Adrift on an Inland Sea: Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands - Couverture souple

Langfur, Hal

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1503633969 ISBN 13 : 9781503633964

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2023

Synopsis

From 1750 until Brazil won its independence in 1822, the Portuguese crown sought to extend imperial control over the colony's immense, sea-like interior and exploit its gold and diamond deposits using enslaved labor. Carrying orders from Lisbon into the Brazilian backlands, elite vassals, soldiers, and scientific experts charged with exploring multiple frontier zones and establishing royal authority conducted themselves in ways that proved difficult for the crown to regulate. The overland expeditions they mounted in turn encountered actors operating beyond the state's purview: seminomadic Native peoples, runaway slaves, itinerant poor, and those deemed criminals, who eluded, defied, and reshaped imperial ambitions.

This book measures Portugal's transatlantic projection of power against a particular obstacle: imperial information-gathering, which produced a confusion of rumors, distortions, claims, conflicting reports, and disputed facts. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of ethnohistory, slavery and diaspora studies, and legal and literary history, Hal Langfur considers how misinformation destabilized European sovereignty in the Americas, making a major contribution to histories of empire, frontiers and borderlands, knowledge production, and scientific exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Hal Langfur is Associate Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1503633969
• ISBN 13: 9781503633964
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 456
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible