The concepts of people and plebs in Brazilian old regime (eighteenth century)

Abstract

Brazil in the eighteenth century witnessed the gradual unbundling of the traditional meanings of the Portugal's Old Regime: 1) the people as the entire Political body participants of an order of mystic stamp whose center is the monarch 2) the people as the "mechanics" or the third state in the society of orders. These meanings are shaken by the conditions of a colonial slave society and the transformations towards modernity that has already occurred, though timidly. In this movement, Illustration and typical forms of contestation of the Portugal's Old Regime become more important, bringing the idea the source of power resides in the people. Moreover, the issue of colonial rabble gets worse, in a way that for many contemporaries the colony does not have a true "people" able to take place in the political system. The identity of the people in colonial territories becomes an increasing problem to be solved or a bet on the future, disrupting the semantic stability of an estate society.