Administração colonial e o provimento de ofícios: a venalidade nas Minas setecentistas (1701-1750)

Abstract

The venality of occupations was an easily located and well spreaded practice in the Spanish monarchy, being used by the Crown as a way out at the moments of financial distress. In the Portuguese case, on other hand, that practice lacks of a deeper investigation, which seeks to notice its frequency and extension. This current paper looks exactly to determinate the existence of the venality in the Lusitanian administration and to define the ways in which it used to happen, focusing its analysis at the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in the eighteen century first half, period of political institutionalization of the metropolitan administration in the region and a several increase of the populational density. Besides that, this study wants also see the venality at the society in which its inserted, based on the historiographic turn of authors like João Fragoso, Maria de Fátima Gouvêa and Fernanda Bicalho and in the concept of Ancient Regime at the Tropics. Ideas like gift economy, graces, negotiated authorities, pluricontinental monarchy and municipal rulings are all present at the vision of the social environment in which the venality grown and developed itself, fitting in that environment which, at first sight, could look straight opposite to that practice. It seeks, therefore, to notice the aspects and main qualities that the sale of occupations took in Lusitanian territory not in an isolated manner, but without losing sight of the society in which it makes itself present. A society in which possibilities of social rise existed and it were pursuit, with the venality being able to be used at that mobility purpose.