This project aims at analysing the authority of the viceroys and governors-general - the highest representatives of the Portuguese kings – in the States of India and Brazil between 1640 and 1750 and as such, it deals with the relevance of non-formal expressions of power and authority, and their role in the efficiency of political communication. UNCERTAINPOWER seeks early expressions of the combination between formal and non-formal expressions of power and authority, namely in places where the physical presence of the main decision-makers was impossible to happen. In a world with ever-changing systems of communication, where virtual forms of power become more and more present, to offer a diachronic perspective on the uncertainties that long-distance expressions of power entail is relevant. The choice of the early-modern Portuguese empire is related with its early presence in the four parts of the world in a period when technologies of power and of communication were very different from ours. In UNCERTAINPOWER, issues that are still relevant today, such as the ways of expressing authority in very different socio-cultural contexts, the reception of this authority, as well as the links between these processes and the conservation of society will be discussed. Which were the ways chosen by Portuguese viceroys and governors to communicate their power and authority with the societies under their control? How did these royal agents exercise the prerogative of representing the royal power in an empire with a significant territorial extension and with a plurality of cultural and political realities? How did they adjust their political cultures to the local needs? How did the local contexts influence their ways of governing? And how did mobility challenge the meanings of power and authority? The more tangible outcomes of this project include 6 articles, 1 book and a virtual exhibition.

CORE (Colonial Recipes, Then and Now) investigates how domestic colonial food cultures in the Portuguese empire (1450-1600) reflect the mobility, agency, labour, and knowledge of women and enslaved cooks; and how colonial recipes can create space for more nuanced conversations around colonial heritage. The project takes a ‘global history’ approach to the empire, examining the extent to which the mobility of people, foods, labour, and knowledge between key port cities shaped colonial food cultures. By focusing on domestic spaces, it places women and enslaved cooks, who did the labour of food preparation, centre stage. In this way, the project revalorises domestic spaces as sites of global exchange, which have been largely excluded from studies of global history, as well as insisting on the importance of gender to understand the complexities of the relations between mobility, food, and empire. By spotlighting colonial recipes, CORE will spark new scholarly conversations about the insights these texts offer into: ‘subaltern’ mobility, creativity, and adaptability; the intersecting production of gender, race, and class; and colonial households as the centre of social provisioning and wider infrastructures of empire, examining how new colonial cuisines intersect with colonial regimes of trade, agricultural production, and domestic slavery. It makes three historiographical interventions, namely it: (1) responds to calls to write a global history of the early modern Portuguese empire; (2) brings the ‘new imperial history’ further into dialogue with a history of the Portuguese empire by showing how food illuminates colonial politics, especially negotiations around gender, race, and class; and (3) contributes to public debate around the production of heritage about the colonial past, using colonial recipes to interrogate the multiple valences and contradictions of the empire, and its legacies in the present.

This project reconstructs series for Brazil’s population, prices, wages, welfare ratios, gross domestic product (GDP), and GDP per capita from the seventeenth century to 1920. This is the first reconstruction of consistent, annual population and economic series for this period and will change the understanding that we have today of Brazil’s historical economic growth. This project will be conducted at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon, under the supervision of Nuno Palma, with Jaime Reis as a member of the board. Long-run GDP per capita series are central to economic growth research, to test competing hypotheses about why nations grow and decline, and for main debates in comparative historical development, such as the great divergence and the colonial origins debates. Until today, however, Brazil has been excluded from these areas of research. This project intends to bridge this gap using known figures in the literature, recently digitized archival sources, and novel archival research in the Overseas Historical Archive and the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Portugal. In addition to providing the first series of four centuries of Brazilian economic growth, it will contribute to a number of debates in the specialized and interdisciplinary literatures and generate open-access databases with the reconstructed time series.

"IN²LISBON - Innovative and Inclusive Lisbon" will investigate whether and how public policies and private investments that announce “innovation” in two neighbourhoods of Lisbon (Beato and Marvila), Portugal, promote or neglect the social inclusion of subaltern groups (women, ethnic minorities and low-income residents) and diversity in this city. These interventions are advertised as vehicles for the establishment of “innovative and creative industries”; for the creation of an “open, entrepreneurial city and a world reference”; and the consolidation of Portugal's status as a “cosmopolitan, open and innovative” country. However, the governance of this urban renewal process can also reproduce privileges and hierarchies, and even reinforce dynamics of urban segregation and inequality within the city. The Beato and Marvila area offers a privileged vantage point for the interests of this investigation, due to the clear articulation between urban renewal operations, on the one hand, and the existence of municipal and national symbolic strategies aimed at repositioning Lisbon and Portugal on the global map. Second, due to the scale and the fast pace that characterize this process in the context of a post-crisis economic recovery phase. Third, due to its timing: since the beginning of the current pandemic, many plans, deadlines and ideas for these projects are being discussed, and IN²LISBON will also be well positioned to contribute to this debate. The researcher will count on the contribution and partnership of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa), with excellent academic resources, namely the stimulating and productive research group Environment, Territory and Society. Based on this unique experience, the researcher intends to assume a more qualified and powerful position to continue his academic career in Brazil.