#20354 - L1 Brazilian Independence - Modern Latin American History

BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE

Late Colonial Brazil

Main historical events:

• 1808: Transfer of the royal court

• 1822: Independence

• 1850: Abolition of slave trade

• 1888:End of the Empire/Fall of the Monarchy

• 1930 – 1954: Vargas era

• 1964 – 1985: Military rule

• 2019: Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Colonial economic cycles and regions

• Brazilwood (1500 – 1530), Coastal

• Sugar (1530 – 1640s)

• Gold (1690 – 1750s), Minas Gerais

• Coffee (1800s onwards), Rio de Janeiro,

Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo

The shortest economic cycle was gold which followed a typical boom and bust pattern of mineral wealth excavation, but Brazil still produces and exports precious gems, sugar and coffee to this day. The difference is their relative share of the Brazilian economy.

Periodisation – Political

• COLONIAL

• 1500-1533: Factory Period

• 1533-1549: Donatory Period

• 1549-1763: Royal Government

• [1755-1777: Pombal reforms]

• 1763-1808: Viceroyalty

Colonial and Imperial Brazil are used frequently to refer to long periods in Brazilian history, whereas this is not the case for the republic, which is a team reserved almost exclusively when discussing the First or Old republic

• 1808: Transfer of Royal Court

• IMPERIAL

• 1822: Independence

• 1822-1831: First Empire

• 1831-1889: Second Empire

• 1850: Abolition of slave trade

• 1888: Abolition of slavery

• 1889: Fall of Monarchy

• REPUBLICIAN

• 1889-1930: First Republic

• 1930-1937: Second Republic

• 1937-1945: Estado Novo

• 1946-19646: Populist Republic

• 1964-1985: Military Rule

• 1985-present : New Republic

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY

Transfer of the Royal Court

The Portuguese Empire

• The map on the top shows the empire at its height in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, when Spain and Portugal joined forces to produce the global empire on which the sun never sets, as it often slated.

• In the second map, we can see the reach of the Portuguese empire a few years before the transfer of the Portuguese Royal Court in 1808, an event that set Brazil on the road to independence

• By the beginning of the 19^th century, Brazil was the largest territory in the Portuguese Empire

• But before the discovery of gold in Brazil in the late 17^th century, the Portuguese crown derived its main source of wealth from the profits of the spice trade in the East

• A century later, by the second half of the 18^th century, Brazilian gold production was in decline and so was the colonial treasury in terms of taxes

• 18^th century European empire building was inextricably linked to processes of industrialisation, and the nation that had invested the most in that process was Britain

• Portugal, though, and due to its dependence on colonial mercantilism and its long-standing treaties with Britain, had not invested in industrialism

• The size of the Portuguese economy was much smaller than that if its colonies, e.g. textile production. In Portugal, textile production was still very much a cottage industry in 18^th and 19^th century Portugal

• Portugal could not prejudice its own industries that did exist by allowing its greatest economic asset (Brazil) to develop its own manufacturing industries and it had to restrict trade with Colonial Brazil in order to not impinge upon pre-existing trade agreements with Britain

Colonial Brazil/Portuguese America: main characteristics

• Economy; Supply foodstuffs or minerals for European commerce (sugar, gold, coffee, tobacco, cotton)

• Portugal relied on the wealth of colonial Brazil in two main ways; through the treasury and the collection on taxes on all exports which were in high demand on world markets

• Society; Landownership: colonisers, plantations, mines, predominantly Portuguese and Portuguese descent. Compulsory labour: indigenous and African (coerced and enslaved)

• The wealth of the colony was in the hands of those who were either Portuguese or of Portuguese descent, and much of that wealth was based on proprietorship of land, especially in the form of plantations and mines

• The labour that worked those mines and plantations was indigenous, African descendant, coerced and enslaved

• Government; Monarchical and colonial, Lisbon as a metropolis, Salvador (colonial capital up to 1763) and Rio (colonial capital 1763 – 20^th century) and governors

• Crown appointed governors in Rio had the powers of the king by proxy, and the most colonial administrators were Portuguese men

Isolation and fragmentation

Colony and Metropolis, pre-1808

• ‘Colonial Exclusivity”; all political power was in theory controlled by Portugal, all economic wealth also had to be exported through Lisbon too. Despite the growth of the native born Brazilians, every attempt was also made to prevent a Brazilian elite forming an identity that could rival that of Portugal

• Trade only with other Portuguese ports

• No printing press

• No universities

• No manufacturing

• Secular organisation stifled

Colonial Brazil and the Portuguese Empire

• 16^th century; Brazil produced 2.5% of revenue in tribute from Portuguese Empire, India 26%

• 17^th century; Portuguese Empire – attacks from Dutch and English, French

• 18^th century; Gold discovered in Minas Gerais – Brazil, largest territory in Portuguese Empire, main source of revenue, highly taxed and regulated

• Late 18^th century; ‘colonial crisis’, collapse of ancient regime in Europe – Portugal: backward nation economically and politically

Turn of the century imperialism (18^th – 19^th)

• These two maps illustrate what was happening in to the Portuguese Empire between the 18^th and 19^th century relative to other global and imperial powers

• This is the global backdrop against which Brazilian independence took place

• Within these geo-political shifts, the one most relevant was the decline of Iberian imperialism

• This took place alongside a repositioning of Anglophone and Francophone imperialism – from the West to the East and from the Americas to Africa and the South Pacific, and the emergence of a new independent nation states in former colonised territories of the Americas

• Spain had lost a lot of its territory, and Russia had extended their power northwards

Latin American Independence – 19^th century Independence of countries

• The loss of the Portuguese colonial power in the Americas was not an isolated incident, it was part of a general movement which spread across the continent from the late 18^th century onwards

• This process started in the Unites States in 1776 with the Independence of the US from Britain, followed by another cataclysmic change to European colonial relations: the Haitian Revolutionary Wars which started with a slave revolt in 1791 and lead to full independence of Haiti in 1804

• In 1789, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) produced 60% of the world’s coffee and 40% of the world’s sugar imported by France and Britain. The colony was the most profitable possession of the French Empire and Saint-Domingue was the wealthiest and most prosperous colony of all the colonies in the Caribbean

• Brazilian independence has been characterised as a relatively peaceful transition

The Napoleonic wars; 1799 – 1815

• The Napoleonic wars were both cause and symbol of the crises of the ancient regime in Europe and the emergent new world order between the 18^th and 19^th century, not least of all because these wars extended across two centuries, had repercussions across the Americas and completely reconfigured continental Europe geographically and politically

• This context is complex, but it lead to the transfer of the Portuguese Royal Court, with Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1806

• After this, he went on the offensive and Portugal was in his sights, not just because it had so far remained neutral, but because control of Portugal and the rest of the Iberian Peninsula meant control of the straits of Gibraltar and access to the Mediterranean

• When Napoleonic forces invaded Spain...