Discovering fortunes, telling stories: patrimonial panorama of portuguese in Brazil (Belém, 1870‑1909)

Abstract

This paper analyses the fortune formation of Portuguese immigrants’ in Belém, capital of the Grão Pará province, between the years of 1870 to 1909, period which is characterized by historiography as the boom of the rubber extractive economy, a known attractive to the different groups of migrants that would adventure themselves seeking to take part on the earnings produced by it. Fortunes that where only possible because of the new social and economic demands that were brought over to the Amazon landscape and made clear the new investments trends, remarkably, the modern capitalist structures, ones that remained even in crisis periods of the rubber extractive economy, demonstrating the solid consolidation of the power and wealth new symbols. The paper sustain itself in the serial analyses of 328 post mortem inventory civil suits and is inserted among a period which is trend marked by a sharp demographic growth, by the urban space reorganization and economic rejuvenation of the city of Belém.