The Digital Archive The Government of Others is one of the main outputs of the project The Government of Others.Political Imaginaries of the Portuguese Empire, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/HIS-HIS/104640/2008), and developed at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and at CEDIS – Centre for Research & Development on Law and Society of the Faculty of Law of the New University of Lisbon;
Following on from the digital base IusLusitaniae (www.iuslusitaniae.fcsh.unl.pt), also funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, the Digital Archive is made up of two large blocks: i) the legislation base IusLusitaniae – Historical Sources of Portuguese Law and ii) The collections Boletim do Conselho Ultramarino and Legislação Novíssima do Ultramar. It also includes an important collection of loose legislation relating to the imperial territories and the people who lived there;
The IusLusitaniae database, which brings together various collections of printed legislation, ranging from the Ordinances, Extravagant Laws, and their Repertories, to Indexes and Collections of legislation subsequent to the publication of the Philippine Ordinances (see. complete list in the section “Consultation“), provides more than 30 000 digitised pages, corresponding to around 17 000 standards. The collections Boletim do Conselho Ultramarino and Legislação Novíssima do Ultramar are the most important printed collections of rules that refer specifically to the imperial territories and their populations, covering the period between 1446 and 1910, comprising 40 volumes and around 35.000 pages, bringing together around 12,000 regulations. Finally, the set of individual pieces of legislation compiled by the project’s researchers completes the base.
Through an interface that combines these three collections, any researcher, regardless of where they are, will now have access to a corpus of documents that was previously dispersed, and which we consider to be of great importance for a deeper understanding of the themes explored in this project.
In addition to the funding provided by the Foundation for Science and Technology, the realisation of this project was only possible thanks to the availability of the Legislação Antiga e colecção Legislação Novíssima by the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, under a protocol established between the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, the Faculdade de Direito da Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Instituto de Investigação Científica e Tropical, as well as the support of the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa.
This project was coordinated by Ângela Barreto Xavier, a professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, and Ana Cristina Nogueira da Silva, a researcher at CEDIS and a professor at NOVA School of Law.
Click here to access the Archive.