Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World. By Erik Lars Myrup (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2015) 256 pp. $42.50

This new study intends an analysis of the Overseas Council, the principal metropolitan administrative body of the Portuguese Empire in the early modern period, as understood through the prism of social-network analysis. Myrup includes chapters about events in continental Portugal, colonial Brazil, and Macau. But Power and Corruption in the Early Modern Portuguese World is not simply an exercise in institutional history; rather, it is a collection of short biographies of figures from the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries whose activities intersected with the Council’s deliberations. The figures analyzed include Jorge de Mascarenhas, a sometime president of the council; António Raposo Tavares, an explorer of the Amazon basin; Rodrigo César de Meneses, a colonial governor in Brazil; and Zhang Rulin, a Chinese magistrate charged by the Qing state with investigating a crime in Macau. Myrup situates each of these men within their specific local contexts as well as within broader...