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The First Plantation Colony Early Latin America Author: Stearns, Peter Date: 1999 The search for gold and silver was a constant theme in overseas expansion, but there were other European demands the New World could also satisfy, which contributed to its growing involvement in the Western-dominated world economy. While Spanish America seemed to fulfill dreams of mineral wealth, Brazil - Portugal's American colony - became the first major plantation zone, organized to produce a tropical crop - sugar - in great demand and short supply in Europe. Although the Portuguese had already set up small plantation colonies on the little Atlantic islands of Madeira and Sao Tome, the move toward plantation agriculture in Brazil was gradual. The first official Portuguese landfall on the South American coast took place in 1500 when Pedro vares Cabral, leader of an expedition to India, stopped briefly on the tropical Brazilian shore, celebrated a mass, and bartered with the Indians. There was little at first to attract European interest except for the dyewood trees that grew in the forests, and thus for 30 years the Portuguese crown paid little attention to Brazil, preferring instead to grant licenses to merchants who agreed to exploit the dyewood in return for tax benefits and services. Pressure from French merchants also interested in dyewood finally moved the Portuguese crown to military action. The coast was cleared of the French and a new system of settlement was established in 1532. Minor Portuguese nobles were given strips of land along the coast to colonize and develop. The nobles who held these capitaincies combined broad, seemingly "feudal" powers with a strong desire for commercial development. Most of them lacked sufficient capital to carry out the colonization and some had continual problems with the local Indian population. In a few places, towns were established, colonists were brought over, relations with the Indians were relatively peaceful, and, most importantly, sugar plantations were established using first Indian, and then imported African, slaves. The limited success of the captaincies caused the Portuguese crown in 1549 to send a governor general and other royal officials and to create a royal capital at Salvador. The first Jesuit missionaries also arrived. By 1600 Indian resistance had been broken in many places either by military action, missionary activity, or by epidemic disease. A string of settlements extended along the coast, centered on port cities such as Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. These served the roughly 150 sugar plantations, a number which would double by 1630. The plantations were increasingly worked by African slaves. By 1600 the Brazilian colony had about 100,000 inhabitants: 30,000 Europeans, 15,000 black slaves, and the rest Indians and people of mixed origin. Sugar And Slavery During most of the next century, Brazil held its position as the world's leading sugar producer. Sugar cane had to be processed in the field - cut, pressed in large mills, and the juice then heated before it would crystallize into sugar. This combination of agriculture and industry in the field demanded large amounts of capital for machinery and large quantities of labor for the backbreaking work. While there were always some free workers who had skilled or artisan occupations, slaves did most of the work. During the 17th century, about 7000 slaves a year were imported from Africa. By the end of the century, Brazil had about 150,000 slaves - about half its total population. Based on a single crop produced by slave labor, Brazil became the first great plantation colony and a model that would later be followed by other European nations in their own Caribbean colonies. Even after the Brazilian economy became more diverse, Brazil's society still reflected its plantation and slave origins. Slavery and the plantation system imposed a strong social hierarchy. The white planter families became an aristocracy that controlled local social and political life. Linked by interest and marriage to resident merchants and to the few Portuguese bureaucrats and officials, this class dominated local institutions. At the bottom of society were the slaves, distinguished by their color and their servile condition as property. There was, however, a growing segment of the population composed of people of mixed origins, the result of miscegenation between whites, Indians, and Africans who - alongside poorer whites, freed blacks, and free Indians - served as artisans, small farmers, herdsmen, and free laborers. In many ways, society as a whole reflected the hierarchy of the plantation. Like Spain, Portugal created a bureaucratic structure that integrated this colony within an imperial system. A governor general ruled from Salvador, but the governors in each captaincy often acted with independence and reported directly to the overseas council in Lisbon. The missionary orders were particularly important in Brazil, especially the Jesuits. Their extensive cattle ranches and sugar mills supported the construction of churches and schools as well as a network of missions with thousands of Indian residents. As in Spanish America, royal officials trained in the law formed the core of the bureaucracy. Unlike the Spanish Empire, which was, with the exception of the Phillipines, almost exclusively American, the Portuguese Empire included colonies and outposts in Asia, Africa, and Brazil. Only gradually in the 17th century did Brazil