COLONIAL BRAZIL

LAH 2020, Spring 2010

Discovery

• 1500: Pedro Alvares Cabral was

attempting to navigate to the Cape
of Good Hope on his way to India.
• He was blown off course westwards
to the Brazilian coast and became
the first European to discover Brazil.
Treaty of Tordesillas

• 1494.
Divided the
world
between
Spain and
Portugal.
Early Portuguese Settlers
• Degredados: first settlers in Brazil were castaways and
common delinquents
• Banished from Portugal to remote parts of the empire.
• Relatively free from political authority in the early
years.
• Many degredados won acceptance by Indian tribes:
– they learned the native languages,
– took chiefs' daughters as wives and concubines, and
– fathered a large progeny of half-caste children;
• Such 'squaw-men‘ included
– João Ramalho in São Vicente and
– Caramurú of Bahia - the first Brazilians.
The brazil-wood trade

• Attracted the attention of the French.

• 1530: Martim Afonso de Sousa was
sent with 400 men to found a royal
colony at São Vicente near present-
day Santos.
• Brazil was divided into twelve
territories and placed under the
lordship of 'donatary-captains‘.
Salvador de Bahia
• 1549 Tomas de
Sousa was sent
out as governor-
general to the
Bahia.
• Salvador
became the first
capital.
Jesuit missions
• Six Jesuit priests came with Sousa –beginning the
missionary and educational presence that this
order would develop throughout Brazil.
• The Jesuits were sent to stabilize and regulate the
relations between Indians and Europeans.
• Their aim was to convert the Indians to Christianity
and European ways by educating them.
Indian villages or aldeias
• The Portuguese Crown determined to
institute a coherent polity in Brazil.
• The Jesuits gathered the Indians in aldeias.
• Conflict between Jesuits and settlers was a
disruptive feature of colonial life in Brazil.
• The settlers did not want to lose Indian
slave labor.
Founding of Sao Paulo
• Secular clergy believed the Indians were
savages.
• They could therefore be held in bondage.
• Conflict between the Jesuits and the first
bishop Fernandes Sardanha,
• 1554: Jesuits forced to move from Bahia to
São Vicente.
• Set up an aldeia at Piratininga, eventually
the city of São Paulo.
• 1557: a new governor, Mem de Sá,
who was more in sympathy with the
aims of the missionaries.
Rio de Janeiro
• 600 Protestant Frenchmen set up a colony,
which they called France Antarctique, at
Guanabara Bay.
• 1567: The French were finally ousted from
Brazil.
• On the site of their colony Rio de Janeiro
was founded and a royal captaincy was
created to secure the area from further
incursions.
Problems with the Dutch
• 1580: Portugal united with Spain under Philip II.
• In 1630 the Dutch seized Pernambuco (richest
sugar-growing area)
• The Dutch conquered Portuguese Angola in 1641.
• 1648/9: The Portuguese regained Angola.
• 1654: Expelled the Dutch from Brazil.
• The Dutch took with them the expertise in sugar
mills and plantations.
• Set up a rival industry in the Caribbean to the
eventual detriment of Brazil.
Brazilian Indians
• Indians in Brazil did not belong to
advanced societies.
• The hunter-gatherers of Brazil were
nomadic and cannibalistic.
• The correct analogy was not with
Mexico or Peru, but with the
experience of the Spaniards among
the Arawaks and Caribs of the
Caribbean islands.
Evangelization
• The Portuguese Crown favored a
missionary policy of evangelization.
• It was the established practice in Iberian
enterprises of expansion overseas to
proselytize among the natives.
• Concentrating the Indians in villages and
teaching them sedentary habits also
greatly assisted the pacification of the
colonies.
Indian Enslavement
• Like the Caribbean islands, the Brazilian tribes had
no tradition of offering labor services to overlords
or of working at routine tasks.
• Iberian settlers found it necessary to satisfy their
labor needs through enslavement.
• The settlers had had plenty of time to develop the
skills of slave-hunting in the bush –
• Able-bodied Indians were a precious commodity
that fetched good prices in the labor market for
the plantation economy.
Conflict over slavery
• The Jesuit model was paternalist – although the
intention was protect the natives.
• The aldeia system, was also a form of benign
intrusion into Indian society.
• The settlers envied the wealth of Jesuit aldeias,
and resented the Jesuits' obstruction their efforts
to procure an adequate supply of labor for their
own plantations.
• Indian slavery did not become controversial in
Brazil as it did in the Spanish Indies.
• The cruelty of the slave-hunts gave rise to moral
qualms among the clergy and the missionaries.
European diseases
• 1562: first epidemic in Bahia.
• Followed by a general outbreak in 1563.
• Between a third and a half of the Indian
population of the coastal areas died.
• The natives succumbed to measles
smallpox, tuberculosis and other viral
infections. Famine quickly followed and the
terrified Indians began to sell themselves to
settlers in return for food and shelter.
Royal Decrees
• 1570: The king declared that the Indians
were born free and could be enslaved only if
they practiced cannibalism or were taken
captive in a 'just war'.
• Resgate - wild Indians captured by rival
tribes were 'ransomed' by slave-hunters and
brought to serve on plantations.
• In practice, the legislation was ignored by
the Portuguese in Brazil.
African slavery
• The Portuguese had been operating
African slave-trade for nearly a century,
• African slaves were more expensive than
Indian,
• Two distinct advantages to the owners:
– The Africans had the same immunities as the
Europeans
– They were considered to better suited to the
kind of hard labor required on the plantations.
Expansion of Sugar Slavery

