ABSTRACT
With the domestic uncertainties of the restoration of the monarchy behind them, royal officials in early eighteenth-century Portugal could turn their attention to the ultramar.2 Although its integrity had been assailed during the Union of the Iberian Crowns by the military conflicts that union implied, the empire now appeared to offer the basis for preventing a future loss of sovereignty. Above all, officials argued, it was Brazil, a continent of agricultural and now well-known mineral resources, which could counter Portugal’s smallness and inescapable geo-political vulnerability within Europe. From the ambassador Luiz da Cunha’s sanguine vision of Dom João V as an ‘Emperor of the West’ to royal counselor Antônio Rodrigues da Costa’s dire prediction about the inevitability of a wealthy Brazil refusing to remain subjugated to an impoverished Portugal, the discourses of empire recognized that the once global sources of wealth and power of the Portuguese monarchy were now predominantly American. Yet, as officials also recognized, Brazil was vulnerable to external rivals and to the internal threat of rebellion. erefore the maintenance of empire would require addressing both defense and American governance and administration. us, Cunha offered a plan for imperial reorganization based on a reasoned practice of commerce, while
Costa urged the crown and his fellow members of the Conselho Ultramarino (Ultramarine Council) to provide Brazil with more efficient recourse to justice, especially in the mining region where lawlessness seemed to prevail, and to reassess Brazilian fiscal burdens. Such claims, according to Laura de Mello e Souza and Fernanda Bicalho, signaled the displacement of an older messianic vision of the empire by an increasingly secular understanding of empire and imperial administration based on the ideal and practice of justice.e empire would now be both American and ‘of this world.’3
