Miguel Dantas da Cruz

From Flanders to Pernambuco: Battleground Perceptions in the Portuguese Early Modern Atlantic World:

This article addresses the way the Portuguese experience in the seventeenth-century battlefields of Flanders, during the Iberian Union (1580–1640), reshaped Portuguese military thought and culture. It argues that their traditional martial perceptions – almost exclusively based in imperial experiences, especially against the Muslims in North Africa and in India – were transformed by the direct exposure to Spanish military endeavours in Europe. It also argues that the experience in Flanders resurfaced in the South Atlantic, in all its religious and political dimensions, transforming the prestige of Brazil as a battlefield. Finally, the article revisits the way the Flanders experience poisoned Spanish–Portuguese relations.This article addresses the way the Portuguese experience in the seventeenth-century battlefields of Flanders, during the Iberian Union (1580–1640), reshaped Portuguese military thought and culture....

Imperial Perceptions and Circulation in the Portuguese Atlantic World (1620s-1660s)

Among the more emphasised aspects of the Atlantic history are the mobility of ideas and goods but also the endless movement of peoples that linked the margins of the ocean and gave the Atlantic basin an indisputable cohesion. Within the theoretical framework of the subfield of Atlantic history, this study addresses the way the imperial perceptions shaped the migratory patterns of the Portuguese Atlantic, notably the transoceanic behaviour of the men who volunteered to defend its scattered territories. During a particularly difficult period in the mid-seventeenth century, the hierarchical ambiguities of Portuguese empire and its religiously charged military thought, in conjunction with the prevalent political culture of service, promoted a constant back and forth across the ocean that revealed the conceptual unity of the Portuguese Atlantic world. For these men, for a while, there were no alluring centres and unappealing peripheries; the Atlantic was conceived of as a wide circulation space essentially free from mental or emotional prejudices.

A nomeação de militares na América portuguesa Tendências de um império negociado

The integration of colonial elites in key imperial institutions of the Atlantic empires was a sensitive subject for suspicious metropolitan governments. Madrid and London, for example, favoured European-born men to fill top-ranking positions in their overseas administration structures; thus provoking the discontent of the colonies leading members, who wanted preferential access to these positions. The same thing seems to have happened in Brazil, where, despite the identity ambiguities, the birthplace and a more general identification with the colony eventually became common features in the discourse of chroniclers, colonial administrators and subjects on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article we discuss the political importance of the geographical origin when selecting the men entrusted with the defence of the Portuguese Atlantic World. We will try to understand if that was something that could be directly discriminated against or if it tended to get diluted by the impersonal imperial bureaucracy or by other considerations (e.g. social status, martial experience and service to the monarchy). In addition to examining the officers recruitment criteria within what was essentially a negotiated empire, the text will also address the identity composition of the military contingents in Brazil, comparing them with the British and Spanish examples.