In 1750, when the Brazilian border expanded by several orders of magnitude, Portuguese Crown officials, administrators, and men of science received the news with hope and apprehension. While the growth of frontiers of Portugal’s possession in the Americas was celebrated, it also presented formidable challenges for settlement. How could a diminutive metropole whose empire stretched across the four corners of the globe, secure its new territorial gains? Drawing on Newtonian physics, novel anthropological thinking about the human as a species, and the accounting technology of “Political Arithmetic,” Portuguese imperial administrators launched a policy known as the “political mechanism.” Recognizing how “population is everything,” this talk historicizes the emergence of racial whitening (branqueamento) as a project of human improvement and “population multiplication.” Arguing that producing bigger and better population futures became the chief scientific project of eighteenth-century Portuguese imperialism, I demonstrate how reform was undergirded by the forging of a new ideal of subjecthood: the salaried laborer. The salaried laborer became, I argue, the embodiment of a new ideal of whiteness (or white subjecthood). The end-goal of a new imperial science of human improvement was premised on the remolding of “rustics” into workers. In the Amazon, the key site where I will focus on in this talk, a new Crown policy promised to assimilate Amerindians and Roma people into whiteness through productive and reproducible labor. This talk excavates the racialized and gendered conditions of possibility for whitening through pronatalism, human speciation, and patriarchal rule.
Patrícia Martins Marcos (Ph.D History and Science Studies) is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge at UCLA’s History Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Her book manuscript, Imperial Whiteness, historicizes genealogies of racial improvement through whitening in the 18th Century Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic by linking histories of the life sciences, to medicine, gender and sexuality, and race. She is currently Associate Editor with the History of Anthropology Review and elected Early Career Representative for the History of Science Society—where she is also co-chair of the Early Sciences Forum. Her work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the John Carter Brown Library. She is currently a fellow with the Folger Shakespeare Library and next Fall she will be a visiting fellow at the Department of History of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG–Brazil) . Her most recent “Blackness out of Place,” was published with the Radical History Review and focuses on the epistemology of Black visual resistance in Portugal and its former imperial spaces.
