An Expanding Vocabulary

In the 16th century, the lexicon of poverty was subordinated to a dual civil and religious hierarchy that organized the Christian republics, simultaneously referring to the theme of the civic governance of cities and a longstanding ethical tradition in relation to determined states of necessity in the community of believers (widowhood, orphanhood, illness, begging, etc.). The typologies of pauperes formed different groups of need and hierarchies of belonging within Christianity, which implied different states of moral dependency prescribed by theology and by law (infirmity, rusticity, rudeness, extreme necessity, minority, misery, etc.). In addition to Roman law, this vocabulary came from the advance of canon law and Franciscan controversies related to the poverty of Christ, which in turn deepened the debate on the natural rights of pauperes, acknowledging spaces of action for them, even in very asymmetric conditions of power. Progressively, pauperes and miserabiles formed specific guardianship groups, stipulated in common law (ius commune) and capable of negotiating with and making demands on the constituted powers based on the doctrine of natural rights.¹

The repertoire related to the poor was disputed again in the 15th and 16th centuries when the question of poverty emerged as an urgent political problem for European cities. At this time, it was possible to observe attempts to achieve greater efficiency in institutional responses in the provision of aid and punitive legislation against “vagrants,” “vagabonds,” and the “idle.” In the 1520s, the growth of cities and the increased precariousness of forms of urban living became specific vectors for the reform of mechanisms for providing aid to the poor; this move for reform emerged in European educated circles with the publication of the work De subventione pauperum (1526). This was written by the Valencian humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540). Vives’ work, rapidly adopted in the reorganization of welfare in various cities after the 1530, stretched the meanings of deserving poverty, in order to restrict the right to alms to the “real” poor and force the “false” poor to work.²

In this context of the advance of frame-working policies, theologians from Spanish and Portuguese universities formed an intellectual current which defined in an integrated manner the vocabulary required to describe those who found themselves on the margins of the civic imagination of Iberians. Since the arrival of Francisco de Vitória³ in Salamanca, the neo-Thomist tradition had been based on the founding of subjective rights in order to respond to European political impasses, as well as those of unknown societies and territories.⁴ For generations, theologians, moralists, and missionaries used the lexicon of poverty and misery to govern those who found themselves in a state of powerlessness and oppression in areas under the jurisdiction of the Iberian monarchs.⁵

This repertoire can be perceived, for example, when in dealing with the American question Vitória characterized Indigenous people as naturally free human beings but dependent on the guidance of those who are wiser.⁶ In the vocabulary of the conquest, Indigenous peoples—and later Africans—came to constitute paradigms of poverty and misery, due to their lack of knowledge of the true faith, Roman law, and political life. The approximations between the terms used to name typologies of the poor and the semantic repertoires used for Indigenous people and Africans drew on the medieval conception of rights belonging to the human person without ignoring the condition of inferiority to which the term “naturally” subjected them.⁷

For theologians and jurists, the expansion of the monarch’s jurisdiction was not reduced to governing multiethnic empires but also involved re-dimensioning the vocabulary of poverty, misery, and charity, expanding the forms of exercise of authority in spaces where the personal power of lords over the majority that was enslaved or under a form of guardianship raised new questions for the political game. Similar to what had happened in the European space, the use of categories of poverty had political implications which aimed at negotiating and intervening in community dynamics. It is thus possible to see the advance of the civic language used to govern the poor but also new uses of vocabulary, as part of the aim of governing the Christian slaveholding republics that were organizing themselves in the Americas.

The New World and the Misery of Indigenous People

The understanding that Indigenous peoples were in a state of need worthy of the mercy of Christians placed them, in political terms, in the category of pauperes, due to their lack of power (parva potentia), the latter term could be translated as meaning “minority,” “rusticity,” “rudeness,” “ignorance” but also as “barbarity,” “savagery,” “paganism.” Once their humanity, natural liberty, and condition as subjects were recognized, Indigenous people were assimilated more precisely in the judicial and canonical category of miserable persons (miserabiles personae), due to their relative incapacity. Miserabiles personae was a term from European common law, drawing on the specific privileges of “those who cause pity in us,” whose condition of physical, judicial, or moral powerlessness needed to be alleviated by those who were wiser and more powerful.⁸ In a treatise published between 1630 and 1636, the Galician jurist Gabriel Álvarez de Velasco (1597–1658) listed a series of conditions that defined the miserable: those of widows, orphans, the ill, poor, elderly, pilgrims, captives, servants, clergy, prisoners, prostitutes, neophytes in the faith, virgins, celibates, soldiers, and so on.⁹

