Rivers and empire : the Madeira route and the incorporation of the Brazilian Far West, 1737-1808 / David Michael Davidson.

Portions of Footnotes and Appendices in Portuguese.

Tese (Ph.D.) - Yale University, New Haven 1970

This case study of the territorial formation and integration of colonial Brazil in the eighteen century focuses upon the history of the Guaporé-Mamoré-Madeira river route - the "Madeira Route" as it was known by contemporaries - which traversed the 2700 miles between the far western mines of mato Grosso and Belém do Pará at the mouth of the Amazon river. The establishment of Brazil's western border along the route in the Treaty of Madrid (1750), and the official opening of navigation and commerce along the rivers two years later climaxed fifteen years of international conflict and brought the western territory of Mato Grosso securely into the Portuguese empire. From 1752 until the arrival of the Portuguese court at Rio de Janeiro in 1808, the Madeira route functioned as a vital defense line, and a principal bureaucratic, logistic, and commercial artery to the west, providing a theater for the methods and mechanisms by which Portugal knit together, sustained and exploited its American empire. Commercially, the route was a partial success. It carried a substantial minority of the west's commerce, but never achieved a sustained competitive advantage over the trades with Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. The Madeira was considerably more successful as a bureaucratic lifeline, becoming the chief route of personnel transfer and crown supply traffic to Mato Grosso, sustaining the royal agencies of the frontier, and binding them to those of Pará and Lisbon with greater cohesion than that achieved by private commerce. A half century of commerce and communication. A half century of commerce and communication did, however, create in the public mind a lasting bond between the far west and Amazon and, thus, seemingly became a source of Brazilian national unity during the transition to political indepence in the first decades of the nineteenth century.