Families in the Expansion of Europe,1500-1800

Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351937184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This volume presents legal, religious and demographic aspects of the transfer of European family organisations to new environments in the overseas colonies, and illustrates the impacts of contact with other ethnic groups. In Africa the focus is on the Cape, the principal area of European settlement in the 17th-18th centuries; in the Americas the analysis includes indigenous and black families. Inheritance, dowry, marriage, divorce, illegitimacy are topics covered, but the emphasis is above all on women's roles and voices.

1
Parents and Daughters: Change in the Practice of Dowry in São Paulo (1600–1770)

Muriel Nazzari

IT is generally accepted that there were few changes in the structure of the Brazilian colonial family, and that only in the nineteenth century did the power of the patriarch decline.¹ This essay challenges the view of an immutable colonial family by describing significant changes in the practice of dowry between the midseventeenth and mideighteenth centuries that reflect a shift in patriarchal/parental power.² I have used the term “parental” interchangeably with “patriarchal” because my study of seventeenth-century Paulista society indicates that widows exercised the same patriarchal power over sons and daughters as had their husbands, and that wives, though subordinate to their husbands, shared some of those powers, especially when they acted as their husbands’ representatives during the men’s absence on bandeiras.

1. For this change in Brazil, see Antônio Cândido, “The Brazilian Family,” in Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent, T. Lynn Smith and Alexander Marchant, eds. (New York, 1951) and Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton, 1987), esp. 188–200. For the importance of the larger kin group in Brazil, see Charles Wagley, An Introduction to Brazil (New York, 1963), 184–204 and Lewin, “Some Historical Implications of Kinship Organization for Family-Based Politics in the Brazilian Northeast,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21:2 (Apr. 1979). For an “ideal” conceptualization of the elite patriarchal extended Brazilian family, see Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (New York, 1956) and “The Patriarchal Basis of Brazilian Society,” in Politics of Change in Latin America, Joseph Maier and Richard Weatherhead, eds. (New York, 1964).
Mariza Corrêa criticizes both Freyre and Cândido for assuming that their descriptions of the structure and behavior of elite families of very specific regions could be applied to the families of different classes, regions, and periods. See “Repensando a família patriarchal brasileira,” in Colcha de retalhos: Estudos sobre a família no Brasil, Maria Suely Kofes de Almeida et al., eds. (São Paulo, 1982).

2. See Muriel Nazzari, “Women, the Family, and Property: The Decline of the Dowry in São Paulo, Brazil (1600–1870)” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1986). Other studies of dowry for Brazil include: Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, “Sistema de casamento no Brasil colonial,” in Ciência e Cultura, 28:11 (Nov. 1976) and Sistema de casamento no Brasil colonial (São Paulo, 1984), 97–110; Eni de Mesquita Samara, “O dote na sociedade paulista do século XIX: Legislação e evidências,” Anais do Museu Paulista, 30 (1980–81). For other parts of Latin America, see Asunción Lavrin and Edith Couturier, “Dowries and Wills: A View of Women’s Socioeconomic Role in Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640–1790,” HAHR, 59:2 (May 1979); Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790ߝ1857 (Stanford, 1985), chap. 3; Couturier, “Women and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice,” in Journal of Family History, 10:3 (Fall, 1985); Susan Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810 (Cambridge, 1978), chap. 2; Laurel Bossen, “Toward a Theory of Marriage: The Economic Anthropology of Marriage Transactions, Ethnology, 28:2 (Apr. 1988).

In the first half of the seventeenth century, Paulista patriarchs and their wives felt free to endow their daughters so magnificently that their sons’ inheritance was diminished, yet sons not only accepted this situation willingly but also worked to increase their sisters’ dowries. By giving their daughters such large dowries, parents controlled not only the marriage choice of their daughters, but that of their sons-in-law, undoubtedly influenced by the size of the dowry of the intended brides. One century later, in contrast, most Paulistas no longer offered such large dowries, losing the leverage a magnificent dowry gave over their daughters’ marriages. In those cases in which parents did give very large dowries, sons increasingly litigated, curtailing their parents’ right to favor their sisters. I will argue that these changes in dowry practices were due to a transformation in the marriage bargain that came about with the rise of a strong merchant class that changed the pool of suitors.

The changes in question occurred simultaneously with great socioeconomic transformations in the São Paulo region. Because it did not have the export crops of the Northeast, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century São Paulo was neglected by the crown, and it thus developed a society that was unique in Brazil. As in other regions of the world where state power was weak or nonexistent, seventeenth-century Paulista society was organized through the extended family or clan, which controlled all economic, political, and military activities.³

3. See Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, Lutas de famílias no Brasil (São Paulo, 1980) for a study of this family-based society in São Paulo. For the clan as organizing principle of other societies with weak governments, see Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 15.

São Paulo’s economy was based in large part on exploratory and slaving expeditions called bandeiras that replenished the Indian labor force for Paulistas, or as an alternative, provided the Indian captives to be sold to other parts of Brazil, especially during the Dutch occupation of Recife and Angola in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, which slowed down the slave trade and increased the demand for Indians. In São Paulo enslaved Indians produced, among other things, wheat, flour, rum, and sailcloth, which Paulistas sold to other regions of Brazil, and even Angola.⁴ These commodities were transported by countless Indian porters over the rugged Serra do Mar that separated São Paulo from the port of Santos.