In Spanish America this category was first used for the judicial protection of Indigenous people by the Dominican Bartolomeu de Las Casas (1484–1566). He did so in 1545, based on the positions of theologians in Salamanca. The lawyers of the Indians, similar to the lawyers of the poor, had to protect the equity of those who found themselves in a state of oppression in the mystic body of the republic.¹⁰ However, the exercise of authority over the first peoples had specific meanings in the—densely inhabited—regions of New Spain and Peru and the political lexicon organized in Portuguese America, as a result of the wider dispersal of the populations who occupied the territory. From 1549 onward, administration of the Indians was disputed by Jesuits—defenders of natural liberty and the primacy of evangelization—and colonists—interested in direct slavery. Despite his initial enthusiasm for conversion by itinerant priests, the provincial Manuel da Nóbrega,¹¹ with the support of the governor general, began the creation of permanent villages under Jesuit protection as a way of countering the dispersal of the native people and the indiscriminate slavery practiced by the colonists.¹²

The controversies which began in the middle of the 1550s were important because because the theological-political arguments justified the model of evangelization, based on the establishment of villages and the Jesuits’ (temporal and spiritual) guardianship of village Indians, drawing on positions common to Portuguese and Spanish theologians.¹³ The explanations formulated can be read in a series of texts, including Diálogo sobre a conversão do gentio (1556–1557) and Plano Civilizador (1558), in which Nóbrega sought to legitimate the paternal administration of Jesuits based on the list of the qualities on which indigenous peoples’ inferiority supposedly rested: “bestiality,” “inconstancy,” “vicious behavior,” “brutality,” “rudeness,” “ignorance,” “rusticity.”¹⁴

In the reports of the clergy the first peoples emerged in toto as groups on the margins, poor people in a state of need, taking into account their vice-ridden customs and their ignorance of law, religion, and political life. In fact, they were considered as consisting of their own type, of an ethnical nature, but one that was assimilable to the open and heterogeneous set of categories of poverty and misery, based on typologies previously described in common law. Between the 16th and 17th centuries, in the documentation produced by the missionaries, the descriptions of the indigenous minority appear as a means of complaining about the actions of the authorities, at the same time as justifying government guardianship and need for charity to help to the “poor Indians.” The helplessness of indigenous peoples and the Christianization duty of monarchs were used as arguments for the expansion of the evangelizing effort, through providing more clergy and more missions, and reducing the indiscriminate presence of colonists.

In 1692, the Jesuit Barnabé Soares (c. 1625–1705) sent a report to the future governor of Bahia, João de Lencastre, in which he summarized one of the missionaries’ views of the Indians of Brazil, describing them as: “the poorest people who have been discovered in the entire universe.” Male Indians were content to wear shorts and a doublet of cotton, while women wore a single long shirt, made from the same fabric, which reached their feet. Their beds were hammocks, their blankets were the fires they lit, and their dishes were made from certain gourds. Although they were intrepid in war, they were careless in farming. If they were not constantly watched, they did nothing and had nothing to eat. Everything depended on the clergy.¹⁵ The diagnosis of the poverty of the indigenous people in Portuguese America produced by a Jesuit missionary at the end of the 17th century, echoed the common opinion that had been established by the Dominican school a century and a half earlier.

Disputes between Jesuits and colonists for jurisdiction over indigenous peoples can be observed, for example, during the occupation of the immense territory which formed the Portuguese Amazon. In the writings of the Jesuit Luís Figueira,¹⁶ one of the first missionaries to work in the Maranhão region, the spiritual helplessness of the Indians is mentioned alongside the evangelization duty assumed by the Portuguese monarch through papal bulls in the 1490s: “the main purpose which the kings of Portugal had at the beginning and still have in conquering new lands is not so much to expand their empire as communicate the faith and gospel to the unbelievers.” The king thus had to aid the “most helpless gentiles who were in a state of spiritual extreme necessity.”¹⁷

