Among the more perplexing questions of Latin American history is the nature of the relationship between the landed creole aristocracy and merchant communities in the major colonial cities. In the case of Brazil, historians have long assumed that the planters, who dominated the colony socially and politically, and the urban merchants, who controlled credit and marketing, constituted two distinct and generally hostile groups.1 In his well-known study, A. J. R. Russell-Wood sought to show that in Bahia the merchants began to gain ascendancy over the planters around 1700 and by the middle of the eighteenth century had attained dominance in the political and social spheres as well as in the economic.2 This theory in turn has been challenged by John Kennedy, whose research indicated that the planters remained very active in the social and political life of Salvador throughout the late colonial period.3
Most previous discussions of the planter-merchant relationship in Brazil have been limited by a lack of information concerning the merchant communities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: who they were, where they came from, how they made their money, whom they married, what voluntary associations they joined, what offices they held, how they changed if they became rich. Our knowledge of the Brazilian (or at least the Bahian) planter aristocracy is somewhat better grounded, but there has been curiously little investigation into the social origins of that class either.4 Furthermore, in order to discuss the composition of the colonial elite, one must know what sort of social requirements had to be met in order to gain entry and where the class boundaries lay. This article is an attempt to answer these questions by taking a close look at the origins, marriage patterns, and economic activities of merchants, as well as their roles in key social and political institutions, over an extended period which included much of the growth and later stagnation of Bahia’s sugar economy and its partial replacement by expanded tobacco raising and slaving.
Our findings suggest that the usual merchant/planter dichotomy posits an excessively rigid division which does not accurately reflect the complex and often ambiguous relationships within the upper strata of Bahian society. The composition of Bahia’s elite changed surprisingly little over the space of a century or more, despite readjustments in the colony’s economy, but our concept of that elite throughout this period must be revised to include certain mercantile types as well as the familiar agricultural aristocracy. The merchant gains in the first part of the eighteenth century noted by Russell-Wood represented not so much the rise and consolidation of a commercial class as the integration of successful immigrant merchants into the established elite. This process may have been somewhat more pronounced in the early decades of the eighteenth century, but it followed patterns well established in the previous century.
Merchant Types, Origins, and Marriage Patterns
During the colonial period, Salvador was the center of an extensive trading network, importing dry goods, iron, and food staples from Portugal and exporting sugar, tobacco, brazilwood, hides, and eventually gold to European and African markets.5 The commercial bustle was greatest when the Portuguese fleet gathered in the harbor, but the more frequent arrivals and departures of small vessels that sailed a direct route between Africa and Salvador and the regular local and coastwise traffic made the city a center of constant activity. Other business was transacted here as well. In the chambers of the city council, producers and buyers haggled over sugar and tobacco prices and debated policy recommendations. Tax farmers negotiated contracts with council officials or ministers of the crown. The bankers of the time—the wealthiest private citizens and the most handsomely endowed social and religious institutions—were also usually found in the city.6
Throughout the colonial period, a resident mercantile community figured prominently in all these activities. Large merchants or businessmen, called homens de negócio or mercadores de sobrado, engaged in the transatlantic and Brazilian distribution trade, both on their own and as correspondents of merchants in Portugal and elsewhere. They also invested in shipping, negotiated the choice tax contracts, and served as financiers for smaller merchants, agriculturists, and homeowners. These homens de negócio seldom acquired the stature of Lisbon merchant-bankers in terms of wealth or magnitude of endeavor, but nevertheless constituted the mercantile elite of the colony. In contrast, the mercador de loja or shopkeeper was primarily a retailer who sold a variety of imported goods over the counter. The volume and scope of his trade did not match that of the homem de negócio and his social status was lower, but a fortuitous investment in a lucrative slaving voyage or an interest in a profitable tax contract might propel the ambitious shopkeeper into the category of businessman.7
On the fringes of the established community, there existed a large, ever-changing merchant population that included shop assistants and apprentice clerks (caixeiros), peripatetic commercial agents (comissários), ship captains and shipmasters who functioned both as agents and as merchants in their own right, and the highly mobile pack traders and peddlers who distributed goods to the Recôncavo and the markets of the interior on consignment and on their own accounts. All of these types maintained close ties with the resident homens de negócio and mercadores de toja who supplied them with work, goods, and credit, but most of them were transients and thus do not concern us here—except to note that they formed a pool from which frequently emerged new additions to the permanent merchant population.8
Despite its importance, Bahia’s resident mercantile community never represented a very large proportion of the population. From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, the number of urban households increased from about 1,000 to something under 7,000, yet the number of resident merchants (including both mercadores de sobrado and de loja) probably never exceeded 150 individuals at any given time.9
During the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth centuries, Bahia’s merchant community was, with few exceptions, made up of immigrants. The figures in Table I indicate the geographic origins of resident businessmen and shopkeepers for the periods 1600-1680 and 1680-1740.10 In the first group of 131 individuals, 116 men or eighty nine percent of the total came from Portugal. A small percentage (five percent) emigrated from the Atlantic islands, and significantly, only seven persons (five percent) were native Bahians. The second sample collected for the later period of 1680-1740 is striking for its similarity to the first. Of 132 merchants, 110 men or eighty-three percent of the total were of Portuguese birth. Five individuals (four percent) migrated from the Atlantic islands, and again only seven (five percent) were of Bahian origin.
The domination of commerce by successive generations of immigrants reflected several important social processes. In the first place, the businessmen and shopkeepers who took up permanent residence in Brazil commonly named their agents, correspondents, partners, and assistants—in effect, the men most likely to succeed them—from among their Iberian contacts. Numerous examples attest to this practice in which one successful immigrant merchant sponsored another immigrant as a protégé. The latter might be a younger brother, nephew, or cousin, or someone from the same Portuguese town, but this was not necessarily the case. To cite one example, businessman Nicolao Lopes Fiuza brought his agent and younger brother João to Salvador where Nicolao’s established contacts and interests clearly paved the way for João Lopes Fiuza’s success as a businessman, his fortunate marriage into one of Bahia’s oldest planter families, and his transformation into a senhor de engenho and leading citizen.11
While providing business opportunities for young immigrants, the successful established merchants directed their own sons away from commerce as a principal occupation. Precisely those men most capable of founding merchant dynasties chose instead to establish their sons in the Recôncavo as planters as soon as possible. Alternatively, they placed their sons in the professions as letrados or priests. João Lopes Fiuza, mentioned above, left extensive agricultural holdings to his three children. His eldest son and namesake became a senhor de engenho, his only daughter wed a millowner and inherited one of the Fiuza sugar mills, and the remaining son became a Jesuit priest.12 When there was continuity in commerce over two or more generations, it was usually through the female line as businessmen married off their daughters to ambitious newcomers—another way of facilitating the rapid establishment of immigrant merchants.
