Mining Exploration and the Limits of Empire in Colonial Brazil

Drawing on my current book project, this presentation will call attention to
the importance of overland expeditions that continued to explore for mineral
wealth well after the end of the gold boom in eighteenth-century Minas
Gerais, Brazil.  These missions offer an underappreciated means by which to
track the changing capacities and limitations of Portugal’s transatlantic
colonial enterprise as it stretched into the Brazilian interior.