Next post to come Monday the 24th!
Mexico was conquered in 1521, and its first printing press was established in 1539. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded in 1620 and acquired its first press in 1638. The colonization of Brazil began in 1500 and the first printing press arrived in 1808. (Previously, they had been forbidden.)
Mexico and Massachusetts derive their titles from preexisting, indigenous names. Brazil’s name comes from the red dye that was the colony’s first major export.
The first president of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria, studied civil and canon law at Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. George Washington did not attend college, but the United States’ second president attended Harvard. Meanwhile, the leading politicians of Brazil's early independence seemed to have all studied at Coimbra in Portugal, Brazil having no higher education outside of military schools.
More than any other American colony, Brazil was run for the purpose of resource extraction. Menaced by a nearly impenetrable interior, a tiny Portuguese aristocracy spread across a vast coastline conscripting natives, importing Africans, and becoming respectively one of the world’s leading exporters of dyes, sugar, gold, rubber, and coffee. Whenever one went out of style, they managed to find another commodity to build their economy around. They entered the twentieth century with less than 15% of their population literate, and coffee farmed by recently emancipated slaves as their most powerful industry. Brazil’s largely-voluntary, gradual abolition of slavery during the nineteenth century and rapid transformation through immigration and industrialization during the twentieth century make for an incredible case study in national reinvention.
Brazil: A Biography by Heloisa Murgel Starling and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
My middle school history textbook framed American History as a synthesis of three civilizations colliding: Europeans escaping Feudalism, Africans extracted through the slave trade, and the indigenous of America. If any country in the world in can claim to be a genuine fusion of these three worlds, it is Brazil. American Barbecue is owed to indigenous methods of smoking meat, and, that most American instrument, the banjo is really West African. However, American cuisine, idioms, and even music are for the most part dominated by our European inheritance.
Meanwhile, Brazil’s national dish Feijoada was created by enslaved Africans preparing a new world mix of ingredients (black beans, leftover pork scraps, rice, manioc flour, orange slices, and diced kale) stewed in a traditionally Mediterranean approach. Brazil’s premier novelist, Machado de Assis, was the grandchild of freed slaves. His novel the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a comical bildungsroman featuring the political ambitions, social slights, and copious extra-marital affairs common to a Nineteenth Century French novel. However, the whole novel is given an unstable and trivial feeling by the brief glimpses of slaves’ lives, which punctuate every four chapters. Finally, Samba music and its simplified nephew the Bossa Nova are built around highly syncopated two-bar phrases. The greater syncopation and repetition give it more continuity with African percussion-based forms than is possessed by American jazz.
Interestingly, this exchange went both ways across the Atlantic. The ethnographer and photographer Pierre Verger observed that Lusophone “Africa received… the hammock, the manioc and the corn” from Brazil.
Half of contemporary Brazilians are white and slightly north of 40 percent are of mixed race, but this European preponderance is a recent phenomenon. In the 1820’s, Rio de Janeiro had a population of 90,000 the vast majority of whom were slaves or freed slaves. The imperial court alone owned 38,000 of the city’s 90,000 souls! A European traveler remarked that 'Rio de Janeiro looked like an African coastal town.’ The plantation-based economies in Northern Brazil had even fewer Europeans. The poor working conditions and climate (remember no air conditioning!) meant that few Europeans were interested in the move. As late as 1859, Prussian began banning its subjects from immigrating to Brazil, because they were so horrified by the experiences of their nationals who had migrated. But as slavery was gradually abolished, Brazil began one of history’s most aggressive campaigns of attracting immigration, almost all from Europe and to a lesser extent Japan. While these twentieth-century waves of newcomers transformed Brazil’s economy, the roots of Brazil’s language, cuisine, and music come from this syncretic past where Europeans dominated politically but in the end not culturally.
Early Brazil
With a few notable exceptions, the early European accounts of the native Brazilians tended to linger on the native’s cannibalism as justifying their civilizing mission. They debated whether the natives should even be considered human in their present form. Interestingly, as is to show how little has changed, the proto-liberal Michel De Montaigne wrote an essay arguing that Brazilians had a superior culture to Europe. Even the cannibalism of enemies was preferable to European ways of war that left more dead and civilian populations starving. Concluding, “I don’t see anything barbaric or savage about these peoples; except that everyone considers barbaric that which is not practiced in his own country.” Though he claims to have interviewed a native Brazillian brought to France, his views are probably more indicative of certain strands in European attitudes toward their own societies rather than any deep information about Brazil.
However, Starling and Schwarcz’s work does delve into the subtle worldview of some of southern Brazil’s American-Indians:
They possessed “a very complex cosmology, but can be simplified by examining two of its major premises: first, that the world is populated by many species, both human and nonhuman, all of whom possess consciousness and culture, and second, these species perceive themselves and each other in a very particular way. Each group sees itself as human and all the others as non-human, in other words, as animals or spirits. According to Amerindian myths, at the ‘beginning’ all beings that were human became the animals of today. Whereas according to Western science, humans were animals who became humans, for the Amerindians all animals were previously humans. The consequence of this was a different interpretation of the interaction between humans and animals, all of whom are ‘citizens’ with social relations. This model also questions basic Western parameters such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. For Westerners, there is Nature (which is a given and universal) and different cultures (which are constructed). For the Amerindians, on the other hand, there was one culture but different ‘natures’: men, animals and spirits.”
