Empire and the Predicaments of Wealth: Brazil and Portugal in the Eighteenth Century
Drawing on From Conquest to Colony: Empire, Wealth and Difference in Eighteenth-Century Brazil (2023), this talk will survey the broader shift in official thinking about Brazil’s status within the eighteenth-century Portuguese empire and then turn to an examination of debates about wealth and consumption in Brazil. While mid-century efforts to regulate consumption in Brazil foundered, the policies they informed, and the responses they elicited, reflected ascendant views of future imperial prosperity based not only on the political-cultural transformations that followed conquest, but above all on a delineation of the productive and consumptive functions of the colony of Brazil and on governance that reckoned with the administration of difference in social and economic relations.
Kristen Schulz is Professor of History at Seton Hall University.
All welcome-
this event is free to attend but booking is required.
This page was last updated on 14 March 2025
