Amazonia and Global Connections in the Early Modern Period (17th and 18th Centuries)

As part of the Latin American History Speaker Series, Rafael Chambouleyron, Professor of History at the Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil, will present a talk titled "Amazonia and Global Connections in the Early Modern Period (17th and 18th Centuries).”

Generally perceived as an immaculate and isolated tropical rainforest, the Amazon had a long history of continental interactions before the European invasion. Following the Portuguese arrival in the early seventeenth century, the region was gradually integrated into a vast and complex network of trade and exchange. This network included European manufactured goods, which circulated through its rivers, as well as Amazonian forest products—such as cacao, clove bark, sarsaparilla, and copaiba—that were consumed in Europe. These interconnections were built upon the enslavement of thousands of Indigenous peoples, along with free Amazonian Indians compelled to work. The aim of this talk is to explain these networks, their diverse agents, and how this system developed independently of the transatlantic slave trade, which has long dominated interpretations of Brazilian colonial society.

Dr. Rafael Chambouleyron has been teaching history since 1996. He is a professor of history at the Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil and is spending the current academic year in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on the history of colonial Amazonia. In recent years, he has been studying the history of Amazonian cacao in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, examining the spatial, labor, trade, and consumption dynamics involved in the exploitation of this colonial commodity.