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was “inhabited” by half-wild cattle, runaways, hastily transferred colonies, downgraded
of the latter revolved around aggressive cartography of Richard Schomburgk's surveys
and Brazil's delay in transferring Indian tribes to the region to function as
muralhas do
sertão
(bulwarks of the backlands) and “Brazilianize” the landscape.
17
The usefulness of physical settlement for territorial appropriation was in part why
charter companies, colonist schemes, and large landed enterprises were viewed with
such alarm during the Amazon scrambles. Charter companies and colonization schemes
might be able to establish definitive territorial sovereignty within the area they claimed
as a consequence of the terms of the territorial contracts. Such colonies often engaged
in “statecraft” processes like establishing their own currencies, stamps, and flags. Da
CunhawashappytoinvokeUSparallelstojustifyBrazil'sownterritorialambitions,but
having large American populations in situ during a period of North American imperial
enthusiasm was far more problematic. In Africa, Belgian charter companies had com-
pletely superseded the various Kongo nations within the boundaries of Belgian charter
rights and had made the Congo a crown colony; the Belgians were currently active in
the Madeira watershed as well. Amazonia had to be settled by Brazilians, or would-be
Brazilians, or it risked territorial losses from within. This anxiety was clearly expressed
by da Cunha, who saw in the terrains of the scramble a zone of appropriation and, dis-
concertingly, the birthplace of a potentially new (non-Brazilian) nation if his country
didn't prevail.
Maps Make Subjects
Maps could make a “people,” and people could make a “nation,” but states (and their
maps) also made subjects. James Scott's
Seeing like a State
has emphasized the degree
to which states sought “legibility” of places and populations by creating more uniform
tenurial regimes, more easily identifiable landscapes, asserting dominion over places
through enumeration of populations in censuses and land ownership and land use sur-
veys. By normalizing and rationalizing such systems, states ratified and legitimized cer-
tain forms of knowledge and spatial organization. Knowing who was where, and how
many, and what the resources might be enhanced the potential for control. Taxes on
products, land, and population and other forms of revenue might be extracted once the
state knew what (and who) was there. The Upper Amazon had considerable revenues
that were moving through the watersheds and
varadouros
untaxed. And in the great
outback, where economic and political “nature” abhorred a vacuum, absence of a state
meantthepresenceofsomeoneelse:thefreebootersandentrepreneursofempire,neigh-
boring polities or “pseudo-states” such as charter companies.
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