This dissertation is concerned with the making of metal making. It explores how skills, knowledge, and artefacts were circulated and grounded within the Swedish metal trades during the period ca. 1730 to 1775. It also analyses how these processes were related to different ways of organising practices of work. The metal trades are referred to as comprising various forms of state-supported metal manufacturing outside the guild system. The focus is on finer metal making (finsmide), above all cutlery making. The first chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological approaches. Critical to the analysis are the terms strategies and tactics, which are used to approach the interplay of different ways of knowing and acting in everyday metal making. This is done related to a trajectorial method. The trajectories of state official Samuel Schröder and the Stockholm cutler Eric Engberg are centred, but I also explore one broader skills-trajectory: the ‘English way’ of making cutlery. Chapters 2 to 4 examine the strategic stage for metal making, focusing on the attempts made by the eighteenth-century Swedish state to order the domestic trades in line with ideas of an all-embracing division of labour. This development is investigated by discussing regulations, spatial mapping and supervision, as well as descriptions and ‘corrections’ of workshop practices. Chapters 5 to 7 highlight the interplay of strategies and tactics within a changing manufacturing ‘system’. Artisans’ journeys, the construction of workshops in Stockholm, and the introduction of piecework at provincial knife works during the 1750s and 1760s are explored. The discussion leads up to the founding of a ‘free town’ for metal-making artisans in Eskilstuna in 1771. The results of this dissertation add to Swedish research on early-modern metal making in a number of ways. Urban space and the connections between metal-making communities are highlighted. In doing this, emphasis is placed on how practices of work were shaped over time by the movements of people, artefacts, and materials. Most notably, the circulation, imitation, and local adaption of knowledge and skills within the metal trades are accentuated. These findings also connect to recent research concerned with manufacturing and knowledge-making in pre-industrial Europe.

It is commonly accepted that, prior to the rise of paediatric medicine as a formal medical specialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medical care of children was primarily conducted by women in the context of the household. However, as this thesis argues, there was vibrant medical interest in children prior to the development of formalized paediatric medicine. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a network of medical practitioners interested in children’s health sought to establish their authority over the subject and, in doing so, devoted increased attention to children, channelling general medical interest into the basis for future medical specialisation. As this thesis argues, medical authority over children’s health was gradually constructed over the eighteenth century through printed texts, institutional experience, medical understandings of disease, and efforts to devise therapeutic practices suitable to children. Key to these developments were the efforts made by medical men to supplant women as authorities on children’s health. Also crucial was the role played by institutions in providing spaces for medical practitioners to encounter children. Institutions, such as the Dispensary for the Infant Poor and the London Foundling Hospital, increased the opportunities for medical practitioners to gain experience treating child patients. As this thesis demonstrates, it was the children of the poor who provided medical practitioners with the hands-on experience necessary to bolster their emerging claims of authority. As such, institutions and poor children both had essential roles to play in the development of medical interest in children, and the translation of that interest into claims of medical authority.