A few merchants brought wives from Portugal or eventually named proxies to marry women in their home towns, but more typically the merchant arrived in Bahia as a bachelor and married a woman born in the city or Recôncavo. Table II shows the birthplace of wives of 178 shopkeepers and businessmen resident in Salvador at some time during the 140-year period under discussion. Once again the data consist of two samples of 77 wives for the period 1600-1680 and 101 wives for the later period, 1680-1740. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that most (ninety percent and eighty-eight percent respectively) resident merchants who married chose Bahian-born wives.13
The social origins of these women, described in terms of their fathers’ professions, is shown in Table III. Available information made it possible to determine the principal occupations of forty-five fathers for the period 1600-1680 and fifty-six fathers for the later time span. Both groups are admittedly small, but their reliability is enhanced by the consistency of findings for the two samples. In each group, about seventy-five percent of the merchants’ fathers-in-law functioned primarily as resident businessmen or agriculturists of some substance. The remaining twenty-five percent included cattlemen, professionals, and artisans.
Thus merchants married women from a variety of social backgrounds, but a significant proportion married directly into established mercantile and landed families—a clear indication of the degree to which merchants were regarded as acceptable, even desirable, husbands for daughters of the local elite. The importance of such marriage connections cannot be overemphasized. They permitted the consolidation of property and capital, imparted a degree of respectability to the newcomer, and introduced him into existing family networks. Finally, these marriages blurred the distinctions between and promoted common interests among potentially antagonistic social elements: merchant versus planter, immigrant versus native-born.
The characteristics of Bahian merchants described thus far conform to patterns noted elsewhere in Ibero-America. In particular, the selection of immigrant apprentices, the contracting of advantageous local marriages, and the placement of sons in noncommercial careers recall Brading’s analysis of eighteenth-century Mexican merchants.14
Economic Interests
A few immigrant merchants arrived in Bahia as full-fledged homens de negócio, but more commonly the new arrival began as an agent of established merchants at either end of the trading circuit or as a young caixeiro or mariner. He might make several voyages to Salvador before taking up permanent residence and more sedentary commercial functions. The mariner-agent Pantaleão Gomes, for example, navigated the Atlantic route and traded goods on consignment before eventually marrying in Bahia and becoming a resident mercador de loja. As another example, two cousins from Madeira, Domingos Martins Pereira and Domingos Escorcio, were both shipmasters who sailed to Bahia several times before settling in the city, where they married and became businessmen.15
The newcomer who was attached to an established merchant often worked on a commission basis, but as soon as possible he began making investments on his own. The quality of his early connections with the resident business community was, at least initially, a crucial factor affecting both his decision to stay in Bahia permanently and his chances of joining the business elite. The advantages of such connections could take many forms: access to credit or a cash loan, the opportunity to buy a share in a slaving vessel, an introduction into society, or perhaps the promotion of a useful marriage. The young caixeiro António Gonsalves da Rocha, for example, who began his career in the employ of the wealthy businessman Cristóvão Barbosa Vilasboas, gained his decisive opportunity in 1698 when his employer’s widow entrusted him with full powers to administer an important tax contract covering the royal tithe on sugar. Shortly thereafter, the hitherto obscure da Rocha invested directly in the slave trade and rose to become one of the Bahian elite with all the necessary prerequisites and trappings including land, an outstanding marriage, a military title, a seat on the city council, and the position of provedor of the prestigious Santa Casa da Misericórdia.18
Throughout the period under discussion, the merchants engaged in and built their careers on certain commercial activities, among them the export-import trade, the distribution trade, tax farming, shipping, and moneylending. However, the business sector did not contain specialized groups of exporters, importers, shippers, bankers, or tax farmers. Like his European colleague, the typical large merchant in Bahia acted in two, three, or more capacities at once. For example, the homem de negócio António Maciel Teixeira traded in all commodities exchanged between Lisbon and Salvador, owned part of at least one slaving vessel, was a tax farmer, and on occasion placed money on loan.17 Regardless of the genesis of his career, the successful businessman characteristically pursued a variety of commercial interests. Economic diversification did not end there. Businessmen typically invested in sugar and tobacco plantations in the Bahian Recôncavo and in the remote grazing lands of the sertão. Merchants acquired property in various ways—in the form of land concessions (sesmarias) from the governor, through foreclosure and auction, and by outright purchase.
In the seventeenth century, merchants, like other Bahians, took advantage of the government’s liberal policy of land alienation.18 Two men mentioned earlier, Domingos Martins Pereira and Domingos Escorcio, each received fifteen square leagues (roughly 160,000 acres) along the Rio Paraguaçu in 1681, and nine years later, Escorcio was one of several merchants who each obtained four square leagues near the headwaters of the Rio Pardo.19 Marriage connections sometimes facilitated the acquisition of a choice piece of property or a sugar mill. Manuel Mendes Monforte inherited one of his two sugar mills from his father-in-law, and another merchant, Domingos Alvares de Araújo, received a tract of land valued at 5,000 cruzados as a dowry settlement when he married the daughter of a planter.20
The most outstanding example of land acquisition by a merchant is that of João Peixoto Viegas, who became one of the four or five largest landholders in all of Brazil. The bastard son of a cleric, João Peixoto Viegas, like so many Bahian merchants, emigrated as a young bachelor from the Portuguese city of Viana. About 1640, he left for Brazil at the age of twenty-four and built a typical mercantile career on the mainstays of the transatlantic trade: imports of wine, slaves, and foodstuffs, and exports of Bahian sugar. He also owned a slaving vessel, assumed several minor mercantile posts and, in 1650, became one of the four administrators of the Brazil Company in Bahia. In the same year, he married Joanna de Sá Peixoto, the daughter of a prominent senhor de engenho and leading citizen, Cosme de Sá Peixoto.
