Museus, coleccionismo e viagens científicas em Portugal de finais de Setecentos

Abstract

This article focuses on the vast and complex scientific and institutional process related to the collection of artefacts and the formation of scientific-natural, ethnological and anthropological collections from various extra-European colonial spaces in Portugal during the second half of the eighteenth century. It also addresses the institutions that housed these materials. In a period when science was, by definition, useful and should serve the public interest in the pursuit of welfare, progress and the happiness of peoples, scientific studies had the objective of contributing to a scientific survey with encyclopaedic pretensions of the imperial spaces through the identification, collection and study of the natural productions and the “physical and moral characteristics” of the natives. The scientific curiosity that characterized the social groups involved in this process allowed the embodiment of a set of practices that was thought in Lisbon and implemented by Portuguese subjects throughout the empire. From this set of practices, I would like to highlight the philosophical voyages, scientific explorations aimed at the physical and economic description of the territories and the inventory of natural resources, considered as an instrument of political and administrative modernization of the empire at a time when science and technology were considered as essential tools for the development of the Modern State.