2In addition to a well-structured introduction, where the author discusses recent historical research on the Portuguese empire, and a conclusion, the book is comprised of five thematic chapters that also follow a chronological order. In the first one, the reader is transported to the new academic venues of John V's court, where academics, ministers, and royal officials gathered to discuss the Portuguese expansion. Chapter two recounts how royal officials reconsidered the American empire as they sought to administer Minas Gerais. In the next chapter, Kirsten Schultz examines the local dimensions of fiscal reforms put forward by Lisbon in the 1730s. Chapter four revisits the role of Brazilian consumption within the broader debates about the general functions of colonies. Finally, in chapter five, Kirsten Schultz recounts how Portuguese authorities tried to defend the Portuguese interests in Brazil while reckoning with population concerns and emergent ideas about race.

3The American historian’s main claim is that the discoveries of mineral wealth in what would become the captaincy of Minas Gerais drastically changed the way the Portuguese thought about and governed their New World possessions. Before the discovery of gold in the late-seventeenth century, Brazil was conceived by many as a continuation of the mother country. Although they had different symbolic statutes (Portugal was a kingdom, while Brazil was a conquest), they shared the same political and juridical culture. Like their metropolitan counterparts, the leading colonial sectors controlled the municipalities and represented their interests in Lisbon, where they insisted on their privileges as Conquistadores. The Portuguese authorities seemed to have no issue with that and, recognizing their own limitations, they adopted a hands-off approach to empire, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Portuguese secession from the Habsburg monarchy (1640).

4The negotiated nature of the Portuguese empire was doomed, though. Change came well before the ministry of the marquis of Pombal, as Kirsten Schultz makes abundantly clear. The desire to tap into the recently found riches of Minas Gerais and the need to establish some sort of recognizable order in that “gold-obsessed” society made alternative approaches to empire necessary. If the monarchy wanted to collect fiscal resources, the state needed to assert itself, pushing aside local elites and municipal authorities. Men like Martinho de Mendonça de Pina e Proença, for example, saw the traditional consultation of local representatives as an illegitimate nuisance that he traced back to the political context of the 1640s. For this royal official, who was assigned to reorganize the taxation structure of Minas Gerais, the crown should freely enact the changes it deemed necessary, without regard for the opinion of the settlers. While a more extractive mindset gained ground amongst the Portuguese authorities, the political status of Brazil dwindled. As Kirsten Schultz shows, it was no longer possible to see the American possessions as a continuation of the mother country. They had become a separate territory with the principal function of enriching the mother country, not reproducing its institutions and society. Alternative views conveyed in the scholarly and editorial initiatives of the Real Academia de História and the Academia dos Esquecidos insisted on the special dignity of Brazil and its history, but these views seem to have carried little weight.

5The sections devoted to the difficulties in implementing the capitação (head tax) in Minas Gerais are seamless examples of historiographical craftsmanship. Kirsten Shultz argues that the head tax reflected a new understanding of taxation and governance that emphasized the importance of gathering knowledge about the colonial society. In a way, for Alexandre de Gusmão, the capitação represented a paradigm shift from a society based on ideals of “heroic conquest” to a colony organized around the production of wealth. His ingenious fiscal strategy to increase the production of wealth through almost universal methods of taxation (capitação and maneio) would also rearrange the social milieu, as well as altering the condition of slaves in colonial Brazil. For example, slaves occupied in unproductive activities would have to be reassigned or else they would become a financial burden for slave-owners, since the head-tax had no exemptions. Naturally, this caused dissatisfaction amongst those who employed their slaves in domestic services or as personal guards.

6In the final chapters, Kirsten Schultz argues that metropolitan society and colonial Brazil continued to diverge during the second half of the eighteenth century, as mercantilist solutions became ever more popular in Lisbon. Emerging concerns with the country’s balance of trade and the desire to defend national industry were put to the test in colonial Brazil, where the Portuguese authorities tried to curb consumption of luxury items with little success. The Black population and interested textile merchants resisted the application of sumptuary laws. Yet, for some, the preservation of the racial hierarchy in Brazil required much more than barring the Black population from wearing rich textiles and garments. For men like Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783), who is examined at length by Kirsten Schultz, it was a question of imperial governance and imperial hierarchies. For the well-travelled physician, Brazil should not be a copy of the mother country. Instead, Brazil should have a “simplified socio-political order” with the sole purpose of enriching Portugal. Where Sebastião da Rocha Pita (1660-1738) had previously defended the transplantation of the Old Regime to the American territory, Ribeiro Sanches suggested that Brazil ought to be governed like an “army in campaign” or a “warship”, according to a simplified socio-legal order which he called “consular jurisprudence”.

8During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Portuguese authorities trialed new settlement schemes, pronatalist policies, the promotion of intermarriage and novel labor regimes such as the Diretório dos Índios. As Kirsten Schultz restates, these measures reconfigured the empire and should have promoted wealth production. However, as she also tries to point out, such solutions reflect imperial perceptions of geography and race, as well. Populations had to be mobilized, redirected, and co-opted for the greater good of the empire. The extension of Portuguese subjecthood to indigenous peoples was a way to show compliance with the principle of uti possidetis to other European powers. The redirection of the slave trade exclusively to Brazil, and away from Portugal, was a way to increase the production of colonial staples, while also making Portuguese soil “free from slaves”. Furthermore, the state-sponsored resettlement of married couples from the Azores was a way to address the overpopulation of the Islands and, at the same time, to augment the white contingent in Brazil.

9Highly compelling, Kirsten Schultz’s book provides new enticing answers to traditional questions, even if, some will argue, she sometimes seems to downplay the persistence of certain traditions. For example, the institutional pillars of the empire were left fairly untouched. In spite of Ribeiro Sanches’s writings, settlers and subaltern groups continued to be governed by the same laws and continued to communicate with the crown using the same channels of communication, which remained open to all of them. At the same time, the leading settlers of the colonial society continued to be co-opted to the imperial bureaucracy, both in Brazil and in Portugal. Indeed, Brazil might have been relegated to the secondary status of colony, but this does not mean that Brazilian-born men were slighted by the Portuguese authorities, a fact which probably helped to stifle the emergence of a resentful and entrenched creole identity. In this regard, there was indeed a significant difference between the politics of the Spanish Empire and the politics of Portuguese Empire.

10The other question with which one might take issue is the recurrent use of politically-charged words like “whiteness”, or “anti-blackness” when describing eighteenth-century settings. As I had the opportunity to say to Kirsten Schultz during our podcast, I am not sure that this is entirely justified when we are writing about societies in which race and ethnicity were plastic and fluid characteristics. We need at least to explain to the reader that modern-day conceptions of whiteness or anti-blackness would be completely foreign to those historical actors. Otherwise, the reader might project modern-day interpretations onto the past. In no way, however, should these remarks detract from Kirsten Schultz’s well-researched and provocative endeavor. This is a book that will have a long shelf-life, and it will certainly become a familiar entry in the mandatory reading lists of many academic syllabuses.