Adrift on an inland sea : misinformation and the limits of empire in the Brazilian backlands / Hal Langfur.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Langfur, Hal, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Misinformation--Brazil--History--18th century.

Misinformation.

Misinformation--Brazil--History--19th century.

Brazil--History--1763-1822.

Brazil.

Portugal--Colonies--America--Administration.

Portugal.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (437 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON CONVENTIONS

Map of Southeastern Brazil, ca. 1800

Introduction NAVIGATING THE IMPERIAL UNKNOWN

PART 1 Making the Wilderness Wild: The Authority of Misinformation

Chapter 1 CIVILIZATION, BARBARISM, AND THE TALL TALE

Chapter 2 TURNING FRONTIER FICTIONS INTO PRIVATE PROPERTY

PART 2 All That Glitters: Forest Informants and Regal Dreams

Introduction

Chapter 3 FOREST KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS

Chapter 4 NATIVES, SMUGGLERS, SOLDIERS, SPIES

Chapter 5 SOVEREIGN RULE AND ITS DISENCHANTMENTS

PART 3 Science for the Sertão: New Modes of Inquiry, Old Uncertainties

Chapter 6 THE ENLIGHTENED SAVANT AND THE BLACK PROSPECTOR KING

Chapter 7 DIAMONDS, LOVE SONGS, AND THE ALCHEMY OF EXPLORATION

PART 4 The Good Sense of Cannibals: Further Dispatches from the Atlantic Forest

Chapter 8 ANTHROPOPHAGY AND THE BODY POLITIC

Chapter 9 ETHNOLOGICAL MISADVENTURES

Epilogue HOW TO TAME AN EMPIRE

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781503633971

1503633977

OCLC:

1346125582