It would seem hard to know how widespread amongst native Brazilians such views were before European contact. Regardless, it speaks to the unique remoteness of the Brazilian interior that twentieth-century Anthropologists could meet Brazilians who still possessed such an alien world picture.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Portuguese and Africa predated their migration to Brazil. Missions of trade and conversion had a long history in West Africa, Angola, and later on South Africa. Despite the Catholic Church’s opposition to conducting the mass in European vulgates, the Jesuits had translated the Bible into multiple Bantu languages and even managed to convert the Congolese royal family. However, the principal Portuguese interest in Africa was labor. They had terraformed the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé into plantations for the breed of sugar cane, which Arabs had acclimated to Sicily. Though the plantations were overseen by the Portuguese, the labor was African, the financing was Venetian/Genoese, and the distribution and much of the refining were Dutch. This model would more or less be transplanted to the new world.
Eventually, the Flemish would supplant the Venetians. Dutch would continue their domination of the refining process, and despite Portuguese bans, Dutch ships hiding their colors continued to be sugar growers’ shipping partners of choice. The Portuguese empire was seemingly unable, or too indifferent, to claim different and potentially more lucrative parts of their main commodities value chains.
However, the sugar plantations were required to do more than simply grow and harvest the cane. Before transportation, there was a complex process of boiling and preparation. Historians of United States slavery debated whether the system of chattel slavery could have transitioned to an industrial economy or whether it was inherent agricultural. For people thinking in abstract, Marx-ish categories (like Feudalism versus Capitalism), the debate has big implications for the direction of history, etc. Brazil would suggest that slavery and industry are an uneasy fit. Under long thatched roofs, cauldrons of boiling sugar would be slowly churned by slaves, who not infrequently could collapse in heat exhaustion into the scorching vats. The production required skilled overseers and technicians, not just manual labor. But such work could not be performed by often the emaciated enslaved. At first, desperate for skilled workers, the Portuguese would import African skilled as blacksmiths or with other skills. Ultimately, this model proved unstable. The limited number of whites, mixed-race pardos, and freed slaves had to assume these skilled roles.
(This picture is of a Black slave catcher, exemplifying both a more fluid racial hierarchy and Machado de Assis observation that “slavery creates its own professions and its own tools.”)
Even among this thin line of non-slave workers, sugar production was never conducted with an industrial mindset. “Scientific methods were ignored in favor of individual and group experience. Travelers used to comment that in Brazil everything was ‘done by eye’. This was the way that the volume of sugarcane transported by boat or by ox-drawn cart was assessed. Tools were rudimentary: pickaxes and hoes were used for preparing the soil; ploughs were not regularly used. Ultimately, the productive cycle depended on the sweat of the slaves and the use of the whip.” An industrial model of carefully deploying workers in a routinized fashion seemed incommensurate with the hatred and fear that slavery inculcated towards its laborers.
Life expectancy for slaves was a slim 25 years (ten years less than in the United States). No doubt Brazil’s climate and tropical diseases contributed to that discrepancy; The longevity of Brazil whites also compared unfavorably to those of North Americans. But, a life expectancy of 25 is a difference of kind not just degree. The astonishing mortality for children was accompanied by an adult population often too sick to reproduce. Between 8 and 11 million people were kidnapped in Africa and taken to the Americas, of those 4.9 million were brought to Brazil. By 1820, when most of those 4.9 would have been imported, yet Brazil’s total population, of all races, was thought to be 4.5 million! The Portuguese are often, and rightly, condemned for continuing the slave trade longer than any other European power. But, having no natural increase in population, their choices were to phase out slavery or continue the middle passage. We should not be confident that other Western powers would have picked better given that dilemma.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1283654/brazil-us-population-comparison-historical/
Revolts, Revolts, Revolts
In his interview with Bruno Maceas, Tyler Cowen asked, “It seems there are populated parts of Brazil where, literally, the government does not rule, neither the central government nor a municipal or state-level government. Is that the future of Brazil?”
One revolt after another; according to Starling and Schwarcz’s history that was at least Brazil’s past. For the first several centuries, the provinces of Brazil were connected solely by sea and an onerous system of fiscal extraction. On several occasions, rebellions led by the enslaved, over-taxed Portuguese, or escaped slaves allied with natives would seize the provincial capital in a bath of blood. None of these movements succeed in gaining formal independence, but it is hard not to believe that with such frequent mutinies, the central government would not recognize the very real limits to their power. Lacking a real national army until the Paraguay war, the colonial government relied on the navy to bombard any captured cities and more importantly to keep afloat a large system of offshore prisons, prohibiting leaders of future rebellions from reconnecting with their incarcerated forerunners.
