“For the said street has been wrecked by the overflow of the waters…”: Technique and politics in the operations of the Municipal Council of São Paulo in response to inundations in the second half of the eighteenth century

Abstract

The article addresses the impacts caused by floodings in the municipality of São Paulo in the eighteenth century, starting in 1750. Our discussion details the reactions of local authorities to the hydrological dynamics of the region in a period before the radical interventions that would occur in the following centuries. We identified seventeen occasions in the period when the São Paulo Municipal Council was compelled to take measures to mitigate the harmful effects of rainwater accumulation, river flooding or excessive runoff from built structures such as fountains, aqueducts, and dikes. The sources demonstrate the recurrence of both the same types of water-caused problems and ways of coping adopted by the Municipal Council, which, as a rule, was only able to act reactively, ordering the execution of repair works. We argue that this very restrained use of the possibilities for technical intervention reflects, on the one hand, the limits of local power and, on the other, the priorities of colonial knowledge itself and the framework of possible relations between society and nature that it determines.