Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil by Heather F. Roller (review)

This book presents an innovative and detailed assessment of the evolution of the settlements in the Portuguese Amazon from 1750 till the early 1800s. Two important transitions occurred during this period. First, as a result of the Pombaline reforms in the 1750s, mission-type villages became secularly administrated settlements under the new Directorate system. Second, towards the end of the 18^th century, the Directorate system was abandoned, the settlements became ordinary villages, and the status of the native people was upgraded to free vassals of the Portuguese crown. A major driving force of these reforms was the scarcity of labor in Portuguese America, which stemmed from a small available Portuguese population to resettle abroad and a reduced and dispersed indigenous population.

There is a consensus that all colonial-era settlements in the Portuguese Amazon were artificial in the sense that natives were forced to abandon their nomadic life-style to settle down in the missions or villages. Such settlements were created to consolidate Portugal’s domain on the land and facilitate the enforcement of compulsory labor needed in the Portuguese colonial enterprises. In light of this, the majority of the traditional literature on settlements considered the Portuguese Crown as the only relevant actor.

Yet, by revisiting this period from the local actors’ vantage point this book reveals a rich environment in which this consensus provides only a partial account of the facts. To do so, the author relied upon primary sources available in many archives, including the important correspondence of colonial administrators. This is the first, and, in my opinion, the most important contribution of this book. More specifically, the author focuses on how the colonial settlements adapted to the harsh environment, and how the natives, migrants, missionaries, Portuguese administrators, and the Portuguese Crown interacted. As explained below, this leads to significant changes in our understating of Portuguese Amazon colonial history.

The first chapter provides a brief overview of the initial settlement in Portuguese Amazon that consisted of missions managed by different religious orders. The second contribution of the book is documenting that most of these settlements had been relocated several times over the years. This distinctive mobility is intrinsic to the Amazon due to the existence of a huge amount of vacant land and to the changes in the fluvial landscape that affect availability of food, suitability for planting, and insect-borne diseases. Next, the author discusses the changes introduced by the Pombaline reforms implemented in the second half of the XVIII century. A central aspect of such reforms was the conversion of the missions into villages with secular administration. This was motivated by the difference in objectives between missionaries—that, for instance, did not teach Portuguese to natives and used their labor for their own benefit—and the Portuguese Crown that needed the native’s labor in its colonial enterprises. Such transition was relatively smooth because the colonial authorities did not change the structure of the missions. By conducting the analysis from the point of view of local actors, the author finds that they had some voice in this process, in particular in those issues related to service obligations (compulsory work) and mobility constraints. This accommodative nature of colonial policy has been overlooked in the literature, and underscores the importance of the use of local primary sources.

The service obligations of the settled natives (índios aldeados) could be met by participating on official collecting expeditions and on official expeditions (descimentos) designed to convince natives to settle in a village. The collecting expeditions—studied in Chapter 2—consisted of annual incursions into the forest to collect cacao and other wild products (drogas do sertão) that could be exported. The author uncovers that the índios aldeados seemed to enjoy these expeditions due to the potential financial gain and to the little monitoring involved, allowing them to have substantial freedom in...