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Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil - The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609-1751 (Paperback)
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Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil - The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609-1751 (Paperback)
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While the Spanish enterprise in America is relatively well known to
the English-reading public, the Portuguese tropical empire in
Brazil has remained until recently an unknown world. In Sovereignty
and Society, Stuart B. Schwartz contributes to our understanding of
the Brazilian past by providing for the first time a detailed study
of the judicial bureaucracy that formed the framework on the
colonial regime. This volume describes the process by which royal
administrators maintained control and the techniques used by the
whole Brazilian elite to guard its interest. At the core of the
book is the previously unstudied Relacao or High Court of Bahia,
the supreme tribunal in colonial Brazil and an institution with
broad administrative and political powers. Presided over by the
governor-general or viceroy, the High Court stood at the apex of
the colonial administrative structure and symbolized royal
sovereignty. The author examines the origins, functions, conflicts,
and history of the Relacao, relying on little-used manuscript
sources in over twenty-five archives and libraries in Brazil,
Portugal, Spain, and England as well as the whole range of
secondary literature. Of particular interest is the departure from
traditional administrative history by emphasis on the people rather
than the office of the Portuguese imperial bureaucracy. The
bureaucrat-judges of the High Court are at the center of the study,
and by a careful analysis of the personal and professional careers
of these magistrates, the author demonstrates the utility of a
human relations approach to the study of historical polities. He
shows how the goals of the crown, the aspirations of the
magistrates, and the interests of the Brazilian sugar planter elite
were expressed and reconciled and how royal officials and the
planters became linked by kinship and interest in a union of wealth
and power. Finally, he argues that the penetration of such primary
relations in the formal structure of a bureaucratic empire helps to
explain the resiliency and the longevity of Portuguese rule in
Brazil. The approach and findings of this book will interest not
only those seeking a deeper understanding of the Brazilian past,
but also historians, sociologists, and political scientists
concerned with colonial regimes and bureaucratic polities in
general. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program,
which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek
out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach,
and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived
makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again
using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally
published in 1973.
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