Kirsten Schultz

Learning to obey: education, authority, and governance in the early eighteenth-century Portuguese Empire

This article examines the published work and correspondence of Martinho de Mendonça, a Portuguese philosopher and royal official known for writing on education and for serving the crown in Brazil. While recent scholarship has examined either Mendonças contributions to philosophical inquiry in Portugal or his tenure as governor, here I analyze the constructions of authority forged in both his book on noble education and his administrative correspondence. Together, his published work and correspondence reveal the ways in which Mendonças encounters with contemporary philosophy provided grounding for surmounting what he regarded as the historical obstacles to an ascendant royal authority in Portugal and its American empire.

Slavery, Empire and Civilization: A Luso-Brazilian Defense of the Slave Trade in the Age of Revolutions

This article examines a defense of the slave trade mounted in the 1790s by the Luso-Brazilian Bishop Azeredo Coutinho. While Azeredos defense has been interpreted as a function of his slave-owning familys interest, this article provides a broader analysis of Azeredos writings on the slave trade and the Portuguese empire within the contexts of eighteenth-century Luso-Brazilian intellectual culture and transatlantic debates about empire, commerce and historical transformation. His writing on the imperial economy and the slave trade included both appeals to an eighteenth-century ideal of civilization as a process predicated upon the universality of humanity as well as defense of empire as the rational, just and necessary exploitation of the barbarous by the civilized.

Perfeita civilização: a transferência da corte, a escravidão e o desejo de metropolizar uma capital colonial. Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1821

This article provides an analysis of the ambivalent process of transforming a colonial capital into a royal court at the end of the colonial period in Brazil after the flight of the Portuguese royal family from Portugal to Rio de Janeiro. In metropolitanizing the city, royal officials sought to limit the public display of slavery and redefine physical and social boundaries for the African and African-Brazilian slaves who made up half of the population. These efforts were, however, themselves limited by an intensification of the use of slave labor and by officials dedication to colonial ideals of how to ensure order.