Legal Files and Empires: Form and Materiality of the Benguela District Court Documents

Abstract Much has been said on the role of judges, legal officials, and courts in the making of colonial regimes. Nevertheless, historiography lacks specific methodological reflections on lawsuits in the Iberian Empires. In order to raise some methodological issues concerning lawsuits as primary sources, I argue that historians could also engage with legal files by looking at instead of just looking through them. In this sense, I seek to establish a dialogue with discussions that anthropologists and social scientists put forward concerning the role of documents as constitutive of bureaucracies and administrative institutions. In order to do so, I will focus on specific aspects of the Benguela District Court collection of legal files.

Benguela is a city with a population of around 500,000 inhabitants in the southern region of Angola. Around the Garden of Benguela's Municipal Administration (Jardim da Administração Municipal de Benguela), one of the main public squares of the city, lie many buildings that house various bureaucrats who daily perform their administrative duties. Some of these buildings are constructions from the Portuguese colonial period that survived the various decades of war that ravaged the country in the end of the 20 th century and the daily exposure to salinity due to the proximity of the building complex to the sea. The location of the buildings is not by chance. During the 18 th and the 19 th centuries, Benguela was one of the most important ports of the transatlantic slave trade. 1 Following a pattern present all over the Portuguese Empire, the first centuries of colonial presence concentrated government and bureaucratic institutions in port cities. Very often, these administrative buildings would be really close to the ports themselves, as in Benguela.
One of these buildings of the Garden's complex, a newly designed one that lies besides an older Portuguese construction, houses the Benguela District Court (Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, hereafter BDC). As in any other court around the world, the daily life of the BDC is busy. Judges, attorneys, judicial officials, and litigating parties lively move from one room to another, files under their arms, seeking to solve the many cases that flow into the Angolan judicial system. Amidst this constant flow of people and files, a room that stores paper is almost unnoticed. The BDC personnel does not access the room very often. Among antique Portuguese legal books, piles of files organized in racks call the attention. Among those files, in the higher shelves, there is a collection of late 19 th and early 20 th centuries lawsuits.
For many decades, there was no catalogue of these lawsuits. Nevertheless, some historians made use of them in their research, 2 and there was even an attempt to build an inventory. 3 Recently, the Universidade Katyavala Bwila, a public institution, took the lead in a joint project to organize and catalogue these legal files. 4 The organization of these documents will open up a wide range of research possibilities to historians.
Having this publication in sight, it is important to reflect on some aspects of this kind of documents, that is, legal files. Despite having been used by historians for many decades now, lawsuits have not yet been the object of extensive methodological reflections. 5 Much has been said on the role of judges, legal officials, and courts in the making of colonial regimes. 6 For the case of Spanish America, historians have even

Legal Files and Empires: Form and Materiality of the Benguela District Court Documents
crafted the concept of ›jurisdictional culture‹ (cultura jurisdiccional) to shed light on instances of normative production and administrative governance that are obscured by perspectives that straightforwardly identify ›law‹ with ›state‹. 7 They argue that in Iberian ancien régime societies, political power was identified to iurisdictio, that is, the power to determine the law (decir el derecho). According to this cultural framework, ›law‹ was a natural order crafted by God and should be maintained and reinforced by political powers. These conceptions placed jurists in the centre of normative production because it enhanced them with the capacity and legitimacy to define what was ›the law‹. 8 Thus, in the Iberian Empires, legal files were at the core of government and administration practices.
Lawsuits, for example, have been, for many decades, used by historians as primary sources for historical evidence. Either in studies focussed on a ›micro-history‹ analysis or for the gathering of serial data, lawsuits are an extremely versatile kind of document. Some studies have a more specific focus on legal history and usually draw on them in order to analyse the production of normativities and how historical actors used courts to claim for rights. 9 Less attention, however, was given to lawsuits themselves. Historians still did not give a systematic treatment to their materiality and formalities. 10 Despite recognizing the role of courts in shaping a ›jurisdictional culture‹, historians did not yet delve deeply into reflections on how Iberian colonial bureaucracies and legal orders were constructed by and out of legal files themselves.
In order to raise some methodological issues concerning lawsuits as primary sources, in this article, I want to argue that among the potentialities that the publication of the BDC collection catalogue will open, researchers could also engage into looking at these documents instead of just looking through them. 11 I do not claim to put aside social history and research focusing on how historical agents resorted to courts in order to claim for rights, in turn helping, in these claims, to shape and give new meanings to norms. What I do state is that a more complex analysis of how law was constructed through conflict and by the agency of different literate and illiterate people could include also an analysis of the form and materiality of legal documents such as the ones stored in the BDC.
To put it clear, this article does not address the usual challenges of a historical analysis focussed on the social conflicts that documents, such as the BDC's, put into light. Studies in this sense might become more frequent in the following years boosted by the publication of the collection's catalogue. What this article does aim at is to call the attention specifically to one of the many important aspects of this kind of documents, that is, their capacity to condition the ways in which judicial institutions process social conflicts. This is, thus, an analysis of the processes of institutional construction materialized by formalities, not of the content of the social conflicts themselves. In this sense, it intends to point out analytical possibilities by engaging into the discussions this special issue raises on the production of files and their role in the daily life of institutions.
In the last years, anthropologists and social scientists discussed on how documents are not only products of bureaucratic and administrative institutions but are actually constitutive of bureaucracies themselves, of their practices and their knowledge. This literature argues that documents have long been overlooked because researchers used to see them only as repositories of information, as a way to access the reality that was their actual object of interest. Documents and files are, however, more than just objects representing reality; they play a mediation role that shapes and defines the boundaries of social actors' agency. 12 In this sense, files are seen as ›raw materials of power‹, 13 as objects that have an active performative role in shaping and constituting power relations and structures. Some of these power relations and structures are shaped by documents that intend to express ›truth‹.
In order to do so, to be taken as evidence, they must comply with certain formalities and acquire specific material aspects. In this sense, these formalities and material aspects are not neutral. They actually shape and conform the content of what is inscribed on files.
The information that they claim to contain as an expression of reality is, in fact, translated and distorted in different and specific ways. 14 Files and paperwork thus mediate relations among people in broader terms than the reductionist assumption that they are mere tools for governments' Hence, the legal files stored in the BDC also follow specific rules in what concerns their form and materiality.
The collection comprises an array of petitions, mandates, ownership titles, certificates of registration, tax receipts, powers of attorney, communication between judges and judicial officials from different jurisdictions, and so on.
The core of the collection, however, are the lawsuits.

