Strays and population policy in Portuguese America in the second half of the XVIII century

Abstract

The term "vagrants", sometimes accompanied of the epithet "wicked", frequented, with certain regularity, the correspondence exchanged among the metropolitan and colonial Portuguese authorities, in the second half of the 18th century. Vagrancy, considered contrary to the public well being, was a crime described in the "Ordenações do Reino". So, although the surveillance on that type of behaviour is not a noveity for the ir century, it is interesting to observe that, for that period, the combat of the vagrants, and of the wicked ones, that swarmed the roads of Portuguese America's hinterland, received a new treatment. In the reign of D. José I, his minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, taking into account Willian Petty's Political Arithmetic principies, declared that the largest wealth of a State was its population. That maxim sustained a settlement action that objectified, to integrate indigenous and dispersed inhabitants to the political body of the Portuguese kingdom, congregating fitem in institutionalised settlements. In that context, the population notion stands out, because it is tied up to a specific condition that is being attributed to the individuais: to be an useful member of the civil society.