Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of the Brazil Company, 1649

Smith, David Grant

doi:10.2307/2512568

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Because the king needed to promote colonization in a way that did not strain the state's coffers, the ability to finance a captaincy, however achieved, had to be a prime consideration. Thus, the wealthy donatarios and settlers were not always of noble birth, and the king's actions did not strictly reinforce the Portuguese political order in the colony (Smith 1974).…”

Section: Historical Elements: the Origins And Development Of Colonial...mentioning

confidence: 99%

World-System Holism and Colonial Brazilian Agriculture: A Critical Case Analysis

Hall

1984

Lat. American Res. Rev.

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Within the last two decades, theories about world systems have played a decisive role in shifting the boundaries of discourse on long-term social change. The triumph of world-system analysis was nearly a “bloodless coup”: few scholars were terribly anxious to defend the theoretical bastion of modernization theory that it supplanted; at best they reinterpreted the old theory within the new framework (for example, Rostow, 1975, 1978; Parsons 1977, 213; Moore 1979).

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Section: Historical Elements: the Origins And Development Of Colonial...mentioning

confidence: 99%

World-System Holism and Colonial Brazilian Agriculture: A Critical Case Analysis

Hall

1984

Lat. American Res. Rev.

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“…35, 144–5, 206–7; Ebert, ‘Trade’, pp. 14, 80, 82–3, 88, 90, 97–8, 217; Smith, ‘Old Christian merchants’; idem, ‘Mercantile class’, pp. 103–4, 103, 119, 125–7, 153–4, 168–9.…”

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Institutional choice in the governance of the early Atlantic sugar trade: diasporas, markets, and courts

Strum

2019

The Economic History Review

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The expanding sugar trade linking Portugal, Brazil, and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries required enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that overseas agents would act honestly and diligently. While the recent literature emphasizes that multiple mechanisms were substitutes in addressing this problem, this article highlights that merchants chose different mechanisms to govern distinct types of transactions and explains why. A reputational mechanism relying on social and economic constraints within an ethnic diaspora governed more complex and higher‐value arrangements. A different mechanism linking economic incentives to professional reputations across the diasporas plying this trade route predominated in simpler and smaller transactions. Finally, long‐distance and transnational judicial enforcement supplemented these two reputational mechanisms. Capable of matching the value and complexity of transactions with the attributes of governing mechanisms, merchants were able to diversify their transactions, expand the market for agents, better allocate agents to tasks, and stimulate competition among them. The resulting decrease in agency costs was critical in such a significantly competitive market as the sugar trade. Evolving institutional choice thus reinforced the expansion of trade. These hypotheses are corroborated by data from a prosopography of merchants of Jewish origin, derived from notarial records from Oporto and Amsterdam, and from Inquisition files.

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“…In 1974 David Grant Smith published an article on the "Old Christian" merchants and the foundation of the General Company of 1649. Contradicting a well-established tradition, he shows that at least a quarter of the merchants who participated in the financing of the company were not New Christians and that in the economic realm, no difference existed between the two groups 72. The following year, he defended a doctoral dissertation on the Luso-Brazilian merchant class in which these ideas are discussed.P During this period of the sugar trade, Portugal's activities in the Indian Ocean and the Orient did not end.…”

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Recent Works on the Political Economy of Brazil in the Portuguese Empire

Mauro

1984

Lat. American Res. Rev.

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This essay will focus on Brazil as a Portuguese possession between 1500 and 1800, with all of the problems that Brazil posed for Portugal and Portugal for Brazil within the framework of that larger unity known as the Portuguese Empire. In order to understand historiographical developments during the last ten years, they must be viewed in light of the general development of the science of history. Since 1960 the number of university students has increased considerably, particularly in Latin America and in Europe, and more specifically in Brazil and France. The number of history students has also increased, although the demand for historians has diminished considerably in the last four or five years. Moreover, students in Europe and Brazil tend to continue into doctoral or pos-graduação programs while in the United States, the number of Ph.D. recipients has also increased for reasons that are not strictly demographic. An expected consequence would be an impressive number of dissertations and theses being defended in universities and, perhaps to a lesser degree, actually published. Such a result has been prevented in the field of the history of colonial Brazil, however, by the fact that the current generation is much more interested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier periods. The advantage of this situation is that as long as the production on the colonial age neither decreases nor increases excessively, it remains quality work and, barring exceptions, is not too affected by the pseudo-marxist language that is extremely popular among certain Brazilian intellectuals. It remains a harmonious blend of genuine scholarship in what might be called the traditional style, and of more innovating accounts inspired by the Annales school that draw on the conceptual approaches and the quantitative concerns of other social sciences. The economic and political concerns are equally represented therein, leaving aside cultural history, which falls outside the field under discussion here.

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Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of the Brazil Company, 1649

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

World-System Holism and Colonial Brazilian Agriculture: A Critical Case Analysis

World-System Holism and Colonial Brazilian Agriculture: A Critical Case Analysis

Institutional choice in the governance of the early Atlantic sugar trade: diasporas, markets, and courts

Recent Works on the Political Economy of Brazil in the Portuguese Empire

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