This thesis argues that British naval officers provide a useful category of analysis for social and cultural historians. While previous scholarship has largely ignored naval officers or treated them as equivalent, socially and professionally, to army officers or the traditional professions, the present study argues that the nature of service at sea presented challenges to officers' social status. Drawing on thousands of recently-digitized sources, as well as extensive archival materials, it explores the formation of naval officers' social identity, the forces that shaped their careers, and the changing landscape of social status at the end of the eighteenth century. The demands of life at sea placed naval officers in a liminal social space. Their claims to gentility were contingent and contested. They needed to be proficient in practical as well as theoretical skills. At the same time, officers were expected to be gentlemen. How officers shaped, and were shaped by, the changing definitions of that term provides the framework for the thesis. It makes three central contributions to the fields of British social and naval history. First, it emphasizes the continuing significance of social status boundaries in Georgian Britain. The existing literature misconstrues the chronology of the changing nature of gentility and misunderstands the relationship of naval officers to issues of gentility and professionalism. Second, it recalibrates our understanding of the nature and mechanisms of patronage networks. Social backgrounds made relatively insignificant contributions to shaping officers' careers; patrons used a much wider range of criteria when selecting clients. Finally, it questions the traditional separation of naval history from social and cultural history. The Navy and naval officers were central to British life at the end of the eighteenth century and cannot be effectively analysed separately. The Navy was both socially unique and uniquely important to Britain during the crisis of the Wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Entre 1702 et 1793, onze hommes occupèrent la fonction d’agent général de la Marine et du Commerce de France à Madrid. Agissant sans statut officiel, ces envoyés du secrétaire d’État de la Marine étaient la pièce maîtresse d’un réseau d’information français en Espagne. Créés après l’avènement du Bourbon Philippe V au trône d’Espagne, ces experts, clé de voûte du réseau consulaire français dans la Péninsule, mirent leur compétence économique au service d’un rapprochement commercial entre les deux monarchies. Par leur action, leur surface sociale, leur connaissance de l’Espagne et leurs discours, ces intermédiaires s’appropriaient une fonction aux contours obscurs. Hommes de l’ombre sous les ordres de l’ambassadeur français, ils acquirent une dimension qui en fit les véritables artisans d’une diplomatie commerciale franco-espagnole au XVIIIe siècle. Ces instances de dialogue interrogent les interactions croissantes entre commerce et diplomatie. L’étude tend à montrer en quoi ces figures hybrides se situaient à l’interface entre plusieurs mondes : la France et l’Espagne d’une part, le négoce et la sphère politique d’autre part. Informateurs, négociateurs et médiateurs, ces agents interrogent le cheminement qui conduisait de l’information à la négociation. Il s’agit de montrer en quoi ces hommes, acteurs de l’interconnexion des deux monarchies, dessinaient les contours d’un espace de dialogue spécifique qui visait à combler les interstices entre les réalités du terrain et la discussion entre gouvernements. / Between 1702 and 1793, eleven men held the position of general agent of the Navy and Trade of France in Madrid. Acting without any official status, these envoys of the Secretary of State of the Navy were the centerpiece of a French informative network in Spain. Created after the advent of the Bourbon Philip V to the Spanish throne, these experts, keystone of the French consular network in the Peninsula, put their economic competence at the service of a commercial alliance between both monarchies. Their action, social surface, knowledge of Spain and discourse, helped these intermediaries seize a function with blurry outlines. Men of the shadow under the orders of the French ambassador, they acquired such a dimension that they became the true artisans of a Franco-Spanish commercial diplomacy in the eighteenth century. These go-between rise the matter of the growing interactions between trade and diplomacy. The study tends to show how these hybrid figures were perfectly in between several worlds : France and Spain on the one hand, trading and the political sphere on the other. Informants, negotiators and mediators, these agents encourage us to question the path that led from information to negotiation. Thus, what is at stake in this study is to show how these men, actors of the interconnection of the two monarchies, drew the frame for a specific dialogue which aimed to fill the interstices between the realities of the field and the more political debate between governments.

A tese investiga a história do Palácio Velho de Ouro Preto, primeira residência de governadores instalada na antiga Vila Rica, sede política da capitania de Minas Gerais a partir de 1721. Foram analisadas, em especial, a biografia de Henrique Lopes de Araújo, capitão-mor de Vila Rica entre 1713-33 e benfeitor do Palácio; a história do conflituoso processo político consumado nas entradas, na fixação e na permanência de governadores no interior do território minerador ao longo das três primeiras décadas do século XVIII; e, por fim, a história do próprio complexo arquitetônico do Palácio Velho no intervalo entre 1717, data de sua construção, e 1734 (intervalo no qual serviu por residência dos governadores da capitania) e no período seguinte, quando a propriedade passou a ser administrada pela câmara (1734-1738) e, logo depois, pela Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Vila Rica (1738-1825). A pesquisa esmiuçou os interesses envolvidos na exploração da rica lavra de ouro existente no Palácio, relacionados, sobretudo, à irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos do Alto de Padre Faria (ou Alto da Cruz), na freguesia de Antônio Dias. Os vínculos dessa confraria com o Palácio Velho estiveram na origem do mito de Chico Rei, também avaliado no trabalho. O contexto histórico que caracterizou a biografia de Henrique Lopes de Araújo e a trajetória do Palácio Velho marcou-se pelas especificidades da sociedade colonial. Dialeticamente interligadas ao mundo europeu de Antigo Regime, mas pautadas por relações sociais próprias do escravismo colonial, singularizadas ainda pela natureza da atividade mineradora, as Minas setecentistas propiciaram experiências sociais únicas. Ali, os mecanismos de ascensão social, de dominação senhorial e de resistência escrava adquiriram matizes particulares, parcialmente referenciados nas normas de Antigo Regime, porém também vinculados às relações sociais de tipo colonial impostas pela escravidão adotada em larga escala. / This thesis investigates the Ouro Preto Old Palace (Palácio Velho de Ouro Preto) history, first governors residence installed in the Vila Rica, the Minas Gerais capital from 1721. It was analyzed the Henrique Lopes de Araujo biography, Vila Rica main captain between 1713-33 and the Palace benefactor, also the conflicted historical process of the \"entries\", fixation and permanence of governors within the mining area over the first three decades of the eighteenth century; and finally, it was studied the Old Palace history between 1717, the construction date, and 1734 (when it served for captaincy governors residence) and in the following period, when the property became administered by the camera (1734-1738) and soon after by the Santa Casa de Misericordia de Vila Rica (1738-1825). The research discusses the interests involved in the exploitation of the rich gold mining in the Palace, related mainly to the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos do Alto de Padre Faria or Alto da Cruz, a slave brotherhood in Antonio Dias district. The link of this brotherhood with the Old Palace gave rise to Chico Rei myth also rated at work. The historical context that characterized the Henrique Lopes de Araujo biography and the Old Palace trajectory was marked by the colonial society specifities. The eighteenth-century Minas given place to unique social experiences, dialetically linked to the european Ancien Régime, but guided by the colonial slavery social relations, singled even for the mining activities nature. There the social mobility, slaveholder´s domination and slave resistance acquired a particular format, partially referenced in the Ancien Régime standards, but also linked to social relations of colonial type imposed by slavery adopted on a large scale.

