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Brazil Historical Setting
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, which was soon tied together
by an extensive web of trails. The cattle came south from ranches
along the Rio São Francisco, thereby linking the mines to
the Northeast. The mules came from the pampas of Rio Grande do Sul
via the market at Sorocaba in São Paulo, tying the South
to the mining region. Because Paulistas (residents of the state
of São Paulo) made most of the initial gold strikes, São
Paulo was connected to all the mining areas. The importance of Minas
Gerais and the mines farther inland led the crown to transfer the
viceregal capital from Salvador, Bahia, to Rio de Janeiro in 1763.
Gold production declined in the later decades of the eighteenth
century, and from about 1820 coffee cultivation provided a fourth
period that lasted to the end of the 1920s. It began in the mountains
behind Rio de Janeiro, moved along the Rio Paraíba Valley
to the west across São Paulo State and out into Paraná.
Coffee powered the rise of São Paulo and its port of Santos,
and although it gradually took a secondary position to industrialization
after the late 1930s, Brazil remained the world's major coffee producer.
The Amazon had an important era of its own from the 1880s to 1919,
when it was the world's major source of rubber. The rubber boom
drew world attention to the region, prompted Brazil to secure its
boundaries, and lured thousands of rubber tappers from the drought-plagued
sertão of the Northeast to the forests of Acre. It turned
into a bust when the helter-skelter collection of wild rubber lost
out to the massive production methods of British, Dutch, and French
plantations in Southeast Asia.
The fifth period began in the 1930s with import-substitution industrialization
(see Glossary) and extended into the 1990s. Industry's initial and
heaviest concentration was in the triangle of São Paulo-Rio
de Janeiro-Belo Horizonte. The period was perhaps best symbolized
by the steel mills of Volta Redonda, built in 1944, and São
Paulo's integrated industrial zone. Industrialization and its parallel
urbanization attracted rural migrants from throughout the country,
but especially from the drought-plagued Northeast. In the space
of a generation after 1940, Brazil leaped from the age of the bull-cart
to that of the internal combustion engine, changing the national
map in the process.
Before the 1930s, despite the earlier incursions into the interior,
Brazil still consisted of a series of enclaves connected by sealanes
rather than by railroads or paved highways. Pan American Airway's
introduction of the DC-3 on its run from Belém to Rio de
Janeiro in 1940 vaulted Brazil directly into the air age. By the
1970s, it had the world's third largest commercial air fleet after
the United States and the Soviet Union. The 1950s push to develop
an automotive industry was followed in later decades by large-scale
construction of long-distance highways, which by the 1980s made
it possible to travel to all regions of the country on paved roads.
Symbolic of this era was the building of Brazil's third capital
at Brasília (1955-60) on the plains of Goiás. The
internal combustion engine and the coinciding growth of the petroleum
industry also made possible the mechanization of agriculture, which
changed rapidly the face of the Brazilian west and made Brazil the
second largest exporter of food in the 1980s. The combination of
highways and automotive transport opened up Amazônia for the
first time. The construction of the highway corridors from Brasília
to Belém and from Cuiabá to Porto Velho to Manaus
triggered large-scale migration, mining and agricultural development,
timbering, land disputes, displacement of native peoples, and massive
deforestation. The latter made Brazil's Amazon policies the subject
of world debate, which in turn made Brazilians worry about the security
of their immense North region (Amazônia).
Data as of April 1997
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