España en Mapas Antiguos. Catálogo de la Colección Rodríguez Torres–Ayuso

the so called paulistas, luso-brazilian mestizos from the plateau of São Paulo de Piratininga, had overstepped the lines imposed by contemporary treaties in their search for indigenous populations to use as slaves, even reaching the Spanish Jesuit missions. At the end of the seventeenth century, gold and emerald mines were found in the centre of South America. By the 1740s, at the peak of extraction, production reached 14 tons of gold, accelerating the need for treaties that would determine more clearly the possessions of each Crown. By approaching the topic of the paulistas, Goes delves into a thorny issue in Brazilian historiography. One of the most important figures in the revival of Alexandre de Gusmão’s writings in the twentieth century was the Portuguese scholar Jaime Cortesão (1884–1960), who, in addition to understanding the Portuguese Crown as being chiefly responsible for Portugal’s westward expansion in South America, thanks to the geopolitical importance of its territories, helped to mystify the image of the role of the paulistas in this process. Most Brazilian historiography, though, tends to question the paulista view of the construction of Brazilian space, especially from a better understanding of their movement in the hinterland in the course of slave raiding to supply the slave markets in the Brazilian Highland. Border myths are crucial elements in the legitimation of territories at the negotiating table. Thus, questioning some of Cortesão’s theses, Goes discusses two of the main myths. First, that of Brazil Island, an idea widely used in the eighteenth century with the help of maps from the previous century. According to this myth, the basins of the rivers Plate and Amazon met at some point in the centre of the continent, forming the immense Xarayes Lake, in such a way that the Portuguese territories were already separated from the Spanish by ‘natural borders’. The second myth suggested that the territories that today make up Brazil formerly belonged to an immense indigenous Tupi-Guarani group and that the whole area from the confluence of the Paraguay River and the Guaporé River to the Amazon was their ancestral territory: Pindorama. Goes questions both myths, pointing to borders as human constructs from a given time and showing the importance of Alexandre de Gusmão as an articulator of two key elements in the diplomatic negotiations: the idea of utis possidetis, by which legitimate possession was guaranteed to those who had already colonized the land, and the idea that territorial possession would be marked by natural landscape elements such as rivers and mountain chains. Thus, in Goes’s view, Brazilian territory as a geographical entity owes much to the role played by Alexandre de Gusmão. But in focusing on Gusmão, he almost leaves an important consideration out of his narrative, namely that of the actual events of exploration in Portuguese America. The construction of maps and their use in diplomacy were also dependent on the circulation of information in important Enlightenment networks, making the whole process muchmore complex. Nevertheless, in focusing on questions about mythologies and space, and identifying them as historical processes, Goes has shown us the dangers of using, for example, Gusmão’s ideas in the twentieth century and turning Gusmão himself into a myth. © Antonio José Alves de Oliveira Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica Santa Teresa, Espírito, Brazil http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5019-5983 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085694.2022.2130547