History of the Colonization of Minas Gerais: An Environmental Approach
A wild world, full of unknown dangers, barbarian people and hungry dragons: this is how the Portuguese settlers used to figure out the interior of Brazil in the early centuries of occupation of Brazil. Only brave or desperate men would dare to leave the ‘
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History of the Colonization of Minas Gerais: An Environmental Approach Alexia Helena de Araujo Shellard
Abstract A wild world, full of unknown dangers, barbarian people and hungry dragons: this is how the Portuguese settlers used to figure out the interior of Brazil in the early centuries of occupation of Brazil. Only brave or desperate men would dare to leave the ‘civilized’ environments of the coast to scroll through the vast hinterland of the colony in search of slaves and richness. Nevertheless, in the last decade of the seventeenth century, the discovery of gold mines in Minas Gerais caused the migration of thousands of people to the unknown terrains, on the first gold rush of the Modern Era. In less than one century, old forests were devastated to open space to cities, pastures, fields and mines, while the indigenous population was almost entirely replaced by Africans and Europeans. This paper address to a common thematic in Brazilian History: Minas Gerais’ gold rush along the eighteenth century. Its approach, however, incorporates an element whose importance is often underestimated: nature.
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Introduction
This paper is an analysis of the social and environmental changes that occurred between late seventeenth century and mid-eighteenth century in Minas Gerais due to the discovery of countless rich gold deposits in the region. Actually before these findings in the 1690s, the area hadn’t even an official name: it was a vast and wild land inhabited by indigenous people and occasionally visited by paulistas in their hunting for slaves. Nevertheless, along the first half of the eighteenth century, the possibilities of quick enrichment attracted thousands of people from all the corners of the colony and also from different regions of the metropolis, besides having caused the abduction of millions of people in Africa, who were compulsorily brought to exploit the mines of Brazil. Thus, the period studied represents a profound transformation of a territory that completely lost its ‘wild’ character in less
A.H. de A. Shellard (*) Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 E. Vaz et al. (eds.), Environmental History in the Making, Environmental History 6, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41085-2_14
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than a century, becoming a crucial extension not only to the Portuguese colony but to the whole Portuguese Kingdom. Occurrences observed in the eighteenth-century reflect homogenizing trends that are still ongoing today: on one hand, exotic species has been introduced in monoculture systems, contributing to reduce the natural diversity; on the other, indigenous cultural diversity has been constraint by European colonial power. Moreover, great part of the land in these new Portuguese territories were turned into lands owned by noblemen who would win their dominium from the crown, according to the number of slaves possessed. As determined by the Mineral Statement from 1702, the access to mineral an
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