It is easy to understand why regions that produce very fine goods such as port wine tend to conceal technological and scientific inputs and praise the uniqueness of the terroir. This paper suggests that, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, viticulture in the Douro region of Portugal was as much a product of soil, local farming traditions, and individual entrepreneurship as it was of modern state science and national politics for agricultural improvement. the unprecedented public projects of building a railroad and fighting phylloxera permanently changed the land of port wine. Moreover, those engineering practices of rationalization, simplification, and standardization that were inscribed on Douro's landscape proved essential for the Portuguese experience of modernization and nation-building.

In the mid 19 th century, plantations began to spread across multiple geographies of the Global South. This paper discusses this particular institution and phenomena, by focusing on the Atlantic circulation of coffee plants, agronomic knowledge and racialized labour practices. Combining approaches from mobilities studies and history of technology, it argues that plantations are particularly well suited to grasp the dynamics of displacement and resettling, and to connect the global and the local scales. More specifically, this paper follows a group of men, directly or indirectly involved in the trade of enslaved persons from Angola to Brazil, and analyses what travelled along with them, namely, plantation artifacts, technologies and ideas about labour and race. By doing so, it unveils the hidden links between the Paraíba Valley and São Tomé, and shows how plantations moved between these localities, and adapted to different social and natural environments.

In the early 1900s, an obscure Portuguese colony in the equatorial Atlantic rose as the world's leading cocoa producer. Cocoa from the island of São Tomé was grown on large plantations with indentured labor and high technological inputs. This technoscientific system, to control both plants and people, became the model for making an industry-suited cocoa, and the material evidence of the moral and economic virtues of the colonial plantation. Experts played a crucial role in building and putting into circulation such a system. São Tomé's cocoa expertise, along with its labor and racial relations, landscape patterns, and imperial imaginaries, contributed to the colonization of other African territories, namely the German Cameroons. This article agues that commodities and their technological histories can help bring to light the transnational and transcolonial features that are embedded at the core of empire building.

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This essay explores the role of technology in building nations as material and cultural artifacts from two peripheral perspectives. First, it brings to the fore what we call epistemic peripheries in the history of technology, be they objects or actors usually neglected when studying the interplay between technology and the nation. Second, it deals with geographic peripheries by focusing on connections, networks, and circulation processes far beyond linear and static core-periphery relations. We claim that one cannot properly understand how technological national identities were created if national boundaries are taken as strict analytical frameworks. In this sense, the essay advocates a transnational history with a wider empirical focus.

Local Agenda 21 (LA21) emerged 23 years ago as a voluntary policy innovation for local governments aiming at sustainability and has now completed its lifecycle. We aim at a second look at LA21 from the standpoint of the institutional and innovation diffusion theories and with Portugal as case study. Results show a three moment lifecycle for LA21, each with distinct diffusion patterns. The Dawn, stymied by lack of regional and national leadership, was likely fuelled by a learning mechanism. It lasted 10 years and involved a mere 1% of the potential adopters. The Zenith took place when other countries had already come full circle. During this phase 27% of the local governments became active and both coercion and competition stand out as relevant engines. Twilight, most probably powered through coercion, competition and imitation mechanisms, took LA21 to a steady state with an additional 19% of local governments enrolling. Since then LA21 has shown departures in several different directions, including oblivion. We speculate, based on preliminary data that, although most LA21 are no longer active, a durable setting was created that promotes further innovation and public participation.

O presente artigo resulta de uma das Atividades Práticas Supervisionadas – APS, no curso de Graduação em Direito da UNIP, que teve como objetivo identificar em documento de autoria da Assembleia Legislativa do estado do Rio de Janeiro – ALERJ, as informações cruciais acerca da temática do racismo religioso, além de produzir comentário jurídico sobre as práticas noticiadas no referido documento e a infração da lei penal, visando identificar práticas ilegais cometidas e as penas que deveriam ser aplicadas. O racismo religioso como atitude discriminatória marcou as entrelinhas do documento municiando a Comissão de Direitos Humanos e Cidadania da ALERJ com a reunião de denúncias, cujo Relatório deveria ser usado para denunciar a situação à Organização das Nações Unidas - ONU. Restou claro que atos cometidos contra terreiros e comunidades ocorridos no ano de 2019, foram os que mais consubstanciaram o documento. Dentre os atos contrários aos direitos humanos identificou-se: agressão, ameaça e ataques a terreiros de religião de matriz africana, além de ataques contra templos religiosos, num quadro explícito de crimes contra o sentimento religioso, e que precisa marcar as propostas de contenção de tais atos, de modo que a liberdade religiosa dignifique as pessoas que de boa-fé praticam suas liturgias.

In this chapter, we outline our contribution to the study of plantations, building upon a wide and important body of critical literature that has developed on the subject over more than a century of reflections and struggles. Plantations are analyzed according to three main axes: an eco-material dimension that articulates to racial injustices; the long-term material, affective and symbolic imprints of plantations; and their sovereign dimensions. We explore these topics through a variety of examples and transdisciplinary approaches that cut across chronologies, geographies and political contexts and provide a navigation tool through the edited volume’s contributions. By stressing plantations’ more-than-human relations and their all-too-human (modern, colonial, imperial) dynamics, we want to both call into question any monolithic notion of “the” plantation and pinpoint the common features that accrue to the different plantation experiences and experiments addressed by authors. Contributing to the current discussion on the predicaments of the Plantationocene, we argue that this book’s breadth and vision might help imagine more nuanced ways of narrating plantation regimes and forms of resistance against them—past, present and future.