Esta dissertação objetiva compreender a prática dos descimentos indígenas no Estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, entre os anos 1680 e 1750. Além de buscarmos entender de que forma esta política contribuiu para a expansão das fronteiras coloniais e para a inserção de mão de obra no Estado, analisamos a atuação e os interesses dos agentes envolvidos na realização dos descimentos, a saber: principais indígenas, missionários, funcionários régios, moradores, deputados da Junta das Missões e populações nativas / The aim of this dissertation is to understand the practice of descimentos in the state of Maranhão e Grão-Pará, between the years 1680 and 1750. Besides, this work also aims to understand how this policy contributed to the expansion of colonial borders and to the inclusion of labor in the state. Furthermore, we analyze the performance and the interests of the agents involved in the descimentos, such as: Indian leaders, missionaries, royal officials, settlers, members of the Tribunal da Junta das Missões and native populations

Este trabalho propõe uma reflexão (auto)crítica sobre a poesia atribuída ao poeta luso-brasileiro Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744-1792). Para a realização dessa reflexão, discute-se testemunhos significativos da fortuna crítica desse autor desde o século XIX até os dias atuais, com o objetivo de compreender a leitura hegemônica dessa poesia. Em seguida, propõe-se uma breve reflexão sobre os pressupostos filológicos que regraram as edições realizadas desse corpus poético nos últimos dois séculos, com o intuito de demonstrar as suas limitações e algumas de suas implicações problemáticas à atividade da crítica literária. Propõe-se, também, a necessidade de reconhecer os textos que compõem esse corpus poético como uma alteridade, e de valorizar a sua materialidade, a despeito da progressiva desmaterialização do conceito de obra que se faz notar na atividade da crítica romântica e da filologia de base neolachmanniana. Por fim, mobiliza-se os resultados das reflexões realizadas para a produção de uma reedição desses poemas. Essa reedição é produzida a partir de critérios cumulativos, negando a pertinência do processo de seleção de variantes autorizadas por meio da colagem de testemunhos para reconstruir um texto genuíno que expresse a última vontade autoral. De modo geral, este trabalho busca, acima de tudo, conferir à materialidade dos poemas atribuídos a Alvarenga Peixoto uma posição central no debate sobre essas produções coloniais setecentistas. / In this thesis, I propose a (self-)critical reflection on the poetry attributed to the Luso-Brazilian poet Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744-1792). In order to carry out this discussion and understand the hegemonic interpretation of that poetry, I analize some significant texts from Alvarenga Peixotos critical fortune from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Then, I propose a brief discution on the philological assumptions adopted by the editors of that poetic corpus on the last two centuries, to demonstrate their limitations and some of the problematic implications they cause to literary criticism. I also propose the relevance of recognizing the otherness of those texts, and the need of valuing their materiality, in spite of the progressive dematerialization of the concept of (literary) work, that can be noticed on the romantic literary criticism and the neolachmannian philology. Lastly, I mobilize the results of the mentioned discussions to re-edit the poems attributed to Alvarenga Peixoto. This re-edition is built uppon cumulative criteria, denying the relevance of the process of selecting authorized variants through the comparison of the known manuscripts to build a genuine text, that represents the final authorial intention. Overall, this thesis intends to give a central position on the debate over the colonial productions of the eighteenth century to the materiality of the edited poems.