Mariana Armond Dias Paes -Legal Files and Empires
And they mattered. Despite many political forces and interests entangled in legal matters and judicial controversies, in order to legitimize itself, law must comply with its own rules and formalities. Thus, even when explicitly following personal, political, or class interests, jurists, and legal officials must do it in the shape predetermined by legal norms and practices in order to enhance their acts with efficacy. Furthermore, in many cases, these jurists and officials truly believed in this set of rules and ideological rhetoric. 25 Thus, the assumption that colonial legal orders were precarious and not hegemonic should not prevent scientific analysis that deal with legal files to take seriously their role in shaping people's agency. Apart from resorting to Portuguese colonial institutions in order to solve their disputes, people who did not hold administrative offices engaged in document and file production. 29 They knew that the creation and recognition of rights could highly depend on these pieces of paper. They were aware that paperwork did not only materialize rights but also constitute them. 30 One example of this paperwork production can be ›Province of Angola‹. In these decades, numerous reforms on judicial organization took place, and they were often preceded by reports stressing the difficulties To do so, they took with them their personal libraries, administrative files, letters and recommendations that would instruct the performance of their duties. 22 Moreover, the handling of paperwork and the production of legal files was not restricted to lettered jurists. A wide stratum of ›non-lettered administrative personnel‹ daily administered and processed them. 23 In Iberian colonial societies, notaries, scribes, and parish priests also played a fundamental role in the daily production of documents that were not mere instruments or products of colonial administration, but rather constructed administrative knowledge and practices that allowed the pervasiveness of colonial domination. 24 This personnel had specific normative conceptions and ideologies. The institutions they formed had specific legal rules in what concerned procedures.

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The first document, the written promise, was on letterhead paper with a high relief of the Treasury

Form and Formalities in the Portuguese Empire
In the Portuguese colonial legal order, form and content were intertwined. 33 Hence, the analysis of norm production should focus on both of them. Analogously to the Spanish legal framework extensively analysed by the historiography that focussed on the ›jurisdictional As many other books, the purpose of the »Tractado« was to present models (formulários) that would instruct people -parties and lawyers -on how to file a petition in Portuguese courts. The importance of formalities and formulae is present in the materiality itself of the book.
For example, in the first page of the book, the expression »Begins the form« (Começase a forma) is highlighted by its size and its position in the page (Fig. 4).
Apart from judicial initial petitions (libelos), the book also offered models to produce other kinds of judicial acts such as defences, appeals, sentences, and so on. Also, there were models for contracts and powers of attorney. This variety indicates that the target of the author was a wide public, ranging from high-ranking officials who occupied seats in the Courts of Appeals  The paragraphs had the following content:   extra-judicial attempts to solve the conflict took place and the whole story was public and notorious. This is the format a story over a social conflict was supposed to have in order to fit into a judicial procedure. Thus,

After this illegal possession acts (esbulho), the
defendant asked the Chief of Catumbela (a colonial official) to call the plaintiff and his mother in order to give them a certificate that the debt was paid.
6. The Chief of Catumbela asked a notary to prepare the certificate, but the plaintiff and his mother refused to receive it because they did not recognize the debt.
7. The Chief of Catumbela obliged them to receive the certificate, menacing them with imprisonment.

The plaintiff's mother left the certificate in
Catumbela and went to Benguela in order to claim for her rights. In a similar way as models did, the reiterated patterns that these initial petitions followed restricted the content of the legal claim. All the conflicts and peculiarities that the real situation involving the claimed pieces of land might encompass were reduced to a few formal elements. These elements were later discussed during witnesses' hearings. Inside the courts,

Abstract
Much has been said on the role of judges, legal officials, and courts in the making of colonial regimes. Nevertheless, historiography lacks specific methodological reflections on lawsuits in the Iberian Empires. In order to raise some methodological issues concerning lawsuits as primary sources, I argue that historians could also engage with legal files by looking at instead of just looking through them. In this sense, I seek to establish a dialogue with discussions that anthropologists and social scientists put forward concerning the role of documents as constitutive of bureaucracies and administrative institutions. In order to do so, I will focus on specific aspects of the Benguela District Court collection of legal files.