Beckman Revolt

Beckman Revolt (1684), a rebellion that resulted in the expulsion of the Jesuits from the captaincy of Maranhão and the removal of its governor. Both were responses to the actions of the Portuguese crown in 1680 prohibiting enslavement of the Brazilian Indians in the state of Maranhão, assigning their welfare to the Jesuits, and establishing a Lisbon-based company of merchants who pledged to furnish the state with 600 African slaves annually in return for a monopoly on its exports. Manoel Beckman, the wealthy planter who led the uprising, and many other rebels were hanged; five others received lesser sentences.

See alsoSlavery: Brazil .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Murray Graeme Mac Nicoll, "Seventeenth-Century Maranhão: Beckman's Revolt," in Estudios Ibero-Americanos, 4 (1978): 129-140.

John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (1978).

Additional Bibliography

Assunçao, Paulo de. Negócios Jesuíticos: O cotidiano da administraçao dos bens divinos. São Paulo: Edusp, 2004.

Castelnau-L'Estoile, Charlotte de. Operários de uma vinha estéril: Os jesuítas e a conversão dos indios no Brasil, 1580–1620. Bauru: Edusc, 2006.

Cohen, Thomas M. The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Vilar, Soccoro de Fátima Pacífico. A invençao de uma escrita: Ancheita, os Jesuitas, e suas histórias. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2006.

                                        Dauril Alden