1

* Article published in John McNeill, José Augusto Pádua and

Mahesh Rangarajan, editors, Environmental History: As If Nature
Existed, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010.

EUROPEAN COLONIALISM AND TROPICAL FOREST DESTRUCTION IN

BRAZIL: THE ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS BEYOND ECONOMIC
HISTORY

José Augusto Pádua

Institute of History
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
jpadua@terra.com.br

INTRODUCTION

When the Europeans first arrived in what is now the Brazilian territory, in the
sixteenth century, they found two major tropical forest complexes: the Atlantic Forest,
originally measuring some 1,300,000 square kilometres, and the Amazon Forest, which at that
time encompassed some 4,000,000 square kilometres.
The different fate of these two forest complexes until a few decades ago reveals a lot
about Brazilian environmental history. Colonial economic activities, particularly export-
oriented monocrops, livestock, and gold and diamond mining, were concentrated along the
seaboard from the Northeast to the South of Brazil, the domain of the Atlantic Forest. Even
after Brazil gained political independence, in 1822, its economy and population remained
concentrated in this area. The growth of economic activities such as coffee plantations and
timber production, and eventually the building of railways, urban construction, iron smelting
and pulp production, were responsible for important losses of Atlantic Forests in post-colonial
Brazil. The historical result is that more then 92% of the original forest area has now been
destroyed (Dean, 1995).
The Amazon forest was left in a very different situation until quite recently. Until
some 35 years ago, only 1% of the original forest had been destroyed. The difficulties of
access to the Amazon region in the pre-industrial world, especially because of the size of its
rivers, the abundance of wetlands in the areas of easier access and the endemic diseases,
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hampered more intense settlement of its lands. The Portuguese were able to adopt a “low
intensity” pattern of colonial domination in order to guarantee a relatively loose political and
military command over the area (largely because it was not seriously threatened by other
European powers) and to ensure a neo-European economy based on the selective extraction
and culture of certain commercially feasible resources from the forest (like spices and cocoa).
Burning forest to plant sugarcane, and other activities highly destructive of forests, were not
attempted on a large scale. By 1820, the population of the Amazonian areas under Portuguese
control, including a majority of Indian descendents, was only 137,000 (Pádua, 1997).
Even the environmental results of the legendary post-colonial nineteenth century
‘rubber boom’, from 1850 to 1915, were not only short-lived, but also relatively limited in
scope. In the first place, rubber tapping was not very damaging to the forest, since it did not
require felling the trees. It is true that the rubber rush promoted migration to the Amazon and
the rapid growth of some of its cities, such as Manaus. Still, this flow stopped after the
bottom fell out of the Brazilian rubber economy (because of the growing world market
hegemony of the rubber plantations in South East Asia). The massive economic settlement
and destruction of the Amazon forest, thus, is a very recent phenomenon that cannot be
explained in the limits of this paper. Anyway, from 1970 to the present time the remaining
forest cover in the Brazilian Amazon was reduced from around 99% to about 83%, which
means the destruction of more then 600,000 square kilometres of tropical woods (Pádua,
1997).
To analyze the relationship between European colonialism and the destruction of
tropical forests in Brazil, therefore, the best case to be discussed is the Atlantic Rainforest.
This effectively involves a case whose historical importance has a clear global dimension.
First, one of the most extraordinary processes of deforestation in the modern world occurred
in Brazil with the loss of around 1,200,000 square kilometers in 500 years. This process was a
direct consequence of European expansion and the creation of a colonial and post-colonial
society in the east of South America. As a result it can be included in a list of the most tragic
effects of the making of the modern world-system and of what Carl Sauer has called the
“destructive exploitation in modern colonial expansion” (Sauer, 1938).
In second place the antiquity of this process in the context of the history of European
colonialism should be kept in mind. The occupation of areas of the Atlantic Rainforest by the
Portuguese began in the first half of the sixteenth century, representing one of the first
European initiatives of constructing permanent and productive forms of settlement in large
areas of a tropical region, quite different from the small trade enclaves established in Africa
 3

