Justice administration in early modern Portugal: Kingdom and empire in a bureaucratic continuum

This article uses the magistracy in early modern Portugal to show a distinctive character in the Portuguese imperial experience that resided in an intense circulation of agents between the kingdom and the colonies. By stressing its early bureaucratic nature, which comes from the notion of royal service, it starts by sketching the institutional framework established during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in the kingdom and in the colonial domains. It draws a profile of the magistrates that served the crown in this system, emphasizing their heterogeneous character. Finally, using methodologies borrowed from social network analysis, it tries to map the bureaucratic network created throughout the period in an effort to identify recurrences in the movement of agents as well as the absence of movement between given places. The result is a map of judicial bureaucracy in the Portuguese empire.