MIRIRI – THE HISTORY OF ENGINEERING (XVI TO XVII) (Atena Editora)

Abstract

This article shows Miriri’s sugar cane milling machine as a place of contribution to the history of Paraíba. This happened in several historiographical works, reports by 17th century chroniclers and more recent research published in Brazilian universities and in books that involve themes such as sugar paths, Benedictines and Miriri. In the methodological part, we used Albuquerque Júnior (2007) and the concept of “inventing”, pointing to fronts on the constructions of Miriri and, thus, we identified the conditions that pointed to the beginning of the history of Paraíba, being a place of development and production of the sugar between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in northeastern Brazil. This way, we present Miriri’s sugar cane milling machine as a place that cannot be silenced in the history of Paraíba. Thus, we go through the beginning of colonization, tracing the paths of sugar to the course of the Miriri’s sugar cane milling machine and how this, through donations of sesmarias, passed to the Benedictines by order of Portugal. The idea was to locate the reader by making an overview of the emergence of this mill, starting from the donations of land at the beginning of Portuguese exploration in the colony. Thus, the place experiences several plots and permanences on the banks of the river, being also involved in the 1960s with the issues of the Peasant Leagues disputes with the large landowners of the Zona da Mata Paraibana region. In addition, it is possible to understand the motives of the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the agrarian reform process, which involved the current owners of the Miriri farm with the federal government in judicial disputes, and the case was brought to trial by the Federal Supreme Court - STF Therefore, the text addressed the historical emergence of Miriri’s sugar cane milling machine, allowing continuities of other issues, if they are addressed to the theme, thus adding value and meanings to the place and demonstrating that new research in Human Sciences has not been exhausted.