Os diretores de povoações: serviços e transgressões no Grão-Pará do diretório dos índios (1757-1798)

Abstract

The villages’ administrators, responsible for the settled Indians’ tutelage during the term Directory (1757-1798), are considered for an important part of historiography as subjects who took advantage of the role assignments to give account of their personal interests, disobeying constantly the legal provisions. Because of this behavior, some authors blame the administrators for the "failure" of the Indians’ Directory. This work, considering restricted this formulated vision, aims to understand better who were the directors that worked in Pará Captaincy. By analyzing the sources, found that those subjects occupied the chambers of the Villages, military troops and requested land grants and mercies. Regarding the latter, specifically, the directors required in return to their services in the Portuguese Amazon. Alongside these services, the directors committed a series of transgressions in the villages aiming to access local resources. Thus, we argue that serve the Portuguese crown and transgress one of its laws, the Indians’ Directory, were not incompatible practices but, coexisting on the day of the administrators. This is because the service and transgression was constituted on key strategies for achieving success in the region. It is due to be used for this purpose, which argued also that the transgression continued to exist on a large scale in the Grão-Pará of the second half of the eighteenth century, even as a practice on which there was moral criticism among the inhabitants of the society, and even she happening in a period in which Portugal sought to have a more effective political and economic control in the kingdom and overseas.