Growth of Brazil

Birth and Growth of

Colonial Brazil:

1500-1750

Only four countries in the world—Canada, Russia, the People's Repub-

lic of China, and the United States (if Alaska is included)—are larger

than Brazil. This chapter tells the story of how Portugal, a country far

smaller than almost all of its competitors in the race for colonial terri-

tory, imposed its authority and culture on a country that spans more

than half of South America.

The focus of this chapter is on key themes that dominate Brazilian

colonial history and help explain Brazil today:

• Portuguese origins

• Contact and clash with indigenous peoples

• Forced importation of millions of African slaves

• Creation of a multiracial society

• Consolidation and expansion of Portuguese-ruled territory

• Establishment of an export-based economy

• Beginnings of an independent Brazilian cultural and political

consciousness

A brief overview of Brazil's current scale, climate, and geography

provides the context for the story. (See exhibit 1-1 for the extraordinary

contrast between Brazil's place in South America and Portugal's place

in Europe.)

The Country the Portuguese

Created in the New World

Present-day Brazil covers 3,286,488 square miles. It extends for almost

2,700 miles from north to south, and roughly the same distance from

east to west. By the 1991 census it numbered 146.8 million inhabitants,

52 percent white, 42 percent mulatto, 5 percent black, 0.4 percent Asian,

and 0.2 percent Indian. As we shall see, these racial categorizations are

much less rigid than in the United States. And Brazil boasts virtually

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Brazil: Five Centuries of Change

Exhibit 1-1. Comparative size of Brazil. From E. Bradford Burns, A History of

Brazil, 3rd ed. (New York, 1993), p. 14.

every mineral needed for a modern industrial economy, with the con-

spicuous exceptions of coal and petroleum (although offshore wells are

now helping to produce 60 percent of domestic needs).

Brazil's climate has been much maligned. "Insalubrious" has been

used historically to describe it, though public health precautions were

all it took to subdue the hideous tropical diseases that so frightened

chroniclers in the past. Although many areas are typically humid, the

extreme cold temperatures afflicting North America and Europe are un-

known, and the high temperature extremes are certainly no worse

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Birth and Growth of Colonial Brazil: 1500-1750 3

those of the United States. Hurricanes and earthquakes are also un-

known, although floods and drought are relatively common threats.

Present-day Brazil covers five major regions. (See exhibit 1-2.) The

following description focuses on the twentieth-century features of these

regions. Their characteristics in the colonial era will be discussed later

in this chapter.

The North includes the states of Rondônia, Acre, Amazonas, Ro-

raimá, Para, and Amapá. It also includes the Amazon Basin and is by

far the largest region, accounting for 42 percent of the national territory.

Enthusiasts, both Brazilian and foreign, have nourished illusions

through the years about the agricultural potential of the greater

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Brazil: Five Centuries of Change

Amazon Basin—from Henry Ford's disastrous effort to grow rubber in

the 1930s, to the Brazilian military dictatorship's decision to build the

Trans-Amazon highway and offer a variety of tax incentives in the 1970s.

The facts of the region contradict them. The great barrier to agricultural

development of the Amazon Basin is and has always been the vast trop-

ical rain forest. It makes overland travel impossible, leaving the rivers

as the only mode of transportation in earlier eras (which air travel is

added today). More fundamentally, because rain leaches the soil if the

vegetable cover is cut down, these lands cannot be used for conventional

agriculture, leaving the area with insufficient carrying capacity for in-

tense human settlement.

The Northeast includes the states of Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Rio

Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Sergipe, and Bahia.

This region, which covers 18 percent of the national territory, was the

heart of the colonial settlement. Since the nineteenth century, however,

it has been in economic decline, with its once-flourishing export agri-

culture no longer competitive in world markets. The result has been con-

tinuing poverty for the population, which now constitutes the largest

pocket of misery in the Americas. Much of the coast is a humid strip

(zona de mata) that has lent itself to plantation agriculture, especially cane

sugar and cotton. Behind this relatively narrow humid zone lie two other

zones that are less hospitable to agriculture: the zona de agreste, a semi-

arid region, and the sertao, a larger region subject to periodic drought.

These latter two regions were famous in the twentieth century for the

Brazilian bandits, such as Lampiao, immortalized in verse, song, and

film. The Northeast is also notable for the effectiveness with which its

politicians have represented the region's interests (historically synony-

mous with the landowners' interests).