João Peixoto Viegas continued to engage in commerce for much if not all of his life, but shortly after his marriage (and perhaps with the assistance of a dowry) he acquired, through a combination of purchase and outright concession, an enormous tract of land covering over 12,000 square miles. This immense domain included all of the territory located between the Paraguaçu and Jacuipe rivers north of the vila of Cachoeira as well as a parcel extending across the plains of Itapororocas and Agua Fria. Much of this far-flung holding remained unoccupied throughout the colonial period, but the owner attracted settlers and introduced cattle raising into the more easily exploitable regions along waterways. João Peixoto Viegas, and later his heirs, personally established numerous cattle ranches and sítios which combined cattle raising with the cultivation of tobacco and foodstuffs. Furthermore, they leased and sold to others holdings ranging from a few hundred acres in size to an apparently standard one-quarter of a square league for the establishment of mixed agricultural and pastoral sítios.21
The sheer size of his holdings made João Peixoto Viegas an outstanding landowner and developer by any standards, but the pursuit of agricultural and pastoral interests was replicated on a smaller scale by many businessmen. Merchants, such as João Verdoa and Diogo Nunes Enriques, who were active in the West African slave trade, logically invested in their prime article of exchange by buying tobacco plantations in Cachoeira.22 Others preferred to buy fazendas de cana, the farms where sugarcane was cultivated, stills (lambiques), which made the cane brandy consumed locally and exported to Africa, and even the prized engenhos that manufactured sugar for export. In one group of eighty senhores de engenho who owned at least 90 mills in the first decade of the eighteenth century, eleven owners (fourteen percent) were immigrant businessmen. At that time the Bahian Recôncavo contained about 130 mills.23
It should be emphasized that as the businessman developed rural properties, he continued to function as a merchant. For example, more than a decade after acquiring a sugar mill and very near the time of his death, Lourenço da Rocha Moutinho still operated as an export merchant at his city residence.24 His contemporary, Manuel Mendes Monforte, owned two sugar mills and several cane farms obtained through marriage and by purchase in the 1680s. Monforte’s position as a major sugar producer is indicated by his repeated election (1701, 1702, 1704) as representative of the entire sugar sector at price negotiations. Yet long after acquiring his mills, he still called himself homem de negócio, was a principal shipowner, and engaged in the transatlantic trade. After his death in 1715, his widow and adult children residing at the Monforte’s Engenho de Salgado named proxies to settle Manuel’s commercial affairs in Lisbon, Angola, Sergipe del Rei, Rio de Janeiro, and Cachoeira.25
As the businessman developed his rural interests and continued his mercantile activities simultaneously, he divided his time between the Recôncavo and the city, often maintaining two residences. Since he could not manage his properties directly all the time, he named men to act in his behalf. He might leave remote and easily operated cattle ranches under the supervision of managers and tenants, while the more demanding administration of tobacco and sugar plantations passed to neighboring planters or tenants of some substance and proven ability. Ideally, the businessman installed his own sons on the Recôncavo as full-time planters, thereby completing the transition of the family from commerce to agriculture. Both Monforte and Moutinho, mentioned above, did precisely this.26
The businessmen who acquired sesmarias, cattle ranches, and sugar or tobacco plantations and who, during the prime, if not entirety, of their lives continued to function as merchants do not fit neatly into either of the two traditional categories of rural planter or urban merchant encountered in the historical literature on Bahia. Such men represented an intermediate social type which might best be termed the “landed merchant” or “merchant-planter.” At any given time, this group was not large, but its existence calls into question the traditional view of Bahian society which stresses the divisions between the rural aristocracy and the urban merchant class.
Sociopolitical Activities
Throughout much of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many businessmen easily translated their economic success into social acceptability and political influence. To some extent, this was true for men who functioned solely as merchants since their aspirations could hardly be ignored in a society so dependent on their services. However, a combination of factors—permanent residence, a good local marriage, the performance of services, wealth, and the ownership of land and agricultural interests—provided the socially ambitious with the prerequisites for entry into the heart of the Bahian elite.
Admission to and officeholding in the most prestigious lay brotherhoods, appointments as officers in the local militia, and access to seats on the city council attest to the very rapid social mobility experienced by some immigrant businessmen within one generation. In addition, merchant participation in these institutions reveals a great deal about the composition and formation of the Bahian elite in general. Traditional ruling families such as the Araújo-Aragão, Monis Barreto, Argola, Góes-Araújo, and Dias de Avila clans, whose presence, power, and landed interests dated from the sixteenth century, were never supplanted by successful merchants, but they admitted these newcomers into their ranks on a selective, but regular basis.27
The penetration of the local elite by businessmen may be observed in the composition of the lay brotherhoods that constituted a focal point of colonial social life. This phenomenon is best studied by looking at the most prestigious of all the brotherhoods, the Santa Casa da Misericórdia. The work and organization of that sodality have received extensive and generally excellent treatment by A. J. R. Russell-Wood, but that author’s contention that “businessmen first appeared as such in the registers of admissions to the Misericórdia at the turn of the century” is misleading. The statement is important because it implies an alteration in admissions policy that signaled the social ascendancy of merchants and a fundamental change in the composition of Bahia’s elite, a thesis developed rather haphazardly throughout the book.28
Read in conjunction with other sources that supply professional information omitted by the brotherhood scribes, the membership rolls of the Santa Casa clearly show that businessmen—with or without land—entered the organization as brothers of higher standing (that is, on an equal footing with members of the old landed families) well before the turn of the eighteenth century. The entry records are missing for the first half of the seventeenth century, but for the earliest fully documented period (1665-1700), at least 54 of the 324 men admitted as brothers of the superior class were businessmen (that is, about one-sixth). More than half of these gained admission prior to 1685.29
Furthermore, within the Misericórdia businessmen held offices and were chosen to sit on the governing board. It is not surprising that landowners and sugar planters from families long established in the region usually occupied the prestigious office of provedor; yet outstanding businessmen occasionally occupied even this high post. During the second half of the seventeenth century at least five businessmen served as provedor for a total of nine years: Francisco Fernandes do Sim (1656, 1657, 1658, 1659, 1661), João Peixoto Viegas (1683), João de Mattos de Aguiar (1684), João Alves Fontes (1694), and António Maciel Teixeira (1695).30
There is little doubt that in the seventeenth century, as well as later, these men were generally perceived as merchants at the time they were admitted as brothers of the superior class. João Peixoto Viegas, for example, was already on the governing board of the Misericórdia by 1650 and therefore must have joined the brotherhood some years earlier. Yet he was clearly identified as a mercador veanez (from Viana) in the city tax roll of 1648 and appears as the Bahian correspondent of two Lisbon-based English merchants in a legal deposition of September 1650. As we have noted earlier, he was one of four merchants who administered the unpopular Brazil Company in Bahia at least as late as 1651. (Francisco Fernandes do Sim, the merchant-planter who became provedor of the Misericórdia in 1656, was one of his coadministrators.)31 Henrique de Guisanrode, who was on the Misericórdia’s governing board in 1665, identified himself in 1669 as an homem de negócio and carregador during sugar price negotiations, and in 1664, he signed a petition of Salvador businessmen acting as agents of Lisbon merchants.32
The same seems to have held true for the Franciscan Third Order. For example, Francisco da Rocha Barbosa, who represented the Bahian merchants in sugar price negotiations in 1683, sat on the Franciscan lay order’s board in 1673 and had also become a brother of the superior class of the Misericórdia by 1679.33
It must be remembered that the resident business community was never very large, and it is probable that most homens de negócio who could satisfactorily prove their limpeza de sangue eventually joined the Misericórdia. Their admission in the seventeenth century and particularly their election to high office could have occurred only with the support or at least the acquiescence of the planters, letrados, and crown officials who outnumbered them on the membership rolls. It may well be that businessmen assumed a more important role in the brotherhood during the course of the eighteenth century, as Professor Russell-Wood suggested. Certainly they continued to be admitted as brothers of higher standing in the first half of that century, and during that time six businessmen served as provedor for a total of eight years.34 However, this must be understood as a continuation of a process well-established in the previous century rather than as a fundamental departure from the past.
