The Avenging Angel and other essays on colonial history

This book is a collection of essays on the colonial history of Mato Grosso, created soon after the doctorate as a kind of intellectual provocation for various questions and problems encountered during the research on the decline of mining and the slow formation of a new society. We begin with four essays more focused on what we understand as the historian’s revenge, based on Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. Then follow several short essays on the colonial towns of Mato Grosso, mainly Cuiabá and Vila Bela. Finally, we address isolated issues such as smuggling, women in the colonial period, historiographical tradition, slavery, and mining. These essays aim more to provoke intellectual debate than to present some complete conclusion about something. They should be understood as a starting point and not as a point of arrival.