and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On the other hand, the European
construction of the Brazilian territory began under the Ancien Régime, in a much more
technologically difficult historical context than, for example, the colonial-imperial expansion
of the nineteenth century. The Brazilian case brings us back to the beginnings of the most
profound contact of Europeans with the tropical world, which was very important in the
process of creating European perceptions and ways of behavior towards this ecological space.
From the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, due to the significant increase
in land occupation resulting from the creation of cities and sugar mills, as well as the
attempted forced conversions carried out by the Jesuits, the violent reaction of Amerindian
peoples from the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family who dominated the Atlantic Rainforest
region grew intensely. Nevertheless, the deaths and population flights provoked by the
violence of the conflicts, and especially by the epidemiological shock produced by European-
introduced pathogens unknown to the immunological systems of the natives, led to the large-
scale depopulation of coastal areas (Cook, 1998; Monteiro, 1999). The Amerindian
population which was probably around one million in 1500, in the Atlantic Forest region, was
reduced to approximately 50,000 by 1600 (not including those groups which fled to the
backlands, escaping from the increasing colonial dominion over coastal areas). Initially, as a
result of this, as has been noted by Warren Dean, the size of the Atlantic Rainforest increased,
due to the radical reduction in the number of small clearance fires that were part of Indian
subsistence agriculture (Dean, 1995: 65). After this, following the creation of the colonial
economic system, a long process of enduring deforestation began.
With native depopulation and the growing control of the coastal region, which
decreased the threat of competition from other European powers, especially France, the
Portuguese found themselves in an historical situation especially relevant for the theme of this
paper. A situation that combined in a singular manner a set of elements that was present in a
more dispersed manner in other European colonial experiences. These were: 1) an enormous
and quite unpopulated continental frontier open to the advance of colonization; 2) a
continental frontier marked almost entirely by the presence of tropical forest; 3) a frontier
whose economic exploration in the first two centuries had to concentrate on the burning and
the cultivation of biomass, taking into account the fact that the extraction of precious metals
only became a strong reality in the third century of Brazil’s colonial history. This combination
of factors produced a paradigmatic case of the historical relationship between European
colonialism and the destruction of tropical forests.
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It is true that it would be somewhat naive to attribute the destruction of the Atlantic
Rainforest merely, or even primarily, to European colonialism. The post-colonial period, and
above all the twentieth century, was responsible for an overwhelming proportion of total
deforestation. Despite the absence of a complete retrospective analysis of the quantitative
evolution of the destruction of the Atlantic Rainforest, some of the estimates that have been
carried out at the level of very few specific provinces indicate that 8% - 28% of total
deforestation occurred before 1912, the year of the publication of the Gonzaga de Campos
map, the first ‘forest map’ at a national scale (Castro, 2002: 176). It can be noted that these
estimates included a considerable period of the post-colonial economy. On the other hand, an
estimate made by Michael Williams for the period between 1700 and 1850, indicates tropical
deforestation of 250,000 square kilometers in Latin America, of which a large part
corresponds to Brazil (Williams, 2002: 335). In relation to the Atlantic Rainforest, in my
opinion it would be plausible to estimate a loss of 100,000 square kilometers of Atlantic
Rainforest until 1850 (less then 10% of the historical total).
My view is that the major reason for the high proportion of deforestation in the late
ninetieth and twentieth centuries lies with the technical variable, especially the introduction of
industrial techniques that enormously increased the potential speed and extent of forest
destruction. The building of railways, for example, was a major direct and indirect channel for
deforestation. However, it is important to emphasize that the use of these new techniques, in
the context of a large general increase in the size and complexity of Brazilian economy,
developed and expanded a destructive pattern of forest occupation which was already present
in the colonial period, within the dimensions and scales of the pre-industrial world. The
essential aspect of the colonial inheritance, thus, is more qualitative than quantitative. This
can actually be observed in the new frontiers of forest destruction in Brazil, which is now
concentrated in the Amazon and the Cerrado (the large wooded savannah of central Brazil),
which presents a clear continuation of certain perceptions and practices created in the old
frontiers of colonial deforestation. An important challenge that analysts face is trying to
understand as deeply as possible the logic of the pattern of colonial land occupation that gave
rise to an economic history so marked by deforestation.
To understand the colonial genesis of the destructive pattern of relationship with
tropical forests in Brazil, nonetheless, it is necessary to go beyond conventional economic
history. The near omnipresence of forests in the landscape has not gone unnoticed by this
historiography. However, forests have normally been treated as a secondary aspect of
economic reality, either as a source of raw materials or as a space to be economically
 5

