O cárcere dos indesejáveis: Degredados na Amazônia Portuguesa (1750-1800)

Abstract

The banishment is a very old penal practice, having been applied by the societies in the defense and conservation of the order, excluding the social environment of the elements that offended the rules of conduct. In Portugal, it had been since the High Medium Age and from the XV and XVI centuries, the Portuguese expansionist politic implemented the use, through the punishment of banishment, to the ones that were socially undesirable like settlers in their overseas domains. This work analyzes the banishment process for the Portuguese Amazon, in the second half of the XVIII century. For Portuguese Amazon we understand the distinct States from the State of Brazil in Portuguese America, therefore, it refers to the territories of the State of Grão-Pará and Maranhão (1751-1772) and the State of Grão-Pará and Rio Negro (1772-1823). It privileges and it relates three study objects that have been little visited by the historiography: the convicted by the Portuguese secular courts to the colonial banishment, the study of the banishment in the second half of the XVIII century and the day-by-day of the convicted at the place of banishment and the dimension of the insertion of those in the Amazonian colonial society. In this sense, it seeks to understand and to evidence the place of the banished in the political communication circuits and in the instances of social structure and institutional presence in the second Portuguese colony in America. It aims at the Amazonian colony as a area of social tensions, negotiations and disputes; a possible place of conquering the challenges of a new social adjustment, building or resuming social ties, to those that had suffered an inverse social mobility: from metropolitans to infamous banished ones