After the death of Luís Figueira in 1643, the missionary project in Maranhão was revived in 1652 by the most important Portuguese Jesuit of his time, António Vieira.¹⁸ In 1654, in light of local authorities’ reluctance to recognize Jesuit jurisdiction over indigenous people, in letters to the monarch João IV, Vieira evoked the poverty, misery, and extreme spiritual necessity of the indigenous peoples as the elements which made royal action necessary: “the injustices done to these poor and utterly miserable people cannot fit on this paper.” Since the Jesuit’s intervention was based on the Catholic raison d’état, he was able to cite the king’s commitment, which had been expressed in previous correspondence:

Lord. “And God knows with all the zeal for His services, I want justice for these poor people, so that I entrust you to inform me of everything that you deem necessary, because in this you do much service for God and for me.” Sire, these words are from Your Majesty, in the letter it pleased you to have written, and which was very dignified of Your Majesty.¹⁹

Vieira’s interventions ensured the maintenance of royal support for the missionary project and the publication of laws aimed at forbidding the slavery of indigenous peoples. The first of these, issued in April 1655, already included the majority of these measures. However, given the reluctance of the residents of São Luís and Belém to recognize the authority of the clerics, over decades a series of advances and setbacks occurred. This culminated in the 1686 Regimento das Missões do Estado do Maranhão e Grão Pará, assuring the Jesuits guardianship over the region’s indigenous peoples until 1759, when the villages were secularized.

The Miserable African Poor

In the middle of the 16th century, Domingo de Soto’s²⁰ writings on the nature of the dominium of slave owners opened a new flank for the recognition of the rights of those who found themselves in the legal condition of slaves. In his Relectio de Dominio (1535), Soto established both an ethical-moral limit on the exercise of power of lords and a space of autonomy for serfs which would be accepted by early-modern scholastics until the 19th century. This meant that slaves could also demand the recognition of the natural rights inherent in their condition.²¹ Soto’s writings were important for the development of doctrines about the evangelization of indigenous peoples and, especially from the 17th century onward, of Africans. In moral theology, they formed part of a broader conjunction of speculations on the ethical implications of the black slave trade and, in a particular form, on just titles to the possession of slaves and the legality of the slave trade carried out by Europeans.²²

For now, it is interesting to explore the first set of reflections listed, because these deal with the mobilization of the vocabulary of poverty and misery as a strategy for the justification of the spiritual government of slaves. As established by early-modern scholastics, the moral nature of seigneurial dominion among Christians was based on reciprocal obligations between slaves and masters, and also recognized certain rights, taking into account the poor and miserable condition of those who found themselves in a state of oppression. From the second half of the 16th century onward, many Jesuit theologians treated the subject in a more detailed manner, especially at the University of Évora,²³ where the problem of the possession of slaves was explored by authors such as Fernão Perez (1530–1595), Luís de Molina (1535–1600), Tomás Sánchez (1550–1610), Fernão Rebelo (1546–1608), Estevão Fagundes (1577–1645), and João Baptista Fragoso (1559–1639).

In the 17th century, the work of missionaries in colonial spaces and the advance of the Christianization effort coordinated by the Congregation De Propaganda Fide (1622) in Rome resulted in a new moment of pastoral action in relation to Africans based on consideration of their natural rights, as had been advocated by early-modern scholastics. The first edition of Alonso de Sandoval’s work,²⁴ Naturaleza, Polícia sagrada i profana costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catecismo evangélico de todos Etiopes, published in Seville in 1627, was the result of an unprecedented effort to summarize in the vernacular the controversies about the moral uncertainties of the enslavement of Africans, as well as establishing a prescription for their proper Christianization.²⁵ Sandoval, who worked on the conversion of Indians for almost four decades in Cartagena de Índias, also published a second revised edition in Madrid in 1647, under the Latin title De instauranda Aethiopum salute.²⁶ The change of title drew an explicit parallel with the work of another Jesuit missionary, José de Acosta (1540–1600), who in 1588 had published De procuranda Indorum salute, one of the most systematic treatises on the spiritual salvation of Indians.²⁷

