Category Archives: Brazil

by | 23 August 2025 · 11:30 am

Cabral’s Armada to India in 1500

From Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 85-87:

JUST SIX MONTHS AFTER Gama’s return, a vastly larger fleet was ready to depart from the shores of Belém: thirteen ships, twelve hundred men, and a capital investment by Florentine and Genoese bankers, now eager to participate in the opportunities of the Indies. Manuel could be irresolute, easily swayed, and perverse, but the year 1500 resounded with messianic portents, the eyes of Europe were turning toward Lisbon, and this new armada, led by the fidalgo Pedro Álvares Cabral as captain-major, was a swift follow-up aimed at winning material advantages and the crusading admiration of the Catholic world. Cabral’s expedition marked the shift from reconnaissance to commerce and then conquest. In the first five years of the sixteenth century, Manuel would dispatch a volley of overlapping fleets of increasing size, eighty-one ships in all, to ensure success in a life-and-death struggle for a permanent position in the Indian Ocean. It was a supreme national effort that called on all the available resources of manpower, shipbuilding, material provision, and strategic vision to exploit a window of opportunity before Spain could react. In the process, the Portuguese took both Europe and the peoples of the Indies by complete surprise.

Cabral was able to apply all the knowledge gained from Gama’s voyage. The timing of departure was no longer decided by the auspicious calculations of court astrologers but by the rhythm of the monsoon. The route was to follow the looping westward sweep undertaken by the ships in 1497, and to draw on the experience of pilots and captains such as Pêro Escobar, Nicholas Coelho, who had accompanied Gama, and Bartolomeu Dias himself. Cabral’s fleet carried back Malayalam-speaking Indians who had been taught Portuguese, with the aim of cutting out the Arabic-speaking middlemen. The Jewish convert Gaspar da Gama was aboard, knowledgeable about the intricate politics of the Malabar Coast, and another converted Jew, Master John, Dom Manuel’s physician, sailed as astronomer to the fleet, with the duty of studying the stars of the Southern Hemisphere for the purposes of future navigation. After the hideous embarrassment of the gifts offered at Calicut, Cabral carried choice items to entrance the samudri. It appears that the Portuguese persisted in believing that the samudri was a Christian king, albeit of an unorthodox kind, and in accord with the remit of the pope, a delegation of Franciscan friars accompanied the expedition to correct his errors, so that “the Indians…might more completely have instruction in our faith and might be indoctrinated and taught in matters pertaining to it, as befits the service of God and the salvation of their souls.”

Equally important was the commercial mission. The personnel, secretarial resources, and goods to establish a trading post in Calicut accompanied the expedition. With the cautionary example of the failures of the previous voyage, calculated attempts were made to load wares that might be attractive to the Malabar Indians. These included coral, copper, vermilion pigment, mercury, fine and coarse cloth, velvets, satins, and damasks in a whole range of colors, and gold coins. A highly experienced factor, Ayres Corrêa, who spoke Arabic, headed up this commercial initiative, supported by a team of clerks and secretaries to keep records and accounts. These literate subordinates—such as Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who wrote the first account of Brazil—provided some of the most riveting, and sometimes heartbreaking, narratives of the deeds of the Portuguese in the years ahead.

Cabral himself was no seaman, rather a diplomat with a carefully framed set of instructions, some of which had been drawn up by Gama to smooth the troubled waters in the wake of his expedition to Calicut and to establish peaceful and lucrative relations with the “Christian” samudri. Vastly better informed than his predecessor, Cabral could consult this multi-page document, which contained branching options in the case of a whole range of eventualities. It also directed him to take peremptory and high-handed action against perceived enemies that was likely to lead to trouble.

