Wholesale merchants and the possibilities of nobilitation in a mining captaincy: Goiás in the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

In the Old Regime society, Brazilian territory seemed to favor ascending social trajectories toward nobleness. With the discovery of gold mines in the Brazilian backcountry (Minas Gerais, Goiás and Mato Grosso), an intense commercial exchange between port cities such as Bahia and Rio de Janeiro and the gold-producing captaincies soon developed. This, added to the decree of 1750, which provided for the attribution of a title of nobility (the habit of Christ) to those who delivered a specific amount of gold annually in the foundry houses, allowed some merchants based in those cities to envisage a real possibility of upward social mobility. Thus, our objective was to follow the trajectory of those individuals who, associated with wholesale trade between the coast ports and the Goiás captaincy, explored the opportunity offered by the Crown to ascend socially and overcome the barrier between the plebeian universe and that of the nobility.