In the middle of the 17th century, the new fronts of evangelization in Africa, increased criticism of Jesuit laxism in relation to the violence of the slave trade, and the development of debates on the natural rights of enslaved Africans formed a scenario that was increasingly sensitive to reforms in the moral theology of early-modern scholastics. The most significant confrontation occurred in relation to passages of Thesaurus indicus, by Diego de Avendaño.²⁸ The attack on Avendaño’s position, seen as “relativist,” on the violence of the slave trade and the inhumane treatment of Africans, was part of a dispute between the Capuchins, the Jesuits, the court in Madrid, and the Congregation De Propaganda Fide. The roots of these events go back to the actions and pastoral ministry of the Capuchin missionary Francisco José de Jaca²⁹ from 1678 onward in Caracas (Venezuela) and, around three years later, in Havana (Cuba), where he met his fellow Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans.³⁰ The two of them worked together, preaching and hearing confession, and acting to further the cause of “human rights” and the liberty of Africans. Arrested and sent to Spain in 1682, the two missionaries were tried in both the civil and ecclesiastic courts. They were absolved by Propaganda Fide in 1685. However, they were prohibited from returning to America.³¹

The modalities of the debate went beyond the limits of Iberian treatises, especially after the last two decades of the 17th century, when it reached Portuguese America. Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça was an African enslaved and freed in Brazil who, between 1681 and 1684, visited Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome; in the latter city, he was among those who spoke out against the perpetual enslavement of Christians through a petition analyzed by the Congregation De Propaganda Fide. The veracity of his information about slavery was certified by Portuguese and Spanish Capuchin missionaries. Mendonça’s petition arrived a little after the analysis of Jaca and Morains’ accusations regarding the cruelty of slaveowners,³² to which was added the report of an Italian Capuchin, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento, a missionary in the Congo in the 1680s and author of Breve e succinta relatione del viaggio nel regno del Congo nell’Africa meridionale, from 1692.³³ More than once the Congregation of the De Propaganda Fide was used as a mouthpiece by those who criticized the moral negligence of Christians who, in the Congo, continued to sell slaves to the heretics.³⁴

On March 20, 1686, the Holy Office in Rome made a pronouncement consisting of eleven summary responses to a Capuchin consultation of De Propaganda Fide. The Holy Office’s positions drew on the tradition established by Iberian theologians regarding the treatment of African slavery. For example, it reiterated the principle that despite much proof to the contrary, it was possible to carry out a just trade to enslave Africans in accordance with good conscience and on a legal basis. Africans could not save themselves without the moral correction of Christians and the masters who were obliged to save them.³⁵

A New Moment of Moral Theology in Portuguese America

The impacts of these controversies on Portuguese intellectual circles could be seen in the 1680s, when the first laws emerged that aimed at countering the excesses and neglect of the owners of African slaves in Portuguese America. Through a model vocabulary, based on natural rights, terms such as “poor” and “miserable” came to be used to describe the enslaved Africans. As well as transforming the semantic field, it was also an ethical-juridical innovation, since for almost two centuries the legislation common to the entire Portuguese empire had remained aloof from deeper interference in slaveholding, considering punishment a private right of owners.³⁶

The legal back-and-forth observed in the 1680s and 1690s was accompanied by increasingly common instances of what had once been rare, missionaries who spoke in their writings of “impiety” toward black slaves. In 1693, a memorial written by the Augustinian friar José dos Mártires who had worked on the missions in Rio de Janeiro, mentioned the banality of deaths without sacraments, a lack of decorum in the burial of the bodies, and the absence of suffrage for slaves. The theme was analyzed by juntas formed in Rio de Janeiro and in Salvador, involving Jesuits, Benedictines, governors, and bishops, which eventually decided to create the first two general cemeteries in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador respectively, administered by the main poor relief institutions in those cities.³⁷

In Bahia, Giorgio Benci³⁸ preached sermons referring to the obligations of slaveowners to their slaves, which a little later would serve as a basis for the preparation of a small moral treatise. The idea of writing a work about the proper government of slaves, an as-yet unheard-of phenomenon in Brazil, was even commented on in a letter sent to Tirso González, provincial general in Rome between 1686 and 1705.³⁹ In 1700, a set of sermons on slaves was compiled and published in Rome in 1705, under the title Economia cristã do governo de escravos. In his dedication to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosmo de Médici, the Jesuit António Maria Bonucci highlighted the “innate compassion” and the “tender mercy” of the Grand Duke toward the “oppressed” and those “vexed by harsh captivity.” He also emphasized the main theme of Benci’s work: “the obligation which slaveowners have to watch over the good administration of the miserable slaves who arrive every year in such numbers from the coast of Africa to Brazil.”⁴⁰

