Aviamento e redistribuição na Amazônia: uma análise evolucionária do período colonial

Abstract

The economy and the market are not synonymous. This distinction is essential to understand aviation, our object of study. The thesis presents an alternative way of viewing the economic system of the colonial Amazon: instead of emphasizing the market system or its elements, we adopt redistribution as an institution that dominantly promotes the circulation of society's means of subsistence. This redistributive economy emanates from the State's ability to receive (taxes) and distribute (payer), in a monetary system without coined currency, which uses genres (means of subsistence) as money. This way of interpreting the economy was only possible through the use of Polanyi and Veblen's institutionalist theory, which helped us to define the objective of the thesis in understanding how the economic and social structures of the colonial Amazon, that is, forms of economic integration (FIE), support institutions and organizational structure of society, were decisive in the emergence, growth and persistence of aviation as a financial institution. In this sense, relief is an adapted and coherent manifestation of the financial demands of the redistributive economy, that is, where credit (and the flows of financial resources) are carried out in kind and debt comes from non-economic obligations – which During this period, it uncouples it from market-oriented motivations. Throughout the colonial period, aviation presented several institutional variations, which are in line with the change in the social and economic structure (we highlight the Missions Regiment and the Pombaline reforms), as we defend in our working hypothesis. Among the main variations that we present as a result of the causal and cumulative, therefore, evolutionary process, we highlight commercial aviation, state redistributive aviation and commercial redistributive aviation. To explain these variations in more detailed Darwinian terms, we chose to outline the evolutionary process for the movement of some important resources, such as captives (rescue troops) and drugs from the backlands, facilitating the work of protected Indians (state redistribution) and families caboclas in constitution (mercantile redistribution). Thus, the layout is dynamic and diverse, resulting from its interdependence with the structure in constant transformation.