Global luxuries at home: the material possessions of an elite family in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, Brazil
Date
2017
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Focusing on the belongings of João Pinto Alvares, Mariana Correia de Oliveira, and their offspring, this dissertation examines the consumption of luxury goods among the mine-owning elite in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, the main gold mining region of Brazil. Although Minas Gerais has traditionally been perceived as isolated, the wealth emanating from the mines enabled the local elite to acquire commodities from manufacturing centers throughout the world. Although historical research has largely overturned the idea of mineiro isolation in recent years, the importance of imported luxury goods for the dissemination of cultural knowledge among the mining region’s elite has received little attention. With few exceptions, scholarship on domestic life in the region has focused on illegitimate families of mixed race living in urban centers. Examination of the lives of four generations of the Oliveira Pinto family reveals that the mine owning elite instead often formed legitimate families of highly educated rural aristocrats. Analysis of the family’s post-mortem inventories from 1748 to 1807 demonstrates that the local elite acquired foreign imports throughout the century and that, like their contemporaries in Portugal and other regions of the world, the mineiro elite gradually adopted new furniture types, modes of dress, and decorative styles. Among the family’s possessions, the ceramics collections, clothing and jewelry, and hammocks were particularly powerful signifiers of their owners’ status, cosmopolitan knowledge, and sophistication. These luxuries functioned as tangible evidence of the gold mining region’s significance to Portuguese imperial expansion, and participation in global commercial and cultural exchange.
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Keywords
Social sciences, Communication and the arts, Colonial Brazil, Consumption, Decorative art, Early modern, Globalization, Material culture