ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“Population is Everything”: Overcoming the Scarcity of People and the Sciences of Producing “Better Races” in Eighteenth Century Brazil

• In Event: Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 2

English Abstract

In 1750, when the Brazilian border expanded by several orders of magnitude, Portuguese Crown officials, administrators, and men of science received the news with hope and apprehension. While the growth of frontiers of Portugal’s possession in the Americas was celebrated, it also presented formidable challenges for settlement. How could a diminutive metropole whose empire stretched across the four corners of the globe, secure its new territorial gains despite the insufficiency of demographic resources? This paper analyses how population scarcity, the most persistent problem of Portuguese colonialism, turned “the multiplication of the people” into the empire’s most ambitious scientific eighteenth-century project. Drawing on Newtonian physics, political arithmetic, and anthropological thinking about the human as an empirically driven, sensorial being Portuguese imperial administrators launched a policy known as the “political mechanism.” Recognizing how “population is everything,” this talk historicizes the emergence of racial whitening (branqueamento) as a project of human improvement and “population multiplication.” Undergirded by the forging of a new ideal of white subjecthood, the salaried laborer, the paper discusses the promise of indigenous assimilation into whiteness through the mobilization of Newtonian mechanics and stadial racial theory into a social and humans science of land cultivation, miscegenation, and patriarchal household sexual discipline and political economic management. In this sense, the eighteenth-century Amazon became a laboratory for the production of bigger and better population futures via a scientific vision premised on expanding the population by remolding “rustics” into useful workers.

Author

• Patrícia Martins Marcos, University of Oklahoma