Compadrio e posse da terra: da produção do espaço às hierarquias sociais (Vale do Rio Piranga, Minas Gerais, 1804 1856)

Abstract

During the early years of the Empire of Brazil, the land structure remained resultant from the Portuguese Crown land concessions, continuing particularly unequal which made possible the persistence of large rural properties around which lived a civilly free population, but politically and economically dependent of rural elites. Thus, it was a widespread practice make yourself a landowner, what enhanced the possibilities of creation and reproduction of social in interpersonal relations of economic and political dependence, what shaped a historical process that defined the social place of the individual in that rural society. This dissertation, by means of spatial orientation in the construction of its objects and research issues, presents the space as a social production pertinent to the understanding of different cultural singularities of human experience. Then, a exhaustive research on land registers and baptism records from three rural parishes on the periphery of mining zones, was conducted to the proposed objective of deep understanding on the interactions between the agrarian space and its social structures, in a historical in which there was a rearranging of capital investments from the mining to the farming activities. Through considering historical maps, written memoires of gold rush, and the formation and expansion of the ecclesiastical territory in a primary district of European colonization, it was possible to trace the historical and geographical paths of the local development of the eastern lands of the captaincy, a region which had as main entrance the valleys of the Piranga River. This micro region had in the transatlantic slave trade an structuring element of its demographic composition, what has defined the development of a historical process of concentration of the slaveholding and accentuation of the social inequalities in that society. In this socioeconomic context, social hierarchies and the social meanings of being a slave-owner were reconsidered, which brought to the research handled the urgency to review the land structure of that rural region. Through operationalization of methods and techniques of the Spatial History and Geographical Information System, important interpretive possibilities on land tenure and rural history in the Brazilian past are demonstrated. Finally, this historical background of mutual inference of social relations and land tenure, made possible to investigate elite families structures and its social strategies, which highlights how political agents in rural parishes have participated in the process of national State building in Empire of Brazil