The question of the businessman’s position in Bahian society is considerably complicated by the factor of limpeza de sangue, that is, the absence of any taint of Jewish, Moorish, or Negro blood. By the seventeenth century, the mercantile profession in the Luso-Brazilian world had become so thoroughly associated with the descendants of forcibly converted Jews that the terms “New Christian” and “homem de negócio” were often used as synonyms.35
Unlike Lisbon, where New Christians did constitute a healthy majority of the merchant community, in seventeenth-century Bahia most merchants were in fact Old Christians. Out of a group of 179 merchants active between 1620 and 1690 whose “quality” was ascertainable, 98 (or fifty-five percent) were Old Christians, and 81 (or forty-five percent) were New Christians. Unfortunately, the necessary sources were not available to make a similar analysis for the later period, and the distinction may have lost some of its importance in the eighteenth century. Despite their minority status, however, New Christians composed a numerically and economically significant part of the Bahian mercantile community and wielded influence disproportionate to their numbers in the population at large.
Although New Christian merchants had much the same goals as Old Christians, and their economic careers developed along almost identical lines, they were formally excluded from membership in two of Bahia’s three most prestigious lay brotherhoods (the Santa Casa da Misericórdia and the Third Order of St. Francis) and could not legally hold office in the municipal council.36 The means they used to enhance their social status therefore necessarily differed from those employed by Old Christian merchants.
From the very beginning of the seventeenth century, New Christian merchants, like their Old Christian colleagues, routinely acquired sugar lands and mills as soon as their wealth permitted.37 However, at the point where wealth and land ownership would ordinarily have been transformed into social prestige and political influence, New Christian businessmen were thwarted in their efforts to penetrate the nebulous barrier separating the mercadores de sobrado from the elite that dominated the municipal council and the city’s social hierarchy. Regardless of their economic assets, their social development was arrested at the upper level of the mercantile sector.38
Barred from admission into the colony’s highest circles, the New Christian merchant-planters did what they could with second best. If they could not sit on the municipal council, they could participate conspicuously in public debates and take part in the committees to which the council delegated authority on certain issues. If they could not enter the Santa Casa or the Third Order of St. Francis, they could join the Third Order of the Carmelites which was open to New Christians. Since many of the men with whom they dealt on juntas, committees, and in the Carmelite auxiliary were also members of the inaccessible organizations, they were thereby able to establish associations with the men who ruled the social and political roost.
Although these connections rarely paid off in the desired coin for the first generation, quite frequently their children were able to marry into leading families, their New Christian blood forgiven, if not forgotten. In one notable example, the daughter of merchant-planter Mateus Lopes Franco, who in his youth had been arrested for judaizing and nearly executed by the Inquisition in 1620, married António Guedes de Brito, the founder of the House of Ponte, one of the largest entails in colonial Brazil.39 Her husband went on to become an officer of the municipal council and twice provedor of the Santa Casa, from which he technically should have been excluded by virtue of his marriage.40 One may say without much exaggeration that New Christian merchants could social-climb almost as well as Old Christian merchants; it simply took them another generation or two to reach their goal.
The appointment of businessmen to high militia posts is further indication of their entry into the local elite. In the city, a special company was organized for merchants, but many of the latter sought and received patents in the regular units organized by district and parish. Possession of a patent to serve as captain, sergeant-major, or colonel did not necessarily indicate military prowess, but it did proclaim high status and conveyed a certain amount of power. This was particularly true beyond the city limits where a militia officer might represent the only institutionalized source of authority. However, even in the city where merchants were most likely to serve, militia officers collected special taxes and assumed the functions of enforcement officers. Furthermore, both minimal and extraordinary services (financial contributions, the loan of a ship, the capture of a criminal, and so forth) performed while in office could be bargained for titles and posts outside the militia or left to be used by heirs.41
By the 1680s, the city of Salvador and its outskirts had been organized into one militia regiment headed by a colonel and sergeant-major and divided into eight regular companies serving various parishes. By that time merchants were well represented among company leaders. Of the eight men serving as captains of the urban companies, half were businessmen: Sebastião Duarte, Baltesar Carvalho da Cunha, António Amorim Correa, and Domingos Pires de Carvalho.42
A general reorganization carried out in 1687 divided the city and environs into two regiments with thirteen companies, and in 1718-1720, population growth necessitated further reorganization of the urban district into four regiments. In the intervening years, sixty-three men filled the thirteen posts of captain, and of that number at least twenty-two, or over one-third of the total, were merchants, several of whom eventually won promotions to sergeant-major. For the most part, these officers, like their predecessors, had attained the status of merchant-planter or landed merchant, although there may have been one or two exceptions.43
Throughout the period under discussion, the coveted position of colonel in both urban and rural units—perhaps the highest local distinction obtainable—remained the special preserve of the great landowning and planter families. However, after the reorganization of 1718-1720, two regiments came under the authority of José Alvares Vianna and José de Araújo Rocha, both successful businessmen. While their appointments represented something of a departure from the past, it should be emphasized that their social triumphs culminated a now recognizable pattern. Each had contracted a good local marriage some years previously and had developed rural properties. Moreover, both men commanded newly created regiments rather than taking over posts traditionally controlled by older families.44
The participation of merchants in local government, analyzed in terms of their role within the Senado da Câmara (municipal council) requires careful treatment. There is no doubt that throughout the seventeenth century, the two magistrates (juíses ordinários), three aidermen (vereadores), and city attorney (procurador) annually chosen by indirect election most often came from landed and planter families long established in the region.45 Nevertheless, even those newcomers who functioned solely as merchants were afforded a voice in council deliberations, and the most successful of these, the businessmen who married well and diversified their economic interests, eventually gained seats on the council itself. When the Câmara convened to make important policy decisions or to make policy recommendations requiring approval of higher authorities, it generally called a junta of leading citizens and interested parties. The council proceedings are replete with examples of merchant attendance in these sessions.
