cardozo, Manoel da Silveira Soares, "A History of Mining in Colonial Brazil" (1939, Stanford)

Umstead, Kenneth H. H., "The French in the Americas During the Six- teenth Century" (1940, UC-Berkeley)

Marchant, Alexander N. D., "The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500- 1580" (1941, Johns Hopkins)

Emert, Martine, "Maritime European Voyages to Brazil before 1532: A Chapter in International Rivalry in America" (1944, UC-Berkeley)

Weir, John F., "The Colonization of Brazil to 1580o (1947, Southern California)

Breymann, Walter Norman, "The Opening of the Amazon, 1540-1640' (1950, Illinois)

Lowery, Martin J., "A Back Door to the Empire: A Study of the Character of the Commerce of the Rio de la Plata, i58o- 1630" (1951, Loyola)

Ramirez, Ezequiel Stanley, "The Diplomatic Relations Between Austria and Brazil, i8i5- 1889" (1952, Stanford)

Morse, Richard M., "Sao Paulo City under the Empire (1822- 1889)" (1952, Columbia)

Rodriguez, Mario, "Colonia do Sacramento: Focus of Spanish-Portuguese Rivalry in the Plata, 1640-1683" (1953, UC-Berkeley)

Gotaas, Mary C., "Bossuet and Vieira: A Study in National, Epochal and Individual Style" (1953, Catholic)

Hutchins, John A., "Portugal and the Plata: The Conflict of Luso-Hispanic Interests in Southern Brazil and the North Bank of the Rio de la Plata, 1493- 1807" (1953, American)

Hower, Alfred, "Hipolito da Costa and Luso-Brazilian Journalism in Exile, London, i8o8-1822" (1954, Harvard)

Kiemen, Mathias C., "The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Re- gion, 1614- 1693" (1954, Catholic)

Starling, George Westley, Jr., "The War of the Mascates in Brazil, 1710- 1714" (1957, UC-Berkeley)

Canales, Jose Carlos, "Rio Grande do Sul in Luso-Spanish Platine Rivalry 1626-1737 (1959, UC-Berkeley)

Alden, Dauril, "The Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy of Brazil (1769-1779) and the Climax of Luso-Spanish Platine Rivalry" (1959, UC - Berkeley)



720 HAHR j NOVEMBER j A. J. R. RUSSELL-WOOD

Momsen, Richard Paul, "Routes Over the Serra do Mar: An Historical Geography of Transportation in the Rio de Janeiro-Sdo Paulo Area" (1960, Minnesota)

Baum, Emmi, "Empress Leopoldina: Her Role in the Development of Brazil, 1817- 1826" (1965, NYU)

Vogt, John Leonard, Jr., "Portuguese Exploration in Brazil and the Feitoria System, 1500- 1530: The First Economic Cycle of Brazilian History" (1967, Virginia)

Conrad, Robert Edgar, "The Struggle for the Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, i8o8- 1853" (1967, Columbia)

Hann, John Henry, "Brazil and the Rio de la Plata, i8o8-1828" (1967, Texas - Austin)

Chandler, Billy Jaynes, "The Inhamuns: A Community in the Sertdo of Northeast Brazil, 1707- 1930" (1967, Florida)

Tambs, Lewis A., "March to the West: Seven Centuries of Luso-Brazilian Expansion, Origins to i8o8" (UC-Santa Barbara, 1967)

Duncan, T. Bentley, "Uneasy Allies: Anglo-Portuguese Commercial, Dip- lomatic, and Maritime Relations, 1642- 1662" (1968, Chicago)

Holub, Norman, "The Liberal Movement in Brazil, i8o8- 1854" (1968, NYU)

Dutra, Francis A., "Matias de Albuquerque: A Seventeenth-Century Capitdo-Mor of Pernambuco and Governor-General of Brazil" (1968, NYU)

Schwartz, Stuart B., "The High Court of Bahia: A Study in Hapsburg Brazil, i58o- 1630" (1968, Columbia)

