Lugar e significado da gestão pombalina na economia colonial do Grão-Pará

Abstract

The historiography on the colonial period in the Amazon involves an opposition between reality shaped by a colonial agricultural project and the occurrence of concrete situations of extractive economies, depending on the availability of capital to be applied in the main means of production: the black slave. So, a long period of scarcity of resources would have conformed a cycle of the extractive economy in the region dominated by the "drogas do sertão", replaced with an agricultural cycle as the very result of Pombal's management. This period would be the turning point for a dynamics determined by agriculture, which improved on by world market situations, particularly those linked to the independence war in the USA, would find significant limitation only with the emergence of the new cycle centered on extractive rubber, which began around the second half of the XIX century. The results discussed here do not show that Pombal's period is the moment when finally the foundations of the Amazon economy were established. In fact, it was a vital and creative time for a trajectory, which even though started almost ¾ of a century before, imposed itself marking the reforms of the period, which in turn conditioned indelibly the history of the region.