Making foreign currency on land: a preliminary study on land tenure, land ownership, and conflicts in municipal intendancies in Pará between the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Abstract

The present article aims to hold a debate about the intensification of land conflicts in Pará in the first decades of the Republic. It is intended to demonstrate that a large part of the land disputes were linked to the overlapping of tenure titles registered in municipal intendancies on the initiative of large landowners, farmers, merchants and heirs of sesmaria, acted as real local potentates in areas for decades held by families of small squatters. This is to point to a significant change that occurred in the early years of the Republic: the attribution given to the municipal councils to decide on the question of the lands belonging to their municipal patrimony. The analysis sought to understand the relations between property practices, their multiple interpretations in the light of the changes and continuities verified in the passage from the Empire to the Republic in the late nineteenth-century Pará, and the actions of small peasants-squatters with a view to ensuring their right to remain on lots of land where they held possession. Having as a theoretical-methodological horizon the realization of a social history of property, the questions formulated as a research problem were directed to the collation of a varied corpus of sources, among which are highlighted: state decrees and laws, news and articles published in the press, sesmaria letter, as well as protests, counter-protests and undersigned reproduced on the pages of the newspapers of the period.