From Conquests to Colonies: Authority, Knowledge, and Difference in the Luso-Brazilian Empire, ca. 1700-1800

FAIN: FT-57504-10

Kirsten Schultz
Seton Hall University (South Orange, NJ 07079-2697)

This book-length project examines transformations in understandings of authority, society, and culture in the eighteenth-century Portuguese Empire in America, focusing on elite debates about the status of non-European peoples in the context of colonial governance during a period of crisis and reform. Based on eighteenth-century print culture and archived imperial correspondence, policy debates, and records of local responses to reform in Brazil, this research will provide a history of changing political and cultural ideas about governance and civil order, assessing the ways in which these ideas were shaped by the metropolitan and elite reception of Enlightened claims about the universality of humanity, reason, and utility. This history will also contribute to our understanding of the historical experiences of empire and of the legacies of empire for modern understandings of sovereignty, political agency, and cultural difference in the Atlantic World.