Maps and the Portuguese Treasure

Exports, written technologies and colonialism, ca. 1760-1810

Abstract

This paper investigates the document typology of export maps in the Portuguese Empire, between 1760 and 1810. Such written technology - increasingly common with the implementation of the pombaline reforms - had a non-linear and transformative course. The intention is to outline a chronology for this typology and highlight some of its peculiarities over time. The text uses quantitative analysis to deal with the specialization of literate practices and the reconfiguration of perspectives on nature. The accounting technologies and their relevance on a large scale in Luso-America are also objects. Finally, such processes are assessed in the captaincy of Rio Grande de São Pedro, through the trajectories of imperial agents and the documents that registered exported commodities. The central argument is that the export maps express a certain notion of nature – unified by its conversion into capital – shaped and intensified through certain technologies, those being tabular export maps, which allowed a more intense economic exploitation of certain colonial spaces.