Merchants also met together on occasion to write petitions and formulate position papers to be considered by the council. In the 1720s, merchants formally organized their own Mesa to articulate their point of view, but the functions of that body had been performed on a less formal basis for at least a century prior to its founding.46 During the seventeenth century, merchants (regardless of status) not only influenced and formulated policies pertaining strictly to their profession, but their opinions weighed heavily in discussions of such crucial matters as defense, taxation, food shortages, currency problems, contraband, and the settlement of the interior.47
At times planters and merchants argued bitterly over prices and credit, particularly in years of economic crisis when each attempted to blame the other for the vicissitudes of an export-based economy.48 However, in evaluating the nature of merchant-planter relations, periodic disagreements must be weighed against the spirit of cooperation that characterized their dealings on other issues. For example, while senhor de engenho Baltesar de Vasconcellos and businessman Manuel Gonsalves Viana represented opposing sides in the price negotiations of 1717, they served together on an important committee named to hammer out the specifics of an enormous special tax (donativo) levied to help pay the royal dowries. The geographical distribution and form of collection of this three million cruzado burden were determined by a committee composed of the 1727 municipal council and eight citizens. The membership of this group illustrates the kinds of men who worked together in local government. Five were senhores de engenho from established Bahian families, two were landed merchants, and three were businessmen who may or may not have acquired land at that time, but who had married locally and were prominent in the commercial caucus (Mesa do Comércio) organized the year before.49
The possibilities for sustained conflict between merchants and planters were reduced as the most succesful businessmen from each generation—the men most likely to challenge the establishment—were absorbed by the governing elite, that is, awarded the status of homem bom and permitted to sit on the council itself. Once again, it should be emphasized that by the time such men obtained offices, in most cases they had established good connections locally and had assumed multiple economic functions. This makes it impossible to view them as spokesmen for any narrowly defined economic group.
The actual seating of landed merchants on the city council is difficult to measure for the first half of the seventeenth century. The membership registers for that institution are complete only for the period after 1625, and important biographical sources for early members are lacking. For most years officials can be identified easily as large landowners and planters, but their possible mercantile activities or origins cannot be confirmed or dismissed with confidence. However, at least the occasional election of prominent merchant-planters to the Câmara is evident in the service of such men as Manuel Gonsalves de Barros (1632, 1642) and Paulo do Rego Barros (1643, 1654).50
The more complete records for the second half of the seventeenth century offer sound proof that businessmen, landed merchants in particular, joined the council well before the turn of the eighteenth century. During the four decades between 1660 and 1699, some 203 different men were chosen to fill the posts of magistrate, alderman, and city attorney or were selected by a junta of electors to replace officials unable to serve. Of this total, at least 22 individuals (eleven percent) were immigrant businessmen who had become permanently established in Bahia. Or, put another way to account for the fact that some men occupied a council seat more than once, the posts were filled by regular or special election 260 times; on 33 occasions (thirteen percent) businessmen were chosen. Merchant access remained about the same throughout the period with one exception. An unusually large turnover during the 1680s, a decade of plague and depression, increased merchant participation.51
During the subsequent four decades businessmen continued to be seated on the Câmara. Of 107 different persons selected between 1700 and 1739, at least 22 men (twenty-one percent) of the total were homens de negócio. Again, expressed another way, council posts were filled 167 times, and on 37 occasions—or twenty-three percent of the total—merchants were chosen. It should be noted that in this second forty-year period, the total number of persons concerned dropped from 203 to 107 in large part because of a royal reform of 1696 that abolished the two posts of juís ordinário.52
A comparison of the two periods 1660-1699 and 1700-1739 reveals that while approximately the same number of men of mercantile origin entered the council in each era, the relative importance of that group among total membership actually increased from about eleven percent to twenty-one percent. The fact that businessmen were able to compete so well for a reduced number of council positions, particularly during the 1720s, is best explained in terms of both a changing economy and certain institutional innovations.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the sugar sector entered a period of extended though uneven decline related to a combination of rising costs, overexpansion, and increasing competition from Caribbean sugar.53 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, the European and African markets for Bahian tobacco and the Brazilian demand for slaves expanded dramatically. Of particular importance was the development of the Mina Coast trade in which Bahian tobacco was exchanged directly for slaves brought to Brazil. This trade came largely under the control of Bahian rather than Portuguese-based merchants. Although space prohibits a detailed analysis of this economic conjuncture, the important point is that the problems of the sugar sector did not affect all Bahians equally. Planters and merchants alike who had diversified their economic interests were able to maintain a solid economic base.54 The fact that many of the mercantile types who occupied Câmara positions in the eighteenth century figured prominently in the tobacco and slave trade—men like Manuel Gonsalves Vianna, José Alvares Vianna, and João Lopes Fiuza—suggests a direct connection between the greater relative importance of businessmen on the council and a changing economy.
Certain reforms also must be taken into account in analyzing the changing composition of the city council. In the late seventeenth century when the number of council positions was reduced, ultimate control over electoral lists passed from the homens bons or citizen-electors to the governor. It is likely that royal officials facilitated the seating of economically powerful landed merchants. Certainly the governor had much to gain from furthering the careers of the principal tobacco and slave traders in this period. They were capable of performing substantial financial services and their cooperation was essential if any headway was to be made against the burgeoning contraband trade in gold, tobacco, and other commodities.55
Moreover, in 1698 the governor raised three settlements in the Bahian Recôncavo to the status of vita and gave them their own municipal councils. The carving out of the new electoral areas from the old Salvador district diminished the pool of homens bons who traditionally entered the membership rolls of the Salvador Câmara.56 Residence requirements were not strictly enforced; yet it is clear that (as Stuart Schwartz suggested might be the case) some families with both urban and rural residences chose to shift their attention to the vila councils. For example, Manuel de Araújo de Aragão, who had served on the Salvador governing body in 1682 and 1690, became one of the first officials of the Câmara of Cachoeira in 1698. António Moreira de Meneses, a Salvador magistrate in 1690, became the first juís ordinário of the Jaguaripe council.57 Many other examples could be cited to demonstrate that the old landed families did not relinquish important offices of local government to merchants but simply extended their base of power to include both the vita and city councils. However, this new trend undoubtedly aided businessmen in securing offices in Salvador despite the reduction in the number of available posts.
