Abstract
Research on the construction of the South Atlantic and, more generally, Atlantic studies, have demonstrated that America and West and Central Africa have a common shared history. They should, therefore, be studied together, regardless of national analytical frameworks. The relationship between Angola and Brazil, in particular, has engendered studies on the participation of Brazilian troops in the reconquest of the city of Luanda from the Dutch in 1648 and the role of slave labor in the construction of colonial Brazil.1 This chapter also focuses on the history of the circulations between the two shores of the Atlantic, but it introduces two dimensions that are usually considered to be secondary in scholarly literature. First, it is more interested in how the Brazilian colony collaborated in the construction of the Angolan colony than in the impact of the different groups of Angolan slaves on Brazil’s formation. Second, it aims to contribute to the analysis of the military, economic, and social interactions that have to do with the intellectual history of the South Atlantic,2 focusing on the circulation of cartographic and historiographical knowledge from Brazil to Angola. Our goal is to show that the cartographic movement that delimited the boundaries of Brazilian territory, from the first half of the eighteenth century, also took place in Angola during the second half of the eighteenth century. Although, as we will see, the Angolan case did not have the same success, there is an intellectual bond between the two Atlantic colonies, which is yet to be studied.
If foreigners were expelled … it would be possible to preserve the whole coast … and an immense Country would be rounded out without any neighbour, and finally the Law would be made for Black people.
Letter from Dom Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, August 15, 1768 (AHU, Cx. 51, doc. 25).
I cannot … explain … the joy that I feel watching the rapid construction … of the settlements in these hinterlands … if the couples come, as requested, we will see much more Populated and useful Cities than those of Brazil.
Letter from Dom Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho, September 13, 1769 (BNL, Res, Cód. 8743, fl. 32–33).
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Notes
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erick R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (London: Pearson Education, 2007).
Charles R. Boxer, Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola: 1602–1686 (London: U. of London P., 1952);
Charles R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society (Berkeley: U. of California P., 1962);
Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (London: James, 1988);
Luiz Felipe Alencastro, O Trato dos Viventes. Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul. Séculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000);
Luiz Felipe Alencastro, “Le versant brésilien de l’Atlantique-Sud: 1550–1850,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61/2 (2006): 339–382;
Alberto da Costa e Silva, Um Rio Chamado Atlântico. A África no Brasil e o Brasil na África (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 2003).
William Joel Simon, in his book Scientific Expeditions in the Portugueses Overseas Territories (1783–1808) and the Role of Lisbon in the Intellectual-Scientific Community of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, 1983), has conducted a detailed study of the three major scientific expeditions, to Brazil, Mozambique, and Angola, focussing on natural history set up from Lisbon (mainly by the Ajuda Palace Natural History Museum) between 1783 and 1808. It is in this context that Joaquim José da Silva, born in Rio de Janeiro and a graduate in philosophy from the University of Coimbra, worked as a naturalist in Angola for around 20 years. Their importance notwithstanding, these expeditions were organized from the metropolis to the colonies, whereas I am interested in the relationship between the colonies. Besides, naturalists like Joaquim José da Silva were fundamentally collectors engaged in the construction of scientific knowledge, whereas the military engineers from Brazil, the protagonists of this chapter, used their knowledge toward the political construction of the territory. It is for this reason that the works of naturalists like Joaquim José da Silva born in Brazil, will not be considered.
I am aware that the use of the notion of “intellectual history” requires some explanation: “intellectual history” surpasses the history of ideas, tout court, because it includes the history of the reception of the concept of “good policy” by the colonial administrators, as well as cartography and historiographical production. Recently, James Sweet, a specialist of the South Atlantic, has carried this discussion much further in his book Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Durham: U. of North Carolina P., 2011). The book is constructed around the knowledge of an illiterate African witch doctor, and his circulation between the Mina Coast, colonial Brazil, and Portugal in the eighteenth century. Sweet has a twofold goal: to counteract a certain tendency in historiography to erase the African categories and knowledge for the benefit of European and American language and colonial institutions, and to include in the field of intellectual history the cultures of orality.
The creation of this Enlightenment project of colonization gathered a rather varied range of knowledge, from scholarly and philosophical knowledge being produced in metropolitan Europe, to the African oral traditions themselves as told by African actors, to the experience of colonial administrators. See Catarina Madeira-Santos, “Administrative Knowledge in a Colonial Context: Angola in the Eighteenth Century,” British Journal for the History of Science 43/4 (2010): 1–18;
Catarina Madeira-Santos, “Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola: reconfigurar dispositivos de domínio (1750 c. 1800)” (PhD diss., Universidade Nova de Lisboa/EHESS, Lisbon and Paris, 2005);
Catarina Madeira-Santos, “Entre deux droits. Les Lumières en Angola (1750–1800),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 60/4 (2005): 817–848.
