Technical and Scientific Training in the Construction of Empires On the Quest of Learning Places

Introduction

Part 1: On learning and teaching

1. “Militarising” dominions and “globalising” knowledge: architects and military engineers in the Mediterranean during the early modern age

Valeria Manfrè

2. “Servants of Mathesis”: early modern education in fortification and the authority of mathematics in the Dutch language

Charles van den Heuvel and Henk Hietbrink

3. Classes or lessons, and the learning of architecture before the Portuguese Restoration (1640)

Margarida Tavares da Conceição

4. Learning places: building expertise in the early modern Portuguese Empire

Renata Malcher de Araujo, Margarida Tavares da Conceição, Alice Santiago Faria

5. Scenes from the war to come: the development of mock sieges in French military schools from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries

Émilie d’Orgeix

6. The professional training in the fields of architecture and engineering in nineteenth-century Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro: institutions, temporalities, and exchanges

Karolyna de Paula Koppke

7. The Portuguese higher studies of colonial agriculture (1878–1910): agronomy, empire, and colonial rule

João de Almeida Barata

8. On building empires: colonial companies, spatial planning, and the circulation of knowledge

Beatriz Serrazina

Part 2: On theories and practices

9. Engineers for the empire: from the academies of mathematics in Spain to the practice of fortification in Cartagena de Indias from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century

Jorge Galindo-Diaz

10. Academic vs colonial fortification: cultural dialogue on building techniques in the Spanish Caribbean and the Philippines

Pedro Luengo

11. From theory to practice: military engineering in the Gulf of Mexico during the second half of the eighteenth century

Miguel Ángel Nieto Marquez

12. (In)formal learning: military engineer education in African territories of the Portuguese empire

Sara Ventura da Cruz, Mafalda Batista Pacheco, Fernando Pires

13. Between readings, writings, and the building site: Diogo da Silveira Veloso, an eighteenth-century Portuguese engineer in northeastern Brazil

Clovis Ramiro Jucá Neto

14. Drawing the territory: cartographic expeditions as learning places, the case of southern Brazil in the middle of the eighteenth century

João Cabeleira 

15. Cartography and mining in Acaraú hinterlands: engineers and practitioners trying to know Ceará, Brazil (1797–1861)

Isabelle Mendonça de Carvalho, Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno

16. The idea of a “new world” in the General Captaincy of the Azores: the territory and its protagonists

Antonieta Reis Leite

Biography

Alice Santiago Faria is an auxiliary researcher at the CHAM – Centre for the Humanities, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Universidade dos Açores, Portugal. She was the PI of the research project "TechNetEMPIRE - Technoscientific Networks in the Construction of the Built Environment in the Portuguese Empire (1647–1871)" with Renata Araujo (Co-PI). Her research focuses on colonial public works across the Portuguese Empire during the long nineteenth century.

Renata Malcher de Araujo is a professor at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the University of the Algarve and an integrated researcher at CHAM  – Centre for the Humanities, FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Universidade dos Açores, Portugal. She conducts research mainly in the areas of the history of urbanism, especially in the scope of Portuguese expansion, history of cartography, and heritage studies.

Margarida Tavares da Conceição is an assistant professor at the Department of Art History, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal, and a full researcher at the Institute of Art History / IN2PAST – Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory, in the same university. Her research is focused on urban and fortification history, and architectural knowledge transmission in the early modern period.