Economia cristã do governo de escravos was a work which reread the Aristotelian matrix of oikonomia through Christian ethics, in order to prescribe behavior within the private sphere of the family.⁴¹ This was a compendium of practical theology which set out how relations of exchange should be based on the variables of authority, obedience, and generosity between unequals. The novelty of Benci’s text was its pastoral nature, aimed at divulging in a systematic form, and in Portuguese, the principles which should govern the Christian way of life of slaveholding families. The slave as a rational being, capable of being baptized, and thus a neighbor in a state of misery, had to be seen through compassionate eyes, in a similar way to that in which inferiors were viewed, those without power, the rude, and those with diminished humanity.⁴²

The text’s defense of captives’ humanity and the list of attributes that accounted for their inferiority were also used by a selection of authors who discussed the duty of compassion to the poor. Benci’s argument did not make slaves and the legally free poor equal, since slaves were not directly responsible for the res publica, but in a particular way allowed an analogous set of rights to them, whereby slaveowners had to guarantee their slaves sustenance, clothing, discipline, and good customs, and include them in the mystical body of Christianity. Mentions of charity for minors were made to promote the organization and moral improvement of the slaveholding universe, advocating compassion as a primordial foundation of human relations: “according to St. Ambrose, whoever denied alms to the needy poor, leaving them to perish, was guilty of the death of the same poor person”; the text later posed the question, “are there day laborers who are poorer and more needy than slaves?”⁴³ The use of terms such as “miserable,” “poor,” “rude,” or “rustic” purposefully evoked the powerless condition of servants, in order to locate the slave, discursively, as someone who is worthy of “pity,” “charity,” “mercy,” and “compassion.”⁴⁴

In 1720, the Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia were published; this was the ecclesiastic legislation resulting from the first and only diocesan synod produced in Portuguese America, held in 1707. In it, references to the misery of slaves were supported by the authority of Benci’s text to justify their indoctrination, based on the recognition of their human nature, and thus their just spiritual and temporal treatment, which should be suitable for Christians.⁴⁵ Although Benci’s treatise had been the most systematic text published in the vernacular on the subject, different works from the same period echoed late scholastic positions on the ethical limits for physical violence, the defense of the provision of food, clothing, and assistance in the case of illness, as well as the imperative to Christianize the poorest which, in the case of slaves, fell to masters and parish priests as part of their duty to the community.

In 1702, references to the condition of slaves appeared, for example, in the work Frutas do Brasil, by Antônio do Rosário,⁴⁶ a Capuchin missionary from the convent of Salvador who had been in Portuguese America since 1686. Rosário referred to sugar mills in which, “inhumanely,” the workers were “hungry slaves, naked and lacking all food for body and soul.”⁴⁷ The Italian Jesuit Antonil⁴⁸ also mentioned the mutual obligations which governed slaves and masters, as well as reprehending the excessive use of violence, in his Cultura e opulência do Brasil por suas drogas e minas (1711):

To hastily punish, with a vengeful spirit, by their own hands and with terrible instruments and perhaps touch the poor with fire or burning wax, or mark them on the face, would not be suffered among barbarians, much less Catholic Christians.⁴⁹

Another Italian Jesuit, Alexandre Périer,⁵⁰ also a missionary in Brazil at the end of the 17th century, published Desengano dos pecadores in Rome in 1724. Once again, the use of the vocabulary of poverty and misery discursively referred to the asymmetric relations between slaves and masters, between powerful and powerless. The condition of slaves were the ultimate in misery and poverty because they were submitted to the excessive violence of slave masters and received no help from parish priests.⁵¹

Between the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, missionaries and ecclesiastics’ literary production in Portuguese regarding the common opinion about enslaved Africans and their descendants shifted, in a progressive effort to base thought on this subject on moral theology and to integrate slaves into Christianity. Applying the condition of being poor and miserable to enslaved Africans was an important mechanism for the recognition and defense of their natural rights, without this signifying any opposition to their judicial condition. In the writings from this time, meant to judge the limits of safe action for believers, slaves appeared as miserable people whose rights included good treatment, but also just correction.

