Corporate and voluntarist strategies of defense in portuguese America (Second half century XVIII)

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the second half of the eighteenth century in Portuguese America as consisting of two concurrent conceptions of power and space on the one hand, the government of the metropolis and its representatives overseas, with its demands framed in the postulates of centralizing absolutism pombalino; otherwise, the local community of the colony, organized according to a logic essentially local, that is corporate. We aim to demonstrate that, even in the face of the imminence of war the local community can not recognize the motives as inherently their, because their social space of reference was the local level do not coincide, therefore, with the total land area of Portuguese America - physical space for the exercise of the sovereignty of the monarch in his Colony. Keywords: defense, recruitment, local community, granular structure, continuous structure