Petitions, rights, people: Portuguese America, 18th century

Understanding that petitions —conceived broadly as claims submitted by individuals or corporations to an authority recognized as legitimate— were a frequent recourse, the questions driving this discussion are: can we understand them as an exercise of rights? And, if so, who would be the subjects of such rights?

The discussion intends, on the one hand, to examine the various forms of supplications, privileges, licenses, complaints, and other resources used by populations through channels that were not strictly judicial, within the framework of the monarch’s distributive justice. On the other hand, it aims to analyze how petitioners operated within that logic, what their expectations were, and what meaning and degree of effectiveness such channels had—avenues that were not always swift in the American territories.