Vices and virtues, money, and the execution of public office in Portuguese domains

Abstract

This article intends to analyzes how money was a promoter of acts of political loyalty while at the same time serving to keep subjects and/or monarchy’s agents away from the straight path in 18th century Portuguese America. The gift economy, although always more distant from venality than in the Spanish monarchy, rewarded pecuniary services to the Portuguese crown of different kinds with the distribution of offices, posts, habits and other honorary bounties. The bonds between subjects and sovereign were reinforce at the same time as contributions were made to the royal treasury. However, this very well-articulated universe coexisted with the misdeeds and abuses of officials who, seduced by money, could harm the fulfilment of the Crown's interests and the conservation of the common good, which supposedly required greater royal control in combating "corruption". The problem posed here gains special relevance when it is observed that a shared institutional culture could coexist with a lack of consensus in the concrete balance of the vices and virtues that money could promote. The line separating virtuous actions from those that were not so recognized is difficult to draw since the public/private, legal/illegal, moral/immoral binomials, for example, useful to study the corruption of agents of the liberal State, to be applied to the Early Modern period they must be redefined and contextualized. We intend to understand the evaluations of such behaviors without seeking linearity or rigid categories that disregard the many elements, expressed on a case-by-case basis, essential to the study in question.