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by | 20 January 2025 · 6:05 am

Discovering the Atlantic Gyres

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 114-116:

The North Atlantic Gyre was a major find, but it turned out to be only half of the story. In the 1470s, the Portuguese crossed the equator and stumbled on a second gyre in the South Atlantic. Once again, it was necessity that prompted the discovery of this second great wheel of winds and currents. As the Portuguese sailors could not make any further progress in their Atlantic explorations by staying close to the African coast, on account of the contrary elements, they were forced again into the open Atlantic, this time venturing in a counterclockwise direction, away from the continent until practically crossing the entire ocean and nearing the coast of Brazil. This detour enabled Portuguese vessels finally to catch the southward-moving Brazil current and eventually to double back east toward the tip of Africa. This volta around the South Atlantic—a maneuver similar to the one in the North Atlantic but longer—could take up to three months of sailing without sight of land.

As early as 1500, Vasco da Gama, the great discoverer of the sea route from Portugal to India, penned a concise but unmistakable characterization of this second volta in the instructions that he left to his successor: “You should always go around the sea until reaching the Cape of Good Hope.” The recipient of such sound advice was Pedro Álvares Cabral, who followed da Gama’s words so closely that he drifted to the coast of Brazil, where he spent a few days before continuing eastward to India. Over the years, Portuguese seamen became familiar with the contours of the South Atlantic Gyre, as is evident in the so-called roteiros (derroteros in Spanish, rutters in English, routiers in French, and so on), or sailing instructions, occasionally penned by pilots to facilitate the task of future navigators. The South Atlantic roteiros alerted pilots to approach the coast of Brazil well to the south of Cabo de Santo Agostinho; otherwise they risked being knocked off course by the currents and pushed into the Caribbean, a disastrous turn of events that could delay the voyage by several months. Farther south along the Brazilian coast, pilots were warned to steer clear of the Abrolhos, a group of islands and reefs off the present-day state of Bahia. (“Abrolhos” comes from abre olhos, or “open your eyes” in Portuguese.) Once the fleets doubled back toward the tip of Africa, the only intervening land was Tristan da Cunha, a group of remote islands in the South Atlantic, first sighted in 1506, precisely during the early exploration of the South Atlantic Gyre.

Sixteenth-century navigators probably did not understand that Earth’s rotation is what causes the ocean gyres. It would not be until the early nineteenth century when Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis worked out the mathematics of the forces in a rotating system. Yet five hundred years ago, Portuguese pilots clearly referred to the ventos gerais (general winds) to distinguish them from more localized and variable winds. They also knew that these ventos gerais formed two rotating systems on either side of the equator. “When you have passed the equator and reached the general winds, you need to go with them for as long as possible,” a pilot named Bernardo Fernandes counseled in 1550, “because with them you will reach the Cape of Good Hope latitude.” Evidently seamen like Fernandes had a clear mental image of the gyres.

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by | 21 August 2024 · 8:40 am

Indentured Servitude vs. Slavery

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 214-215:

As the 17th century drew to a close, English and French colonists were no longer able to justify investments in indentured servitude, even as temporary chattel, on economic grounds. They were, however, able to promote the institution on social and political grounds. The policy decision to pull white women from field gangs because they were better placed to serve the colonial enterprise in the field of reproduction exemplifies the significance of social forces in determining the shape of the labor system. Importantly, it shows that the planters’ efforts to reinvent servitude as slavery received some pushback for social and political purposes. In addition, there was the matter of sustaining militia regiments to assist in the suppression of enslaved Africans. To these ends colonial governments, rather than planters, sought to ramp up the demand for male servants.

Given the harshness of Caribbean work and epidemiological environments, for many servants the plantation experience amounted to lifelong enslavement. The legal requirement of fixed-time servitude and the social reality of lifelong labor were offset by mortality trends and management policy. To suggest, as one scholar does, that it “was, of course, inconceivable that any of the [white] labor pools mentioned (convicts, prisoners of war, or vagrants) could have been converted into chattel slaves” is to ignore what was taking place on the ground in the colonies (Eltis 2000, 70).