transformed - in other words, as an externality. The emphasis has always been on the study of
the social construction of productive activities, with the landscape of tropical forests being an
eventually relevant, but never essential, detail in the creation of this logic. Deforestation, in
turn, was normally seen as an indirect and ordinary effect of economic production. In other
words, the tropical environment tended to be considered as a plain and almost empty space,
which only served to support the internal motivations of the economic forces
The environmental history approach, to the contrary, sees the environment as a full
and complex space, whose concrete and singular characteristics participate in the definition of
human social life. The dialogue with environmental history can contribute to the creation of a
broader and more inclusive economic history, where the biophysical reality of each region is
understood as an essential element, though not a determining one in the reductionist sense, to
understand the genesis and development of a socio-economic system.
It is clear that the elements and resources of nature only make sense in certain
historical and socio-cultural contexts. For example, the abundant presence of gold in the
rivers of Serra do Espinhaço in the southeast of Brazil did not generate any sort of attraction
for the Tupi-Guarani population who passed through that region, but it was the fundamental
motivation for the intensification of Portuguese colonialism in eighteenth-century Brazil. It
cannot be forgotten, however, that the objective presence of gold in the middle of a landscape
marked by tropical forests was a necessary biophysical condition to define and mould the type
of economic and environmental culture developed at that moment.
It is through this analytical play between ecology and socio-economic factors that we
can rethink the intrinsic importance of the continental landscape dominated by the Atlantic
Rainforest in order to understand the making of colonial Brazil; and more specifically, to
understand the genesis of the pattern of land occupation, so destructive of forests, which
extended from the colonial to the post-colonial period.
In the next part of the text, I will try to examine in a synthetic manner how the
dynamic shock between the Portuguese colonizers, with their concrete historical and cultural
baggage, and the tropical environment and its native inhabitants, caused cultural, ninetieth
century mentalities and practices.

THE TROPICAL FOREST AS A SOURCE OF CULTURAL ESTRANGEMENT

Before the Early Modern period, the European historical experience was situated north
of the Tropic of Cancer. Considering the inheritance of classical geography – in the tradition
 6

of Hippocrates, Aristotle and Ptolemy – the horizon of human existence moved from the
Mediterranean to the East (with a very imprecise perception of the map of Asia). Beyond the
Southern Mediterranean, heading towards what is now Africa, a terra incognita was entered
which, according to powerful theoretical speculation, ended in an essentially uninhabitable
‘torrid zone’ (Glacken, 1967: 93; Arnold, 1996: 15).
One of the principal historical and cultural consequences of the crossing of the limit
represented by the Tropic of Cancer by Europeans, thereby widening the horizons of their
experiences towards the tropical world (which extends to the Tropic of Capricorn), was the
debunking of the myth of the ‘torrid zone’, identifying the presence of abundant life where
previously only desert had been imagined to exist. The fact that intellectuals in Portuguese
America continued to be surprised about this discovery in the second half of the eighteenth
century indicates the dimension of estrangement of Europeans as regards the new ecological
spaces open to their colonial dominium. The Jesuit João Daniel, for example, writing in the
1770s, noted that the Amazon Region, “being perpendicularly below the torrid zone, which
discourse and speculation prove to be uninhabitable, experience and practice have shown this
not only to be habitable, but also to be very healthy” (Daniel, 2004: 77). The European
surprise, moreover, did not refer solely to the existence of life in the tropics, but also to the
differences in the form of its appearance. In 1557, for example, in the Guanabara Bay region,
the French chronicler Jean de Léry was frightened to find trees that even in February, the
European Winter, were “as green as in France in May and June” (Lery, 1980: 77).
This astonishment, however, was mixed with a very ambiguous evaluation of the
meaning of that mosaic of different and strange forests from the European viewpoint. It is true
that the wealth of Brazilian tropical nature was praised by local writers throughout the
colonial period. However, the tendency that could be observed in the first centuries of
colonization, both in the Atlantic Rainforest and in the Amazon region, was much more to
highlight some of the more striking elements of local fauna and flora than the forest
background that served as their habitat. Parrots, monkeys, cashew nuts and passion fruit – or
in the case of the Amazon, turtles, manatees, sarsaparillas and copal trees – received much
more attention that the forest as a whole. These isolated elements, in addition to their
exoticism, could also create economic and much more defined and evident utilitarian benefits
than the unknown green mass of the forests. Even in the cases where there was a positive
reading of the landscape, the presence of ‘good airs’ and pure waters was given primacy in
relation to the forests. This was because, among other reasons, they corresponded more
directly to the signs of health and perfection present in the Biblical tradition and in the
 7