become the predominant Portuguese colony. Even then, Brazil's ties to Portugal were in some ways stronger and more dependent than those between Spanish America and Spain. Unlike Spanish America, neither universities nor printing presses existed in Brazil. Thus intellectual life was always an extension of Portugal, and Brazilians seeking higher education and government offices or hoping to publish always had to turn to the mother country. The general economic dependency of Latin America was matched by an intellectual subordination more intense in Brazil than in Spanish America. [See Sugar Plantation In Hispanola: Sugar was introduced to the Caribbean in 1493, but Brazil became the greatest producer by the next century. Sugar plantations using enslaved workers characterized Brazil and the Caribbean. This early European engraving is wrong in some details, but it does convey an image of the almost factorylike conditions in the sugar mills.] Brazil's Age Of Gold As overseas extensions of Europe, the American colonies were particularly susceptible to changes in European politics. For 60 years (1580-1640), Spain and Portugal were ruled by the same monarchs, a situation that sponsored their cooperation and gave the Habsburg kings of Spain and Portugal a worldwide empire. From 1630 to 1654, as part of a global struggle against Spain, the Dutch seized a portion of northeastern Brazil and controlled its sugar production. Although the Dutch were expelled from Brazil in 1654, by the 1680s the Dutch, English, and French had established their own plantation colonies in the Caribbean and were producing sugar, once again with slave laborers. This competition - which led to a rising price for slaves and a falling world price for sugar - undercut the Brazilian sugar industry, and the colony entered into hard times. Eventually, each European nation tried to establish an integrated set of colonies that included plantations (the Caribbean, Brazil), slaving ports (Africa), and food producing areas (New England, southern Brazil). Although Brazil's domination of the world sugar market was lost, throughout the 17th century Paulistas, hardy backwoodsmen from Sao Paulo (an area with few sugar plantations), had been exploring the interior, capturing Indians and searching for precious metals. These expeditions not only established Portuguese claims to much of the interior of the continent, but were eventually successful in their quest for wealth. In 1695, gold strikes were made in the mountainous interior in a region that came to be called Minas Gerais (General Mines), and the Brazilian colony experienced a new boom. A great gold rush began. People deserted coastal towns and plantations to head for the gold washings, and they were soon joined by waves of about 5000 immigrants a year who came directly from Portugal. Labor in the mines, as in the plantations, was provided mostly by slaves. By 1720 there were over 35,000 slaves in Minas Gerais, and by 1775 there were over 150,000 (out of a total population of 300,000 for the region). Wild mining camps and a wide-open society eventually coalesced into a network of towns like the administrative center of Ouro Preto, and the government, anxious to control the newfound wealth, imposed a heavy hand to collect taxes and reign in the unruly population. Gold production reached its height between 1735 and 1760 and averaged about three tons a year in that period, making Brazil the greatest source of gold in the Western world. The discovery of gold was a mixed blessing in the long run. Further discovery of gold - and later of diamonds - opened the interior to further settlement, once again with disastrous effects on the Indian population and with the expansion of slavery. The early disruption of coastal agriculture caused by the gold strikes was overcome by government control of the slave trade, and exports of sugar and tobacco continued to be important to the colony. Mining did stimulate the opening of new areas to ranching and farming, to supply the new markets in the mining zone. Cattle ranches appeared in the interior of northeast Brazil, while large herds spread over the grassy plains of the south. Rio de Janeiro, the port closest to the mines, grew in size and importance. It became capital of the colony in 1763. In Minas Gerais a distinctive society developed in the mining towns, where the local wealth was used to sponsor the building of churches, which in turn stimulated many artisan activities and the work of artists, architects, and composers. Like the rest of Brazil, however, the hierarchy of color and the legal distinctions of slavery marked life in the mining zones, which were populated by large numbers of slaves and free persons of color. Finally, gold allowed Portugal to continue economic policies that were detrimental in the long run. With access to gold, Portugal could purchase the manufactured goods it needed for itself and its colonies. Few industries were developed in the mother country and, with pressures from Portuguese wine producers, a treaty was signed with England in 1703 that guaranteed a trading arrangement with that country. As a result much of the Brazilian gold flowed from Portugal to England to pay for manufactured goods and to compensate for a trade imbalance, since the value of English manufactures was greater than that of Portuguese wine. After 1760 as the supply of gold began to dwindle, Portugal was again in a difficult position, in some ways an economic dependency of England. 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