Product Description: From the late 16th to the late 18th century, Brazil was a Portugese colony and most of its art was religious. Zealous in their desire to convert the indigenous peoples, Jesuit exploited the sensory impact of painting and sculpture and the result was a type of art that was perfectly crafted, opulent, majestic, theatri...read more

Product Description: In this authoritative and readable study, Russell-Wood documents the experience of both slaves and freemen of color in colonial Brazil, charting their culture, social framework, and domestic lives.

Product Description: This is a comprehensive survey of royal government in the Portuguese, Spanish, English and French seaborne empires in Africa, the Americas and Asia. Essays focus on four facets of such government: political, judicial, fiscal, and military administration...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A wide-ranging introduction to local government in the overseas empires of Portugal, Spain, England and France, with further reference to the English East India Company and the Dutch East and West India Companies. In an exercise in compensatory history, the book examines the government of empire not from the metropolitan perspective, but at the local level where government was most likely to impact on the everyday lives of both persons of European birth and indigenous peoples...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The articles collected together in this volume allow the reader to look at how plans for overseas settlement, conceived at council tables in Europe, actually took place on the ground overseas. The differing models and spatial distribution patterns of European colonies in the various parts of the New World, Africa and Asia were the result of a complex interplay of numerous conditioning forces...read more

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Product Description: Professor Russell-Wood’s detailed studies of Brazilian social history in the colonial era have long been recognised as model contributions to the history of class, race, gender and religion. This collection combines work on particular persons and groupings with survey articles on the role of the port and the frontier in colonial Brazil and on its historiography...read more

Slaves and freedmen of African origins in the English north American colonies and later United States have been objects of intense scholarly scrutiny, but the life-styles and contributions by their counterparts to the societies and economies of Portuguese America are generally ignored. Yet it was in Brazil that plantation slavery on a large scale was initiated in the Americas, and which absorbed greater numbers of persons of African descent than any other region of the continent. This volume seeks to redress the balance, combining largely unpublished archival sources with contemporary accounts and modern scholarship in order to present the slaves and freedmen of the colony to a wider group of readers. The author emphasises the gap between the letter of the law, official interpretations, and everyday reality. Differences of topography, the predominating commercial enterprise, chronology, and demography, were but some factors contributing to the degree of self-determination or freedom accorded to a person of African descent. There was a delicate balance between such external conditions and personal attributes in determining the roles of such men and women in a slavocratic society in which for the most part persons of European descent were in a numerical minority. This is not a history couched in terms of extremes: black or white; slave or master; European or African. Rather it is the history of a society unique to the Americas in which flexibility, permeability, ambiguities, and nuances resulted in a continually evolving and revolving play between freedom and bondage, between the individual and the greater community, between regulation and compromise, between colony and mother country. This is a history of the play of light and shade, each component changing in its relationship to the other, in its extent and in its intensity: in short the chiaroscuro which was Portuguese America - an appreciation of which is essential to an understanding of modern Brazil.

Product Description: Used.Good Condition.Hardcover.Edited by A. J. R. Russell-Wood.267 Pages.Former owner Name on it.No Dust Jacket.Minor Wear to the Edge.The Johns Hopkins University Press.