medical literature of the Mediterranean in antiquity, which so influenced post-Renaissance

European writers in the colonial tropics (Holanda, 1977 and Assunção, 2001).
A similar perception can be noted in the contacts of European colonizers with the
Amazon forest. To the contrary of what is imagined, the first reports of the contacts of
Europeans with the Amazon river, in stark contrast with the dominant image nowadays,
contain no great shock at the giant forest, that ocean of tropical trees. In the famous report of
Frei Gaspar de Carvajal in the middle of the sixteenth century, just to cite one example, trees
basically appear in indirect commentaries, as in the case of the cutting of timber to make or
repair boats, towns fortified with ‘thick timber walls’ and the search for nocturnal refuge in
‘robledales’ (oak groves). It is significant that the author used the idea of an oak forest
(Quercus pirenaica), a tree typical of the Iberian Peninsula, to identify the Amazon Forest. A
clear indication of how difficult it was to culturally translate in the eyes of the Europeans a
biodiversity and a landscape so different from what they were used to. The general praise for
this landscape, moreover, does not appear in terms of its intrinsic value, but rather in the
possibility of its conversion into something more civilized and palatable: “It is temperate land
where much corn is reaped and where all kinds of fruits can be cultivated. Furthermore, it is
suitable to raise all types of cattle, because as many types of herbs exist there as in our Spain”
(Carvajal, 2002: 23, 26, 32, 35 and 36).
This type of vision cannot be considered absolute. The Jesuit Simão de Vasconcellos,
for example, highlighted in 1688 among the elements that indicated the paradisiacal nature of
Brazilian territory the presence of “immense forests that are the glory and crown of all the
trees in the universe” (Vasconcellos, 1977: 79). However, readings such as this were quite
rare exceptions. It should be remembered that the valorization of forests as a whole in the
context of European thought is a much later phenomenon. It was the emergence of the modern
conception of a Nature’s Economy, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
that disseminated the idea of the systemic importance of forest for the quality of climate, soil
fertility and the regular offer of water. The Romantic culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, on the other hand, emphasized large forest landscapes in the context of an aesthetic
of the sublime (Grove, 1995; Harisson, 1992; Thomas, 1983).
Generally speaking the Europeans of the Ancien Régime produced a devalued image of
the forest mass as a whole in Brazil, and were not very concerned with studying what we now
call its biodiversity (Dean, 1995:66). Their vision of the Atlantic Rainforest, especially in the
daily reality of production and settlement, approximated much more the image portrayed in
1711 by another Jesuit, André João Antonil, in his book “The Culture and Opulence of Brazil
 8

due to its Drugs and Mines”. In Antonil’s work, at least indirectly, the forest was not seen as
a glory, but rather as a large obstacle. This can be clearly seen in the following passage, which
presents the most synthetic and suggestive form of the destructive agriculture dominant in the
colonial period: “once the choice of the best land for the sugar cane had been made, it is
cleared, burnt, cleaned and everything that can serve as a hindrance must be removed from
there” (Antonil, 1976 [1711]: 112). The Atlantic Rainforest, whose remnants are now
considered to be a treasury of beauty and diversity, was nothing more than a hindrance to
sugarcane.
The presence of this cultural factor – the devaluation of the tropical forest as a whole –
facilitated the establishment of a destructive pattern of land occupation, since the burning of
native vegetation was not seen, generally speaking, as representing the loss of economic or
biological wealth. Deforestation as Antonil leaves clear, meant ‘cleaning’ the land. The
cultural factor, however, is not sufficient in itself to explain the deforestation dynamic as a
whole. For example, we can see that in the case of the Amazon there was much less
deforestation. The devaluation of the forest was similar, but geographic and socio-economic
factors limited its destruction. Cultural standards, therefore, should be seen as just one of the
elements present in a broader historical scenario.

