Colonial Brazil: History, Indigenous Policy & Economic Cycles
Colonial Brazil
After Pedro Álvares Cabral discovered Brazil, Portugal decided to colonize it. As they tried to do so, French merchant ships began to appear on the Brazilian coast. King João III, in 1530, sent an expedition under Martim Afonso to drive away the intruders and establish permanent settlements in Brazil. The limited resources of the Portuguese crown forced the king to assign the responsibility of colonizing Brazil to private individuals.
The territory was divided and distributed to individuals who agreed to colonize, develop, and defend their captaincy. The captaincies usually planted sugar cane because it was a crop that was largely demanded in Europe. This reduced the diversity of crops since the agriculturists had no intention of planting other crops.
Portugal’s Indigenous Policy
The problem of labor was ‘solved’ by raiders. They attacked natives and captured them to sell them as slaves. Due to resistance from the indigenous slaves, after 1550, planters turned to black slaves from Africa to do the work, but due to a lack of supply, native slaves were still sold. Indigenous people did not accept the loss of land and liberty without a struggle, but their resistance was handicapped by the fatal tendency of tribes to fight against each other.
Almost the only voices raised in protest against the enslavement and mistreatment of native people were those of the Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits followed a program for the settlement of their native converts in “aldeias” where they lived under the care of the priests. This conduct clashed with the interests of slave hunters and planters who rose in revolt and expelled the Jesuits. In 1653, a priest called António Vieira arrived in Brazil with full authority from the king to settle these issues.
The crown generally sympathized with the Jesuits, but in 1750, during the ministry of the Marquis of Pombal, the Jesuits were expelled, and a program to integrate natives into society was started. Meanwhile, the growth of the African slave trade, also encouraged by Pombal, diminished the demand for native labor.
The French and Dutch Challenges
The dyewood, sugar, and tobacco of Brazil early attracted the attention of foreign powers. The French were the first to challenge Portuguese control of the colony. With the help of indigenous allies, they founded Rio de Janeiro in 1555. A more serious threat to Portuguese sovereignty over Brazil was posed by the Dutch, whose West India Company seized and occupied for a quarter of a century (1630-1654) the richest sugar-growing portions of the Brazilian coast. The Brazilian forces were soon victorious over the Dutch. Because they were also pressured by their simultaneous war with England, they withdrew from Pernambuco in 1654.
The Mineral Cycle, The Cattle Industry, and The Commercial System
In this time of gloom, news of the discovery of gold in the southwestern region later known as Minas Gerais reached the coast in 1695. Large numbers of colonists from Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro swarmed into the mining area. The crown had no luck in establishing a fixed share of the gold profits. Mining revenue peaked about in the year 1760, and thereafter the deposits suffered progressive exhaustion.
Between 1750 and 1800, Brazilian cotton production made significant progress but then declined just as rapidly as a result of competition from the more efficient cotton growers of the United States. Cattle raising also made its contribution to the advancements of the Brazilian frontier. The penetration of the distant São Francisco Valley from Bahia and Pernambuco was led by powerful cattlemen.
During this period, Brazil’s commerce was firmly restricted to Portuguese nationals and ships. The Dutch, who had been the principal carriers of Brazilian sugar and tobacco to European markets, responded with intensive smuggling. Pombal’s reforms created a Portuguese merchant class with enough power to compete with British merchants. Thanks to this, between 1796 and 1802, 30 percent of all the goods shipped to Brazil consisted of Portuguese manufactures.