Conclusions
The image of Bahian society that emerges is far from one characterized by a rigid division between merchants and planters. It is better visualized as a continuum in which the local elite was set off from the rest of the population by an ill-defined and permeable barrier constructed from requirements of wealth, land ownership, family connections, and other intangible criteria. The social space between men who functioned solely as merchants and the established planter aristocracy was occupied by a hybrid social type, the merchant-planters, some of whom had crossed the boundary into the elite, while others for one reason or another remained outside.
Russell-Wood’s contention that “the aristocracy always kept itself hermetically closed to any aspiration on the part of the haute bourgeoisie,”58 is belied by marriage connections, landed interests, and social and political activities of the immigrant businessmen described here. The very ease with which wealthy merchant-planters joined the elite prevented it from becoming a closed corporation which might have left an economically powerful and politically weak social group on the outside—a situation that almost certainly would have transformed the frictions between merchants and planters over prices and credit into a more serious conflict. A comprehensive view of merchant/planter relations must take into account their close social and political ties and common economic interests as well as areas of disagreement.
There is simply no evidence to support the theory that merchants (by whatever definition) supplanted landowners to dominate Bahia’s social and political life by 1750. John Kennedy found the planters firmly in the saddle in the second half of the eighteenth century,59 and our data indicate that merchant-planters never assumed control of elitist institutions during the period Russell-Wood claims merchants rose to power. Men who maintained mercantile careers did experience gains on the city council in the period 1700-1739 in comparison with the preceding forty years, but this was not a symptom of any fundamental change in Bahian society. For the most part, the men concerned satisfied much the same criteria as their colleagues from the planter gentry. It is likely that there occurred some quickening in the pace of upward mobility in the first decades of the eighteenth century. However, this must be viewed as a continuing process through which the most successful merchants became part of an elite dominated by older landed families—a phenomenon discernible at the beginning of the seventeenth century and still functioning 200 years later.60
Throughout the period, it is equally evident that non-elite merchants assumed essential, if subordinate, roles in the colony’s political and social life. Their participation in public meetings of the municipal council and their membership in the major lay brotherhoods contributed to the formation of personal connections with the established elite which both facilitated and measured upward social movement made possible by economic success in commerce.
For example: Pedro Calmon, História Social do Brasil. Vol. I: Espírito da Sociedade Colonial (São Paulo, 1937), p. 27; Wanderley Pinho, História de urn Engenho do Recôncavo, 1552-1944 (Rio de Janeiro, 1946), pp. 307, 315-316; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and its Judges, 1609-1751 (Berkeley, 1973), ch. 5, especially pp. 120-121; Schwartz, “Free Labor in a Slave Economy: The Lavradores de Cana of Colonial Bahia,” in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 185-187.
A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Bahia (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 110-111, 119, 123, 132-133, 135, 354.
John Norman Kennedy, “Bahian Elites, 1750-1822,” HAHR, 53 (Aug. 1973), 415-439. Kennedy recommended reexamination of social change in the early eighteenth century. In his review of Russell-Wood’s book, Stuart Schwartz suggested the need to explain the changes noted by Russell-Wood and to take into account circumstances—such as fusion between mercantile and agricultural sectors —that may have mitigated a transfer of power; HAHR, 50 (May 1970), 370-372.
See Eduardo d’Oliveira França, “Engenhos, Colonização e Cristãos-Novos na Bahia Colonial,” Anais do IV Simpósio Nacional dos Professores Universitários de História (São Paulo, 1969), pp. 181-241.
Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal et l'Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1960); Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe de Benin et Bahia de Todos os Santos (Paris, 1968); Luís Lisanti Filho, Negócios Coloniais: Uma Correspondência Comercial do Século XVIII, 5 vols. (São Paulo, 1973), especially Vol. I, cdlxxv ff.
Documentos Históricos do Arquivo Municipal: Atas da Câmara, 1625-1700 (hereafter cited as DHAM: AC), 6 vols. (Salvador, 1944-1945), passim; also Arquivo Municipal da Bahia (hereafter cited as AMB), Atas da Câmara, 1697-1750, Códices 9. 24-9. 30; see for example: Códice 9. 24 (1697-1702), fols. 117-119, 185-187, 225-256; AMB, Provisões do Governo (1689-1695), Códice 124. 3, fols. 69-74, 177-183. The importance of the city as a center of credit is amply demonstrated in the hundreds of loan agreements registered with the Salvador notaries: Arquivo Público da Bahia (hereafter cited as APB), Secção Judiciária (hereafter abbreviated as SJ), Livros de Notas, Livros 1-42 (1664-1725).
The mercador de loja, in turn, should be distinguished from the city’s petty retailers who were largely tavernkeepers and grocers (vendeiros) and street venders (regateiros). The terminology used in this paper to identify various types of merchants is based on terms that appear in a variety of contemporary documents.
The Bahian categories are roughly analogous to those described for Spanish America. See: David A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge, Eng., 1971), pp. 251-257; Susan Migden Socolow, “Economic Activities of the Porteño Merchants: The Viceregal Period,” HAHR, 55 (Feb. 1975), 2-3.
Padre Jacome Monteiro, “Relação da Província do Brasil, 1610,” in Serafim Leite, História da Companhia de Jesús no Brasil, 10 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1938-1950), VIII, 404; DHAM: AC, II, 388-405; Thales de Azevedo, Povoamento da Cidade do Salvador (Salvador, 1969), pp. 188-189; José António Caldas, Notícia Geral desta Capitania da Bahia desde o seu Descobrimento até o Presente Ano de 1759, facsimile ed. (Salvador, 1951), pp. 525-533.
