AHA Session 39
Conference on Latin American History 7
Conference on Latin American History 7
Thursday, January 5, 2023: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Grand Ballroom Salon I (Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 5th Floor)
Chair:
Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University
Papers:
Session Abstract
In recent years historians have emphasized how frequently people, ideas, and goods crossed imperial borders to demonstrate the fluidity of the early modern world. Most of these studies, however, have focused on the Hispanic and Anglophone worlds. This panel offers to broaden the scope of these inquiries by centering the Lusophone world as an equally important lens through which to study trans-imperial interactions and to deconstruct linear histories that equate territorial conquest with political, economic, or cultural exclusivity. The panel examines issues such as the way that eighteenth-century African ontologies of rituals surrounding native West African flora influenced Portuguese exorcists particularly in Angola and the Kingdom of Kongo, and how these exorcisms impacted European thought, particularly in the broader context of Portuguese efforts to commodify tropical drugs in the face of heightened imperial competition (Chelsea Berry). Salvador da Bahia, the Portuguese capital of Brazil and its main sugar-exporting port, tackled this issue in the 1680s by expanding the production of tobacco and marketing its sale not only to Europe but to societies as diverse as indigenous communities of the Great Lakes in North America, India, and China. The Portuguese crown tried to monopolize the growing profits of this culture but spectacularly failed to do so in West Africa where it had to tolerate large-scale trading with other Europeans to satiate the increasing Brazilian demand for enslaved laborers (Thiago Krause). This system strengthened Salvador’s merchant community and the city’s function as an Atlantic entrepôt. Indeed, the Portuguese empire had long been an entangled entity. This was especially true during the Iberian Union period (1580-1640) when several Portuguese actors crossed imperial lines to participate in the Spanish Atlantic world. The conquistador Martin Soares Moreno is a case in point. Born in Portugal but raised in Brazil at the start of the seventeenth century, he followed the typical Portuguese conquest strategy of integrating into local indigenous society for the benefit of imperial interests. His story reveals how integrated early modern imperial networks were as he moved across Spanish and French borders throughout the course of his career (Cacey Farnsworth). Unlike the Spanish, the Portuguese seaborne empire was never exclusively territorial. This is emblematic in the vast network of merchant nations it maintained across the early modern world. These merchant communities betray how Portuguese royal policies on religious and cultural exclusivity were often more rhetorical than real, as is apparent in the Portuguese Jewish nation established in northern Europe and throughout the Dutch and English Atlantic empires. Although their embrace of Judaism denied them full access to Portuguese imperial institutions, they continued to function as nodes of Portuguese commercial and imperial interests abroad (Oren Okhovat). Together these aspects of the Portuguese empire suggest that not only was the Portuguese empire a fluid space, but that the early modern world was too entangled to be divided into single imperial lenses and that regional studies require an understanding of multiple cultural, economic, and political perspectives to avoid the pitfalls of methodological nationalism.
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