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Digital Environmental MAPE · 1640–1822

Portuguese Empire
Environmental History
MAPE

5,859 Thematic Records · Environmental Intelligence · Geospatial Data Analysis

MAPE Environmental History is an experimental thematic research platform built from microcorpora concerning environmental phenomena documented in Portuguese overseas correspondence. It brings together selected archival records on climate, natural hazards, water, forests, fauna, resource use, urban environments, agriculture, wine and alcohol, and related forms of environmental governance.

The platform is designed for thematic exploration rather than as a complete representation of all environmental information contained in the MAPE corpus.

Built on the archival corpus MAPE: A Dataset of Correspondence from the Portuguese Empire

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Thematic Research Areas

Explore the thematic domains that document environmental events preserved in Portuguese correspondence records. Five have interactive dashboards; the rest are in preparation. Each domain brings together archival evidence, spatial data, and AI-extracted environmental signals.

ENV-01 / ENV-02 · Crisis & Food Systems Droughts & Famines

Records of drought events, harvest failures, food shortages and the responses to episodes of scarcity — read together, because in this correspondence they are usually the same crisis reported at different stages.

Open the drought & famine dashboard
ENV-03 · Biosurveillance Epidemics

Records of epidemic outbreaks, mortality events, public health measures, and disease reporting.

Open the epidemic outbreak map
ENV-04 · Marine & Terrestrial Fauna Ichthyofauna & Fauna

Records of fish, marine mammals, turtles and other fauna named in colonial correspondence — as fisheries, contracts, cargo and royal collections.

Open the ichthyofauna atlas
ENV-05 · Hydrology Water Governance

Records of water infrastructure, irrigation systems, hydraulic management, and water-related disputes.

Open the water governance dashboard
ENV-06 · Climatology Weather Conditions

Records of weather conditions, seasonal variability, temperature extremes, and unusual atmospheric conditions.

Open the climate explorer
ENV-10 · Commodity & Market Wine & Alcohol

Cane spirit, honey wine and overseas viticulture — 63 documents, the taxes, contracts and monopolies through which their trade was governed.

Open the beverages archive
ENV-07 · Resource Extraction Forests & Extraction

Timber extraction, forest law and the crown's forest-conservator judges — 143 documents, cross-verified.

Open the forests archive
ENV-11 · Urban Environmental History Urban Environment

Sanitation, cemeteries, greenery and noxious industries — 63 documents across four verified threads.

Open the urban archive
ENV-12 · Hazard & Risk Fires and Fire Risk

Fire events and prevention from gunpowder stores to garrison stockades — 92 documents, cross-verified.

Open the fires archive
ENV-13 · Scientific Practice Natural History Collections

Named naturalists collecting for the Royal Cabinet of Natural History — 114 documents, cross-verified.

Open the natural history archive
ENV-14 · Mineral Extraction Gemstones: Extraction & Governance

Diamonds, emeralds and the crown monopoly that policed Minas Gerais — 307 documents, cross-verified.

Open the gemstones archive
ENV-15 · Commodity & Labour Cacao: Cultivation & Trade

Amazon cacao harvests, forced labour and the seedling transfer that founded São Tomé cultivation — 150 documents, cross-verified.

Open the cacao archive
ENV-09 · Hydrological & Maritime Hazards Storms, Wrecks & Forced Landings

Storm damage, vessels forced into port, and ships actually lost — 1,212 documents, second-pass verified.

Open the hazards archive
ENV-08 · Social Ecology Environmental Conflicts

Disputes over land, water, forest and cropland in petitions and litigation — 71 documents, second-pass verified.

Open the conflicts archive

Analytical Workspaces

Three dedicated workspaces complement the thematic domains. Each can be accessed independently from the navigation or via the calls-to-action below.

Maps

Historical Cartography

Archival maps and geospatial layers documenting Portuguese colonial records, trade routes and environmental data across four continents.

Open Maps →
Archive

Archive Explorer

Illustrative full-text search over a small set of sample records drawn from the MAPE dataset. Filter by territory and date range. Each result links to the original archival reference.

Open Archive →
Data Lab

Corpus Analytics

Temporal frequency charts, keyword distributions and territorial analysis drawn from validated environmental corpora.

Open Data Lab →

Methods & AI

This project uses Large Language Models as tools for exploratory Digital Humanities research on Portuguese colonial correspondence. The method combines prompt engineering, keyword-based extraction, semantic classification, and iterative corpus cleaning.

The MAPE dataset is already a structured archival resource. What this platform adds is transformation: turning that structured dataset into visualisations, maps, and spatially-referenced views that can be queried and read against one another.

Read full methodology →
Core approach

Colonial correspondence records provide evidence for tracing environmental recurrences, monitoring practices, and examining how environmental knowledge was produced and circulated throughout the Portuguese Empire.

LLM-Assisted Environmental Philology of Empire

About the Project

What is Portuguese Empire Environmental History?

Portuguese Empire Environmental History is a visualisation of the MAPE dataset. It asks what the administrative correspondence of a colonial empire records about the environment: which droughts, harvest failures, epidemics, fish mortalities, and disputes over water reached Lisbon, in what language they were reported, and what the crown was asked to do about them.

The environmental record here is indirect. These are not weather observations but petitions, reports, and requests for relief, written by people who needed something from the metropolis. Read at scale, they show how environmental knowledge was produced, transmitted, and acted upon across the Portuguese colonial world between 1640 and 1822.

Each domain — droughts, famines, epidemics, fisheries, water governance — is an analytical lens rather than a static layer: a way of asking how a particular kind of environmental event was experienced, communicated, and administered.

MAPE

MAPE — Mapping the Atlantic Portuguese Empire is a large-scale historical resource curated from archival material: a dataset of correspondence from the Portuguese Empire, comprising roughly 182,000 regests of overseas administrative letters covering 1640–1822.

The dataset is published independently and is not produced by this platform. What is presented here is one reading of it — an environmental reading, built by extracting and visualising the environmental signals contained in records assembled for quite different administrative purposes.

Project & Funding

This project was developed as part of the research grant "Imperial commoners of Brazil and West Africa (1640–1822): global history from a correspondence network perspective", funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (NCN), OPUS programme, grant no. 2022/45/B/HS3/00473.

Institution
Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences
Project Manager
Post-doc / Adjunct
Funding
NCN · OPUS · Poland

Continue your research in the MAPE Dataset

Found a theme or microcorpus you want to investigate further? Continue your research across the full MAPE dataset of 182,000 AHU regests. Use the broader corpus to identify related records, follow terminology, actors and places, and move from thematic exploration to individual archival documents and close reading.

Explore a theme Inspect a microcorpus Download records Continue in the MAPE Dataset Find and analyse correspondence
Continue in MAPE Archive Intelligence ↗

The two tools are complementary, not overlapping. Environmental History (this platform) is for thematic discovery — validated environmental microcorpora, maps and visualisation. MAPE Archive Intelligence is for corpus-wide search, discovery and AI-assisted exploration of the underlying correspondence itself.