Entre mobilidades e disputas: o sertão do Rio Piranhas, Capitania da Paraíba do Norte (1670-1750)

Abstract

After the expulsion of the Dutch of Portuguese America, the Lusitanian Crown returned to efforts for economic development and occupation of their colony in the New World. The time had come to expand its boundaries westward, turning to the distant hinterlands, investing in wars and raising cattle, as a impeller of the opening of paths and of occupation areas. From the perspective of a Social History of the Hinterland, this research sought to contribute to the debate on the spatial and social formation of the colonial hinterlands, building upon the Hinterland of Rio Piranhas, between 1670 and 1750, located in the Captaincy of North Paraíba. In this context of internalization of the lusos domains, the aforementioned hinterland was involved in a play of power over their spaces articulated by strategic actions of the colonizers, which resulted in the reconfiguration of territories, through the deterritorialization of indigenous nations, which in turn, they did resistance actions of different ways, from direct confrontation, the war against the colonial forces, to the formation of alliances with outsiders. Using documents of the Overseas Historical Archive, land grants registers and cartographic documents, among other sources, sought to launch a historiographic view at the plot of this hinterland, which had become a zone of multiple frontiers, pervaded by the mobile capability of their social agents, which articulated in paths networks and social networks that points a moving hinterland.