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Salvador da Bahia: American, European, and African forging of a colonial capital city

Final Report Summary - BAHIA16-19 (Salvador da Bahia: American, European, and African forging of a colonial capital city)

Throughout the four-year period of the project (from 1st September 2012 to 31st August 2016) a group of around thirty researchers investigated in-depth the interactions between Amerindians, Europeans, and Africans between the 16th and the 19th century. Taking Salvador da Bahia as a case-study, BAHIA 16-19 explored the various dimensions of such multifaceted interactions. The several studies developed within this project took into account the agency of the Amerindians, the Europeans, and the Africans, and put them in the wider context of the Atlantic world. The end result was a series of groundbreaking works with a substantial amount of innovative data about the history of Bahia and its articulation with Africa and Europe.

The mobility funded by IRSES made possible a total of 81,37 secondments (fellow months), during which the following tasks were undertaken: archival research; field work; lecturing of mini-courses; participation in workshops, in symposia, and in conferences.

In quantitative terms, the work conducted within this project consisted of:
- 21,61 secondments (fellow months) of Brazilian researchers in Europe; 49,78 secondments (fellow months) of Portuguese researchers in Brazil; 9,98 secondments (fellow months) of French researchers in Brazil;
-10 workshops;
-2 major conferences;
-7 mini-courses.

The project’s implementation rate of the original plan is as follows: 87,49%. Out of a total of 93 secondments, 81,37 secondments were effectively implemented.

The main outputs of this four-year project are as follows:
-three collective volumes comprising works that directly resulted from the research conducted within the project;
-a new series of academic books, entitled "Atlantica", publishing simultaneously both hard copy volumes and e-books in open access, available at http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/ext/BAHIA/BAHIA_home.html;
http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/pb_col_apresenta.aspx?col=6;
and
http://hdl.handle.net/10362/17105
-157 conference papers and keynote addresses directly or indirectly resulting from the project;
-146 publications (journal articles, book chapters, monographs) directly or indirectly related to the research carried out within BAHIA 16-19;
-an e-learning course on the history of Bahia and its connections with the wider Atlantic world, largely based on the findings that resulted from the research conducted within the project; the course is already part of the e-learning Master program of the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and it will soon be integrated in the Master program of the Universidade Federal da Bahia;
-a series of didactic videos on the several topics addressed by this project, namely slavery and slave relations, Amerindian history, Portuguese colonial rule, connections with Sub-Saharan Africa; and so on, and so forth.

The presence, on a regular basis, of Brazilian scholars in both Lisbon and Paris was of crucial importance to enhance the knowledge about many aspects of the history of the wider Atlantic world, in particular its African component. Likewise, the fact that such a large number of European scholars spent long periods of time in Bahia also contributed to the development of the graduate training in Bahia, not just in the Federal University of Bahia, but also I other universities across that Brazilian State. This project also contributed to strengthen the academic ties between the researchers involved in it. As the outcome, it was possible to add more funding to the budget originally granted by IRSES. In fact, during the four-year period of the project the researchers from BAHIA 16-19 successfully applied for other funding schemes, namely from CAPES (Brazil) - FCT (Portugal), and from the Gulbenkian Foundation (Portugal). This extra funding made it possible to involve an additional group of researchers, some of them Ph.D. students and Ph.D. candidates. BAHIA 16-19 therefore gave a significant contribution for the advanced training of a considerable number of young scholars. In addition, this extra funding also resulted in the strengthening of the African dimension of the project, as well as of its archival science component, since it includes the inventory of a large ensemble of documents from the Overseas archives in Lisbon.

The project's web page: http://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/ext/BAHIA/BAHIA_home.html
final1-publishable-summary.zip