Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World by Eric Lars Myrup (review)

In Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World, Eric Lars Myrup argues that early modern Portugal and its far-flung empire were linked together by a network of informal personal relationships that underlay the country’s formal instruments of administrative control. It was largely this network that determined to what extent, and in what manner, instructions formulated in the name of the crown by the various advisory and administrative bodies were actually implemented—if they were carried out at all: the system allegedly generated widespread corruption and administrative abuse.

To demonstrate how this defective system operated in practice, Myrup first describes the origins, composition and formal administrative role of the Overseas Council—the key body, founded in Lisbon in 1642, to advise the king on the management and administration of his overseas possessions and interests. Then, drawing on a mass of documentation, both published and unpublished, Myrup presents a series of individual case studies set variously in Portugal itself, Brazil, and the Portuguese empire in Asia. The book has an introduction, a six core chapters and a conclusion. The chronological framework covers approximately the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century.

In the first of his case studies Myrup focuses on the careers of two prominent members of the seventeenth century Overseas Council, D. Jorge de Mascarenhas and Salvador Correia de Sá e Benavides. The former was a career military fidalgo who rose to be the first Marquis of Montalvão, first viceroy of Brazil (1640–41) and the Council’s first president (1641–44), while the latter had a distinguished military and administrative career in Brazil and Angola before returning to Portugal in 1652. Next, with the spotlight still on Brazil, Myrup recounts the memorable deeds of the celebrated seventeenth-century bandeirante, António Raposo Tavares, followed by those of Rodrigo Cesar de Meneses, an eighteenth century governor of São Paulo. A chapter follows concerning the vicissitudes of Luso-Spanish relations in East Asia during the 1580–1640 period, when Portugal and Castile were ruled by the same monarch.

The final case study, which concerns relationships between the Macau City Council and the Chinese bureaucracy, is somewhat different from the others. It centers on an official called Zhang Rulin who in the 1720s was charged by the authorities in China to conduct an inquiry into the disappearance of two Chinese citizens while visiting Macau. The incident threatened to escalate into a serious jurisdictional dispute and to jeopardize continued Chinese tolerance of Macau itself. Eventually, to avoid a dangerous political impasse, Zhang struck a deal with elements on the Macau City Council to accept what was clearly a cover-up. This was despite strong evidence that the two missing men had in fact been murdered. The reality was that good informal relations between the Chinese authorities and the local Portuguese were essential for Macau’s continued prosperity—indeed, for its very survival—and this basic political reality could not be ignored.

The book concludes with a useful bibliography that is generally up-to-date. But bibliographies are seldom comprehensive and this is no exception. Here the absence of any reference to the work of the Spanish historian Rafael Valladares, whose challenging views on Luso-Castilian relations in maritime Asia raised a considerable stir in Portuguese scholarly circles a few years ago, is a noticeable omission.¹

Myrup’s emphatic focus on portraying colorful individual characters, and his repeated use of mini-biographies as a didactic tool, may perhaps attract criticism from some readers—particularly those who prefer a more explicitly reflective approach. Moreover, given that the term “corruption” figures prominently in the book’s title, one might reasonably have expected some significant discussion in the body of the work itself about precisely what, in this context, “corruption” means. Myrup does indeed remind us, in his introduction, that we should not necessarily assume that behavior regarded as “corrupt” today would have been recognized or condemned as such in early modern times...