Adrift on an Inland Sea
eBook - ePub

Adrift on an Inland Sea

Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands

  1. 456 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Adrift on an Inland Sea

Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

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 reshaped imperial ambitions.

This book measures Portugal's transatlantic projection of power against a particular obstacle: imperial information-gathering, which produced a confusion of rumors, distortions, claims, conflicting reports, and disputed facts. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of ethnohistory, slavery and diaspora studies, and legal and literary history, Hal Langfur considers how misinformation destabilized European sovereignty in the Americas, making a major contribution to histories of empire, frontiers and borderlands, knowledge production, and scientific exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Frequently asked questions

Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Adrift on an Inland Sea by Hal Langfur in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Stanford University Press
Year
2023
ISBN
9781503633971
Edition
1
Topic
History
Subtopic
Latin American & Caribbean History
Index
History

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Note on Conventions
  9. Map of Southeastern Brazil, ca. 1800
  10. Introduction: Navigating the Imperial Unknown
  11. Part 1. Making the Wilderness Wild: The Authority of Misinformation
  12. Part 2. All That Glitters: Forest Informants and Regal Dreams
  13. Part 3. Science for the SertĂŁo: New Modes of Inquiry, Old Uncertainties
  14. Part 4. The Good Sense of Cannibals: Further Dispatches from the Atlantic Forest
  15. Epilogue: How to Tame an Empire
  16. Abbreviations Used in the Notes
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index