Tropas pagas e ordenanças: perfil social dos militares da capitania do Rio Grande (séculos XVII-XIX)

Abstract

This examines the admission of “mestiços” (mixed race) individuals into the Captaincy of Rio Grande’s military administration, with an emphasis on the ones who resides in Ribeira do Seridó, in the backlands of Captaincy of Rio Grande’s riverside, between the 17th, the 18th, and the first years of the 19th centuries. To do that, it also discusses the quantitative profile of the settlers who took on roles in the Rio Grande military administration, in order to therefore make sense of the role reserved for “mestiços” in the aforementioned space in comparison to others qualified as white, black, or indigenous individuals. In consonance with this, it also investigates the institutionalization process of the military administration in the Captaincy of Rio Grande and underlines the difficulties involved with the military service in this colonial territory. This analysis also includes the role of the military institution in the process of territorialization of Ribeira do Seridó, which had a military structure as its first territorial and institutional landmark, in between the Lusitanian efforts to expand towards the American countryside: the Casa Forte do Cuó (“Cuó Stronghold”), built between 1686 and 1687, furthermore highlighting the existing relationship between this administrative institution and the construction of colonial territory in the analyzed context. Methodologically, this has taken into consideration the play of scales, as discussed by French historian Jacques Revel, in which macro (the Captaincy of Rio Grande) and micro (Ribeira do Seridó) spaces meet to make it possible to approach the military administration’s role in territorializing Ribeira do Seridó, as well as the social composition of the military corps then existent in the Captaincy of Rio Grande. In terms of documentation, this is supported by military (assignments of army personnel), parochial (baptism, marriage and death registries), and judicial (post-mortem inventories) sources, determined by the aforementioned temporal-spatial outline and submitted to data crossexamination, as well as to quantitative, serial and qualitative analyses. This work makes it possible to fill in some of the historiographic gaps in terms of research concerning the military administration in Ribeira do Seridó and in the Captaincy of Rio Grande itself, focusing on the role of “mestiços” within that field of colonial administration.