From the planisphere to the global: The spatialization of the European world-economy and Terra dos Patos (c. 1600-1650)

ABSTRACT

The toponym Patos appears on several 17th-century maps to identify an area on the southern coast of Brazil. This study showed the characteristics of social agents, spaces, economic practices, and power relations that can be analyzed in view of the current demands for approaches that promote local people and spaces at the center of the analysis of global dynamics. Patos offered a site of disputes among priests, colonial authorities, colonists, sertanistas, Indigenous peoples, traders, privateers, and characters who played more than one of these roles. This study defends the pertinence of Fernand Braudel’s unit of world-economy to analyze the globality of these local dynamics and propose that the spatial dynamics of this unit of analysis be understood in their complex interaction among the diverse and conflicting space-time that constitutes the nature of the capitalist world-economy in the Modern Era.

KEYWORDS:
Global history; World-economy; Colonial Latin America; 17-th century