BRAZILIAN ECONOMY AND PEOPLE (1500-1750)

The Colonial Economy and Society

Colonial Brazil's economy began, as already discussed, as a series of crudely constructed trading posts (known as feitorias, or factories) scattered along the coast, from Pernambuco in the north to Sao Vincente (modern-day Sao Paulo) in the south. Brazil wood was the first main export of the colonists from Brazil, accompanied by more exotic items such as parrots and animal skins. In return, the Portuguese delivered necessities such as clothing and tools. Brazil wood, prized for its dye-making qualities, was a valuable commodity in Europe and the export that eventually gave Brazil its name. (The country's first name, Vera Cruz, or "Land of the True Cross," has mercifully sunk into oblivion.)
When increased Portuguese commitment in the 1530s gave birth to the captaincies, and to smaller land grants (sesmarias), the principal crop was cane sugar, grown on enormous plantations to take advantage of economies of scale. Once harvested, the cane was processed and refined in the mills (engenhos) belonging to the wealthier plantation owners. For more than a century Brazil was the world's leading sugar exporter. From 1600 to 1650, sugar accounted for 90 to 95 percent of Brazilian export earnings. Even in the period around 1700, when the sugar sector declined, it continued to represent 15 percent of Brazil's export earnings. Sugar set Brazil on the course of being a single-crop plantation economy for the colonial era and well into the twentieth century.
The typical export-oriented plantation of the colonial era, especially after 1600, was largely self-sufficient, growing much of its own foodstuffs, maintaining its own chapel (often with resident priest), and being marked by an axis of power concentrated in the casa grande (big house) of the fazendeiro (landowner) and filtering down to the senzala (slave quarters). This is the plantation world depicted in Gilberto Freyre's  'The Masters and the Slaves'—the world of the all powerful fazendeiro and the closed agrarian horizons that have so deeply influenced modern Brazil.
Cane sugar, the most important export crop after Brazil wood had been pretty much exploited, was grown largely within the humid zone on the Northeastern coast and exported to the Dutch-dominated European trade. But cane cultivation and processing required a labor force far beyond what the colonists could provide. It was a need eventually met, as we have seen, by the import of African slaves. The frailty of the Indian population in a forced-labor environment led to the first major influx of African slaves, brought from Portugal and from the Atlantic islands, such as the Azores and Madeira. Only later did the Brazilian colonists turn to Africa for their major slave supply.
Thus was established the nexus of the Brazilian colonial economy: land-extensive single-crop agriculture based on slave labor, concentrated primarily in the Northeast. This plantation system generated the hierarchical society of the colonial era. It was, in turn, part of the South Atlantic economy, which the Portuguese controlled on both sides of the ocean—one side the source of slaves (West Africa), the other side the location of their work (Brazil). By the seventeenth century, the Brazilian Northeast was one of the richest regions in the Americas, surpassing New England or Virginia. At the same time, however, the intensive cultivation of sugar was to inflict deep ecological damage on the Brazilian Northeast.
Sugar was the foremost but not the only form of rural economy pursued by the colonists. One of the most important additional endeavors, particularly in the Northeastern interior, was the cattle culture, which furnished animal power, meat, natural fertilizer, and leather. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the cattle culture was an important counterpart to the sugar regions that consumed the cattle products.
But disaster soon appeared to strike. International sugar prices fell in the 1670s and 1680s, as increased production in the Antilles cut into Brazil's world market share. An epidemic of smallpox in Angola and of yellow fever in Bahia and Pernambuco, all in the 1680s, were further blows. As Padre Antonio Vieira (1608-97), the great Jesuit missionary whose sermons became a classic of Portuguese and Brazilian culture, wrote from Bahia in 1684: "We shall shortly relapse into the savage state of the Indians, and become Brazilians instead of Portuguese."
This gloomy forecast turned out to be premature, as the Portuguese quest for gold was finally satisfied in the early 1690s. By 1696, the discovery had become official news in Lisbon. The finds (which later included diamonds) were located in the present-day states of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Goias, and southern Bahia.
The Portuguese had always been interested in precious metals. They wanted above all to find gold, the ultimate currency in Europe's mercantilist trade. And they never lost the hope of equaling the Spanish luck in finding vast supplies of gold and silver. In 1500, Cabral had taken special care to interrogate the natives about the possible presence of gold, "because we wanted to know if there was any in that land." When there were few traces of these metals to be found near the coast, the colonists set out to penetrate the vast interior.
The discovery of gold triggered an immediate gold rush of migrants from all over Brazil, especially the Northeast, as Minas Gerais rapidly became the fastest growing region of eighteenth-century Brazil. It was followed by central Bahia (discoveries in 1718) and Mato Grosso (discoveries in 1725). There was also a sudden increase in new arrivals from Portugal. This drain of Portugal's youth became so large that in 1705 the Crown even attempted (unsuccessfully) to slow the flow.
Within decades, Brazil became the world's greatest gold producer. By the 1720s, Brazil also began producing diamonds. At last, Portugal could enjoy the kind of bonanza Spain had won centuries earlier. This gold and diamond production had one very positive result. It financed the flowering of a rich culture in South-Central Brazil. The eighteenth-century mining towns in Minas Gerais, for example, saw the building of Christian churches in a unique Brazilian baroque style. Antonio Francisco Lisboa ("Aleijadinho"), a mulatto, stood out for the churches he designed in Ouro Preto, Sabara, and Sao Paulo do Rei¹, and for his full-size sculptures of the prophets in Congonhas do Campo. He overcame the stigma of his color, not to mention leprosy, to become one of the giants of Brazilian art history.
Gold and diamond mines, like the plantations, depended on African slave labor—necessitating a shift of African slaves from elsewhere in Brazil, as well as new deliveries from the South Atlantic slave trade. What the mining boom did not do was change the basic pattern of colonial Brazilian economic development. Like the tropical agricultural products (such as sugar, cotton and tobacco), gold and diamond mining did not stimulate the broad-based economic growth necessary for industrialization.
The mineral riches went to Portugal, where they rescued a kingdom in decline. Portugal was running a steady deficit in its trade with England, and much of the Brazilian gold went to cover Portuguese debts to England. That gold also went to maintain the lifestyle of the royal court and the religious orders.
Portuguese historians have long debated whether the discovery of mineral riches in Brazil was an asset or a liability. As early as 1711, the noted Italian Jesuit chronicler Antonil gave his view that "no prudent person can fail to admit that God permitted the discovery of so much gold in the mines so that he could punish Brazil with it." The gold and diamond windfall undoubtedly helped to finance a standard of living (including lavish church construction) Portugal could not have otherwise enjoyed in the first half of the eighteenth century. Fortified by Brazilian gold, Portugal was able to ignore with impunity, at least for a while, the economic transition toward the modern industrial world that was taking place in West Europe and England.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THE PORTUGUESE NEW WORLD