Through her texts depicting amorous adventures, Eliza Haywood engages with critical, contemporary discussions about power relations and consent in both social and legal constructs. Her texts resist the boundary between the private domain of interpersonal relationships and the public domain of political relations. Rather, her fiction engages in a wide-reaching discourse that explores the interrelations between power, agency, consent, and education, and lays bare the ways in which societal roles and expectations are reinforced in damaging ways. This thesis aims to prove that Haywood’s repetition of central motifs—including the continued tension between resisting and yielding to sexual pressure or temptation, and the line between seduction and rape—serves to question how these behaviours become normalized and naturalized. Through analyzing three categories of relationships—women and their fathers or guardians, women and their lovers, and women with other women—this thesis unpacks how women’s agency is stifled by parental relationships, transferred to male lovers, and finally empowered by female intimacy.

Esta dissertação objetiva compreender a prática dos descimentos indígenas no Estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, entre os anos 1680 e 1750. Além de buscarmos entender de que forma esta política contribuiu para a expansão das fronteiras coloniais e para a inserção de mão de obra no Estado, analisamos a atuação e os interesses dos agentes envolvidos na realização dos descimentos, a saber: principais indígenas, missionários, funcionários régios, moradores, deputados da Junta das Missões e populações nativas / The aim of this dissertation is to understand the practice of descimentos in the state of Maranhão e Grão-Pará, between the years 1680 and 1750. Besides, this work also aims to understand how this policy contributed to the expansion of colonial borders and to the inclusion of labor in the state. Furthermore, we analyze the performance and the interests of the agents involved in the descimentos, such as: Indian leaders, missionaries, royal officials, settlers, members of the Tribunal da Junta das Missões and native populations

A tese investiga a história do Palácio Velho de Ouro Preto, primeira residência de governadores instalada na antiga Vila Rica, sede política da capitania de Minas Gerais a partir de 1721. Foram analisadas, em especial, a biografia de Henrique Lopes de Araújo, capitão-mor de Vila Rica entre 1713-33 e benfeitor do Palácio; a história do conflituoso processo político consumado nas entradas, na fixação e na permanência de governadores no interior do território minerador ao longo das três primeiras décadas do século XVIII; e, por fim, a história do próprio complexo arquitetônico do Palácio Velho no intervalo entre 1717, data de sua construção, e 1734 (intervalo no qual serviu por residência dos governadores da capitania) e no período seguinte, quando a propriedade passou a ser administrada pela câmara (1734-1738) e, logo depois, pela Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Vila Rica (1738-1825). A pesquisa esmiuçou os interesses envolvidos na exploração da rica lavra de ouro existente no Palácio, relacionados, sobretudo, à irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos do Alto de Padre Faria (ou Alto da Cruz), na freguesia de Antônio Dias. Os vínculos dessa confraria com o Palácio Velho estiveram na origem do mito de Chico Rei, também avaliado no trabalho. O contexto histórico que caracterizou a biografia de Henrique Lopes de Araújo e a trajetória do Palácio Velho marcou-se pelas especificidades da sociedade colonial. Dialeticamente interligadas ao mundo europeu de Antigo Regime, mas pautadas por relações sociais próprias do escravismo colonial, singularizadas ainda pela natureza da atividade mineradora, as Minas setecentistas propiciaram experiências sociais únicas. Ali, os mecanismos de ascensão social, de dominação senhorial e de resistência escrava adquiriram matizes particulares, parcialmente referenciados nas normas de Antigo Regime, porém também vinculados às relações sociais de tipo colonial impostas pela escravidão adotada em larga escala. / This thesis investigates the Ouro Preto Old Palace (Palácio Velho de Ouro Preto) history, first governors residence installed in the Vila Rica, the Minas Gerais capital from 1721. It was analyzed the Henrique Lopes de Araujo biography, Vila Rica main captain between 1713-33 and the Palace benefactor, also the conflicted historical process of the \"entries\", fixation and permanence of governors within the mining area over the first three decades of the eighteenth century; and finally, it was studied the Old Palace history between 1717, the construction date, and 1734 (when it served for captaincy governors residence) and in the following period, when the property became administered by the camera (1734-1738) and soon after by the Santa Casa de Misericordia de Vila Rica (1738-1825). The research discusses the interests involved in the exploitation of the rich gold mining in the Palace, related mainly to the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos do Alto de Padre Faria or Alto da Cruz, a slave brotherhood in Antonio Dias district. The link of this brotherhood with the Old Palace gave rise to Chico Rei myth also rated at work. The historical context that characterized the Henrique Lopes de Araujo biography and the Old Palace trajectory was marked by the colonial society specifities. The eighteenth-century Minas given place to unique social experiences, dialetically linked to the european Ancien Régime, but guided by the colonial slavery social relations, singled even for the mining activities nature. There the social mobility, slaveholder´s domination and slave resistance acquired a particular format, partially referenced in the Ancien Régime standards, but also linked to social relations of colonial type imposed by slavery adopted on a large scale.