Pascale Laborier, Frédéric Audren, Paolo Napoli, and Jakob Vogel, Les sciences camérales: Activités pratiques et histoire des dispositifs publics (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).
Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières. Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris: Maspero, 1971), 30 and 110–117; Madeira-Santos, “Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola,” 52–57. For the use of the expression in the correspondence, see the letter from Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho to Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, October 18, 1769, in Arquivos de Angola, vol. 1, no. 1 (Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1933), unpaginated.
Anthony Pagden, “Fellow Citizens and Imperial Subjects: Conquest and Sovereignty in Europe’s Overseas Empires,” History and Theory 44/4 (December 2005): 28–46.
Isabel da Mota, Academia Real da História: Os intelectuais, o poder cultural e o poder monárquico no séc. XVIII (Coimbra: Minerva, 2003), 38, 98.
Jaime Cortesão, Alexandre e Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid, vol. 2 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1984);
Luís Ferrand de Almeida, Alexandre de Gusmão, o Brasil e o tratado de Madrid (1735–1750) (Coimbra: Instituto de Investigação Científica, 1990);
Luís Ferrand de Almeida, “Problemas do Comércio luso-espanhol nos meados dos século XVIII: Um parecer de Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo,” Revista de História Económica e Social 8 (1981): 95–131;
Luís Ferrand de Almeida, A propósito do “Testamento Político” de D. Luís da Cunha (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1984).
Beatriz Siqueira Bueno, “Desenho e desígnio—O Brasil dos engenheiros militares,” Special issue, “A Construção do Brasil Urbano,” Oceanos 41 (January–March 2000): 49;
Siqueira Bueno, “Decifrando mapas: Sobre o conceito de ‘território’ e suas vinculações com a cartografia,” Anais do Museu Paulista, São Paulo, n.s. 12 (January–December 2004): 193–234.
Maurice Lombard, Espaces et réseaux du haut Moyen Âge (Paris: Mouton Éditeur, 1972);
Denys Lombard, Le carrefour javanais, vol. 2: Les réseaux asiatiques (Paris: EHESS, 1990);
Jean-Luc Vellut, “Le Royaume de Cassange et ses réseaux luso-africains vers 1750–1810,” Cahiers d’Etudes africaines 15/57 (1975): 117–136;
Jean-Luc Vellut, “Notes sur le Lunda et la frontière luso-africaine, (1700–1900),” Études d’histoire africaine 3 (1972): 61–166.
Phyllis Martin, The External Trade of the Luango Coast, 1576–1870 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1972).
See Valentim Alexandre, Os Sentidos do Império. Questão Nacional e Questão Colonial na Crise do Antigo Regime Português (Lisbon: Edições Afrontamento, 1993), 25–77.
Niel Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 2008), 80.
Jean-Pierre Chrétien, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs. Deux mille ans d’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 149.
Ensandeira or Incendeira, Portuguese colonial designation of mulemba (pl. milemba), from Kimbundu, a sacred tree related to Mbundu political power and especially related to the figure of Ngola Quilunaji. According to Cadornega, “these such trees are very durable in their plant, and grow naturally from their cuttings and seeds; it is believed that the ancient Kings of Angola traditionally had them planted as certain signs of the limits of their Kingdom, of solid ground”; see António de Oliveira Cadornega, História geral das guerras angolanas, vol. 1 (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1972 [1690]), 26–27;
Pe. João António Cavazzi de Montecúccolo, Descrição histórica dos três reinos Congo, Matamba e Angola, bk. 2 (Lisbon: Agrupamento de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965), 131;
John Gossweiler, Nomes indígenas das plantas de Angola, vol. 7 of Agronomia Angolana (Luanda: Impr. Nacional, 1953), 459–460. Father Maia made the equivalence between Mulemba, insandeira, and sycamore. He says the word “mulemba” is of Kimbundu origin and the word “insendeira” is of Kikongo origin, having been formed from unsandi, nsanda (Antonio da Silva Maia, Dicionário Complementar: Português-Kimbundu-Kikongo [Cucujaes: Tipogafia das Missoes, 1964], 433);
Catarina Madeira-Santos and Ana Paula Tavares, Africae Monumenta. A apropriação da escrita pelos Africanos, vol. 1: Arquivo Caculo Cacahenda (Lisbon: IICT, 2002).
