Featured Graduate Student Research: Romina Wainberg

Written in Stones: Tracing Early Modern Iberian Origins of the Modern Brazilian Mining Economy

The objective of my trip was to conduct research on Iberian 16th to 18th century sources that contain key information regarding long-term extraction of mineral resources in Brazil. Although mining remains one of the country’s central economic activities and the biggest catalyst of environmental crises in the area, the origins of this exploration model lie on the other side of the Atlantic: in diaries, letters, treatises, and literary pieces written by Iberian settlers from the 16th century onwards. Thus, in order to trace and to grasp the logic behind mineral extraction in Brazil, as well as its contemporary consequences for the Brazilian population, it was necessary for me to examine early accounts written by European explorers and stored by European institutions.

My travel was mainly based in Portugal, particularly in the city of Lisbon, which ended up being an outstandingly fruitful destination for the development of my research. Although the copious collections held at Saint Peter’s Room (Sala de S. Pedro) and The Royal School of Saint Peter (Real Colégio de São Pedro) in the city of Coimbra were eye-opening and promising, my first ground-breaking finding took place at The Lisbon Academy of Sciences (Academia das Ciências de Lisboa). There, I had the opportunity to examine volumes I, III, and V of the Economic Memories of the Academy (Memorias Económicas da Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa), which revealed interesting details about emerging economic and logistical models for geological extraction in Latin America over the course of the 18th and the 19th centuries. These models comprised a detailed inventory of goods found in different regions of Brazil (including the area of Minas Gerais, where my research is focused), as well as a nuanced depiction of the characteristics of the country’s soil, flora, and fauna. This kind of inventory was also present in early rare editions found in the Academy, such as José Pedro Xavier Da Veiga’s Ephemerides mineiras, which collected data and testimonies ranging from the 17th to the 19th centuries.  

Although interacting with these rare editions was fascinating, proof found in both the Memories of the Academy and Da Veiga’s Ephemerides was not entirely unfamiliar to researchers specialized in early modern mining: By the second half of the 17th century, geological extraction in Brazil was a matter of fact and there were ongoing plans to turn exploration into a more sophisticated, systematized, and/or prominent economic activity. This evidence is backed by official documents issued by the Portuguese Crown and compiled in volumes such as the Chronological History of Diamond Mining Contracts Up to Year 1778 (História Chronologica dos Contratos da Minerassão dos Diamantes … quese lhe Tem Occorrido Ate o Anno de 1788), which I also had the chance to examine during my first visit to the National Library of Portugal.

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After a long week of researching, I found new evidence of what is now a turning point in my investigation of the bilateral relations between Portugal and Brazil: I found underexplored proof that  Portuguese influence on the systematization of the Brazilian mining economy started not in the 17th century, but in the early 16th century. Even though volumes such as A América Portuguesa (2008) published by the National Library itself establish that the planning of systematic geological exploitation started ca. 1690, two documents stored in the same institution suggest otherwise. The first one is a hitherto undigitized article written by researcher and mining engineer Luís de Castro e Solla, published in one of the mining bulletins of 1968 with a print run of merely 200 copies. Drawing on primary sources from the 16th century that range from the well-known Treatise of Gabriel Soares to the rather underexamined chronicles of Duarte Coelho, Tomé de Souza, and Mello Morais, the researcher demonstrates that Portuguese ingenuity started shaping Brazil’s mining economy beginning in the first half of the 16th century. The second document that I found in support of de Castro e Solla’s argument is a manuscript likely written at the end of the 16th century and published in the year 1603, entitled Original Regiment for the Brazilian Mines (Regimento Original para as Minas do Brasil). This document, officially issued in Lisbon, proves that even early stages of geological extractivisn in Brazil were intended to be systematically structured and regulated by Portuguese metropolitan centers.

With these promising findings in mind, I will now travel to Minas Gerais to carry on my research at the Museum of Mines and Metal (Museu das Minas e do Metal) and at the Mining Archive (Arquivo Mineiro). Based in the city of Belo Horizonte, I will be working alongside geologists and social scientists to examine the intricacies, the origins, and the thick specificity of the Brazilian mining sector, as well as its contemporary impact on the Latin American population and beyond. In this upcoming trip, I plan to continue developing my understanding of the complexity of the historical interrelations between Brazil and Portugal.

Romina Wainberg is a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures.