Abstract

ALENCAR, Paulo Gustavo de; ESPINDOLA, Giovana Mira de  and  SOUSA, Maria Sueli Rodrigues de. Sesmarias System and the Foundation of the Coloniality of the Territory in Piauí, Brazil. Rev. Geog. Amer. Central [online]. 2023, n.71, pp.77-110. ISSN 2215-2563.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15359/rgac.71-2.3.

This study aims to characterize the first moment of construction of the subjectivity of land as a commodity in the state of Piauí, Brazil, one of the marks of coloniality Aníbal Quijano conceptualized. The study involved bibliographic research and documental research. It examines the sesmarias regime, a policy used as a mediator in the main conflicts between colonizers. Through this policy, the colonizers could ensure the appropriation of land and almost all the richness of the territory of native peoples and the destruction of territorialities. The cattle ranch was the most important territorial unit in colonial Piauí because it transcended the importance of the sesmarias as documentary ballast, transforming itself into the territoriality that supports the appropriation over large areas supported by the imprecision of the limits of the productive unit. In the colonial period, the function of land was still incompatible with the function of commodity, but the sesmarias regime was the institution transported from the metropolis to impregnate the underlying symbologies of the colonizer as something not contestable, erasing the other symbologies not recognized or despised.

Keywords : Sesmarias regime; coloniality; territoriality; land as a commodity; Piauí.

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