The conversion of servitude into slavery was conceived by planters of cotton, tobacco, and sugar. If these planters failed at this conversion, it was not because of weak managerial resolve, but because of the multiple internal and external forces that militated against them, including servants’ unrelenting ambition to participate in colonialism as independent wealth makers.

From the beginning, those Barbadian planters who received large grants of land calculated the benefits of importing African labor to work them. Pre-sugar Barbadian planters, such as James Drax, were directly involved in sponsoring slave voyages to the African coast; the Drax family later became sugar barons in Barbados and Jamaica. Other English merchants with investment interests in Barbados were known slave traders. The Earl of Warwick, who claimed in 1629 that Barbados was granted him by the monarch, and Maurice Thompson, a large landowner, were involved in the supply of enslaved Africans directly to Barbados before the “sugar revolution.”

The contrast with smaller landholders is sharp. Before the [Dutch] Brazilian political crisis of 1645 wrecked that country’s sugar industry, the Dutch West India Company was selling slaves on easy terms to creditable planters in Barbados and Guadeloupe. Strapped for cash and alienated from credit, the “small holders did not take to sugar,” says Blackburn, “because it was a new and unfamiliar crop, and because it could not be harvested for at least eighteen months after the first planting” (Blackburn 1997, 231). They did not attract Dutch or English credit, had no access to core funding for slave purchase, and thus remained in the servant market. In this way they drove the demand for servants despite the potential availability of slaves.

“Slavery and cotton,” then, was as established in Barbados and Guadeloupe in 1640 as would be “sugar and servitude” in 1650 and “sugar and slavery” in 1660. Between 1645 and 1650, the midpoint of the transition, the mixed-labor regime was at its peak. As big investors in cotton production, planters with financial access did two things that prepared them for sugar: they consolidated small plantations into large ones, and they made substantive purchases of enslaved Africans. Economies of scale in cotton production enabled many of these planters to access larger external credit instruments that enabled the expansion of both the servant trade and the slave trade. In addition, the planters sped up the land consolidation process that facilitated the sugar industry.

These investors became industry leaders who championed the charge into sugar production and plantation expansion after 1645. In effect, they were deepening rather than creating the reliance upon enslaved Africans. Capital was scarce and expensive; risks were high. In pursuit of profits, planters fully exploited whatever labor was within their reach. Alongside “sugar and black slavery” there was “sugar and white slavery.” Plantation agriculture before, during, and after the sugar revolution generally meant disciplined, coerced labor—and, as Williams so aptly concluded, “at times that labor has been slave, at other times nominally free; at times black, at other times white or brown or yellow” (Williams 1944, 29).

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by | 14 August 2024 · 6:15 am

Dutch & Portuguese Role in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 142-145:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil became the site where the Portuguese first managed to reinstall the sugar plantation complex they and the Spanish had pioneered on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and to achieve its continuity and growth. By 1526 Brazil was exporting sugar, and in the early 17th century its output superseded not only that of earlier Atlantic outposts but also that of the rapidly declining Spanish-Caribbean sugar industry. Part of the reason for this success was that the Portuguese straddled both shores of the Atlantic. Most of the slaves, on whose labor the early Brazilian sugar industry depended, came from the Portuguese colony in Angola, the civil war-ridden neighboring kingdom of Kongo, or the Portuguese factories in the Bight of Benin and Cape Verde (which drew on Senegambian sources). As a result, Portuguese planters in Brazil did not face a problem their Spanish colleagues in the Caribbean would unsuccessfully struggle with for another two centuries: the highly restrictive and inefficiently organized asiento system by which Spain provisioned its New World colonies with African slave labor. While Spanish plantations floundered after the turn of the 17th century, the same period marked the beginning of a boom in Brazil. If the British and French in the Caribbean were looking for a model for hyperprofitable overseas agricultural enterprises, by that time it would not have been Hispaniola or Cuba but the northeastern Brazilian province of Pernambuco.

