The Making of the Brazilian Backlands by Naturalists, Military Engineers, and Cartographers, 1750–1850

This paper explores how the interior spaces of Brazil were mapped and described in the diaries of military engineers and in the accounts of naturalists between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will analyze the different forms of graphic and toponymical representations of the rivers, mountains, lakes, villages and communication routes very distant from the coastline, giving special attention to the process of colonial territoriality and the appropriation of natural and human resources. I ask: What were the most frequent place names for the unknown spaces? How were the indigenous, African and Portuguese toponyms re-created and reinvented in the process of colonization of the interior of the continent? A core goal is to problematize the meaning of these names in local, national and international discourses. This research aims to highlight the making of geographical memory in different perspectives, dealing with both the native traditions and the foreign denominations. Not surprisingly, there was many cartographers and naturalist that had proposed to move the capital of the coastal to the center of the country, in the region of Goias in the first half of the nineteenth century, justifying the transfer of the imperial court for geopolitical arguments, but also for economic, physical and environmental reasons.