Kahler, Mary Ellis, "Relations between Brazil and the United States, i8%5-1825, with Special Reference to the Revolutions of 1817 and 1824" (1968, American)

Beal, Tarcisio, "Os Jesuitas, a Universidade de Coimbra, e a Igreja Bra- sileira. Subsidios para a Historia do Regalismo em Portugal e no Brasil, 1750- i85o" (1969, Catholic)

Hayes, Robert Ames, "The Formation of the Brazilian Army and its Politi- cal Behavior (1807- 1930)" (1969, New Mexico)

Gross, Sue Ellen, "The Economic Life of the Estado do Maranhdo and Grdo Para, 1686- 1751" (1969, Tulane)

Maxwell, Kenneth R. "Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750- 1807" (1970, Princeton)

Harrison, William Fredric, "The Struggle for Land in Colonial Brazil: The Private Captaincy of Paraiba do Sul, 1533- 1753" (1970, New Mexico)

Davidson, David M., "Rivers and Empire: The Madeira Route and the Incorporation of the Brazilian Far West, 1737- i8o8" (1970, Yale)




Bartley, Russell H., "Russia and Latin American Independence, i8o8- 1826" (1971, Stanford)

White, Robert A., "Gomes Freire de Andrada: Life and Times of a Bra- zilian Colonial Governor, i688- 1763" (1972, Texas-Austin)

Slade, James Jeremiah, III, "Cattle Barons and Yeoman Farmers: Land Tenure Division, and Use in a County in Southern Brazil, 1777- 1889" (1972, Indiana)

Dorenkott, Charles J., Jr., "Jose da Silva Pais: The Defense and Expan- sion of Southern Brazil, 1735- 1749" (1972, New Mexico)

Karasch, Mary, "Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, i8o8-1850" (1972, Wis- consin)

Prince, Howard Melvin, "Slave Rebellion in Bahia, 1807-1835" (1972, Columbia)

Ramos, Donald, "A Social History of Ouro Preto: Stresses of Dynamic Ur- banization in Colonial Brazil, 1695- 1726" (1972, Florida)

Archuleta, George Louis, "Pedro de Cevallos and the Luso-Spanish Struggle in the Rio de la Plata (1750- 1778)" (1973, New Mexico)

Joyce, Joseph N., Jr., "Spanish Influence on Portuguese Administration: A Study of the Conselho da Fazenda and Habsburg Brazil, 1580- 1640"

(1974, Southern California) Bardwell, Ross L., "The Governors of Portugal's South Atlantic Empire in

the Seventeenth Century: Social Background, Qualifications, Selec- tion, and Reward" (1974, UC-Santa Barbara)

Soeiro, Susan A., "A Baroque Nunnery: The Economic and Social Role of a Colonial Convent: Santa Clara do Desterro, Salvador, Bahia, 1677- 1800" (1974, NYU)

Sweet, David G., "A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed: The Middle Ama- zon Valley, 1640- 1750" (1974, Wisconsin)

Simon, William Joel, "Scientific Expeditions in the Portuguese Over- seas Territories, 1783- i8o8: The Role of Lisbon in the Intellectual- Scientific Community of the Late Eighteenth Century" (1974, CUNY)

Cardoso, Geraldo da Silva, "Negro Slavery in the Sugar Plantations of Vera Cruz and Pernambuco, 1550- i68o. A Comparative Study" (1975, Nebraska- Lincoln)

Williams, Donn Alan, "Brazil and French Guiana: The Four-Hundred- Year Struggle for Amapa" (1975, Texas Christian)

Gurfield, Mitchell, "Class Structure and Political Power in Colonial Brazil: An Interpretative Essay in Historical Sociology" (1975, New School for Social Research)

Delson, Roberta Marx, "Town Planning in Colonial Brazil" (1975, Columbia)




Turner, Jerry Michael, "Les Bresiliens The Impact of Former Brazilian Slaves upon Dahomey" (1975, Boston Univ. Graduate School)