The Civic Vocabulary of Poverty in Portuguese America

At the beginning of the 18th century, the lexicon of misery and poverty was used in distinct forms of politico-religious forms of intervention aimed at governing a pluri-ethnic empire. Marks of inequality could be observed in the attenuated recognition of the natural rights of indigenous peoples and Africans, a discourse which at the same time served both the advance of Christianization and those peoples’ hierarchical belonging to the political body. For this reason, they were seen as poor and miserable subjects of a specific type, who were also distinctive because of their recent conversion, their supposed ethnic homogeneity, and their cultural inferiority.

According to the political vocabulary in force in the Christian and slaveholding republics in Portuguese America, the slaves’ condition as “civil dead” did not eliminate the existence of their moral persona. In this way, the moral status of slaves was defined, in advance, by a situation of misery, since they were deprived of the natural liberty intrinsic to all humanity. In addition to the condition defined by civil law, indigenous people and Africans were also understood through the vocabulary of civilizational (paganism, infidelity, imbecility, barbarism, savagery, stupidity) and civic inferiority (ignorance, rusticity, rudeness).

Also noticeable is the use of civic vocabulary related to the poor which was based on the traditional European canonic-legal repertoire. Widows, orphans, the sick, foundlings, and prisoners, as stipulated by common law, also fell under the categories of misery and poverty referred to by civil and ecclesiastic institutions in Portuguese America. The brotherhoods that provided assistance to the poor founded on the Portuguese model, at least until the second half of the 18th century, were monopolized by the Old Christian and slaveocrat elites who, in turn, directed their assistance policies toward their “poor.”⁵² For example, Santa Casa de Misericórdia in Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1739, aimed to educate orphan girls who were white, honorable, devout, of legitimate birth, and without any degree of mulatismo.⁵³

In Minas Gerais in the middle of the 18th century, the municipal councils of Mariana and Vila Rica (Ouro Preto) decide to fund the placement of “poor” children abandoned in public places. The quality of those abandoned emerged as a problem in the 1750s, giving rise to a series of attempts to limit funding only to children considered “white,” preventing access for mestizo foundlings based on the quality of the newborns. According to the justifications for this reduction of scope in those receiving aid, honor was a natural attribute of whites, a qualification which, especially in colonial regions, defined one’s social place and not a status of ethnic purity. This was a narrative that was openly defended only in specific circumstances, but it was one that was revealing of interpretations of notable discursive coherence, based on the unequal honor of mothers in comparison to fathers and, consequently on the unequal merit of goods from the civitas. The vocabulary of detraction made use of a longstanding worldview marked by the subalternity of large groups of people who were characterized by an attenuated belonging to the politico-religious community.⁵⁴

In the Americas, similar to what had occurred in Asia, the main institutions which aided the poor—the Santas Casas de Misericórdia—catered for the free Christian community, whose degree of need was hierarchized according to distinct levels of quality in the civic body, with precedence being assured to the Old Christians on a descending scale of dignity in which lowest priority was given to recently Christianized generations and those coming from slavery. These organizations thus did not address the needs of captives, who were understood as mere inhabitants of the city, groups under the authority of slave masters, who in turn were morally obliged by natural law to assist their slaves materially (food, clothing, and in cases of illness) and spiritually, in solidarity with parish priests. Thus, enslaved Africans and Indians and their posterity were outside the preferential groups of aid, although they could “out of charity” be accepted in hospital and civil cemeteries, through the pecuniary payment of their master, or out of mercy in the event of their owner being “poor.” Those whom the Misericordias looked after were among the deserving poor; in short, a selective identity, an imagined community, and not a cohesive socioeconomic group, which could be defined sociologically.

Until the middle of the 18th century, misery and poverty were concepts cut across by religious meanings which hierarchized the categories of need. The reformist directives based on raison d’état of the 1700s would lead, in an integrated manner, to the first initiatives to secularize the administration of the poor in Portuguese America. However, despite the innovative intentions of this agenda, it would start from the judicial and canonical foundations which until then had dictated the very terms by which misery and poverty were understood.