The biographical information used in compiling Tables I-III and drawn upon throughout this paper was taken from a variety of sources of which the most important were: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (hereafter cited as ANTT), Inquisição de Lisboa, Processos; Registo Geral de Testamentos; Habilitações do Santo Ofício; Habilitações da Ordem de Avis. APB: SJ, Livros de Notas, Capital, Livros 1-42 (1664-1725); APB, Secção Histórica (hereafter abbreviated as SH), Alvarás (1650-1714), Códices 438-440; Provisões (1714-1725), Códice 276; Ordens Régias (1645-1736). AMB, Atas da Câmara (1697-1750), Códices 9. 24-9. 30; Provisões do Governo (1683-1716), Códices 124. 2-124. 7; Ofícios ao Governo (1717-1725), Códice 111. 2. Arquivo da Santa Casa da Misericórdia da Bahia (hereafter cited as ASCMB), Termos dos Irmãos (1663-1733), Livros 2-3; Livro Primeiro do Tombo (1614-1652), Livro 40; Livro Segundo do Tombo (1652-1685), Livro 41; Livro Terceiro do Tombo (1686-1829), Livro 42. DHAM-. AC, I-VI. António Jaboatão, “Catálogo Genealógico de Fr. António de Santa Maria Jaboatão Adaptado e Desenvolvido por Afonso Costa,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 191 (1947), 1-279. Documentos Históricos da Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro (hereafter cited as DHBN), 120 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1928 to the present). We have included in our samples all merchants about whom we discovered the type of biographical information indicated. The term “sample” should not be understood as a scientifically random selection, since none was feasible here; we have used that term because the men for whom such information was available obviously do not constitute the entire population of merchants in Bahia during these periods. Each author independently gathered data for separate time spans, thereby affording a check on the reliability of the other’s information and making it possible to evaluate change and continuity over an extended period.
APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 7 (1690), fols. 68-70; Notas, Livro 21A (1708), fols. 45-48; Testamento e Inventário de João Lopes Fiuza, no. 4623 (1741); AMB, Provisões do Governo (1702-1716), Códice 124. 7, fols. 99-100, 187-199; Jaboatão, “Catálogo Genealógico,” p. 193. For the importance of kinship ties, see also: Lisanti, Negócios Coloniais, I, cl.
Sources cited in note 11 and Caldas, Notícia Geral, pp. 429-438.
See note 10.
Brading, Miners and Merchants, pp. 95-128. See also Louisa Schell Hoberman, “Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City: A Preliminary Portrait,” HAHR, 57 (Aug. 1977), 479-503, especially 494-496.
Luiza da Fonseca, “Bacharéis Brasileiros: Elementos Biográficos, 1635-1830,” Anais do IV Congresso de História Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, 1951), XI, 141; ASCMB, Termos dos Irmãos, Livro 2, fols. 753-754; and Livro 3, fol. 326; DHAM: AC, IV, 72-74; V, 97-98; VI, 35-36; DHBN, IV, 169-171; APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 6 (1688), fols. 91-93.
APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 12 (1698), fols. 46-48; Notas, Capital, Livro 28 (1713), fols. 113-114. APB: SH, Alvarás (1678-1702), Códice 439, fol. 200. ASCMB, Termos dos Irmãos, Livro 3, fol. 385. DHBN, LXII, 136-139. Caldas, Notícia Geral, pp. 432, 435. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, p. 374. Afonso Ruy, História da Câmara Municipal da Cidade do Salvador (Salvador, 1953), p. 359.
APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 15 (1699), fols. 42-43, 197-198; Notas, Capital, Livro 25 (1712), fol. 40; DHBN, LXXXIII, 140.
DHBN, VI, 361-372.
Publicações do Arquivo Nacional, 27 (1931), 73, 85.
APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 6 (1688), fols. 136-138; Notas, Capital, Livro 21A (1708), fols. 27-29; Livro 10 (1696), fols. 54-56; Livro 17 (1700), fols. 35-36.
A biography of João Peixoto Viegas is included in David Grant Smith, “The Mercantile Class of Portugal and Brazil in the Seventeenth Century: A Socio-Economic Study of the Merchants of Lisbon and Bahia, 1620-1690” (Ph. D. Diss., University of Texas, 1975), pp. 297-314. For the development of family properties in the subsequent period, see for example: APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 7 (1690), fols. 109-111, 202-204, 229-231; Livro 13 (1698), fols. 64-66; Livro 15 (1699), fols. 144-145; Livro 27 (1712), fols. 82-83, 84-85, 118-120; Notas, Cachoeira, Livro 2 (1710), fols. 124-126; Livro 8 (1718), fols. 211-218.
APB: SH, Alvarás (1678-1702), Códice 439, fols. 190-191, 195; Alvarás (1702-1714), Códice 440, fols. 20, 29. APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 15 (1699), fol. 158; Livro 24 (1710), fols. 5-6, 84-86; Notas, Cachoeira, Livro 3 (1704), fols. 19-20; Livro 5 (1710), fols. 29-32; Livro 13 (1722), fols. 110-112.
For a detailed discussion of these merchant-planters and a socioeconomic profile of sugar planters in general, see Rae Flory, “Bahian Society in the MidColonial Period: The Sugar Planters, Tobacco Growers, Merchants, and Artisans of Salvador and the Bahian Recôncavo, 1680-1725” (Ph. D. Diss., University of Texas, 1978), ch. 4. Some Spanish American merchants also invested in rural properties; see Brading, Miners and Merchants, p. 215 and passim. Hoberman, “Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City,” pp. 499-500. Socolow, “Economic Activities of the Porteño Merchants,” pp. 13-16. Socolow emphasizes that the porteño merchants, in contrast to their counterparts in Mexico and Peru, invested in land and ranching “sporadically” because of special regional conditions.
DHBN, XXXII, 272-273; APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 15 (1699), fols. 130-132; Livro 17 (1700), fol. 15.
APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 6 (1688), fols. 136-138, 139-141; Livro 15 (1699), fols. 5-6, 87-88, 99-101; Livro 24 (1710), fols. 145-146; Livro 30 (1715), fols. 146-148. AMB, Atas da Câmara (1697-1702), Códice 9. 24, fols. 185-187, 255-256; AMB, Atas da Câmara (1702-1708), Códice 9. 25, fols. 154-156.
ASCMB, Termos dos Irmãos, Livro 3, fol. 195; APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 21A (1708), fols. 53-55; Livro 30 (1714), fols. 108-109; APB: SH, Cartas do Senado (1715-1741), Códice 131, fols. 16-18. DHBN, LXXVII, 257.
Kennedy, “Bahian Elites,” pp. 416-420, 431-433. Jaboatão, “Catálogo Genealógico,” passim. Both sources indicate the continuity of some of Bahia’s oldest families.
Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, p. 120, plus pages cited in note 2.
ASCMB, Termos dos Irmãos (1663-1695), Livro 2; Termos dos Irmãos (1696-1733), Livro 3, in conjunction with biographical information from sources cited in note 10. Even after 1700 the scribes did not consistently identify homens de negócio as such.
Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, pp. 372-373.
DHAM: AC, II, 391; III, 161. APB: SH, Alvarás (Santa Casa da Misericórdia), 1498-1684, Códice 436, fol. 75. Treslado do Confisco. . ., Sept. 23, 1650, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon), Bahia, Papeis Avulsos não-Catalogados, caixa 1.