THE TROPICAL FOREST AS A SOURCE OF TECHNOLOGICAL ESTRANGEMENT

As well as the cultural strangeness, the permanent occupation of an enormous tropical

forest created a dynamic of technological estrangement on the part of the Portuguese
colonizers. It is worth noting that European and Portuguese agriculture possesses an old
tradition of soil fertilization and renewal, including the use of empirical methods to maximize
the use of solar energy and the recycling of organic elements present in the productive system
(Sieferle, 2001: 20). In this context the dominance in colonial Brazil of careless, extensive
techniques that were destructive in relation to natural resources, essentially based on the
burning of the forest biomass, can be considered as a process of technological involution.
To understand this process, however, it is important to recognize the dissonance
between European techniques and tropical ecology. As argued by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda,
“if the agricultural technique adopted here by the Portuguese represented in some cases a
regression in comparison with those of Europe, in certain instances actually millennial-old,
at the same time the resistance of nature also contributed to this, a nature distinct from that of
Europe, as much as the inertia and passivity of the colonists themselves” (Holanda, 1997:50).
 9

A letter from the governor of the capitania of São Paulo to the Viceroy of Brazil in
1766 stated, according to the categories of the time, that the land was ‘cold’ and that it was
not rich enough except on the surface. More important, however, was the fact that “the plough
could not be used, since some have used it and lost everything they had”. In other words the
use of the plough, the basis of European agriculture, was seen as impractical in the recently
opened tropical forest soils, particularly due to the presence of thick roots in the soil. It is true
that the plough then used in many parts of Portugal was heavy, quadrangular and wheeled,
requiring various oxen to pull it. It was a clearly inadequate instrument for the tropical
environment, since, among other reasons, it penetrated deep into the soil, burying the layer of
organic substances necessary for successful cultivation (Holanda, 1995: 205).
Various options were suggested at the end of the colonial period, in the context of the
Enlightenment thought, to adapt the plough to Brazilian soils and to facilitate the renewal of
deforested and abandoned soils. For example, the manufacture of lighter ploughs was
suggested; ploughs that only scraped the surface of the soil. This was an attempt similar to
what had occurred with good results in the Jesuit missions in the south of the country, where a
Spanish plough with little depth was adopted, similar to the ‘taclla’, the foot plough used by
the peoples of the Andes. Also suggested was the exploitation of older soils which had been
cultivated and abandoned after the burning of the forest; these soils did not contain thick roots
and could be restored through the use of the plough (Pádua, 2002: 37 and 58).
The truth, however, is that these alternatives were either not developed or did not
become widespread in the colonial economy for a very concrete economic and environmental
reason: burning brought good results in terms of productivity, even in the short term, while
the abundance of forests created a sense that this method could be carried on indefinitely and
that there always would be new forests to burn.
The historical origin of forest burning in colonial Brazil can be discussed, even taking
into account the fact that slash-and-burn was a practically universal method in tropical
regions. The Tupi-Guarani Indians from the Atlantic Rainforest certainly used it, opening
over a number of centuries a large number of small areas, around a hectare in size, for
subsistence cultivation. Nonetheless, the small size of the clearings, associated with the length
of fallow periods – between 20 and 40 years – allowed the continual regeneration of the forest
and a degree of maintenance of total cover (Dean, 1995: 27). The Portuguese obviously
observed the efficiency of indigenous slash-and-burn in Brazil. Some historians, however,
argue that the introduction of this method in the country was not totally indigenous. Burning
was used both in ancient Portuguese agriculture and in the Atlantic islands colonized before
 10