A popular Portuguese saying in the late seventeenth century called Brazil "a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattoes." There can be no doubt that the first part was correct.
The social structure established during sixteenth-century Brazil became, with variations, the pattern for the rest of the colonial period. At the top of the hierarchy were white males of Portuguese descent, typically major landholders. Their white wives or daughters were strictly subordinated to the husband or father, who was the patriarch. Such families were described by the historian Capistrano de Abreu as having a "taciturn father, an obedient wife, and cowed children."
In this way, colonial Brazil inherited the Portuguese relegation of women to inferior status, excluding them from any public, state, or ecclesiastical role. One ordinance in particular empowered the husband, on discovery (or suspicion) of adultery, to kill his wife and the adulterer.
What is fascinating is the subordinate clause of that ordinance, "unless the husband is a peon [peao] and the adulterer a nobleman, a judge [desembargador], or someone of high standing." Husbands are documented to have taken repeated advantage of this "right" (thirty cases were reported, for example, in Bahia in 1713), which continues to be honored today by some Brazilian judges.
Unmarried daughters were not much better off. They were often relegated to a convent for life. But at least they did not suffer death "in legitimate defense of honor," as could happen to their mothers. As a consequence, upper class women turned into virtual recluses, seldom venturing out of the house even for mass. The single exception was widows with minor children. They, on their husband's deaths, gained full property rights and assumed the family role of the deceased patriarch. They must account for many of the considerable number of femaleheaded households that appear in the colonial records.
Marriageable white women were in continuing short supply, which gave white men the excuse to take Indian, African, or mixed-blood women as partners or mistresses, and often to father children by them. The missionaries attacked them for such practices. The correspondence of the Jesuits showed a virtual obsession with the erotic vagaries of the settlers. But most of the priestly clergy, admittedly not often celibate themselves, did not spend much time denouncing the colonists for their infidelity. We shall see below the social implications of this frequent miscegenation.
Beneath the major landholders were ranged the lesser landholders and the small farmers (often of peasant origins in Portugal). The thin urban settlements included landless Portuguese (of Portuguese descent) such as artisans and soldiers. At the bottom of the white hierarchy were the free men (the degregados), persons of widely varying social backgrounds whom the crown had banished to exile from Portugal because of various crimes. Some built a constructive new life in Brazil but many failed to rise in the social scale and became troublemakers.
At the very bottom of the hierarchy, both social and legal, were the slaves. Until 1600, these were primarily Indians. By the turn of the century, however, they were increasingly Africans, especially in the Northeast. One of the crucial characteristics of Brazilian society of that era was disdain for manual labor. In the words of a Portuguese colonist writing in 1690, "it is not the style for the white people of these parts, or of any other of our colonies, to do more than command their slaves to work and tell them what to do." This trait was to persist long after slavery was abolished.

