From men of governance to first nobility: social vocabulary and the remaking of elite status in seventeenth-century Bahia

This article shows how, throughout the seventeenth-century, the political elite of Salvador, capital of the State of Brazil, claimed the social classification common in Portugal as their own, thus representing itself as a local nobility and being recognized as such. This process took place because of the confrontations and negotiations with the Portuguese Crown and its representatives, markedly since the Portuguese Restoration of 1640.

Nobility ; social hierarchies ; politics