the arrival in Brazil, such as Madeira and São Tomé. Furthermore, at the end of the
eighteenth century the Academy of Sciences in Lisbon criticized the continuity of the use of
burning in Portugal (Dornas Filho, 1958: 253; Pádua, 2002: 74).
In the tropical environment of Brazil, the results of slash-and-burn agriculture raised
enthusiasm amongst the colonizers. A despised mass of forest could be transformed by fire
into fertile soil capable of producing with a few seeds five to ten times more than could a
similar area in Portugal. Moreover, in many areas of the Atlantic Rainforest, dominated by
relatively small mountain chains, the deforestation and burning of slopes was relatively easy,
taking advantage of the force of gravity. Dean (1995:100) estimated that in small agricultural
operations in colonial Brazil the burning method required only one quarter of the time
required by European cultivation methods.
However, on the scale adopted by the European colonizers the slash-and-burn system
with the burning of areas much greater than in indigenous agriculture, created serious mid-
and long-term problems. After just a few years, the open land, vulnerable to the intense
activity of natural elements in the tropical world, lacking the protection of the forest, tended to
be degraded by erosion, to lose nutrients and to be susceptible to the invasion of those
notorious pests, the leaf-cutting ants of Brazil. As they said at that time, the soil became
‘tired’. Despite this evidence, the burning of forests was practically the only method used for
preparing land for planting in Brazil until the end of the nineteenth century. To understand
the durability of this routine in the rural world, responsible for the consolidation of an
aggressive mentality and praxis in relation to forests, it is necessary to integrate cultural and
technological aspects on a broader political ecology of the spatial dynamics of colonial
agriculture in Portuguese America.

CONTINENTAL TROPICAL FORESTS AS AN OPEN FRONTIER: THE LOGIC OF

DEFORESTATION

The generalized adoption of burning and the subsequent abandonment of the diversity
of techniques that were part of the European agricultural inheritance, or at least the attempt to
adapt some of them to the tropical context, is related, as we have seen, to the cultural
depreciation of tropical forests by the colonizers. Given this dominant mentality there were
very few exceptions, either in terms of the literary and artistic praise of the presence of forests
in the landscape, or, in more practical terms, laws or political determinations aimed at the
conservation of areas or forestry resources. When the latter were adopted, they arose out of
 11

empirical demands related to the interests of the colonial government or the concrete
economic experiences of the colonizers. This is the case, for example, of some of the articles
of the 1605 Regimento do Pau Brasil (Brazil Wood Regulations), which prohibited the
burning of this valuable wood and stipulated quotas per licensed timber cutter, in order to
avoid the exhaustion of a arboreal resources monopolized by the Portuguese Crown, which
obtained considerable income from it (Wainer, 1999: 20). Another example is the royal
decision of 1681, in the capitania of Bahia, at the request of the local Senate, which
established a minimum distance between sugar mills constructed in the forest, in order to
reduce conflicts over property boundaries and to guarantee the continued availability of
firewood to the actual mills themselves (Miller, 2000: 36). Only at the end of the eighteenth
century, influenced by the Enlightenment vision of the rational use of natural resources did a
somewhat more intense intellectual and political concern appear in the colony regarding the
problem of forest conservation (Pádua, 2002).
The pattern of land occupation centered on forest destruction through burning,
however, was not only based on cultural visions or technological difficulties. It involved an
economic and environmental dynamic centered on four variables: 1) spatial separation
between livestock and crops; 2) the abundance of forest land available for the advance of
colonial occupation; 3) the institutional encouragement for the occupation of new lands and 4)
the abundance of cheap labor through the African slave trade.
The ecological difficulty for cattle herds that emerged in the closed environment of the
tropical forests, except in areas that had already been opened by burning, was discovered by
the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. This fact stimulated a policy, defined from the
seventeenth century onwards, of pushing cattle ranching to the backlands of the Atlantic
Rainforest - an enormous hinterland of more than three million square kilometers dominated
by different types of arboreal savannah, much more open than the Atlantic Rainforest. This is
the case in the two large biomes called the ‘Cerrado’ and ‘Caatinga’ in Brazil.
This policy served to comply with the different objectives of colonial occupation.
First, cattle were an important ecological instrument for the occupation of the more isolated
regions of Brazil, where there were still unconquered Indian tribes. Cattle ranching were
actually the crucial economic factor for the conquest of these inner lands and for the expulsion
of Indian groups even more far away along the hinterland. Second, the enormous herds were
the basis of a subsistence economy in the remote parts of the colony, which guaranteed a
regular supply of meat to the coast, essential for the survival of the sugar mills, cities and
mines where the majority of the population was concentrated. Third, moving livestock
 12