But what about the Dutch? Like other northern European nations, the Dutch initially began to prey upon the Spanish fleet in the second half of the 16th century. Like the British and French, they also perceived the advantages of piratical raids on the Spanish mainland colonies. By the early 17th century, however, the new Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, embarked on a different course of action. Its novel approach was not merely to skim off profits by raiding Iberian colonies or preying upon the homeward-bound fleet, but to take over the very source: fully developed colonial enterprises.

Aware of the advantages the Portuguese enjoyed by maintaining a connection between Angola and northeastern Brazil, the Dutch seized control of both places at once. Between about 1630 and 1650 they achieved three distinct but interrelated goals: they subjected both regions to a rigorous scheme of capitalistic development, pumping in the requisite cash and credit for building up the plantation infrastructure of Brazil; they continued their role as major maritime architects of legal and illegal commercial links between the Caribbean colonies of various nations; and they turned Amsterdam—which already was the center of finance and banking in northern Europe—into one of the major international European markets for sugar. In contrast to the Portuguese, the Dutch apparently had no strong interest in monopolizing sugar production. In their view, profit lay in offering credit and taking over commercial shipping and distribution.

…

While the importance of the Dutch introduction of sugarcane to Barbados in 1637 is open to question, the crucial role of Dutch merchants in providing financial backing with which British settlers built the first sugar mills on that island is beyond dispute. Dutch planters and sugar masters also taught the British Barbadians what they came to call the “method of Pernambuco”—which included not only the know-how of planting, milling, and processing cane, but also the rudiments of a legal code regulating slavery. Dutch ships, finally, linked Barbados’s emerging plantation economy both to the supply of African labor provided by the Atlantic slave trade and to the effective and profitable distribution networks in the Netherlands. Although the extent of Dutch involvement has lately become the subject of debate among historians, it may be safe to say that within little more than the decade between 1640 and 1650, the Dutch helped to transform Barbados from a slaveholding society with a large yeoman population engaged in fairly diversified economic pursuits into a slave society solidly based on sugar monoculture.

…

These developments were due in no small measure to a fortuitous Atlantic conjuncture. For the “sugar revolution” in Barbados occurred at a time when English metropolitan control over the island faltered. What allowed the Barbadians to engage in such principally illegal dealings with the Dutch was the colonial result of the turmoil in the metropole incited by the English Civil War. As the eminent historian of that war, Christopher Hill (1986), put it, between 1641 and 1650, Barbados virtually became an independent state, or at least approached a state of home rule. As a consequence, the emerging planter elite began to control legislative and executive matters in a manner unprecedented in any New World colony. Only when the British Parliament sent the fleet in the fall of 1651 did the Barbadians finally resubmit to imperial control. They arguably did so, however, because they had become too afraid of their own slaves and rebellious servants to risk giving out arms to them—a situation foreshadowing the agonizing decisions the Jamaican planter elite made when the protest of the 13 North American colonies against British commercial legislation began to escalate into a full-scale colonial war more than a century later.

Still, the intervening period had allowed the Barbadian planter elite enough autonomy to achieve three major objectives: first, to engineer the crucial economic takeoff with the help of Dutch capital and distribution networks; second, to forge a brutal slave code—first properly codified in 1661, but developed in the 1640s—that allowed masters almost unlimited power to exploit their human chattel; and third, to begin a process of concentration of landholding that effectively pushed small freeholders off the island.

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Filed under Angola, Brazil, Britain, Congo, economics, Equatorial Guinea, labor, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, war

by | 5 June 2024 · 11:47 am

Sicily’s 1908 Earthquake and WW1

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 308-310:

At 5:20 A.M. on December 28, 1908, Messina had suffered the deadliest natural disaster in European history: an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, followed by a forty-foot tsunami along the nearby coasts. More than ninety percent of its buildings were destroyed, between 70,000 and 100,000 people killed. Hundreds more were buried alive, often for a week or more, since all terrestrial lines of communication were shattered; it was several days before the Red Cross and other relief organizations could reach the city. Nearly all the municipal archives were lost—which is why so much of modern Sicilian history has to be told from the frequently misleading point of view of Palermo.

