History of Brazil

EXPORTS, SLAVERY, AND PATRIARCHY have been the three constants of Brazilian history. The export orientation of the colonial economy shaped Brazil’s society. Even the name "Brazil," like the country itself, is suggestive of commerce and the pursuit of wealth. Brazil’s name derives from the brazilwood trees from which Europeans sought in the sixteenth century to make valuable red dyes. However, the central fact of the country’s history was the exploitation of cheap labor, first as slaves, then as wage-earners. Indeed, Brazil’s history is the story not only of conquest but also of the enslavement of its native peoples and of millions of imported African slaves. Brazil’s history can be divided into five economic periods, each characterized by a dominant export product. The first period, from 1500 to 1550, involved the logging of brazilwood along the coast of the Northeast (Nordeste). Brazilwood was the source of a red dye important to the expanding textile industry of sixteenth-century northern Europe, particularly Normandy and Flanders. The trees and the ready labor of the natives, who were eager to acquire metal products in return for cutting and hauling logs to the coast, attracted Portuguese and French ships. The French were quite successful because they sent young men to reside among the natives, to learn their languages, and to get them to bring the timber to the nearest bay or estuary. By contrast, the Portuguese, in the first few decades, traded from their ships or haphazard outposts. The Portuguese attempted to use the factory system that they were then employing along the African, South Asian, and Asian coasts. This system consisted of fortified trading posts that had minimal contact with the local population. The French, with deeper roots among the native peoples and more knowledge of their cultures, filled their waiting ships more quickly. France’s activity convinced the Portuguese crown to undertake sustained settlement to protect its claim. The Europeans struggled among themselves for control of the beachheads, anchorages, and bays. The Portuguese effort to gain effective control of the coast coincided with the onset of the sugar era, which extended from 1530 to 1650. Sugarcane cultivation was carried out in widely separated tidewater enclaves from São Vicente in the South (Sul--the present-day states of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul) to Pernambuco in the Northeast; it became most successful around the Bahian Recôncavo and in Pernambuco. Enslaved natives and increasingly, after the 1560s, imported African slaves provided the labor for the mills (engenhos ) and fields. Sugar tied Brazil into the developing system of European capitalism, imposed a patriarchal social system on the country, and prompted Dutch attacks on Portugal’s South Atlantic empire. The sugar economy’s need for oxen and meat led to the accompanying growth of cattle raising in the dry interior hinterlands, known as the sertão . Cattle raising became so important to the economy and to the development of the interior as to almost constitute a phase in its own right. However, although cattle raising provided hides for export, it supplied principally local markets. The Dutch seizure of Recife in 1630 and their subsequent capture of Luanda on the Angolan coast, a principal source of slaves imported into Brazil, disrupted the Portuguese dominance over sugar. When the Hollanders (holandeses ) withdrew from Brazil in 1654, they stimulated cane growing on the Caribbean islands and used their control of distribution in Europe to reduce Portuguese access. The third period--mining of gold and diamonds from the 1690s to the 1750s--carried Portugal’s effective occupation of the land far into the interior of what are now the states of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso. The discoveries of alluvial gold on the Rio das Velhas in about 1693, throughout central Minas Gerais in the next years, and out into Mato Grosso in 1718 and Goiás in 1725, and then the growth of diamond mining along the Rio Jequitinhonha in Minas Gerais after 1730, shifted the colonial center away from the Northeast coast into the interior. Minas Gerais became the new jewel in Portugal’s crown, although one that was difficult to keep in place. As more people spread to the distant interior, many of them were living beyond the reach of royal officials. Indeed, one of Brazil’s distinctive features has always been the existence of people who live within the boundaries of the country but outside the limits of the society and the controls of the state. The Northeast and the South were tied to Minas Gerais via the livestock trade. The mineiro (Minas Gerais) towns needed beef, as well as a seemingly endless supply of mules. Without good roads, mule trains became characteristic of the region, whic