Nielsen, Lawrence James, "Of Gentry, Peasants, and Slaves: Rural So- ciety in Sabari and its Hinterland, 1780- 1930" (1975, UC- Davis)

Smith, David Grant, "The Mercantile Class of Portugal and Brazil in the Seventeenth Century: A Socio-Economic Study of the Merchants of Lisbon and Bahia, 1620- 1690" (1975, Texas-Austin)

Aufderheide, Patricia, "Order and Violence: Social Deviance and Social Control in Brazil, 1780- 1840" (1976, Minnesota)

Uricoechea, Fernando, "The Patrimonial Foundations of the Brazilian Bu- reaucratic State: Landlords, Prince and Militias in the XIXth Cen- tury" (1976, UC-Berkeley)

Kiernan, James P., "The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Paraty, 1789- 1822" (1976, NYU)

Mulvey, Patricia Ann, "The Black Lay Brotherhoods of Colonial Brazil: A History" (1976, CUNY)

Kuznesof, Elizabeth Anne, "Household Composition and Economy in an Urbanizing Community: Sdo Paulo 1765 to 1836" (1976, UC- Berkeley)

Anderson, Robin Leslie, "Following Curupira: Colonization and Migra- tion in Para, 1758 to 1930, as a Study in Settlement of the Humid Tropics" (1976, UC-Davis)

Pardo, Anne Wadsworth, "A Comparative Study of the Portuguese Colo- nies of Angola and Brazil and their Interdependence from 1648- 1825" (1977, Boston Univ. Graduate School)

Bauss, Rudolph William, "Rio de Janeiro: The Rise of Late Colonial Bra- zil's Dominant Emporium, 1777- i8o8" (1977, Tulane)

Clayton, Arnold Burgess, "The Life of Tomas Antonio de Villanova Por- tugal: A Study in the Government of Portugal and Brazil, 1781- 1821"

(1977, Columbia) Cumiford, William L., "Political Ideology in United States-Brazilian Re-

lations, i8o8- 1894" (1977, Texas Tech) Miller, Francesca, "Brazil's Relations with Russia, i8o8- 1840: A Study in

the Formation of Foreign Policy" (1977, UC-Davis) Tengwall, David Lewis, "The Portuguese Military in the Seventeenth

Century: The Sargento Mor in the Portuguese South Atlantic Em- pire, 1640- 1706" (1978, UC-Santa Barbara)

Reagan, Mary Agneta, "The Role Played by Gomes Freire de Andrade in the Exile of the Jesuits from the Portuguese Empire" (1978, Catholic)

Brown, Gregory Girard, "The Evolution of Small Property Agriculture in Southern Brazil: 1747- 1824" (1978, Northern Illinois)




Flory, Rae Jean Dell, "Bahian Society in the Mid-Colonial Period: The Sugar Planters, Tobacco Growers, Merchants, and Artisans of Sal- vador and the Reconcavo, i68o- 1725" (1978, Texas-Austin)

Colson, Frank, "The Destruction of a Revolution: Polity, Economy and Society in Brazil, 1750- 1895" (1979, Princeton)

Lugar, Catherine, "The Merchant Community of Salvador, Bahia, 1780-

1830" (1980, SUNY-Stonybrook) Rivero, Diego David G., "Brazil: The Crucial Years, 1570-1612" (1981,

Georgia) Parker, John David, "The Tridentine Order and Governance in Late Colo-

nial Brazil, 1792- 1821 (Univ. of Washington, 1982) Martins da Silva, Raimundo, "Four Centuries of Struggle. The Idea

of a Brazilian University and its History" (1982, Southern Illinois- Carbondale)

Goodyear, James D. "Agents of Empire: Portuguese Doctors in Colonial Brazil and the Idea of Tropical Disease" (1983, Johns Hopkins)

Metcalf, Alida, "Families of Planters, Peasants, Slaves: Strategies for Sur- vival in Santana de Parnaiba, Brazil, 1720- 1820" (1983, Texas-Austin)