The Messina earthquake resulted in a huge increase in the rate of emigration. Sicilians were already leaving their homeland in greater numbers than any other people in Europe. In the early days many of them had made the relatively short journey to Tunisia, then a French protectorate; but by 1900—though Argentina and Brazil were also popular—the vast majority were traveling to the United States. By the beginning of the First World War, the number of emigrants totaled not less than a million and a half. Some villages, having lost virtually all their male population, simply disappeared off the map. Here indeed was a terrible indictment of the way the island had for so long been governed; on the other hand, many of those emigrants who prospered made regular remissions to the families they had left behind, and reports of their prosperity gave the younger generation new ambitions toward education and literacy. Moreover, the increasing shortage of labor led to a huge increase in agricultural wages.

The war itself created new problems. Sicily’s export markets, on which the island depended, were virtually cut off for its duration. War industries, of the kind which were established elsewhere in Italy, were clearly not indicated in a region in which there was no skilled labor and no efficient transport. The government, desperately needing cheap food, fixed unrealistically low prices for flour; officially declared wheat production consequently declined by about thirty percent over the war years. Black market prices rocketed. As for the Mafia, it had never had it so good. Here the villain was the notorious Don Calogero Vizzini, who somehow escaped military service and made vast sums out of wartime shortages. In 1917 it proved necessary to pass a law against the stealing of animals; thanks to high prices and government controls, whole flocks would disappear overnight. True, there were occasional compensations: men who went to fight in the north would return with new skills and new aspirations—but also with new political ideas. During the years of war, Sicily moved steadily to the left.

Finally, during the postwar years, more and more emigrants were returning in retirement to their old homes, often with considerable savings, and bringing with them all their experience of the New World. Some, admittedly, also imported the latest techniques of gangsterism, but these were only a small minority; perhaps the most important result of the years spent abroad was a new self-respect, and with it an inability any longer to accept the old cap-in-hand approach to the large landowners. Gradually, the people of Sicily were learning to look their masters in the face.

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by | 14 February 2024 · 6:11 am

First Fleet Commander & Governor

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 72-75:

In early September 1786, Captain Arthur Phillip was officially commissioned to become the governor of the colony in New South Wales. This would prove to be an excellent choice; Phillip was a veteran mariner with vision and humility and had enlightened views on equality. Support for Phillip’s appointment had not been unanimous. On 3 Sep 1787, Lord Howe wrote to Lord Sydney ‘I cannot say the little knowledge I have of Captain Philips [sic] would have led me to select him for a service of this complicated nature’. Arthur Phillip is certainly not the focus of this story but his importance to the ultimate success of the First Fleet and the New South Wales settlement cannot be overstated. Because of this, a short overview of his career is warranted.

Excellent biographies of Arthur Phillip’s life have been published. Michael Pembroke writes ‘He was a man with a good head, a good heart, lots of pluck, and plenty of common sense. To those qualities he brought an uncommon amount of integrity, intelligence and persistence’. As an experienced sea captain, Phillip appreciated the dangers of the voyage ahead and from his time as a farmer he knew that establishing a new settlement would be challenging. He had progressed through the ranks of the Royal Navy from Ordinary Seaman to Post Captain mostly by merit and had held numerous important commands during his long naval career.

Like the great maritime navigator and explorer James Cook, Arthur Phillip had risen to some eminence from quite unprivileged beginnings.

