This original and challenging book seeks to reexamine Brazil's colonial status in the eighteenth century by studying the changing governmental policies and the intellectual analyses and project proposals that accompanied or promoted those changes. This is a theme that since the 1960s has generated a rich historiography, but Kirsten Schultz, having kept abreast of the more recent debates about the nature of “negotiated empires” of local interests and powers versus the idea of centrally directed imperial authority, provides a new reading and interpretation. Her study is based principally on the developing statecraft and mercantilism that emerged during Brazil's age of gold and continued to flourish thereafter. It is an analysis not of the economy per se but of thought about it. The result is a cogent study of eighteenth-century political writing in defense of colonialism and mercantilism, but done with a sensitive attention to social and cultural effects and responses...
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