ASCMB, Livro de Acordãos da Mesa, 1645-1676, Livro 13, fol. 145; DHAM: AC, IV, 187, 405.
DHAM: AC, V, 349; ASCMB, Livro 2o das Eleições das Mesas e Juntas (1667-1726), Livro 34, fol. 14; Arquivo da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco, Livro Terceiro do Tombo, Códice 112, fol. 163.
José de Araújo Rocha (1716), António Gonsalves da Rocha (1725), Miguel Passos Dias (1730), André Marques (1739, 1749), Domingos Lucas de Aguiar (1742, 1747), Custódio da Silva Guimarães (1743).
David Grant Smith, “Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of the Brazil Company, 1649,” HAHR, 54 (May 1974), 233.
Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, pp. 136, 143.
Oliveira França, “Engenhos, Colonização, e Cristãos-Novos,” pp. 181-241; Anita Novinsky, Cristãos Novos na Bahia (São Paulo, 1972), passim.
Smith, “The Mercantile Class of Portugal and Brazil,” pp. 327-336.
Jaboatão, “Catálogo Genealógico,” pp. 81, 117; ANTT, Inquisição de Lisboa, Processo no. 8187.
Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, p. 373. DHAM: AC, IV, 178, 278, 403; V, 154.
AMB, Provisões do Governo (1683-1716), Códices 124. 2-124. 7, passim; Ofícios ao Governo (1717-1725), Códice 111. 2, passim.
AMB, Provisões do Governo (1683-1689), Códice 124. 2, fols. 42-50.
See together the sources cited in notes 10 and 41. Those promoted to sergeant-major included: Domingos Pires de Carvalho, Francisco Machado Palhares, Domingos Ramos da Cunha, Bernabé Cardozo Ribeiro, João Lopes Fiuza. AMB, Provisões do Govrno (1683-1689), Códice 124. 2, fols. 287-289; Provisões do Governo (1700-1702), Códice 124. 6, fols. 9-11; Ofícios ao Governo (1717-1725), Códice 111. 2, fols. 50-51, 114-116, 197-198.
See together: AMB, Ofícios ao Governo (1717-1725), Códice 111. 2, fols. 48-50; Provisões do Governo (1702-1716), Códice 124. 7, fols. 187-199; DHBN, LXXIV, 130-133. APB: SH, Cartas do Senado (1715-1741), Códice 131, fols. 16-18; APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 18A (1702), fols. 17-18; Livro 23 (1709), fols. 31-32; Livro 26 (1712), fols. 169-171.
For the history of the council, functions of officials, election procedures, etc., see: C. R. Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics: The Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia, and Luanda, 1510-1800 (Madison, 1965); Ruy, Historia da Câmara Municipal, passim.
Eduardo de Castro e Almeida, ed., Inventário dos Documentos Relativos ao Brasil Existentes no Arquivo da Marinha e Ultramar de Lisboa, 8 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1913-1936), I, 171-172.
For example, DHAM: AC, I, 358-365, 405-406, 454-464; III, 171-178, 331-332; IV, 186-187, 362-363; V, 134-135, 238-240, 256-257; VI, 35-36. AMB, Provisões do Governo (1702-1716), Códice 124. 7, fols. 177-199. John Kennedy has also emphasized interests shared by the two groups in the late colonial period: “Bahian Elites,” pp. 431-439.
AMB, Atas da Câmara (1697-1702), Códice 9. 24, fols. 117-124; Wanderley Pinho, História de um Engenho, pp. 193 ff.; Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, pp. 69-70.
AMB, Atas da Câmara (1716-1718), Códice 9. 28, fols. 29-31; Atas da Camara (1718-1731), Códice 9. 29, fols. 209-210, 211-216. The committee included senhores de engenho Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Cosme Rolim de Moura, Diogo da Rocha Albuquerque, Baltesar de Vasconcellos Cavalcante and José Pires de Carvalho; landed merchants José de Araújo Rocha and José Alvares Vianna; businessmen Manuel Gonsalves Viana, Pascoal Marques de Almeida and Manuel Passos Dias. The exact status of two members of the committee could not be determined. Similar examples could be drawn from the sources cited in note 47. On other occasions the two landed merchants on this committee emerged as civic leaders and conciliators—roles to which they were particularly suited because of their diversified economic concerns and their local as well as external connections. For example, Rocha was personally credited with persuading disgruntled merchants to accept a new import tax, while Vianna was designated a special mediator at deadlocked sugar price negotiations in 1721. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Livros de Registo do Conselho Ultramarino, Códice 87, doc. of Nov. 7, 1719, fols. 287-288 (Bancroft Microfilm). AMB, Ofícios ao Governo (1717-1725), Códice 111. 2, fol. 158. For biographical data, see note 44.
Ruy, História da Câmara Municipal, pp. 349-352.
Membership figures are based on the list compiled by Ruy (História da Câmara Municipal, pp. 348-360), revised and corrected from the council proceedings: DHAM: AC, I-VI; AMB, Atas da Câmara (1697-1750), Códices 9. 24-9. 30; Circulares da Câmara (1685-), Códice 33. 1. The professional status of members was determined from the sources cited in note 10.
Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics, pp. 74-75.
Wanderley Pinho, História de um Engenho, pp. 195-202; Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists, pp. 64-71; Mauro, Portugal et I’Atlantique, p. 234.
Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres, pp. 27-126. The economic situation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the impact of change on various socioeconomic groups is a major theme developed in Flory, “Bahian Society in the Mid-Colonial Period.”
Boxer, Portuguese Society in the Tropics, pp. 74-75; for one example of financial aid, see APB: SH, Ordens Régias (1727), Códice 21, doc. 66.
APB: SH, Provisões (1653-1724), Códice 272, fol. 128; Cartas do Senado (1696-1714), Códice 130, fols. 22-24, 36.
Ruy, História da Camara Municipal, pp. 355-356; Pedro Celestino da Silva, “A Cachoeira e seu Municipio,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico da Bahia, 63 (1937), 94; APB: SJ, Notas, Capital, Livro 15 (1699), fols. 49-50. Schwartz, review of Russell-Wood’s book, pp. 370—372 and Free Labor in a Slave Economy,” p. 193, n. 132.
Russell-Wood, “Mobilidade Social na Bahia Colonial,” Revista Brasileira de Estudos Políticos, 21 (July 1969), 184.
Kennedy, “Bahian Elites,” pp. 431-432.
Ibid., p. 433.
Author notes
David Grant Smith is Political Analyst for Brazilian and Cuban Affairs in the Office of Research and Analysis for the American Republics, Department of State, Washington, D. C. Rae Flory resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
