Nobles, bourgeois, Inquisition : les prémisses de l'expansion coloniale portugaise au XVIe siècle.

Abstract

C. Geffray — Noblemen, Bourgeois and the Inquisition: The Premises of Portuguese Colonial Expansion in the ioth Century. The Portuguese aristocracy, as institutionally incarnated in the Crown to allow for its intervention in the accumulation of merchant capital, is both a motor and a parasitic element in the capitalistic process of primary accumulation in i6th-cen-tury Europe. A motor element since it assumes the routing of exotic wealth, a parasitic one since it is unable to go beyond a mere diversion of this capital in order to reproduce its own economically fruitless domination of Portugal's feudal society. As such, the aristocracy is led into a head-on contradiction with the rising national bourgeoisie. Thus are generated the political, ideological, legal and repressive mechanisms which make its position a precarious one. This explains the particular forms of Portuguese colonial expansion, by defining the complemen-tary or conflictual functions of the administration and the independent traders on the East African coast.