Another Alchemy: Turning Gold into Land in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil

Another Alchemy: Turning Gold into Land in 18^th c. Minas Gerais, Brazil

My paper draws from a book project concerning wilderness expeditions in 18^th c. Portuguese America.  The paper will focus on one of these expeditions, led by a powerful rancher who was rewarded for his actions with multiple royal land grants, thereby becoming one of Brazil's largest landholders.  The Portuguese legal regime at the time officially forbade any individual from acquiring more than a single land grant.  I will consider how this rural potentate circumvented that law by appealing to a longstanding compact forged between the Portuguese Crown and some of its most favored subjects engaged in territorial expansion.  As his expedition proceeded, the rancher searched for gold, but none could be found.  He sought Indians to conquer, but they escaped his armed lieutenants.  He attempted to root out runaway slave settlements, but their occupants vanished into the forests.  Eager to proclaim his accomplishments, he invited rural poets to sing his praise and recorded their crude stanzas for royal authorities to read.  In short, to build his ranching empire, he enacted a series of conquest rituals, which the Crown read as heroic and worthy of uncommon recompense, despite their modest results.  His greatest achievement lay in his ability to enlist the colonial state in his campaign to seize land just beyond its effective jurisdiction.  At such distances, formal legal authority became attenuated and gave ground to customary practices developed over the course of more than two centuries of Luso-Brazilian inland exploration.  The promise of acquiring treasure—in the form of gold, Indians, and productive slaves—turned the Crown into an eager accomplice of shrewd adventurers who did not always do its bidding in the drive to territorialize colonial control over new lands