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"Contact Strategies excavates the histories of independent Indians in the vast interior of Brazil, and sheds light on native peoples' many confrontations, negotiations, and tactical decisions to initiate contact with Brazilian society and continue to claim vast territories, centuries after the arrival of Europeans"--
Around the year 1800, independent Native groups still effectively controlled about half the territory of the Americas. How did they maintain their political autonomy and territorial sovereignty, hundreds of years after the arrival of Europeans? In a study that spans the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and ranges across the vast interior of South America, Heather F. Roller examines this history of power and persistence from the vantage point of autonomous Native peoples in Brazil. The central argument of the book is that Indigenous groups took the initiative in their contacts with Brazilian society. Rather than fleeing or evading contact, Native peoples actively sought to appropriate what w...
This book reconstructs the world of eighteenth-century Amazonia to argue that indigenous mobility did not undermine settlement or community. In doing so, it revises longstanding views of native Amazonians as perpetual wanderers, lacking attachment to place and likely to flee at the slightest provocation. Instead, native Amazonians used traditional as well as new, colonial forms of spatial mobility to build enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. Canoeing and trekking through the interior to collect forest products or to contact independent native groups, Indians expanded their social networks, found economic opportunities, and brought new people and resources ba...
A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions. In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil. The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history ...
Marcy Norton tells a new history of the European colonization of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the center of the story. She reveals that it was, above all, the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life that transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
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 resh...
This Handbook integrates innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the production of Iberian imperial borderlands in the Americas, from southwestern U.S. to Patagonia, and their connections to trade and migratory circuits extending to Asia and Africa. In this volume borderlands comprise political boundaries, spaces of ethnic and cultural exchange, and ecological transitions.
Thanks to creative uses of the environment, Xochimilco's residents preserved their culture and society in the face of colonial disruption.
An innovative global history of science, empire and geography explaining how the Himalaya became the highest mountains in the world.
This book examines the efforts of Spaniards and Portuguese to attract Native peoples and other settlers to the villages, missions, and fortifications they installed in a disputed area between present-day Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The first part examines how autonomous Native peoples and those who lived in the Jesuit missions responded to the Indigenous policies the Iberian crowns initiated following the 1768 expulsion of the Society of Jesus. The second part examines military recruitment and supply circuits, showing how the political centers’ strategy of transferring part of the costs and delegating responsibilities to local sectors shaped interactions between officers, soldiers, Natives, and other inhabitants. Moving beyond national approaches, the book shows how both Iberian empires influenced each other and the lives of the diverse peoples who inhabited the border regions.