Brazil's history: a colony that became its empire's capital

Who lived in Brazil before Cabral landed

People lived in what is now Brazil for at least 11,000 years before any European arrived. The oldest evidence is the skeleton known as Luzia Woman, found near Pedro Leopoldo in Minas Gerais, and pottery excavated near Santarém in the Amazon basin has been radiocarbon dated to more than 8,000 years ago. On Marajó island at the mouth of the Amazon, the Marajoara culture built earth mounds and made large painted and incised pottery between about AD 400 and 1400, and archaeologists have estimated its population at as many as 100,000 people. How far that society came from the island itself, and how far from the Andes, has been argued over since the 1950s.

By 1500 the territory held an estimated 7 million Indigenous people in as many as 2,000 groups, most of them semi-nomadic and living by hunting, fishing, gathering and shifting agriculture along the coast and the larger rivers. Many coastal peoples spoke languages of the Tupi-Guarani family. None of them left written records or monumental building, so very little of their history before 1500 is known beyond what the pottery shows.

The first confirmed European landing was Spanish. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón reached the Cape of Santo Agostinho in present-day Pernambuco on 26 January 1500, but the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 had put that coast on the Portuguese side of the line, and he could not claim it. Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet, sailing for India, claimed the land for Portugal on 22 April 1500.

How sugar and slavery built the colony

For three decades Portugal treated the coast as a source of one commodity, brazilwood, a tree whose trunk gave a red dye prized by European textile makers and which gave the country its name. Settlement began only when French traders and privateers threatened the claim. The first town, São Vicente, was founded in 1532, and in 1534 King John III divided the coast into fifteen hereditary captaincies granted to Portuguese nobles. The system failed, and in 1549 the crown put the colony under a governor-general at Salvador.

Sugar made the colony pay. Plantations called engenhos spread along the northeastern coast from the sixteenth century, and by 1570 Brazil's sugar output rivalled that of Madeira and São Tomé. Settlers first tried to enslave Indigenous people for the work, against the resistance of the Jesuits, who won a royal decree in 1574 giving them control of the converted villages while leaving colonists free to enslave people captured in what the decree called legitimate warfare. Colonists then turned to Africa.

The scale is recorded in figures that do not agree with one another. The Wikipedia account of slavery in Brazil gives about 5.5 million Africans brought to Brazil between 1540 and the 1860s in one passage, and an estimated 4 million, 40% of all those shipped to the Americas, in another. Its country article gives more than 2.8 million between 1500 and 1800. Every version is in the millions.

Resistance was constant. The Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of people who had escaped slavery in the interior of Pernambuco, held out against Portuguese attacks for 67 years and had more than 30,000 inhabitants at its height. Its central settlement fell to an artillery assault on 6 February 1694, and its leader Zumbi was captured and killed on 20 November 1695.

The Dutch West India Company took Pernambuco in 1630 and held it for a quarter of a century. Britannica records that the colonists expelled them in 1654 without Portuguese help, an episode it treats as an early source of Brazilian national feeling.

Why gold moved the capital south

Prospectors found large gold deposits in 1695 in what became Minas Gerais, the General Mines, and diamonds followed in the early eighteenth century. The rush pulled people and enslaved labour off the sugar coast and into the interior so fast that large sections of the coast were left nearly empty. It produced the towns of Ouro Preto, Diamantina and Congonhas, all now on the World Heritage List, and it moved the colony's centre of gravity. In 1763 the Portuguese government transferred the capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, the port nearest the mines.

The same century fixed most of the border. The Treaty of Tordesillas had drawn the Portuguese limit at 46° 30′ W, and expeditions from São Paulo called bandeiras, hunting for enslaved Indigenous people and for gold, pushed far past it. The treaties of Madrid in 1750, Pardo in 1761 and San Ildefonso in 1777 recognised much of what they had taken. The Marquis of Pombal, governing for King Joseph, expelled the Jesuits in 1759 and centralised the administration.

A rebellion in Minas Gerais in 1789, the Inconfidência Mineira, was put down. Its instigator, José Joaquim da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, was executed, and the republic later made him a national hero.

How the royal court made Rio a capital

Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807. The prince regent, later King John VI, sailed for Brazil under British naval escort on 29 November 1807 with the royal family and much of the government, and reached Rio de Janeiro on 7 March 1808. Britannica describes Brazil as the one colony that became the seat of government of its own mother country.

The court turned the colony into a capital. John opened the ports to the ships of friendly nations, ending Portugal's trade monopoly, and repealed the laws that had banned manufacturing in Brazil. He set up a supreme court, a treasury, a royal mint, a printing office and the Bank of Brazil in Rio, with medical and law schools and a military academy. A decree of 16 December 1815 made the Portuguese possessions the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, putting Brazil on an equal footing with Portugal.

Why independence left the territory in one piece

Revolts in Lisbon and Porto in 1820 forced the king home. He sailed on 24 April 1821, leaving his son Pedro as regent, and the parliament in Lisbon, the Cortes, set about reversing the reforms and ordered Pedro back to Europe. He refused in January 1822 and on 7 September 1822, beside the Ipiranga stream near São Paulo, proclaimed Brazil independent. He was crowned emperor on 1 December 1822.