Virgílio Coelho, “Em busca de Kabàsà: Uma tentativa de explicação da estrutura político-administrativa do ‘Reino de Ndongo,’” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Universidade Cândido Mendes, 32 (December 1997): 135–162;
Coelho, “‘Os de dentro, os de fora e os outros’: Análise sucinta de um modelo estrutural de organização administrativa e urbana do ‘Reino de Ndòngò’, desde a sua fundação até fins do século XVI,” Fontes & Estudos, Luanda, Arquivo Histórico Nacional de Angola, 4–5 (1998–1999): 163–228.
Augusto Bastos, “Traços gerais sobre ethnographia do districto de Benguella,” Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa 26/1–6 (January–June 1908): 137.
See Aida Freudenthal, Arimos e Fazendas. A transição agrária em Angola (1850–1880) (Luanda: Edições Chá de Caxinde, 2005).
It should be noted that there was a renaming of places in Brazil and Angola through the introduction of Portuguese toponyms preceded by the adjective “novo” (new): for example, “Novo Belém,” “Nova Golegã.” That is what Benedict Anderson calls “spatial synchrony”; L’Imaginaire national: Réflexions sur l’origine et l’essor du nationalisme (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 189–190, Eng. orig.: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Cf. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (London: James Currey, 1988);
Roger Chartier, Inscrire et effacer. Culture écrite et littérature (XI e –XVIII e siècle) (Paris: Gallimard and Seuil, 2005);
João Carlos Garcia, “Mapas e Atlas do Visconde de Santarém. A prioridade do descobrimento da África Ocidental,” in A História da Cartografia na Obra do Visconde de Santarém, Exposiçao cartobibliográfica, 24 de Nov de 2006 a 10 de Fevereiro de 2007 (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2006), 7–16; Madeira-Santos, “Um governo ‘polido’ para Angola,” 87–119.
Mário António, “História de Angola de Elias Alexandre da Silva Corrêa,” in Reler África (Coimbra: Instituto de Antropologia, Universidade de Coimbra, 1990), 209–232; Mário António, “À sombra do Marquês de Pombal—Um grande acto de luso-afro-brasilidade,” in Reler África, 393–406;
Francisco Soares, Notícia da Literatura Angolana (Lisbon, Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, 2001), 70–71;
Iris Kantor, Esquecidos e renascidos: Historiografia acadêmica Luso-Americana (1724–1759) (Hucitec: Centro de Estudos Bahianos, 2004), 14.
Isabel da Mota, A Academia Real da História: Os intelectuais, o poder cultural e o poder monárquico no séc. XVIII (Coimbra: Minerva, 2003), chap. 2.
Jan M. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (London and Nairobi: James Currey and Heinemann, 1985), 19; Thornton and Miller, “A crónica como fonte, história e hagiografia. O Catálogo dos Governadores de Angola,” 9–55.
See Charles R. Boxer, A “História” de Cadornega no Museu Britânico (Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 1961), 6.
Latin American historiography is abundant on the issue of Creole people—understood as the descendants of the Spanish colonists—and the emergence of a self-consciousness; see Jaime E. Rodriguez O., “The Emancipation of the America,” The American Historical Review 105/1 (February 2000): 131–152. In the case of the Portuguese Empire, the meaning of the term Creole is less unambiguous. Jill Dias used the term to characterize the society of Luanda in the late nineteenth century and showed that, among the great diversity of social actors that it embraces, there were also Westernized Africans (“ocidentalizados”);
Jill Dias, “Uma questão de identidade: Respostas intelectuais às transformações económicas no seio da elite crioula da Angola portuguesa entre 1870 e 1930,” Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 1 (January–June 1984): 61–94.
Letter from Martinho Teixeira de Mendonça to Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, June 10, 1796, AHU, Cx. 83, doc. 61; letter from António Máximo de Sousa Magalhães to Martinho de Melo e Castro, Angola, April 23, 1780, AHU, Cx. 63, doc. 17. Óscar Ribas refers to the term Angolan (angolense): “what is natural or inhabitant of Angola. The same as angolano”; Óscar Ribas, Dicionário de regionalismos angolanos (Matosinhos: Contemporânea, 1994).
See Franz W. Heimer, O Processo de Descolonização em Angola 1974–1976 (Lisbon: A Regra do Jogo, 1980), 23.
J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1998), 7, fn. 164.
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© 2014 László Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török
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Madeira-Santos, C. (2014). “To Round Out this Immense Country”: The Circulation of Cartographic and Historiographical Knowledge between Brazil and Angola in the Eighteenth Century. In: Kontler, L., Romano, A., Sebastiani, S., Török, B.Z. (eds) Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137484017_7
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