In his sixth and final chapter, Erik Lars Myrup recounts the murder of two Chinese subjects in eighteenth-century Portuguese Macau and its subsequent cover-up, all the way to the top of the colonial hierarchy. Drawing heavily on the reports of a Chinese subprefect sent to investigate this crime, Myrup shows not only how Portuguese officials deflected the initial Chinese investigation, but also how they later collaborated with their imperial interlocutors to concoct a legalistic but fictitious explanation satisfactory to both sides.
This case from Macau points us toward Myrup's central thesis: that “the powers of the [Portuguese] colonial state were both magnified and diminished by informal networks” (3) in its overseas territories. The murderers, for example, fled to the protection of the Portuguese governor after committing the crime, proving elite complicity from the beginning while simultaneously provoking serious threats from neighboring Chinese officials. At the same time, another Portuguese administrator soon reached out extra-officially to the Chinese subprefect to create the legal fictions necessary to smooth over the diplomatic wounds, self-inflicted though they were.
In his other chapters, Myrup evokes the power of informal networks. Among his illustrations are the fall of the first president of the Portuguese Overseas Council due to his family's pro-Spanish militancy (Chapter 1); the promotion of bureaucrats across the empire (Chapter 2); the suspected orchestration of an ambitious South American bandeira raid from Lisbon (Chapter 3); the chartering and the administrative errors that ruined gold mines in Cuiabá (Chapter 4); and the continuing flow of contraband between Manila and Macau despite official prohibitions (Chapter 5). Taken together, these chapters support current readings of Portuguese overseas administration as personalist, corporative, and contested.
The strength of this book lies in its many vignettes illustrating the improvised, extra-judicial nature of Portuguese colonial rule, but such a focus also leaves the reader feeling that the information is piecemeal and impressionistic. Across the chapters, chronology slips over centuries, sometimes to the period of Iberian union (1580–1640), sometimes to the post-Pombaline era (after 1777), other times in between. The Portuguese Overseas Council serves as a reference point in the text, as do the locations of Macau and São Paulo, but none of these are given the sustained attention necessary to anchor Myrup's larger argument.
Key terms, including “corruption,” “power,” and “informal networks,” also remain undefined and under-theorized, leaving readers to invent their own conclusions. Corruption could likely define both the Macau cover-up and its later resolution, for instance, but Myrup says nothing of the comparative importance of these two political processes. Finally, although the text is generally well written, a few phrases land jarringly, such as Myrup's evocation of Portugal's “humble approach to imperialism” (175).
This remains a worthwhile book overall, both for the stories it tells and the questions it provokes. Myrup's archival work is admirable, stretching from Goiânia to Macau by way of metropolitan capitals, and his dominance of both European languages and Chinese strengthens his conclusions, particularly in the culminating sixth chapter. Finally, he does suggest—perhaps offhandedly—more ambitious avenues of attack. He laces the introduction with provocative evocations of “social network analysis” (7) and “kinship and affinity” (12), two vibrant areas of study that could revolutionize standard descriptions of overseas Portuguese administration.
Although Myrup does not pursue either of these leads, he leaves tantalizing strands of possible argument. For instance, in 1669 a canon of the Lisbon Cathedral and member of the Overseas Council wrote an English colleague offering “a young Amazonian slave girl” (65) in exchange for diplomatic help. This enslaved child was surely just as much a part of the “informal social networks” of Portuguese colonial rule as any homesick fidalgo. The casual offer to hand off this female child evokes both predatory and ambiguously official social networks, ripe for both modeling and theorizing.
