The translation of this book from Portuguese to English allows us to share it with a broader audience and, at the same time, makes it possible for the book to receive different interpretations.
For Portuguese-speaking readers, especially in Brazil, it is associated with the history of the lands of Brazil, Portuguese America, and its relations with Spanish America. Readers more familiar with Iberian history will find in the themes explored in this book the ambiguities of conquest and colonization processes that had specificities and transferred experiences and rivalries from other regions to a continent that was new to Europeans. The period when the Kingdom of Portugal was under the rule of the Spanish Crown, during the reigns of Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV, which historiography calls the Iberian Union or the period of the Hispanic Monarchy, is given particular focus here. Questions concerning the place occupied by Luso-Brazilians and Brazil within the vast Spanish Empire come to the fore.
To address this context, the book turns to the broader scale involving Europe and America and thus reveals another angle: hence, the expectations that Potosà raised about the lands of Brazil can be considered a case study within the broad spectrum of effects resulting from European interests in America.
For me, as a historian, one perspective clarifies the other. It becomes a composition of scales, as well as an invitation to understand two projections: Portugalâs expectations were projected onto Peru; European aspirations were projected onto Peruvian America. The sources explored in the book also reflect different scales: the handwritten cartography, especially Portuguese, that circulated through mapmaking workshops nourished the more widely disseminated printed cartography. In this transfer of information, traces of the interests and choices that motivate any geographic description can be found.
The English title, Mapping South American Promises: PotosÃ, Brazil, and European Visions, conveys a central element of European representations, both in texts and images, regarding the New World. The signs and indications gathered by travelers and conquerors in the lands of America were expressed in the form of promises and hopes that translated, expanded, and recycled what was actually found.
The presence of this book in the Mapping the Past Collection places it alongside the endeavors of other historians to expand and deepen our knowledge about the complexity of the work of mapmakers, examining their practices and motivations and scrutinizing their effects.
This English-language edition has greatly benefited from feedback and comments on the original Brazilian publication, especially by Laura de Mello e Souza and Luiz Estevam de Oliveira Fernandes. It was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Postgraduate Program in History at the Universidade Federal do Paraná and Capes (Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education). My gratitude goes to Miriam Adelman for her skill and enthusiasm in translating the text. I am also deeply thankful to my friends Chet Van Duzer, Lisa Voigt, Hal Langfur, Kittiya Lee, and Andrés Velez Posada for their generous and thoughtful suggestions and corrections.