Um mercador de Vila Rica: atividade mercantil na sociedade do ouro (1737-1738)

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the commercial movement of a shop in the region of the Minas, through the current accounts registered between February 1737 to August 1738 in an accounting book. Particularly we analyse, inside the limits dictated by our source, the customers of this commercial establishment. As the book distinguishes each one of the goods and his buyers, we take such goods like an indicator of the taste and preference of the clients, and based on this observation, identified the preferences and some characteristic elements of determined groups of that society. Another aspect privileged by this study was the mercantile activity in Vila Rica. In this sense, we detached the mercantile circuit of the commercial houses and the form like was structured, through a standard hierarchical depending on the size and capacity of investment of their owners. The reach of this investigation corroborates what the historiography has long had already made clear: that the mercantile activity in force in the space of the mining region of the seven hundred has a signification that goes very much besides that space, and there goes by the extensive configuration that was unifying the Portuguese Crown and its overseas possessions, in this case, the Portuguese Empire.