Administrative knowledge in a colonial context: Angola in the eighteenth century CATARINA MADEIRA SANTOS* Abstract. This essay analyses the circulation of political models and administrative practices drawn from the Enlightenment statecraft of metropolitan Portugal and their inscription in specific colonial contexts of Angola in the mid-eighteenth century. The purpose here is to show how these models had to be ‘unpacked’ when confronted with foreign contexts, reconfigured and even reinvented for local circumstances. During the 1750s, the Lisbon government conceived a new imperial project to territorialize the colony through the intellectual and physical appropriation of this Central African space. In order to do so, three levels of this administrative knowledge are distinguished: the quantification and systematization of information, cartography, and the archive. For each, this essay demonstrates how they were made available to, appropriated by or transformed by both the colonial and the African societies in the colonial context. The second half of the eighteenth century marked an important turn in the colonial politics of Angola. This moment coincided with the implementation of the Pombaline reforms in Portugal. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquês de Pombal and prime minister under King Dom José I, devised a set of reforms inspired by the political philosophy of Enlightenment. The first generation of Portuguese savants were linked with the fourth Count of Ericeira and were familiar with Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian science, even though their Catholic environment required a certain reserve with regard to these currents, and ‘errors’ were often pointed out in them. The mid- eighteenth century marks a turning point in the reception of other European currents of thought, especially of French encyclopedism. This period also inaugurates a systematic reformist movement which gave rise in the 1770s and 1780s to a body of bureaucrats and military officers trained within a new framework. Be that as it may, it is widely accepted that a diplomatic and intellectual elite connected with the Portuguese Academy of History and linked to intellectuals in other European metropoles were able to read Descartes or Newton. In this article I propose to understand the Enlightenment as a polycentric movement, based on the circulation of ideas and experiences in which European and colonial actors and spaces participated. Through the example of Angola, I shall suggest that we can conceive of non-European spaces, in this case Central African territories, as real intellectual laboratories. * Centre d’Etudes Africaines, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 96, bd. Raspail, 75005 Paris, France. Email: cmadeira@ehess.fr. I would like to thank Kapil Raj and Mary Terrall for their help and guidance with this paper. BJHS, Page 1of 18. © British Society for the History of Science 2010 doi:10.1017/S0007087410001275