The Southeast comprises the states of Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo,

Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo. This is the heartland of Brazilian indus-

trialization, occupying 11 percent of the national territory. The state of

Minas Gerais is growing rapidly, having recently succeeded in combin-

ing agriculture with industry. Present-day Espirito Santo relies primar-

ily on agriculture, especially coffee and cacao. Rio de Janeiro was the

political capital of Brazil until the 1960s. In 1960 it lost its premier sta-

tus when the national capital was shifted to Brasilia, a modernistic new

city built from scratch in the interior. Since then it has been losing in-

dustry to surrounding states. Sao Paulo was an economic backwater un-

til the second half of the nineteenth century, when it became the world's

primary coffee-producing area. In the twentieth century, for reasons still

not perfectly understood, it has become the industrial giant of Brazil, as

well as the champion producer of non-coffee foodstuffs.

The South consists of Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do

Sul. A temperate region, it was and remains a cattle and grain-growing

area with only modest industrialization. It is the smallest of the regions,

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Birth and Growth of Colonial Brazil: 1500-1750 5

occupying only 7 percent of the national territory. Historically, the most

important state in the region has been Rio Grande do Sul, primarily be-

cause it borders both Argentina and Uruguay. The residents (known as

gauchos) flirted with separatism in the 1840s and 1890s, but have since

became known as among the most nationalistic of Brazilians. Like Es-

pirito Santo in the Southeast, Rio Grande do Sul experienced a heavy

inflow of German immigrants after 1890. Parana was a marginal state

until the 1950s, when the coffee culture moved south from Sao Paulo

and touched off an agricultural boom. Parana was also a prime desti-

nation for immigrants from Japan, Germany, and East Europe.

The final region, the Center-West, includes the states of Mato Grosso,

Mato Grosso do Sul, Goias, and the Federal District (greater Brasilia).

Traditionally underpopulated, this has become one of Brazil's fastest

growing areas. It covers 22 percent of the national territory, including

much of the cerrado, or interior farmland, which has become highly pro-

ductive since the 1970s, especially of soybeans. The building of Brasilia

(inaugurated in 1960) was a great stimulus to growth in this region,

bringing modern transportation for the first time, and thus the capacity

to market products to the rest of Brazil.

HOW COULD THE PORTUGUESE DO IT?

Any explanation of Portugal's historic role in the Americas must begin

with the link between the crown and overseas exploration. The discov-

ery of Brazil fits squarely into that relationship. The series of events lead-

ing directly to the discovery of Brazil began in early March 1500, when

King Manuel of Portugal attended a solemn mass in his capital city of

Lisbon to celebrate the launching of a new ocean fleet. Larger than any

of its predecessors, it was to include thirteen ships carrying a total of

1,200 crew and passengers. Barely a year earlier, the great Portuguese

navigator Vasco da Gama had returned to Lisbon from the epic voyage

(1497-99) that opened the sea route to India. His success, with its promise

of future trading riches, stimulated the Portuguese court to sponsor and

organize this new voyage. The commander of the new expedition was

Pedro Alvares Cabral, a distinguished nobleman who gave it a social

distinction the earlier voyage had lacked.

The stated intent of this expedition was the same as the earlier one:

to head for the southern tip of Africa, sail around the Cape of Good Hope,

and head north toward India through the Indian Ocean. Almost as soon

as the fleet had set out to sea, however, disaster appeared to strike. The

lead ship, commanded by Cabral, swung off course into the Atlantic, sail-

ing due west. Cabral and his crew eventually reached the coast of what

is now the Brazilian state of Bahia, arriving on April 23,1500.

They had stumbled on what turned out to be a vast continent. Or

was it more than stumbling? There has been considerable speculation

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over the years that the Portuguese navigators knew exactly what they

were doing, that they had in fact planned this "accident" to outflank the

Spanish, who had already claimed so much of the new world, and that

they were really following the route of previous secret voyages to Brazil.

Historians have failed to uncover any evidence in the Portuguese

archives or elsewhere to support this version of events. If there were, in-

deed, previous secret voyages to the new continent, they are still secret.

Nor, of course, was the continent new to the several million indigenous

Indian people who already lived there.

