The Eldorado of the Disinherited: indigenous people, slaves, migrants, hucksters and the expansion towards the Amazonian west in the 19th century

Indigenous peoples, slaves, hucksters, migrants, fugitives, are characters who crisscrossed the meanders of the history of expansion towards the Amazonian west during the 19th century. The temporal basis of this work is entangled between 1830-1880, including events before and after the Cabanagem Rebellion, related with attempts of strengthen of the Brazilian Nacional State in the Western Amazon. Such process resulted on the implementation of the Province of Amazonas (1852), which was followed by coercive policies of control of the colorful crowd who inhabited the backwards of the Brazilian Empire. The rainforest populations were composed by diverse social layers, formed by multiple cultures. They have gotten contact with the rainforest territorial reconfiguration and reconstituted their possibilities of survival and freedom dealing with violent interventions inside their customs and ways of living. The social scenery became even more complex with the strength of the extractive economy, which increased the interests on the terrae incognitae of Amazonian west, especially after the rubber boom during the last decades of the 19th century. Beyond the analysis of internal dimensions of the expansion front, also will be studied other levels of interests connected with the Upper Amazonian rivers. On the last chapters of this thesis will be articulated scale variations into the reading of the historical process, considering the role of international interests inside the rainforest, which operated through capitalist projects during the preludes of the Age of Empires. Some travelers testimonies will be examined into the attempt to demonstrate the existence of other layers of meanings inside the internal displacement of frontiers. According to the study of macro and micro dimensions of such process, will be analyzed diverse kinds of historical sources, like newspapers, police records, documents produced by Diretoria de Índios, official reports made by recognition travels through the Upper rivers, maps, images, between other fragments of the past, which registered the wandering and intricated human experiences inside the expansion front in the Amazon during the 19th century. (AU)