Right Land In Brazil

This book has as its starting point the year 1795, when the Portuguese Queen, Mary I, enacted the alvará of 3 May, with the aim of legislating on the irregularities and disorders of the sesmarias system in Brazil. In 1822 the system was permanently discontinued. The final cut was the Constitutional Charter of 1824, which enshrined land ownership in all its fullness in the nascent Brazilian Empire. The objective was therefore to understand how the sesmaria system was inserted in the Crown’s attempt to regulate its relationship with the colony, while it – the sesmaria – was understood in Portugal as an important instrument for the appropriation of the land which led to various conceptions and conclusions concerning it. Throughout those years, the problems experienced in the metropolis that culminated with the transfer of the Court and, in 1822, with the independence of Brazil, produced numerous studies on the desired relationship between Portugal and Brazil that, despite different views, provoked reflections on the right to land, both in Portugal and in its then main colony.