ranching to the remoter parts of the colony left the Atlantic Rainforest region free for more
profitable economic activities, aimed at the world market. From the environmental point of
view, this separation can be seen as harmful because it made agricultural production even
more dependent on burning and continual deforestation, since animal manure could not be
used for soil fertilization. But the fact is that this model of territorial exploitation had its own
logic, which did not involve this type of rural integration.
In the same way, in both the savannahs of the interior and the tropical forests of the
coast, the question of the open frontier was essential to understand the logic of the colonial
economy. The Portuguese colonizers, used to the ecological scales of their region of origin,
saw the Atlantic Rainforest as an unending green ocean. The element that most stood out in
the first centuries of the formation of Brazil was the contrast between the gigantic ecological
space and a relatively small and local colonial society, creating the sense of a frontier
indefinitely open to the horizontal advance of economic activities. This historic experience
favored the use of extensive and rudimentary methods of exploration, based on a parasitical
posture towards what we now call ‘natural capital’.
It is true that some negative results of deforestation were observed during the
colonial period, especially from the eighteenth century onwards: soils deteriorated, water
flows were destabilized and many different regions experienced shortages of firewood.
Furthermore, in the context of the material culture of that time, where rustic wooden
carriages pulled by oxen were the principal means of transport, the disappearance of forests
rich in good wood within a radius of a few dozen kilometers almost made their economic
use unfeasible. Nonetheless, the image of the open frontier minimized concerns. The Jesuit
André João Antonil, who has already been mentioned, noted early in the eighteenth century
that the rudimentary furnaces in the sugar mills were “mouths engulfing forests”. But he
then went on to say that a country like Brazil, “with the immensity of forests that it has
could enjoy, as it had for years, and would in the future, as many furnaces as existed now”
(Antonil, 1976: 115).
 13

Domenico Vandelli, the principal naturalist in Portugal at the end of the eighteenth
century, succinctly captured the logic of this model in Brazil in 1789: “agriculture is
expanding along the borders of rivers in the interior of the country, but it does so in a
manner that in the future will reveal itself harmful. It consists of burning ancient forests
whose wood, because of the ease of transportation by means of the river themselves, would
be very useful for naval construction, or for extracting dyes, or for cabinet making. Once
these forests are burned, they are cultivated for two or three years, while the fertility
produced by the ashes lasts, until the diminished fertility makes them abandon the plots in
order to burn new sections of forests. Thus they continue destroying the forests along the
rivers” (Vandelli, 1990: 131).

In other words, as deforested agricultural soils were ruined, the frontier advanced
towards the remaining intact forests. As useful types of timber vanished from around the
productive centers, reserves where they were still abundant were sought on the frontier.
The open frontier guaranteed a certain level of continuity in the economy and in the social
structure of the country, despite the many examples of farms, or even cities, that had been
abandoned after reaching the limit of their ecological capacity to sustain themselves
(Pádua, 2000).
The feeling of the inexhaustible space was also related to a juridical – institutional
factor: the vast tracts of colonial territory which the Portuguese Crown had formally
appropriated and which were not sold but rather freely granted to members of the colonial
elite, who only had to pay for the official registration of the land. It is worth noting that the
price of this registration process, although very small in relation to the genuine value of the
land, was sufficient to prevent poor colonists from having formal access to the land. The
horizontal advance of the deforesting frontier was made many times through the simple
informal occupation of the land, including the spaces made 'free of Indians’ by wars of
conquest. However, in a parallel movement, the colonial state did support the permanent
growth of the formal occupation of the continental land through the official grants. This
model had important environmental consequences, as was noted in 1780 by José Teixeira
Coelho, a former colonial government employee in the capitania of Minas Gerais. He
argued that “the lenience with which sesmarias (land grants of around 4.000 hectares)
have been granted has been very harmful, since the best woods have been burnt, those
closest to the settlements, which are now suffering the lack of timber, firewood and
pasture”. This ease of concession meant that “the goods of the capitania of Minas are not
stable; because the roceiros (backwoodsmen), since obtaining grants of new land is not
 14