There is no record of what the Indian residents thought as they were

"discovered" by a band of strange sailors with odd clothes and a bad

smell, but their reaction can well be imagined. The reaction of Cabral

and his men is known: They were fascinated by what they saw. Their

thoughts were captured in an official account written for King Manuel

by Pero Vaz de Caminha, the fleet's scribe. His "Carta" (letter) demon-

strated a typical late-Renaissance perception of the new land, naturally

emphasizing what was exotic to European eyes. Vaz de Caminha de-

picted a realm where the resources—human and environmental—were

there for the taking. The native women were described as comely naked,

and without shame, and the soil as endlessly fertile. The image of end-

less fertility was to capture the imagination of the Portuguese and later

the Brazilians, a romanticization that has led to a variety of overopti-

mistic estimates of Brazil's potential. This description of Brazil sounded

seductively different from the hardscrabble life facing most Portuguese

at home. It was also designed to encourage the monarch to send follow-

up expeditions.

Cabral's feat, though dramatic, was in fact part of the continuing

success of the Portuguese at overseas exploration. Despite their rela-

tively meager resources (the Portuguese population was about 1 million,

compared with England's 3 million, Spain's 7 million, and France's 15

million; Holland was closest with 1.5 million), the Portuguese were, dur-

ing these years, in the process of creating a trading empire reaching all

the way to Asia. Vasco de Gama's arrival in India in 1498 marked the

creation of the Estado de India, a network of coastal enclaves running

along the Indian Ocean, from Mozambique, around the Malabar coast

of India, and all the way to Macao on the coast of China. The resulting

wealth had made their kingdom a major international power in fifteenth-

century Europe.

Such success was made possible by a combination of factors: early

consolidation of the monarchy, and a social structure that respected

trade, along with leadership in navigational technology, long-standing

involvement in oceanic trading networks, an instinct for trade rather

than colonization, and a collective thirst for adventure.

Like Spain, Portugal had to fight a long war against the Muslims,

who had occupied the Iberian peninsula since the eighth century.

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The Portuguese had liberated their kingdom from its Arabic-speaking

occupiers by the thirteenth century, two hundred years earlier than the

Spanish. In addition, they were able to resist repeated attempts by the

kingdom of Castile (the bureaucratic and military core of modern Spain),

to manipulate the succession to the Portuguese throne. To strengthen its

position against Castile, Portugal forged an alliance with the English

crown in 1386. This alliance, which remained the bedrock of Portuguese

foreign policy for the following five centuries, was to lay the basis for

England's involvement—especially its economic involvement—in mod-

ern Brazil. The marriage of Portuguese King Joao I to the granddaugh-

ter of England's Edward III consolidated the Portuguese dynasty (known

as the house of Avis, 1385-1578) and created the stable monarchical base

that facilitated the country's foray into world exploration and trade.

In addition to early political stability, Portugal was helped by a so-

cial structure in which the merchant class played a major role. Portu-

gal's economy in the fifteenth century combined commercial agriculture,

subsistence agriculture, and trade. The merchants were the key to trade

and were respected by the crown. Thus, they had the support of their

sovereign as they maneuvered on the world stage, pursuing exploration

and trade and gaining the cooperation of foreign merchants, especially

the Genoese in what is modern-day Italy.

The power of the merchants and the interest of the crown com-

bined to produce the resources necessary to make Portugal a leader in

perfecting the technology necessary for traveling long distances by sea.

One of her relative advantages in maritime skills was in ship-building,

about which the Portuguese had learned much from their Basque

neighbors in northern Spain. For example, they produced the caravel,

the first sailing ship that was reliable on the high seas. Previous Eu-

ropean ships were designed for coastal sailing or for use in the rela-

tively calm inland sea of the Mediterranean. When sailed on the open

ocean, they were apt to be swamped by ocean waves and often cap-

sized. The Portuguese also excelled at navigation. In particular, they

pioneered development of the astrolabe, the first instrument capable

of using the sun and stars to determine position at sea. Finally, the Por-

tuguese were skilled at drawing maps, which were based on the in-

creasingly detailed geographical knowledge accumulated on their voy-

ages. Such maps made possible systematic repeat trips. (The astrolabe

and the map-making skills give some credence to the speculation that

Cabral "discovered" Brazil by design.)

Portugal had yet another asset: a long-standing involvement in the

trade routes that linked the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. Over

the preceding centuries Lisbon had been a regular stop for Genoese

traders traveling from the Mediterranean to European Atlantic ports. By

1450, as a consequence, Portugal was already integrated into the most

advanced trading network of the time. Portugal's location .

To be continue next time thanks for reading.

Am Igili Ikenna.