Entre subordinação e autonomia: exploração madeireira e política florestal em Pernambuco e Paraíba no século XVIII (1755-1799)

Abstract

This research is an effort to understand the timber exploitation in the late colonial period of capitania da Paraíba, between the years 1755 and 1799, based on the documentary foundation of the Overseas Historical Archive, made available digitally by the National Library from the Resgate Barão do Rio Branco project. In the second half of the 18th century, the government of the captains-major of the captaincy of Paraíba was subordinated to the government of the captains-general of Pernambuco, in which one of the main factors that provoked this royal decision was the bankruptcy of the Provedoria da Real Fazenda da Paraíba, an institution responsible for guaranteeing the financial needs of the colonization. At the same time of this political event, the Crown of Portugal started several changes of your perception of nature – the reform of University of Coimbra in 1772 and the philosophical journeys started with Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira between 1783 and 1792, for example -, and that situation transformed natural resources in a political subject in Brazil. As an addition for that conjuncture, some historians, like Morton, Henrique Dias, Diogo Cabral and Shawn Miller, argue that the decade of 1780 was marked by the growing demands of the Secretaria de Estado da Marinha e Ultramar for brazilian timber used for warships construction. In Paraíba, the intervention of the crown, projecting her political power over the forest and conducting the production of timber for shipbuilding, was intensified with the nomination of Antônio Manoel Prata as the administrator of the Reais Cortes in 1788. However, the timber administration created a political conflict between the administrator and the general of Pernambuco, Dom Tomás José de Melo. Despite the political problems, timber exploitation in Brazil was a subject of various attritions in economical and social order, as the conflicts among indigenous peoples that used the land as farm for subsistence and landlords that were more interested in exportation agriculture. So, when the Portuguese Crown proposed a political action over the timber exploitation in Paraíba, the conflict between the administration of the Reais Cortes and the government of Pernambuco created openness to Other groups to dispute the uses of the land and the natural resources. This process is understood here as an uneven and combined development between the merchant sector from Recife and the landlords of Paraíba coast based on the political forms of appropriation of forest resources.