MISCEGENATION: BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL

The description so far is of the hierarchy as established in the 1500s, including only Portuguese colonists or those of Portuguese descent and their slaves. The most important change thereafter was the emergence of mixed bloods, predominantly children of unions between the white Portuguese and the indigenous (producing mamelucos or caboclos) and with the African (producing mulattoes). It should be remembered that bureaucratic barriers meant that few of these unions became formal church marriages. The mixed bloods entered the hierarchy just above the slaves. As time went on, at least some of them rose to higher status. It was especially here where the traditional Portuguese racial prejudice softened in practice. Women of this social segment often became itinerant vendors, specializing in selling every variety of food.
The Portuguese image of Brazil was from the beginning erotic. As the legendary Portuguese phrase had it, "beneath the equator there is no sin." In the words of Amerigo Vespucci, Brazil was "more appropriate for Epicureans than Stoics." Miscegenation between the Indians and the Portuguese produced a category of mixed bloods who often served as intermediaries between the two groups. (Interestingly enough, this extensive miscegenation was not typical of the rest of the Portuguese Empire.)
For the first century, mixture with the Indians prevailed, both in the Northeast and in the Sao Paulo region. By the 1600s, miscegenation with the Africans and their descendants increased. In the South, especially around Sao Paulo, Indian slavery—and therefore sexual unions with Indians—prevailed until the late 1600s. Such miscegenation has occurred in virtually every slave-holding society—even in the United States, where miscegenation flourished despite legal prohibition of interracial marriage.
The major difference among slave societies is the fate of the mixedblood offspring. In the colonial United States, the mixed offspring, unless light enough to pass as white, was relegated to the non-white category.
The result was the American bipolar system of race relations, which recognized only the categories of black and white—the "one drop" rule, with one drop of non-white blood condemning the child to non-white status. Brazil, like most of Latin America, developed a third category: mulatto or mixed race (mestiço in Portuguese, which is roughly equal to mestizo in Spanish).
As it happened, a constant shortage of European labor in the higher echelons of the Brazilian labor force left open some job opportunities for free people of color, who were far more numerous in colonial Brazil than in colonial North America. One should not conclude from this that Brazil was a climate without prejudice.
On the contrary, colonial legislation discriminated sharply against mulattoes. They were forbidden to carry weapons, wear "costly" clothes, or hold official positions in Church or state. In fact, these rules were frequently breached, as in the case of Joao Fernandes Vieira, a mulatto sugar planter and leader in the fight to expel the Dutch in the period from 1645 to 1654. He was governor of Angola and Paraiba during that period. Another case was Padre Antonio Vieira, Brazil's most illustrious Jesuit, who had a mulatta grandmother but still entered the highly selective Society of Jesus.
These cases, which are multiplied many times over, illustrate a crucial point about race relations as they developed in the colonial era. Race in colonial Brazil was seen as a spectrum, where individual physical characteristics (quality of hair, shape of nose and lips, skin color) could be interpreted ad hoc—i.e., by how people looked rather than who their parents were, and, in special cases, selectively ignoring certain physical features in interpreting where in the race spectrum a particularly favored or unfavored individual was located. This ambiguity in applying racial categories—i.e., blurring the distinction between white and non-white—has continued into the modern era and has made Brazilian race relations especially complex. The nature and effects of miscegenation in colonial Brazil, when it operated both as a means of approximation and of domination, are key to understanding the multiracial Brazilian society of today.
Such miscegenation involves not only physical but also cultural mixture. In Brazil, the combination of European, Indian, and African produced a culture very different from the austere Portuguese original. The African proved to be the most powerful among the non-European influences. African influence can still be seen among the present-day white Brazilian elite. Afro-Brazilian-influenced religion—such as umbanda, for example—attracts followers from every social class in Brazil. And Brazilian music, with its heavy African influence, is the supreme example of Brazil's national popular culture.

1. Correct name is São João del Rei 


By Thomas E. Skidmore in the book 'Brazil - Five Centuries of Change', Oxford University Press, New York- Oxford, 1999, p. 19-25. Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

Share this post