João Paulo Salvado

Universidade de Évora | uevora · Interdisciplinary Centre for History, Cultures and Societies (CIDEHUS)

During the eighteenth century, Euro-Asian maritime trade peaked, following an unprecedented surge in European demand for exotic goods. Cotton textiles, porcelain, tea and coffee experienced an increasing penetration in European households. The popularisation of tea also triggered a profound change in European material culture. The hot beverage was...

By weaving the political economy of the Portuguese empire into business history, this article highlights the role of metropolitan and colonial tax farming in the rise and fall of an elite that dominated the business scene in both mainland Portugal and colonial Brazil between roughly 1730 and 1760. It takes the Torres family business as a case study...

The Resources of Others. Dutch Exploitation of European Expansion and Empires, 1570-1800 Historiography pertaining to the study of European colonial empires can generally be defined in two different strands: on the one hand, the nationally geared scholarship that zooms in on the development of specific ‘national’ empires and their relationships to...

This chapter examines the changes that the Portuguese tobacco trade underwent in the first half of the eighteenth century and explores the role played the tobacco monopoly in explaining those changes. Based on eight purchase day books of the Royal Tobacco Factory of Lisbon, it showcases a decline in the number of importers between 1710 and 1737 and...

This chapter examines the partition of the tobacco tax revenue extracted under fiscal monopoly between the State and tax farmers. Whereas a clique of businessmen amassed considerable wealth by farming this monopoly during the second half of the eighteenth century, this was not the case in the first part of the century. We discuss the different fina...

The murder of Ferdinand Leopold von Hallweil in August 1696, in the Vienna Woods, drew a great deal of attention, because the suspected perpetrator was the Portuguese ambassador, Charles-Joseph of Ligne, second marquis of Arronches. Building on the existing literature and on unchartered sources, this article examines how the Portuguese royal court...

In this article we take the example of smuggled Brazil wood to study the complex relationship between smuggling and the development of overseas empires. We trace the legal framework provided bythe Portuguese monarchy and the WIC for the exploitation of Brazil wood, from the logging in Brazil to the import into the European consumption markets. We w...

Over the years the 1640 naval battle of Paraíba (Brazil) has attracted the attention of several historians, including F.A. Varnhagen, H. Wätjen and J.C. Warnsinck, who made extensive use of Dutch sources. By combining the Dutch and Portuguese accounts, C.R. Boxer and, more recently, M.J. Guedes shed new light on the episode. The Portuguese material...

This article examines the main characteristics of the economic governance of the estate of the Marquises of Castelo Rodrigo, one of the largest Portuguese noble houses of the first half of the seventeenth century. Themes such as the formation of the house's patrimony and its management, the source of its income, and its spending and investment stra...