…

In April 1787, Captain Phillip received details of his commission as Governor of New South Wales. They included the authority to establish a new settlement at Botany Bay. Somewhat controversially Phillip was ordered to govern the colony alone, without a council. Much later, during the establishment of the settlement, some officers questioned the extent of the powers granted to Phillip. Arthur Bowes Smyth, the Fleet Surgeon, observed that Phillip’s commission was ‘a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any Governor under the British Crown’. This concern was understandable. Although the governor was subject to the rule of British law, he had been given the power to appoint justices and officers of the law, to raise an army, to erect fortifications and to exercise sovereign naval powers. Phillip also had full authority to pardon and reprieve, either absolutely or conditionally, according to the seriousness of the crimes, and, most importantly, to make land grants to emancipated convicts. Matters of particular concern for Phillip with his commission were the rights and official status of transportees. He had been appalled by the slavery he had seen in South America and Africa, and he was determined that New South Wales not be another convict slave colony.

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by | 1 April 2022 · 3:33 pm

Brazil’s Economic Miracle

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 428-429, 435:

The reasons for the failure of the guerrillas are complex. With their predominantly middle-class, university-educated cadres they were unable to break out of their political isolation – the clandestine Communist Party disapproved of the guerrillas’ strategy and blocked their access to working-class organizations. The terrorist attacks on military targets precluded the emergence of any sympathetic groups within the armed forces who might have staged a coup d’état, this being the usual short cut to power for progressive movements in Latin America. But, decisively, the guerrilla campaign coincided with the long-awaited upturn in the economy. From 1968, while the guerrillas were robbing banks and bombing barracks, life was getting better for the middle classes and the skilled workers in the cities, which is where, in a rapidly urbanizing country, the political fate of the nation would be decided. In short, what finally put paid to the prospects of the urban guerrillas was the arrival of the Brazilian ‘economic miracle’.

As far as the generals were concerned, the ‘miracle’ obviated the need for an explicit political ideology to run the state. The tremendous popular enthusiasm generated by the idea of an economic miracle was manipulated by the junta to rationalize their continued suspension of full democratic rights. The economic upswing was ‘miraculous’ in that it seemed to be a sudden take-off into self-sustaining industrial growth, the hallmark of a modern economy. Brazil was at last on its way to world-power status from the doldrums in which it had found itself for the best part of the 1960s.

The Brazilian rate of economic growth was indeed amazingly good: in 1968–74 the economy grew at an average yearly rate of between 10 per cent and 11 per cent. Even after the sudden rise in the world price of oil in 1973, which seriously damaged all the industrial economies, the Brazilian rate of growth averaged between 4 per cent and 7 per cent a year. By the mid-1970s the volume of exports had quadrupled since 1967. Far more significant was the fact that manufactured goods had replaced coffee as the major component of exports: the stubborn Latin American problem of monoculture – the dependence on the export of a single primary commodity – had been solved.

Without doubt, a substantial industrial revolution had occurred in Brazil; and it had largely been engineered by technocrats sponsored by the armed forces. But this success was built on the programme of industrialization achieved over many years since the foundation of the Estado Nôvo by Getúlio Vargas in 1937. Underlying the intervening conflicts of parliamentary politics, there had been a remarkable continuity in the course of Brazilian development from the Getúlio Vargas era to the military governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Development continued to be based on a sustained drive for industrial growth largely financed by foreign loans and investment, but directed by the state. The military governments of the 1960s and 1970s kept all basic industries and utilities under state control; they largely retained the nationalist policy of import-substitution industrialization by selective tariffs; and they also preserved the core of the social welfare and labour legislation of the Estado Nôvo.

…

Brazil’s extraordinary drive to modernize in the twentieth century produced a powerful industrial economy in the space of little over three decades. The costs were enormous: acute dislocations of regional economies, the destruction of virgin lands, an imbalance between the countryside and the cities, and deep cleavages between the working class, industrial capitalists and the middle classes. And yet, industry did not become productive enough to absorb the potential labour force, while the countryside remained under-productive and socially divided. Successive governments tried to force the pace of industrial development, as well as increasing spending on welfare programmes to alleviate the social misery. The results were vicious circles of inflation and budget deficits, which spiralled uncontrollably, robbing governments of authority. In 1964 the armed forces intervened to try to restore order, but by the late 1970s they too had been drawn into the spiral of inflation and debt; their historic pursuit of ordem e progresso had led, paradoxically, to a situation where economic progress had become the enemy of social order.

