This innovative book explores the implementation of the ambitious reformist Dirétorio dos Índios law (1755) in the vast expanses of the Captaincies of Pará and Rio Negro, in colonial Portuguese Amazonia. The central premise of the directorate law was that native peoples were to live in corporate Indian villages and not dispersed, ruled by crown-appointed directors and no longer by missionary priests. These changes, enlightened Pombaline legislators believed, would foster productivity, a more rational occupation of the contested Amazonian frontier and borderlands and ultimately a more effective ‘civilisation’ of Amazonian Indians.
Heather F. Roller shows that natives and immigrants built the communities that constituted the foundation of the directorate's ideal Indian villages over generations, before and after 1755, and in contact with a variety of actors, including settlers of all races, priests and independent native groups. Indian villages would thus remain ‘fundamentally unstable places with porous boundaries’ (p. 19), so that ‘a villager's life was never a purely local one’ (p. 141). It is precisely instability and porousness that explain the historical resilience of colonial indigenous communities in Amazonia. Whereas native mobility is often portrayed as withdrawal and resistance, Roller presents it as having strengthened and sustained community life.
Amazonian Routes unfolds in six chapters that focus on the ‘directorate era’ (1755–99) and its immediate antecedents and consequences. Chapter 1 reveals that in the shift from missions to secular villages, continuity was as important as rupture. Governor Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado's reforms were more symbolic than structural, and ‘not a major shift in direction’ (p. 31) in terms of settlement patterns, but effective in appropriating mission villages as civilising tools for the crown. Continuities with the missionary era were pragmatic choices rather than signs of failure, and ‘village politics’ (p. 52) were constitutive of the process.
Chapters 2 and 3 study, respectively, the state-sponsored collecting expeditions that left native villages each year, and the descimentos, trips to find and settle ‘new peoples’ from uncolonised groups. These activities were part of the crown's broader geopolitical and civilisational agenda, and of efforts to promote an Amazonian export boom through a standardisation of the comércio do sertão. But they were also the sites of native attempts to ‘assert a degree of control within the system’ (p. 84). Indian crewmen and leaders leveraged their expertise and networks in ways that granted them autonomy to pursue their own social and economic interests while they mediated the incorporation of products and peoples to the ‘colonial sphere’ (an important concept throughout the book and potentially beyond it, but one that is nevertheless not fully defined).
Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the destabilising roles played by chronic indigenous absenteeism from colonial villages and by the emergence of a free Indian and mixed-race population outside of colonial villages. Absenteeism did not cause general population decline in part because fleeing Indians often resettled in different colonial villages, with the acquiescence of local authorities. By complicating the very notion of the rooted village Indian, this practice ‘conflicted with state efforts to achieve a precise social and spatial definition of colonial subjects’ (p. 128). Similarly, by the 1890s, increasingly massive anti-vagrancy campaigns targeted a growing free population whose members responded by developing complex strategies to ‘argue their way from one ethnic category (and its associated legal status) to another’ (p. 175) to avoid race-specific obligations. Because ethnic identities were ultimately subjective and shaped by local interests, these campaigns also ‘weakened the very system of administration that they were trying to bolster’ (p. 189).
The abolition of the directorate in 1799 forced directors to leave the villages and auction their goods, as Indians became ‘free vassals’ and native councils took over administrative duties. Chapter 6 claims that these changes did not actually lead Indians to leave their villages more frequently. The new, ‘more assimilationist model’ (p. 196) put labour and settlement responsibilities in private hands. This led to an increase in commercial cacao plantations, to the creation of an elite of non-Indian settlers, and, eventually, to resistance in the form of struggles for Indian village autonomy, even as late as the 1820s, when ‘village Indians’ had lost official meaning. These patterns of conflict, Roller argues, were the basis of the massive Cabanagem Rebellion of 1835.
The book's general argument about the links between mobility and community constitutes an important intervention in Amazonian historiography. It emphasises native agency and adaptability over a long tradition of interpretations influenced by environmental and cultural determinisms, but still pays attention to environmental and cultural differences. Natives obtained rights and benefits as well as obligations from these arrangements, and the indigenous knowledge, social networks, and internal community dynamics that made this regime of mobility possible constituted an integral aspect of the colonial system in Amazonia.
This is an exceptionally rigorous and sophisticated historical monograph, based on the author's mastery of the historiography of the Luso-Brazilian Amazon, an eye for useful comparisons, and a particularly impressive use of primary sources. In some ways, it is this decade's (colonialist) heir to Barbara Weinstein's The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford University Press, 1983). The little known, village-level directorate-era sources that constitute its empirical core are tapped in systematic, quantitative ways and through fine-grained close readings, and complemented with more traditional sources. At every turn, the author manages to ask difficult and imaginative questions that push the documentation to its limits. It is through all of these that we learn of the subjective meanings of mobility and community for the book's elusive protagonists: Índios aldeados.
Some of these characteristics, along with the book's problem-oriented prose, charts, graphs and images, will likely make it more accessible to specialists and graduate students than to wider audiences. Except for a concluding passage about the present-day meanings of the ‘mobility and rootedness’ of Amazonian communities, Roller rarely discusses how Amazonian Routes may impact debates outside the historiography of Colonial Amazonia. This is regrettable, since the book has major analytical and empirical implications for the histories of Brazil and the Portuguese Empire far beyond colonial Pará, and more generally for understandings of frontier settlement and colonial state- and community-formation. Still, the sheer quality of the scholarship makes it a distinguished contribution to Amazonian history.