difficult, do not make improvements in the property they possess and abandon it for any
reason”. In other words, after the burned land became “tired”, a very common option was
to ask the local authorities, representing the Portuguese Crown, to concede a new sesmaria.
This institutional dynamics reduced the incentives for the proper care and conservation of
the agricultural land. In fact it promoted a continuous cycle of burnings, land abandonment
and new burnings. The proposed remedy by Teixeira Coelho was only to grant one
property per person in order to stimulate a better treatment of the soil (Coelho, 1852: 452).
This suggestion, however, could not be accepted since it clashed with the political ecology
of the colonial system in Brazil. The horizontal expansion produced by this model of land
occupation, indeed, was one of its basic components.
Finally, it should be made clear that the establishment of this pattern of land
appropriation, besides the physical presence of a continental open frontier, presupposed the
existence of an abundant and cheap source of labor. A labor force that had to be
submissive, in order to accept the continuous renewal of the hard and dangerous work of
opening large areas of forest through burning. A type of worker, therefore, who would be
very different from the family farmer whose tendency, as imagined by some of the
observers of the time, was to root themselves in the properties already opened with great
effort by their limited amount of labor and monetary resources. This labor force was
achieved through the continual flow of African slaves to Brazil from the middle of the
sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. The perception of the landowners
that this source of labor was abundant and cheap remained until the nineteenth century
when, for institutional and political reasons, especially the pressure of England against the
slave trade, it became ever more expensive, and in the end unviable. It is worth noting that
of the approximately 10,247,000 Africans who survived the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean
in the slave ships, around 4,029,000 came to Brazil. This number represents more than
seven times the amount introduced into the United States (estimated at 559,800) (Klein,
1999: 211).
It is interesting to note that the connection between slave-based production and the
dominium of a rural economy centered on forest destruction was clearly noted by José
Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, the father of Brazilian independence in 1822, who used it as
one of the strongest arguments for the end of the slave trade and the gradual abolition of
slavery itself: “If the landlords did not have at their disposal an excessive multitude of
slaves, they themselves would use lands already opened and cleared of forests, that today
lay abandoned as derelict lands. Our precious forests full of woods proper for construction
 15

and shipyards would not be destroyed by the murderous ax of the Negro and by the
devastating flames of ignorance. The upper parts of our mountain ranges, perennial
sources of humidity and fertility transferred to the lowlands, and of electric circulation,
would not be bare and toasted dry by the heat waves of our climate. It is obvious, therefore,
that if agriculture is practiced by the free arms of small proprietors, or by journeymen,
these neglected lands will be used, because of need or interest, specially in the vicinity of
the larger population centers, where one can always find a safe market, ready and
rewarding, and in this manner the ancient virgin forests that characterize our beautiful
country with their vastness and luxuriance will be conserved as a sacred heritage for our
posterity (Silva, 1973 [1823] : 95).

CONCLUSION

I hope that it has been possible, even if in a very general way, to present in this text the
basic lines of the colonial pattern of territorial occupation in Brazil and its destructive
relationship with forests. The main aim of this synthesis was to stimulate comparative debate.
I have become convinced that a deeper understanding of the forest question in colonial Brazil,
which is my principal theme of investigation, needs to be constructed in the context of a
global comparative effort. The forest experience of Portuguese America cannot be thought of
as a closed universe, or as a bipolar relationship between Portugal and Brazil. It is inserted in
a broader historic process that involves the establishment of European colonial systems with
diverse models in different forest regions in the planet. Understanding what existed in
common or what was regionally specific in the European colonial experiences in tropical
forest areas can motivate a promising research agenda in world environmental history.

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