• Demand for labor in sugar industry of Brazil led

to enormous expansion of the African slave-
trade.
• By the end of the sixteenth century there were
between 13,000 and 15,000 black slaves in
Brazil, constituting some 70 per cent of the labor
force on the plantations.
Importation

• 1585: The white population =

29,000.
• 1600: 4,000 slaves a year were
imported into Brazil;
• 1650 to 1680: 8,000 slaves a year
were imported.
• In the 18th century slave imports increased
again due to gold-mining demand.
• Bahia alone received some 5,000 to 8,000
slaves a year.
• In the north-east slaves made up about half the
population.
• The mortality rate of the black slave population
was so high and its rate of procreation fell
consistently below the level of replacement —
• Philip Curtin estimates that in the course of the
seventeenth century Brazil took a 41.8 per cent
share of the total number of slaves transported
to America.*
• The importation of African slaves did not do
away with the enslavement of Indians.
• Brazil had been a slave society from its origins;
the sugar industry magnified the scale of
enslavement and introduced a new population
from another continent.
• The Indians gradually began to disappear from
the society of 'civilized' Brazil.
The Moving Frontier:
Sertão and Selva

• Towards the interior. The sertão

offered a possibility to those
Portuguese and half-castes who were
unable to establish themselves
adequately on the coast. The interior
was full of Indians to enslave and
precious metals to be discovered.
Bandeirantes
• Bandeirantes: active slave hunters in the
early 17th century, when the Portuguese lost
Angola to the Dutch and Brazilian plantations
were cut off from the African slave-trade.
• 1648-51: Rapôso Tavares led a bandeira from
São Paulo across the Chaco of Paraguay to
the foothills of the Andes, after which he
veered north to the Amazon basin, from
where he followed the course of the great
river down to the sea.
• The men of São Paulo were renowned for their
skills as trackers and Indian-fighters.
• Governors of captaincies in the north-east
enlisted their services to make war on the
aggressive Indian tribes of the sertão and so
clear these backlands for cattle-ranching.
• It was the bandeirantes of São Paulo who
would make the first gold strikes in Minas
Gerais in the 1690s, following these up with
new strikes in Goiás and the Mato Grosso.
• the Jesuits also went in search of
Indians to convert in their missions.
• As disease decimated the tribes on
the coast, the priests ranged inland
and founded new mission stations.
• They found themselves in
competition with the settlers of Sao
Paulo, who claimed a right to a share
of Indian labor.
Paraguay and the Parana
rivers.
• Became a frontier zones because of frequent boundary
disputes between Portugal and Spain.
• Missions founded by Spanish Jesuits among the Guarani Indians
between São Paulo in Brazil and Asuncion in Paraguay.
• The Jesuits created productive plantations of sugar, mate tea
and other crops.
• The bandeirantes of São Paulo preyed upon the pool of Guarani
manpower that the Spanish Jesuits had so conveniently
'civilized' on their plantations.
• Paulista bandeiras took to raiding the Jesuit missions, carrying
off converted Indians as slaves.
• Although the Spanish Jesuits moved their missions to the south
and west, and even armed their Indians to fight off the
Paulistas, the bandeirantes kept up their raids and, in doing so,
helped eventually to define the southern and south-western
boundaries of Brazil.
Jesuit Antonio Vieira,
• Achieved great fame as a preacher, diplomat and
confessor to the king of Portugal.
• Vieira denounced slave-hunting and instituted Jesuit-
run aldeias similar those in Paraguay.
• The king issued a decree in 1655 forbidding the
enslavement of Indians. But even though the Jesuits
were successful in persuading many Indian tribes to
convert and settle voluntarily in the mission villages,
their promises of humane treatment were undermined
by epidemics of European diseases - which carried off
large numbers of natives - and by the harassment of
the Indians by Brazilian settlers anxious for manpower.