The lack of uniformity sets up Chapter 5, which focuses on the places that were developing along the main course of the Amazon and the lower parts of its tributaries. Most of these settlements were missions, and by the early eighteenth century they had taken on board a dual identity of being connected to the hinterland and to the colonial centre of Belém. This chapter seeks to show the riverine areas were not emptied, as many scholars have wrongly assumed. A more nuanced historical understanding of the ethnic profiles between missions and the hinterlands is revealed, where the core elements of each place include ethnic composition, its location (chosen or imposed), economic contribution to the colonial economy, military and missionary presence, and relationship to hinterland. We thus have the three spaces emerging by the mid eighteenth century – the Amerindian complexes in the hinterland, the colonial sphere centred on Belém, and the riverine settlements which formed their own assemblies.

The final chapter examines how a new kind of shamanism developed in the riverbank settlements and attracted peoples across the colonial and Indigenous spaces. Although shamanism was a feature of Amerindian societies, the Portuguese also had a tradition of healing and folk curing. Riverine shamans from Indigenous communities were highly active in the eighteenth century, and modified Indigenous practices and Catholic symbols to meet the needs of their clients from all backgrounds seeking their ‘merciful’ work. Shamanic curing and healing connected the three spaces as shamans moved between each one and provided clients with relief from their suffering.

Chapter 3 examines the reorganization of Indigenous regional networks in the areas near to Belém in the Lower Amazon. To avoid enslavement by the Portuguese, some Indigenous communities moved away from the easy-to-access riverbanks. Other Indigenous people successfully engaged with the Crown on their own terms, which allowed them a measure of autonomy to build communities, use their skills for their own benefit, and meet the demands of settlers. These changes and movements led to the development of what the Portuguese called the sertão, a place where people and forest and river products could be retrieved. From an Indigenous perspective, a regrouping occurred as people fled slavery upriver and moved to the riverbank to access colonial goods, such as metal tools.

Chapter 4 looks at the strengthening of Indigenous networks in the sertão in the Lower Amazon, especially around the Tapajós and Trombetas rivers. Here missions acted as gateways to the deep multi-ethnic forest networks in Amerindian territories where more slaves and converts could be found, and where people were recruited to work on canoes to collect cacao and the drugs of the hinterlands. In these regions, long standing networks between Indigenous societies had alternated between alliance and peace and war and enslavement. Colonial agents were added as new players in the complex set of relations that linked Belém and the sertão. Sometimes the shift of relations led to the strengthening of Amerindian networks, such as in the south bank areas. The reconfiguring of networks led to the reconstitution of the riverbanks and the creation of the hinterland; each region was different according to local dynamics that spawned singular cultural and social situations.

Chapter 2 examines a period when various European traders attempted to settle in the Amazon by forming local alliances with Indigenous peoples. Although the numbers of these non-Iberian Europeans were tiny, the impact of their partnerships, and the resulting effort by the Portuguese and their allies to eliminate their presence, caused immeasurable damage to native societies in the estuarine areas. By 1640, the Portuguese had expelled the other European interlopers and exacted revenge on the Indigenous allies of their enemies, and started to establish riverbank settlements and plantations. In turn, this led the Portuguese to require labour to service this colonial economy and support their territorial ambitions. They pushed up the Amazon as far as the Tapajós and Madeira rivers to obtain their slaves from the riverbank polities, which gave rise to Belém as the focal point of the Eastern Amazon and marked the beginnings of the formation of a colonial sphere.

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, bankers thrust the disciplinary power of the state between debtors and creditors. They used their influence to criminalise the act of writing an uncovered cheque as fraud. From 1932 until 1984, debtors who wrote bad cheques to guarantee loans faced serious consequences, from fines to jail time. By examining approximately 115 arrest records, Chapter 4 uncovers the early history of financialisation, as more people began to use new financial instruments. When people wrote uncovered cheques, some of them experienced first-hand the growing pains that came with participating in financial modernity. Cheques represented the new dynamics of economic citizenship at mid-century, as the political elite of the PRI shored up the interests of bankers at the expense of bank account holders. As this chapter shows, the criminalisation of bad cheques facilitated the emergence of financial capitalism by establishing new kinds of property rights and creating a new white-collar crime. In the process, political leaders introduced new forms of coercion into the debtor–creditor relationship that left debtors more vulnerable than ever.

Chapter 6 analyses how kinship is both a relationship over time creating the next generation, and one that is spatially promiscuous, adapting the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The riverbank villages had become strengthened by their hinterland networks but also by their own internal connections by the mid eighteenth century. The reforms of the Portuguese Crown in the 1750s supported this process with greater resources, control, and scrutiny. Each community, or village, continued to hold its own ethnic profile through the endurance of viable kin units and marriages within and across ethnic identities.

In the late nineteenth century, modern institutional lenders such as banks began to expand into the lives of ordinary and middling people, as well as into the firmament of small and medium enterprises. When the Banco Nacional de México (Banamex) opened its doors in 1884, it hired the American credit-rating agency R. G. Dun to appraise the creditworthiness of people and businesses. The bank needed clients, including people and businesses to whom it could lend money, and it used Dun’s services to find these potential debtors. Dun offered a new solution to the trust problem in credit relations: the credit report. Chapter 3 analyses risk and trust by examining this major shift in economic history, showing how the credit report as a form of bureaucratic economic information began to replace older face-to-face trust mechanisms. Analysing approximately 125 credit reports on people and businesses from the 1880s to the 1920s, the chapter examines changing ideas about creditworthiness as the modern credit economy took root. It argues that financial exclusion was baked in from the start, and that the power struggle between debtors and creditors changed when bankers succeeded in wedging a bureaucratic report between them

The introduction explains how the Eastern Amazon was shaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this means appreciating the diverse spaces and peoples of the Amazon and how they define one another. The introduction shows how this approach re-centres the Amazon as part of a continental space and elucidates its role in continental history by analysing the historical agency of the people who inhabited the region. Sections make the theoretical and methodological justification for analytically joining up the spaces and territories that are historically considered separate. It discusses the use of a spatial history approach, and how this perspective contributes to a new understanding of the Amazon, and presents a revisionist and historically anthropological framing of the argument along definitions of keywords used in the book.