Interview with Jorge Pedreira

Abstract

In December 2023, we made our first contact with Professor Jorge Miguel Viana Pedreira, who gladly accepted the invitation to give this interview. Since then, we have exchanged a few messages with the interviewee and the questions and answers were conducted by email, between April and May 2024. We decided to focus the interview on the topic related to the Dossier - "Capitalists, merchants and businessmen: trajectories of activity and mercantile networks in the Atlantic world (19th century)" -, in which Professor Jorge Pedreira is a great expert, with an internationally recognized historiographical production. A professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa since 1982, the interviewee was also a visiting professor at Brown University and the University of São Paulo (2004) and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library (2018). He is the author of several books, articles and academic works, with emphasis on "Estrutura Industrial e Mercado Colonial. Portugal e Brazil 1780-1830" (Oeiras: Difel, 1994), "Os Homens de Negócio da Praça de Lisboa, de Pombal ao Vintismo (1755-1822). Diferenciação, reprodução e identificação de um grupo social" (PhD Thesis in History, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1995) and "D. João VI. Lisboa: Temas e Debates" (2009), in partnership with Fernando Dores Costa. Over the next few pages, readers will be able to learn a little more about the academic trajectory and the interviewee's opinions on some of the most recent historiographical debates and historical approaches, as well as some methodologies important to the Social History of Elites.