Entre agricultores e industriosos: circulação da ciência e mobilização de olhares por senhores de engenho e lavradores de açúcar (1798-1834).

Abstract

The objective of this work is to re-evaluate a classic discussion in the social sciences and in historiography that affirmed that without processes of social transformations definitively carried out, particularly in the countryside, the circulation of ideas and knowledge would be impossible, an interpretation that was given precisely to the sugar elite in Brazil. Brazil an anti-reformist profile. The focus of the research consisted mainly in the mobilization of illustrated ideas for technical-scientific reforms and scientific fields by characters of sugar production in Brazil at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th through the circulation of books and memoirs authored by this group. Therefore, the time frame (1798-1834) is limited to the period in which the beginning of a process of production of memories, techniques and ideas by characters of sugar production, supported by institutions such as the Universidade de Coimbra, the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Industria Nacional and the Sociedade de Agricultura Commercio e industria da Provincia da Bahia. Our object, therefore, falls not on the structure of a closed thought, but on its mixture given in the circulation of ideas and local responses. On this subject, we follow the reflections of Serge Gruzinski (2001; 2014) and Kapil Raj (2007; 2015; 2017), as we are interested not in the centrality of one or the other side of the globe, whether the European world, usually defined as the place from which the ideas of the Enlightenment emerged, or the New World, defined as the place where these ideas were received. On the contrary, we seek to detect the exchanges between one and the other. Through a small group of the sugar society, composed of planters and farmers, we seek to demonstrate how the circulation of technical-scientific and utilitarian pro-reform ideas, through books and memoirs, constituted a collective effort in this historical context expressed in the expression "farmers and industry".