The Gold Century

Vila Rica, July 1752. Clerks in a low building on the main street close the year's accounts.

A hand-coloured plate of the Brazilian interior. Araucaria pines stand on the high ground above a valley, and on the track below a party of travellers moves with pack animals. Routes like this one carried the gold century. The mining district sat hundreds of kilometres of broken country from any port, so everything that went in or came out went on the backs of mules. The road built for that traffic, the Caminho Novo, opened in stages from 1698 and pointed the metal at Rio de Janeiro. In 1763 the government followed the same road south. Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

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Contents — 9 sections

OPENING SCENE
THE LAST OF PALMARES, AND THE FIRST OF THE GOLD
A WAR OVER THE DIGGINGS, AND A TOWN ON THE BLACK ORE
FIVE WAYS TO TAKE A FIFTH
A FENCE AROUND THE DIAMONDS, AND A TAX THAT COUNTS PEOPLE
A NEW BORDER, FREEDOM SOLD IN INSTALMENTS, AND A WAR
POMBAL REBUILDS THE COLONY
THE GOLD RUNS DOWN, AND THE ARREARS BUILD
TWO CONSPIRACIES, AND A FLEET LEAVING LISBON

OPENING SCENE

Vila Rica, July 1752. Clerks in a low building on the main street close the year's accounts.

The building is a royal smelting house. It opened for business the previous August, and from that month every ounce of gold in the captaincy was supposed to pass through it.

Gold arrives there as dust and grains. It is melted down and leaves as a stamped bar, with a fifth of it kept for the king. A sealed bar is gold the crown has been paid on. Gold dust in a pouch, which is how people in Minas actually carried money, is legally suspect.

Over the twelve months to July 1752 the building took in 55 arrobas, 13 arráteis, 7 onças, 1 oitava and 39 grãos of gold on the king's account.

The units are worth knowing. An arroba of gold runs to about 14.69 kilograms. An oitava is 3.586 grams, and a grão is a grain, the smallest weight the system bothers to name.

So the royal revenue for the year was counted down to a single grain. It came to a little over 800 kilograms.

The quota those officials had been told to deliver was 100 arrobas, which is about 1,469 kilograms. They had delivered a little over half of it.

The system this one replaced had brought in 114 arrobas and 907 oitavas in its final year, comfortably above the quota. It had done that by counting people rather than gold, and it had just been abolished at the request of the men who paid most of it.

The shortfall did not stay a shortfall. Arrears built from here into a threatened emergency levy, and the levy became a conspiracy in 1789.

Today's Core Question: The crown rebuilt its tax machine four times in thirty-eight years. Why did it never rebuild the labour system underneath it?

LOCKED AFTER THE PREVIEW

What's in the rest of Day 3

THE LAST OF PALMARES, AND THE FIRST OF THE GOLD
A WAR OVER THE DIGGINGS, AND A TOWN ON THE BLACK ORE
FIVE WAYS TO TAKE A FIFTH
A FENCE AROUND THE DIAMONDS, AND A TAX THAT COUNTS PEOPLE
A NEW BORDER, FREEDOM SOLD IN INSTALMENTS, AND A WAR
POMBAL REBUILDS THE COLONY
THE GOLD RUNS DOWN, AND THE ARREARS BUILD
TWO CONSPIRACIES, AND A FLEET LEAVING LISBON

A fleet is at sea in the winter of 1807 with a monarchy on board, and the colony it is heading for has no bank, no printing press and no permission to make cloth. Tomorrow a European court arrives in its own colony and starts governing an empire from it. Day 4 is about the eighty years that follow: a country made without a revolution, and the long argument about the one thing it would not change.

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Back Continue to Day 4

OPENING SCENE

The Casa dos Contos in Ouro Preto, photographed in September 2018. Building began in 1782, thirty years after the smelting-house year described here, and it went up as the private house of João Rodrigues de Macedo, a holder of crown revenue contracts. The treasury moved the captaincy’s accounts office into it in 1803. It is also the building where Cláudio Manuel da Costa was held during the 1789 investigation, and where he was found dead.Pedro Henrique Hudson / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Vila Rica, July 1752. Clerks in a low building on the main street close the year's accounts.

The building is a royal smelting house. It opened for business the previous August, and from that month every ounce of gold in the captaincy was supposed to pass through it.

Over the twelve months to July 1752 the building took in 55 arrobas, 13 arráteis, 7 onças, 1 oitava and 39 grãos of gold on the king's account.

The units are worth knowing. An arroba of gold runs to about 14.69 kilograms. An oitava is 3.586 grams, and a grão is a grain, the smallest weight the system bothers to name.

The Museu do Ouro at Sabará, photographed on the morning of 22 September 2015. The building is the town’s eighteenth-century Casa de Fundição e Intendência do Ouro, a royal smelting house of the same kind as the one described here, and one of the very few still standing. It became a federal museum in 1946, which is why the scales, weights and moulds the operation ran on survived alongside the walls.Robert Serbinenko / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

So the royal revenue for the year was counted down to a single grain. It came to a little over 800 kilograms.

The quota those officials had been told to deliver was 100 arrobas, which is about 1,469 kilograms. They had delivered a little over half of it.

The shortfall did not stay a shortfall. Arrears built from here into a threatened emergency levy, and the levy became a conspiracy in 1789.

Today's Core Question: The crown rebuilt its tax machine four times in thirty-eight years. Why did it never rebuild the labour system underneath it?

What's in the rest of Day 3

THE LAST OF PALMARES, AND THE FIRST OF THE GOLD

A WAR OVER THE DIGGINGS, AND A TOWN ON THE BLACK ORE

FIVE WAYS TO TAKE A FIFTH

A FENCE AROUND THE DIAMONDS, AND A TAX THAT COUNTS PEOPLE

A NEW BORDER, FREEDOM SOLD IN INSTALMENTS, AND A WAR

POMBAL REBUILDS THE COLONY

THE GOLD RUNS DOWN, AND THE ARREARS BUILD

TWO CONSPIRACIES, AND A FLEET LEAVING LISBON