A educação como herança das elites coloniais em três comarcas da capitania de Minas Gerais: Rio das Mortes, Rio das Velhas e Vila Rica (1750–1810).

Abstract

The present thesis aims to analyze the education as an inheritance of the elites of three districts of Minas Gerais Captaincy (Rio das Mortes, Rio das Velhas and Vila Rica), in the second half of the 18th century and the first decade of the 19th century. It is intended to understand which place did education or the legacy of a patrimony linked to educative precepts, intended for the family group members, but also for society; occupy with the intention of local elites to maintain, increase and perpetuate their social positions and their privileges. For that, we chose as a starting source a list of "Rich Men of 1756". This list, which was elaborated in 1756 at the behest of the Navy and Overseas Council, had the purpose of indicate to the King the names of the richest men in the Captaincy of Minas Gerais. From the list, we looked for those individuals who concomitantly had inventories and wills. Such documents were chosen to form the central corpus of this research once they allow to observe the educational heritage left by. The theoretical basis used for the present analyzes was, fundamentally, Bourdieu's theory of capitals. This approach has been helping to think how the individuals from the elite in the eighteenth-century Minas – many of them young people that came from Portugal – have sought, through the construction of a social capital linked to the large accumulation of economic capital; to effect the constitution of the land nobility, symbolic, social and cultural capital, and the used strategies to do so. Among these strategies, one seeks in particular to notice the place that education, especially related to the legacy of an educational heritage, used to occupy in the social reproduction of these same subjects.