Miguel Dantas da Cruz is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (University of Lisbon). He has a PhD in Early Modern History by the Interuniversity PhD Program in History (2013), a consortium that includes the University of Lisbon, the University of Évora, ISCTE-IUL and the Catholic University.

He has been studying the history of international relations at the end of the 18th century, with an emphasis on political and economic issues. He has published several papers about the Portuguese neutrality during the Atlantic Revolutions, with a special emphasis on the Portuguese foreign trade with North Atlantic countries (including the U.S. and the Scandinavians).

During his PhD research he studied the South Atlantic and the administrative dynamics of the Portuguese Empire in America. He explored the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Empire and the political communication between several institutions of the Portuguese political system, starting with the Overseas Council and general government of Brazil. The work reconstituted the network and hierarchy of political powers in the Portuguese Atlantic World, it explored who intervened, and how it intervened, in the governance and defense of the Empire. The investigation was subsequently published in several articles, and essays, as well as in a book entitled An Empire of conflicts. The Overseas Council and the defense of Brazil.

In the meantime, other topics have been receiving special attention, as was the case with the military elites in colonial Brazil. During the post-doctoral research, he explored the dynamics of circulation in the Portuguese Empire, especially soldiers in the mid-17th century, articulating these dynamics with the martial status of each territory. He published several texts that corelate visions of Empire with the Portuguese martial imaginary. They show how the Iberian Union and the 17th century struggle against Protestants contributed to the gradual transformation of a military culture originally marked by the Holy War paradigm and the struggle against the Muslim World.

Petitioning, as a pervasive form of addressing authority, and the broader petitionary movements of the early 19th century have been receiving special attention in the recent years of his research, which was partly supported by the participation in the Project Resistance (funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020). Equally important is the ongoing work on the Liberal Revolution, and its legitimation process through public rituals. In this respect, it is important to remember the participation in the Project Public Rituals in the Portuguese Empire.

The contradictions of the liberal mind and the adaptation of traditional societies to the liberal agenda are other areas of ongoing ​​work. Of particular importance is the research about the disappearance of trade guilds in the Portuguese revolutionary context.

He has been an active member of the academic community, going beyond the all-important publications and several conferences, lectures and communications, both in national and international stages (USA, Brazil, England, Italy and France). He recently organized two major international events: the ICS Annual Conference “Imperial Wars in a Global Perspective”, in 2017, and the Conference Petitions in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions (c.1760-c.1840), in 2019. He is also co-organizer of a Cycle of Seminars called “The Iberian-American Atlantic. (XVI-XX). Resistances: challenges of a historiographic agenda“. He also teaches at the University of Lisbon, ensuring for example the coordination of the Seminar History of Brazil / Topics of Brazilian History.