There was a war. Portuguese garrisons held Salvador until 2 July 1823, when a naval blockade and a land siege forced them out, and fighting ran through the north, the northeast and the southern province of Cisplatina. The last Portuguese troops surrendered in March 1824, and Portugal recognised independence by the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro on 29 August 1825, in exchange for compensation paid by Brazil.

The result differed from the rest of South America in one visible way: the territory did not break up. Britannica attributes the cohesion to things the colony already had in common, the Portuguese language, a small number of powerful families controlling land, labour and cattle across regions, and a crown that kept contact with every part of the coast. The regency after Pedro I abdicated in 1831 faced provincial revolts from the Cabanagem in Grão-Pará to the Ragamuffin War in Rio Grande do Sul, and the central government came through them. The one province that did leave was Cisplatina, which became Uruguay after a war with Argentina from 1825 to 1828.

How abolition and the monarchy fell together

Pedro II was declared of age at fourteen in July 1840 and reigned until 1889. Under him the population grew from 4 million to 14 million, the value of exports rose tenfold and more than 8,000 kilometres of railway were built. Brazil fought the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870 alongside Argentina and Uruguay, and Britannica records that the war gave an opening to free a significant number of enslaved Brazilians.

The empire's economy still ran on enslaved labour, now on the coffee plantations of the São Paulo area as well as on sugar estates. Brazil agreed under British pressure in 1831 to end the slave trade, and the Atlantic traffic was outlawed only in 1850, by the Eusébio de Queirós Law. Abolition then came in steps:

• the Law of the Free Womb of 1871 freed every child born to an enslaved mother
• Ceará and Amazonas freed their enslaved populations in 1884
• a national law of 1885 freed everyone enslaved over sixty
• the Golden Law, signed by Princess Isabel as regent on 13 May 1888, abolished slavery without compensation to the owners

About 700,000 people were freed in 1888. By the 1872 census, 15% of a population of 10 million had been enslaved, and three quarters of Black and mixed-race Brazilians were already free.

Military officers deposed the emperor on 15 November 1889, and he went into exile in Europe. Many historians have blamed a restive army, a resentful landed aristocracy and a hostile clergy. Britannica's own reading is that the abolition of 1888 and the coup of 1889 ended the two institutions that had shaped the country since the colony, and that the urban middle class, the officers and the coffee planters saw the monarchy as bound to the old landed elite.

Why the republic kept changing its constitution

The republic has written six constitutions since 1889, and each marked a change of regime.

From 1894 the presidency passed between politicians from São Paulo and Minas Gerais, the arrangement known as coffee with milk, on a franchise that excluded women and the illiterate. Coffee earned more than half of export revenue by 1900. The system ended in 1930, when coffee prices collapsed and Getúlio Vargas, who had lost that year's election, took power with the army. He ruled until 1945, from 1937 as dictator of the Estado Novo, and in August 1942 took Brazil into the Second World War on the Allied side; an expeditionary force fought in Italy from July 1944. The army removed him in October 1945, the voters returned him in 1950, and he killed himself on 24 August 1954.

Juscelino Kubitschek moved the capital inland, to Brasília, inaugurated on 21 April 1960. Under him the cost of living tripled between 1956 and 1961.

How the military ruled and then withdrew

Military units in Minas Gerais rose against President João Goulart on 31 March 1964, and he fled to Uruguay on 2 April. The generals governed through Institutional Acts. The second, in October 1965, dissolved every party and replaced them with a government party and one permitted opposition. The fifth, of 13 December 1968, suspended Congress, let the president rule by decree and opened the most repressive years of the regime. The United States backed the coup through Operation Brother Sam.

The toll is recorded in several counts. About 50,000 people were detained in the regime's first months and about 10,000 went into exile. The report Brasil: Nunca Mais, published in 1985 from military court records, documented 1,918 cases of torture between 1964 and 1979. The Wikipedia history of Brazil gives 434 people confirmed killed or disappeared and 20,000 tortured, and records that human rights groups consider the true figures higher. The Amnesty Law of 1979 covered crimes committed by the regime as well as against it, and it has limited prosecutions since.

The generals withdrew in stages from the mid-1970s. The Diretas Já campaign of 1983 and 1984 filled city streets demanding a direct presidential vote; Congress rejected it, and an electoral college chose the opposition's Tancredo Neves in 1985. He died before taking office, and José Sarney was sworn in on 15 March 1985. The constitution of 5 October 1988, the seventh since independence by the Wikipedia count and the eighth by Britannica's, made torture and armed action against the constitutional order crimes without bail. Since then two presidents have been removed by impeachment, Fernando Collor in 1992 and Dilma Rousseff in 2016, both through Congress. On 8 January 2023, a week after a presidential inauguration, a crowd attacked the federal government buildings in Brasília.