Contract Enforcement and Risk Reduction: The Luso-Brazilian Companies in the last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent investigations into long-distance trade in the early modern period have highlighted several strategies which were used by traders to mitigate risk. This article attempts to contribute to this historiography by analyzing contractual clauses of mercantile companies registered in Lisbon notarial records between 1784 and 1807, comprising merchants residing both in Portugal and in Brazil. These contractual clauses reveal that companies were a form of trade organization in which the capital owners residing in Lisbon limited the scope of action of agents in Pernambuco, in the northeast of Brazil, in order to protect their investments. In addition, this study demonstrates that mercantile hierarchies existed between the marketplaces of Portugal and Brazil. Thus, I cast some doubts on the most recent investigations of the economic history of the Portuguese Empire that argue for a predominance of Brazilian merchants in the overseas investments. I assert that, at the end of the eighteenth century, merchants residing in Lisbon still financed and directed colonial trade with agents in Pernambuco. This analysis explores the reasons that led trade to assume such a framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".