Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to address how the municipal experience, well-known in Portuguese Iberian territory, was implemented in several colonial cities, as Macao, considering the institutional models imported and the local contexts of government.

Paper long abstract:

In the last decades of the 16th century, the city of Macao received a charter of privileges and duties (foral) from the vicerei D. Duarte de Meneses, in which the Iberian Crown recognized the first legal corpus of the municipal council of Macao.

This charter (foral) was based on the text of the charter of privileges from Evora, which had a long tradition as a paradigm charter to new municipal councils established during Middle Ages, but also in the manueline period. However, in the case of Goa, some years earlier, Portuguese crown had decided to assign another paradigm of charter of privileges and duties: the charter of Lisbon. It seems that the municipal councils in overseas expansion were thought in different ways, probably giving local contexts of the cities.

According to Liam Matthew Brockey, following C. R. Boxer's theory about municipal councils, "(…) colonial cities were always hybrid enviroments." (Portuguese Colonial Cities in the early Modern World, Ashgate, 2008, p. 8). In fact, this "hybrid" situation was due to the combination of local interests with institutions imported from the kingdom. Focusing on our subject, the municipal experience in these cities was indeed "hybrid" and, nowadays, probably it is a "misunderstood" field of research, in what concerns political and institutional History.

This paper seeks to analyze how the municipal institution, brought from Portuguese kingdom, has survived and readjusted in an overseas city, as Macao, where local social, political and economics contexts were strongly well-defined in the modern period.