Environment Impact of the Portuguese Empire

Environmental Impact of the Portuguese Empire

Programme June 2-3 King’s College London, Strand, Anatomy Museum (King’s Building floor 6). Organised by the Charles Boxer Chair of History with the support of the Camões Institute (Portugal) and the Observatory of Democracy in Latin America

Atlas Miller, 1519, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Friday, June 2

10h00: Opening session – Francisco Bethencourt (KCL)

I. Origins and Infra-structures

Chair: Chloe Ireton (UCL)

10h10 Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University) –

Expansion Reconsidered: Eco-Material and Political Transformations in Fifteenth-Century Atlantic Corridors

10h30 Koldo Trápaga Monchet (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos) –

Conservation or destruction? Revisiting the environmental impact of the shipbuilding industry of Lisbon and the sugar industry in Madeira Island (15th-17th centuries)

10h50 Amélia Polónia (Universidade do Porto) –

Environmental impacts of the historical uses of the seas. The Portuguese seaports, 1500-1800

12h00 LUNCH

II. Panel of discussion

Chair: José Vicente Serrão

13h30 Cátia Antunes (Leiden University); Sujit Sivasundaram (University of Cambridge); Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University) [via Zoom]; Toby Green (KCL); Francisco Bethencourt (KCL)

III. Indigenous and Environmental Rights

Chair: Francisco Bethencourt

15h00 José Pedro Monteiro (CESC, Universidade do Minho)  –

Economic development, political integration, cultural and environmental preservation: the promises of Portuguese late colonial reformism (1961-1970)

15h20 José Miguel Ferreira (ICS, Universidade de Lisboa) –

Into the Woods. Nature, Forests and Colonialism in 19th Century Goa

16h00 BREAK

16h30 José Vicente Serrão (ISCTE-IUL) –

Colonization, Native land rights and environmental issues: how did all these intersect in the early modern Portuguese empire?

16h50 Décio Guzmán (Universidade Federal do Pará) –

Indigenous communities in the Amazon [via Zoom]

Saturday, June 3

IV. Brazil

Chair: Susana Münch Miranda

10h00 José Augusto Pádua (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) –

Perceptions of environmental deterioration in late Portuguese America

10h20 Diogo de Carvalho Cabral (Trinity College Dublin), Ana Lunara Morais (Rio Grande do Norte Federal University/Campina Grande Federal University), Cristiane Barreto (University of Brasília) - 

Geoecologies of empire: space, natural resources and the making of the sugar nobility in colonial Brazil 

11h00 BREAK

11h30 Miguel Carmo (IHC, Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Joana Sousa (CES, Universidade de Coimbra), Ricardo Ventura (CEG, Universidade Aberta) –

The strange case of white rice in Maranhão: the plantation and its contraries from a long-term transatlantic perspective

11h50 Vinicius de Carvalho (King’s College London) –

The long-term impact of mining in Minas Gerais

12h30 LUNCH

V. Africa

Chair: Alexandra Lourenço Dias (KCL Camões Centre)

14h00 Susana Münch Miranda (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and João Paulo Salvado (Universidade de Évora) –

Ivory extraction and trade in the Portuguese South Atlantic empire, 1725-1820

14h20 Marta Macedo (IHC, Universidade Nova de Lisboa) –

São Tomé plantation ecologies: vulnerabilities and disruptions

15h30 BREAK

16h00 Barbara Direito (CIUHCT, DCSA, NOVA School of Science and Technology) -

“Islands in a sea of flies” – livestock, animal disease and the environment in Mozambique, 1900s-1940s

16h20 Bernardo Pinto Cruz (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) –

The developmental effects of late-colonial coercion: countersubversion at Cunene (Angola) and Cahora Bassa (Mozambique), 1968-1974

Concluding remarks:

Cátia Antunes (Leiden University)