Discussion of the Literature

In the last fifty years, the historiography on the colonial epoch has analyzed the references to the poor in documentary sources through different theoretical and methodological viewpoints, which, despite their diversity and amplitude, can be divided into four perspectives. It is not the intention here to produce a critical and exhaustive overview, but to define the main areas of research which are still productive.

First, the theme of the poor has been referenced in investigations into the institutions that provided care. In English-language studies, authors such as Charles Boxer and Russell-Wood have recognized the relevance which welfare institutions had for the political preservation of the Portuguese empire between the 16th and 18th centuries.⁵⁵ Since then, the Santas Casas de Misericórdia have been analyzed as important vectors in the building of civic identity, which was established around the provision of charity to specific types of poor people, such as orphans, widows, and the sick. Boxer’s considerations were taken further by Russell-Wood in a study, developed from his doctoral thesis, on the Santa Casa de Misericórdia of Bahia. The imperial dimension and the political relevance of aid institutions for the poor are two important perspectives which have influenced research into institutions providing aid to the poor in Portugal and Brazil.⁵⁶

In parallel, during the 1970s, social inequalities in Brazil formed a particular problem of analysis; they were illuminated by the Marxist perspective then in force in Universidade de São Paulo, at that time the main center of historiographic production in the country. In that decade a second field of study became established which combined the Marxist matrix, as it had been organized in Brazilian academia, with different orientations of social and cultural history, active in French and English historiography. The mechanisms of control and marginalization studied by Michel Foucault were added to analyses of poverty, through the works of Michel Mollat and Bronislaw Geremek. Laura de Mello e Souza’s study, produced at the end of the 1970s and published in 1982, was the best finished example of this historiographic moment. Souza incorporated, somewhat freely, the different historiographic traditions in order to demonstrate how the colonizing process, especially the occupation of the region of Minas Gerais in the 18th century, produced social “declassifications.” In her work, “the poverty of Minas” appeared as the result of objective conditions of economic expropriation, typical of the Portuguese colonial system.⁵⁷

In the middle of the 1980s, poverty as a historiographic object ceded space to analyses which emphasized the agency of the subaltern. Mentions of poverty and misery present in the documentation of the colonial period were reduced to a secondary role in favor of the capacity to act of poor whites, indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants, even in very asymmetrical conditions of power. Souza’s work, in turn, was read as excessively structuralist and not very critical of the depreciative and “prejudiced” view which characterized the exercise of Portuguese power. Certain “white” colonists—as indigenous people, Africans, and their descendants—could have been considered poor; but they were not declassified, in that they were capable of forming stable families, accumulating savings, and integrating ties of sociability. Many case studies have sought to emphasize the enrichment capacity of these sectors, notably on the part of freed women.⁵⁸

However, in all the studies cited, poverty is mentioned as a condition with a transparent, objective, universal, and ahistoric meaning, primarily economic, completely ignoring the many meanings of the vocabulary related to the poor, as forged in Western culture. In Brazilian historiography, the turn in colonial studies that occurred in the middle of the 1990s was fundamental for the diversification of historiographic perspectives beyond a dualist perception centered on the essential antithesis between colony and metropole, which had ended up nationalizing the debate. The research agenda was reoriented through studies of European common law and the political and religious nature of the exercise of power (monarchical and papal); in summary, the intellectual foundations which justified the Iberian empires.⁵⁹ The construction of differences can be interpreted not as an aprioristic and autonomous program of economic exploration but as organized through theological and political perspectives based on Aristotelianism and second scholasticism. In this sense, the vocabulary and language of poverty emerged as a manifestation of the common intellectual repertoire, anchored on theology and law, allowing the connected comprehension of the reciprocal influence of experiences.⁶⁰

In turn, in the last forty years, the historiography on poverty has also called attention to the unavoidable importance of the rhetorical arsenal formulated to capture the phenomenon of poverty.⁶¹ From this perspective, the uses of the vocabulary related to the poor and miserable stopped being seen as matters of objective and measurable fact, as poverty came to be analyzed as an intellectual construction with political, judicial, economic, and moral implications. It is not a question of denying the relevance of quantitative investigations, but of privileging the historic uses of the vocabulary, in order to recompose, genealogically, the relations of strength which forged the argumentative structures.⁶²