Pelos caminhos d’água, pelas rugosidades da terra: a construção territorial de Sergipe D’el Rey

Abstract

When considering the territory a composition of multiple layers of meanings, amalgamated over time, but in continuous transformation, causing the accumulation of processes, forms and time expressions, this thesis proposes to investigate the occupation processing of Sergipe d’El Rey’s captaincy particularly during the colonial period, based on the evidence found in the official documentation, on the maps produced within the scope of the colonizing intentions undertaken in this period of history and in the contemporary space itself. It is intended to understand this process considering the great movements of the territory moved by the economic exploration projects as the cattle farms, wood extraction and the sugarcane mills, but also from the inhabited nuclei, from the previously found arrangements, promoted by the indigenous people led by their caciques, going along the settlements and arriving at the small villages, towns and cities, that come timidly into being in the great and unknown space of the forest and the sertão, the Brazilian notheastern dry lands, although infiltrated by innumerable veins of water which serve as way for those who intended to enter in the lands. In this way, the urban nuclei are understood as a stage of a territorialization process related to several other forms of establishments in this space. In Sergipe’s colonial context, cattle, landings, farms, villages, sugar mills, parishes, chapels and roads, among others, will be fundamental "unknowns" to understand the later stages of population and human congregation of that territory, begun in 1590. The hypothesis of the thesis is suspicious of assertions about the representations of Sergipe d'El Rey as a simple "hinge" between the captaincies of Bahia and Pernambuco, an ancillary zone to the sugarcane poles, and it is anchored in the representation of an active sharer captaincy since the 17th century, in a system of mutual interdependence between supply and breeding areas with sugar zones linked to the Atlantic trade. Thus, by searching documents and material vestiges of the past, under the focus of textual and iconographic sources, we seek to describe the movements of recognition, demarcation and territorial occupation of Sergipe d'El Rey within the general social context of the Colony, as well as to understand their peculiarities.