The Brazilian crisis of the 1980s was as much a crisis of the state as of the economy. In the medium term economic improvement might come through an upturn in the world economy combined with a successful anti-inflation programme and international assistance with debt relief. But a lasting settlement of the crisis would require the emergence of a legitimate democratic state, whose representative institutions could command the confidence of the nation as a whole.

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by | 26 March 2022 · 3:39 pm

Latin American Industry in World War II

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle p. 332:

The Second World War turned out to be a watershed for Latin American industrialization. The worsening international situation had exacerbated the historic rivalry between the armed forces of Brazil and Argentina. Sensing the drift to war in Europe, the military establishments in both countries wanted to develop their own armaments industries instead of relying on imports. But the manufacture of arms required the setting-up of steel and electrical industries, and so from the 1940s the armed forces of Brazil and Argentina pressed their governments to develop an industrial base. Furthermore, as the outbreak of war created strong international demand for raw materials and foodstuffs, the Latin American export-economies boomed, and as wartime conditions abroad reduced the flow of imports, especially luxury goods, Latin American countries were able to build up large surpluses in their balance of payments: this enabled national debts to be paid off and led to the accumulation of domestic capital for investment in industrial projects.

The USA played a decisive part in fostering industrial development during these years. Needing Latin American raw materials for its war effort, it offered loans, technical expertise and equipment to assist the Latin American countries in their programmes of industrialization. During the early 1940s numerous US missions went to Latin America and signed trade agreements. The major republics duly declared war on the Axis powers and supplied the Allies with minerals and commodities. The notable exception was Argentina, where sympathy for Italy and Germany within the military junta caused it to adopt an awkward neutrality, for which it forfeited the kind of technical and financial assistance from the USA that Getúlio Vargas was getting for Brazil. The lack of US aid was an important cause of the economic difficulties which General Perón had to face in the post-war years and which contributed to his downfall in 1955. Still, even though the USA helped Latin American countries to initiate industrial development, the policy of industrialization as such was the late product of the nationalism that had evolved since the turn of the century, intensifying in the 1920s and 1930s.

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Filed under Argentina, Brazil, economics, Germany, industry, Italy, Latin America, U.S., war

by | 21 March 2022 · 2:02 pm

Brazil’s Path to Independence

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 229-230:

Brazil’s passage to independence, however, was not without its risks of political catastrophe. Though the attachment to monarchy was very strong, there had emerged here and there a considerable feeling for republicanism, as attested by the Inconfidência mineira of 1788–9 and intermittent republican revolts since. In the event of a sufficiently grave crisis of royal authority, these republican sympathies could have cohered to challenge the Catholic monarchy of Portugal. Such a possibility arose in 1820, when events in the Peninsula again placed the Crown in difficulties. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 Portugal had been ruled by a Regency Council in the absence of the king, but in late 1820 a series of revolts by liberals led to the establishment of a government committed to a constitutional monarchy. A Cortes was called in Lisbon to draw up a constitution modelled on the 1812 constitution of Cadiz, and the king was summoned to Portugal by the liberal government.

In Brazil there was extensive sympathy for the liberal revolution and John VI came to accept the principle of a constitutional monarchy, but he was torn as to whether or not he should return to Lisbon, fearing that he might lose Brazil if he did, or else Portugal if he did not. Finally, he decided to go back, but he left behind his son Dom Pedro as prince regent in Brazil. Thus the Portuguese monarchy put out an offshoot in its most important overseas colony in an attempt to span the political rift that was opening up between Brazil and the mother country.