4. For the history of the bandeirantes, see Richard M. Morse, ed., The Bandeirantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders (New York, 1965) and From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo, Brazil (Gainesville, 1958); Affonso d’E. Taunay, História geral das bandeiras paulistas, 11 vols. (São Paulo, 1951). For commerce in seventeenth-century São Paulo, see Roberto Simonsen, História econômica do Brasil (1500–1820) (São Paulo, 1978), 215–219; John French, “Riqueza, poder e mão-de-obra numa economia de subsistência: São Paulo, 1596–1625,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal, 45:195 (1982).

The first half of the eighteenth century was a period of rapid economic, military, and political changes in São Paulo that entailed both losses and gains for propertied families. After the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais in the early 1690s, many of the old families’ most enterprising members moved to the mining regions, but wealth trickled back and countless Portuguese newcomers took their place in the city. Though the extended family did not disappear, by the middle of the eighteenth century São Paulo’s clans had lost the absolute power they and their ancestors had enjoyed previously.⁵ After the discovery of gold, the crown aggressively sought to gain control of the region, thereby curbing the clans’ autonomy and diminishing their authority.⁶ Instead of being the main source of power, clans now had to manipulate the sources of power.⁷ At the same time, the virtual slavery of Indians permitted during the seventeenth century under the guise of their “administration” was finally abolished in 1758.⁸

5. Perhaps the ultimate example of São Paulo’s previous independence was the unilateral measures taken by the municipal council in 1690 regarding the value of coins, which were always in short supply since merchants who brought goods from Portugal wanted payment only in specie. Despite colonial requests for the creation of a colonial coin that could not be used in Portugal, in 1688 the crown decreed that coins would have uniform value in the entire empire, increasing the shortage throughout Brazil. But it was only in São Paulo that countermeasures were taken when in 1690 the municipal council decreed that coins in São Paulo would be worth more than in the rest of the empire and set exchange rates for trade with other towns (Simonsen, História econômica, 222–227; d’E. Taunay, História da cidade de São Paulo [São Paulo, 1953], 52–56). Three years later, the value of specie was reflated even further in São Paulo, leading the exasperated governor-general to write that the crown’s monetary reform was enforced without opposition in the whole colony, “save only in São Paulo, where they know neither God, nor Law, nor Justice, nor do they obey any order whatsoever” (as quoted in Charles R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 [Berkeley, 1962], 34). Interestingly enough, by 1694 the crown had decided to create a colonial coin with greater value than the Portuguese.

6. Raymundo Faoro, Os donos do poder: Formação do patronato político brasileiro, 2 vols. (Pôrto Alegre, 1979), I, 162, argues that the biggest push toward state control took place in the eighteenth century.
Until then the vila of São Paulo had belonged to the donatary captaincy of São Paulo and São Vicente. In 1709, a wealthy Paulista, José de Góis Morais, offered to buy the captaincy from the donatary captain for 40,000 cruzados, but instead the crown bought it at the same price with the income from the tax on gold (Simonsen, História Econômica, 229). Though the crown was to elevate São Paulo to the status of a city in 1711, it progressively dismembered the captaincy, creating the separate captaincies of Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Goiás, and, finally, in 1748 further diminished São Paulo’s independence by making it a part of the captaincy of Rio de Janeiro until 1765 (see Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, História geral da civilização brasileira [São Paulo, 1981], I, part 2, 34–36).

7. See Taunay, História da cidade, 118; Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, “The Role of the Merchants in the Economic Development of São Paulo, 1765–1850,” HAHR, 60:4 (Nov. 1980).

8. Alvará of May 8, 1758. See Caio Prado, Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil, Suzette Macedo, trans. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 102.

The loss to the mines and to freedom of their plentiful Indian labor force weakened the great Paulista families that now had to compete in the growing eighteenth-century market economy in order to accumulate the capital to buy African slaves. The seventeenth-century expeditions had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Parents and Daughters: Change in the Practice of Dowry in São Paulo (1600–1770)
• 2 The Church and the Patriarchal Family: Marriage Conflicts in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century New Spain
• 3 Marriage and the Family in Colonial Vila Rica
• 4 Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts
• 5 Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America
• 6 Les naissances illégitimes sur les rives du Saint-Laurent avant 1730
• 7 Women and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice
• 8 Women and Means: Women and Family Property in Colonial Brazil
• 9 Ownership and Obligation: Inheritance and Patriarchal Households in Connecticut, 1750–1820
• 10 The Spiritual Conquest Re-examined: Baptism and Christian Marriage in Early Sixteenth-Century Mexico
• 11 The Black Family in the Americas
• 12 Marriage Patterns of Persons of African Descent in a Colonial Mexico City Parish
• 13 The Anatomy of a Colonial Settler Population: Cape Colony, 1657–1750
• Index