A Guerra dos Emboabas : as figurações sociais no alvorecer do Leviatã mineiro

Abstract

I analyse the importance of different networks of social interdependence that frame and guide people’s actions in a populous border region, the Brazilian gold mines (centre of the current State of Minas Gerais), discovered and disorderly occupied from the end of the 17th century. The Portuguese Crown has great difficulty in controlling that tumultuous environment and the potentates retain dominion through bossy relationships, imposing themselves through intimidation and force, supported by armed militias of enslaved and aggregates. Relations with the Crown are increasingly relevant and form an important interdependent web for the consolidation of local power. Thus, the powerful, apparently free, independent and absolute figures in the hinterlands, are, in fact, limited by networks of social interdependencies, I highlight two: one governed by elements such as power, sovereignty, defense of honor, boldness, insolence and violence, which structured local power relations, and another governed by dependency relations with the Crown, founded on respect, submission and vassalage. The objective of this work is to observe how these structures are related and how they pressure some individuals in the midst of the conflict that took place, known as Emboabas’ War. In this clash, outsiders, called emboabas, expelled from the mines those who had discovered them, the violent São Paulo’s explorers, allowing Portugal to gain greater control of society. To colonize the hinterlands, the Crown relies on the explorers, but with the discovery of gold, they become an obstacle to the consolidation of the central power. The Emboabas’ War, for having collaborated for the domestication of the country population, for the monopolization of the use of force, for the political centralization, for the development of interdependence between people and for the self-control of conduct, can be seen as an important episode of the western civilizing process in Portuguese America.