That rift was to widen into an unbridgeable gulf once it became evident to the Brazilian delegates at the Lisbon Cortes that the peninsular liberals were determined to return Brazil to its colonial status prior to 1808. The liberal government proposed to cancel the political equality of Brazil with Portugal and the freedom of trade which the king had decreed for Brazil when he had first arrived in Rio. This the Brazilians would not countenance and, when the Lisbon government recalled the prince regent in October 1821, the Brazilians urged him to ignore the order. Perversely, Lisbon was pushing the mostly reluctant Brazilians towards some kind of separation, but it was still unclear what form this separation would take and how it might come about. At this juncture, in the final months of 1821, a political crisis arose which could have led to one of a number of outcomes – even to a republic, for which there was considerable support among radical liberals.

It was Dom Pedro’s chief minister, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a conservative monarchist who had spent over thirty years in the service of the Crown in Portugal, who steered Brazil towards independence. On 9 January Dom Pedro had declared that he would stay in Brazil, thereby asserting his autonomy from Lisbon. After his appointment a week later, José Bonifácio edged the country along an independent path, allowing indirect elections for a constituent assembly and disregarding orders from Lisbon. The final break with Portugal came when the Lisbon government tried once again to assert its authority over Brazil by recalling the prince regent. On 7 September 1822, on the banks of the River Ipiranga near São Paulo, Dom Pedro finally rejected Portugal and proclaimed the independence of Brazil.

After his famous Grito de Ipiranga the prince regent was crowned emperor and the former colony became a constitutional monarchy in its own right. Portuguese troops in various captaincies in the north and north-east put up violent resistance to independence, but by 1824 the whole territory had been won for Dom Pedro’s regime. In the following year Portugal, under pressure from Britain, recognized the independent state of Brazil; Britain also extended recognition, in return for a promise from Brazil to abolish the slave-trade and a commercial treaty which accorded imports from Britain a preferential tariff.

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by | 19 March 2022 · 10:03 am

Elite Unity of Portugal and Brazil

From The Penguin History Of Latin America, by Edwin Williamson (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 208-209:

It was generally recognized in Portugal that Brazil was the engine of the imperial economy. Though Portugal might have reversed her trade deficit with Britain, it was only because she was herself in chronic deficit with her largest colony. The imbalance, however, did not lead to political frustration in Brazil. The Portuguese had been conspicuously successful in creating a unitary sense of empire in which the colonial élites could strongly identify with the mother country. In contrast to Spanish America, there was no great resentment against peninsular Portuguese: there existed little by way of a separate Brazilian culture for the élite; the involvement of sugar planters in the export-economy made for a common interest with Portuguese merchants, slave-traders and royal officials; finally, the massive presence of Africans and mulattos reinforced the identification of white Brazilians with their European cousins (family ties were, indeed, close).

The political value of this unitary sense of empire was well understood by Portuguese statesmen. Pombal, for instance, was careful not to alienate the Brazilian élites by his reforms. Posts in the bureaucracy and in the newly founded militias were open to Brazilians; local oligarchies were allowed to invest in the monopoly companies; the introduction of new crops into hitherto unsettled areas and the general expansion and liberalization of trade were designed to favour American as much as European Portuguese. Even the expulsion of the Jesuits, who had always opposed the white settlers’ Indian slaving and occupation of native lands, met with Brazilian approval – the large, well-managed estates of the Jesuits, as well as the Indian labour released by the destruction of the missions, provided excellent economic opportunities for wealthy merchants and planters. Brazil was considered to be fully a part of Portugal, even though it happened to be situated on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean; so much so, that the possibility of transferring the imperial court to Brazil in a time of peril had been mooted in Lisbon as early as the middle of the seventeenth century.

The American and French revolutions were to plunge all of Europe, Portugal included, into ideological and military turmoil.

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