Monarcas, Ministros e Cientistas. Mecanismos de Poder, Governação e Informação no Brasil Colonial

This book combines 15 papers united by a common denominator - colonial Brazil - and by a predominant period, the eighteenth century.

Starting from the notion that knowledge is a form of power, the author aims at understanding how the use of knowledge produced throughout the eighteenth century was particularly useful in the governance of Portuguese America, used by rulers as a means of controlling space, nature and humanity.

This knowledge also allowed the discovery of the Brazilian colony by 18th-century Europeans, with obvious repercussions on the formation of a European consciousness and the construction of images of the Portuguese Empire and the Portuguese, which accentuated the existing cultural, political, economic and scientific differences, challenging a uniform vision of Enlightened Europe.