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

This new study intends an analysis of the Overseas Council, the principal metropolitan administrative body of the Portuguese Empire in the early modern period, as understood through the prism of social-network analysis. Myrup includes chapters about events in continental Portugal, colonial Brazil, and Macau. But Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World is not simply an exercise in institutional history; rather, it is a collection of short biographies of figures from the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries whose activities intersected with the Council’s deliberations. The figures analyzed include Jorge de Mascarenhas, a sometime president of the council; António Raposo Tavares, an explorer of the Amazon basin; Rodrigo César de Meneses, a colonial governor in Brazil; and Zhang Rulin, a Chinese magistrate charged by the Qing state with investigating a crime in Macau. Myrup situates each of these men within their specific local contexts as well as within broader institutional frameworks, showing how their individual career trajectories linked to the vast structures that were articulated to hold the Portuguese Empire together. The end result is a fragmented picture of a fragmented entity, of individuals loosely connected to institutions that only loosely bound a massive political and economic construct.

The workings of the Overseas Council are undoubtedly crucial for an institutional understanding of the Portuguese Empire. But in the end, Myrup’s book offers a disjointed perspective: His stories about the Brazilian sertão (hinterlands) sit uncomfortably beside an episode from Macau. He offers little substantial discussion of other, undeniably important, parts of the empire, such as Angola, Mozambique, and India (areas, it should be noted, that are discussed in the same archives that Myrup consulted). Troublingly, Power and Corruption contains only a brief analysis of the highly problematical term corruption (11), despite its heavy moral implications. This lacuna is symptomatic of a larger issue regarding the tone in the book, which generally reads as an attempt to imitate those works of early twentieth-century imperial history that contrasted the imputed virtues of the English or the Dutch with the venality and inefficiency of the Portuguese.

Set within these echoes of a dated register are a few fashionable notes: Myrup’s use of social-network theory adds little more to his analysis than a few schematic depictions of a layered imperial administration (25, 48, 61)—and the uncontroversial assertion that “human relationships played multifaceted roles in the history of the Portuguese state, magnifying and diminishing the authority and reach of a colonial bureaucracy that stretched from South America to East Asia” (6). A fuller discussion of these networks would have necessitated an examination of the intersection between the Church and the Inquisition, both of which were integral to the early modern Portuguese state, frequently supplying members for the Overseas Council.