In the past decades, Brazilian historiographical production has risen dramatically. Colonial Brazilian history has been profiting from two major developments: the electronic availability of sources and government support for the extension of public universities in terms of the number of faculty and graduate programs. Adelto Gonçalves has made good use of the documents from the Overseas Archives (Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino), which have been available on DVDs in Brazil and in Latin American Research Institutions such as CEDLA and Leiden University’s library for some time and are currently online (http://resgate.bn.br). Leiden University also contributed to this program, as Marianne Wiesebron coordinated the cataloguing and scanning from the Dutch National and the Royal House Archives. This accessibility and the funding through state and federal Brazilian institutions such as CNPQ, CAPES, FAPESP and Petrobras have led to new international cooperation. Moreover, Adelto Gonçalves’ work has been funded and published by a private foundation in the state of São Paulo. These new publications have been crucial to fill gaps in the colonial Brazilian historiography.

Gonçalves sees his book as an elaboration of two main publications on the high courts in Salvador (Stuart Schwartz) and Rio de Janeiro (Arno and Maria José Wehling). Yet, whereas these two books mostly provided an in-depth study of high court justice and the lives of the upper echelons of the Brazilian officialdom, Adelto Gonçalves expands his work by focusing on the whole justice system of the São Paulo captaincy. Gonçalves also pays considerable attention to Crown appointed judges with a law degree, (juízes de fora and ouvidores) which had to be obtained in Coimbra, Portugal as no universities were founded in colonial Brazil. Still, he also stresses the importance of the often times uneducated juizes ordinários (common judges), and crucial officials such as the provedores da fazenda (inspectors of the treasury) of local origin.

More than Schwartz and Wehling, Gonçalves book reads as a history of the captaincy through the eyes of the colonial magistrates. Indeed, a substantial part of the book is devoted to the ouvidores (crown appointed judges), and he lists and discusses the actions of all who served between 1709 and 1822. In the book, he first traces justice back to the origin in in São Vicente, one of the earliest Brazilian private colonies in the first half of the sixteenth century. He explains how the justice system was slowly put in place through local justices who were often times unlettered and who followed common law. Second, he shows how royal intervention came slow, especially in the fiercely independent city of São Paulo, which into the eighteenth century abhorred any royal intervention, let alone governors and royally appointed judges. Yet in the mid-eighteenth century, after the gold mining districts were separated from the captaincy, it was the other way around. At times São Paulo was without a governor and without a crown appointed judge, and thus the Municipal Council of the proud city felt undervalued. And third, Gonçalves demonstrates how local elites became more important by independence, though an analysis of the influence of José Bonifacio de Andrade and his family, the main advisor of the first emperor and Brazil’s first Secretary of State.

For Gonçalves the São Paulo justice system exemplified disputes between the governing and the justice agencies. As no separation of powers existed, the Municipal Council and local justices; governors, and Crown-appointed judges had jurisdiction over, reported about, and intervened in each other’s affairs. Gonçalves uses the Weberian model of the sense of ownership over the offices (through payment of the donativo tax) and hence the combination of the public and the private, as an explanation for these disputes. This sense of ownership was exemplified through the misappropriation of finances as well as the engagement in (il)legal trading networks. In these handlings, the governors and judges had their affairs contested through two major officials: the inspector of the royal finances (provedores and corregedores) and the judge of the customs. In general, though, the elites profited from these systems of government, and Gonçalves claims that the oligarchies of the Brazilian Republic had their origins in Portuguese colonial rule.

Adelto Gonçalves’ work is an important step in the study of local judicial power. Gonçalves has produced a solid work of reference which can only inspire a new generation of Brazilian historians interested in legal history. Yet, much is still to be uncovered in notarial, city and parochial archives that can shed light on the elite networks and the day-to-day functioning of legal systems that Adelto Gonçalves has started so adeptly to bring to the surface.