I’ll focus on two of the biggest insurrections. First, the Minas Gerias conspiracy was an effort by European-educated Portuguese to join the sweep of Atlantic Revolutions in the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s. Minas Gerias translates as General Mines. Imagine if officially and colloquially Utah or Idaho were known as the Borax Plateaus or the Northern Potato Range. Naming one of your largest states General Mines typifies the early Portuguese approach to Brazil like nothing else: finding a commodity and squeezing out every drop of fiscal capacity from it. All Catholic priests were banned from the province after their privileged packages were identified as major sources of tax evasive ore smuggling. While the liberal attitudes sweeping Europe gave an intellectual veneer to their conspiracy, the mind-boggling economic restrictions (which could make the basic necessities literally hundreds of times more expensive with the province) were a clear impetus.
Yet, the most amazing revolt was Palmares, a several thousand strong society of escaped slaves living in the interior of Brazil. At a time when Rio’s total population was 7,000, Palmare’s largest metro area, Cerca Real do Macaco, is thought to have numbered 6,000. In North America, slave rebellions were exceedingly rare and never less successful. However, in Brazil, African slaves could often ally with Brazilian native slaves who understood how to thrive in the country’s interior so impregnable to the Portuguese. In other instances, Islam was important in creating unity and shared language. The colonial government would refer to Palmeres as a Republic, and began bargaining with the Ganga Zumba (leader) to return all runaway slaves:
“In exchange, Portugal guaranteed freedom, the donation of land and the status of subjects of the Crown for all those who had been born in Palmares. The Recife Agreement divided the quilombolas [towns], pitted Ganga Zumba against Zumbi [second in charge], and inaugurated the most violent period in the community’s history. Ganga Zumba was poisoned after being declared a traitor and all his military leaders were beheaded. During the next fifteen years Zumbi led the war against the Portuguese authorities, maintained the autonomy of the quilombo and guaranteed the freedom of its inhabitants. The war only ended with the fall of the Cerca Real do Macaco after a siege of forty-two days, the defeat and execution of Zumbi, and the total destruction of Palmares.”
In the Nineteenth Century, two events transformed the authority and power of the central government stabilizing the situation. As Napoleon prepared to invade Portugal, the royal family made a shrewd retreat. They took British protection to move their court to Brazil, continuing their reign. Their move transformed their approach to Brazil. The royal family declared that Brazil and Portugal were now equal in status within their empire. Having lacked higher education or printing presses for centuries, they were suddenly allowed. Eventually, displeased with liberal and constitutionalist reforms in Portugal, an ambitious heir in the royal family would declare independence and become Pedro I of Brazil. Almost all the other American colonies had already made for independence, by striking out pre-emptively Pedro I managed to rally that latent patriotism to the aid of legitimizing the Empire.
Importantly, the Imperial Court also positioned itself as a moderate critic of slavery. On its face, this was an amazing act of hypocrisy, as they continued to be one of the largest participants in the peculiar institution. But, it would be wrong to totally dismiss their sincerity. Upon the court’s arrival in Brazil, many of their coterie expressed horror at the conditions of slaves. Slavery itself had always been small within Portugal itself and had been banned in sine 1761. They were no doubt shocked to see people sold and whipped on the streets they now walked. By the mid-century, Empress Isabella would completely abolish slavery, and the groundwork for the transition had been laid by her father who declared all children of slaves freed (upon their maturity). However, by publicly criticizing the institution and at least formally banning the Atlantic importation of slaves in 1826, the royal family gained tremendous legitimacy amongst Brazil’s slave and mixed-race populations. (Given the atrocious mortality and birth rates, everyone knew that restricting the Atlantic trade was potentially setting Brazil on a path to abolition). So, great was this loyalty that slave and mixed-race uprisings against provincial governments often claimed the mantle of defending royalty rather than liberty.
In fact, after Pedro I abdicated in scandal, the regency of the royal family’s hand-picked politicians tried unsuccessfully to govern the country and was met with a series of decentralizing revolts. To stabilize the situation, they had the heir assume the throne years before it was legally allowed, claiming that the 14-year-old had assumed maturity and implausibly claiming that he could actually govern the country. Yet, the move seemed to quell the revolts that had plagued the regency. Reading this section of the book, definitely reminded me of what powerful legitimacy monarchy had for most of history. Africans and native Brazilians, who to our modern way of thinking, had every reason to hate the Emporer instinctively separated him from their local oppressors. Then, for the monarchy to enlist patriotism (declaring Brazil independent) and populism (their criticism of slavery) into their political themes had a powerful combination that kept the Empire in power for a near century after the rest of America had become Republican.
The other signal event in Brazil's political centralization was the Paraguay War. In a continent with few navigable rivers, the Rio de la Plata (the mouth of which now divides Uruguay and Argentina) became an important zone for commerce. However, on its north bank, the mix of Spanish speakers and Portuguese cattle ranchers had created a political contest between Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay for control of the area. Into this contest came Paraguay. In 1864, seeking an outlet to the Atlantic for his landlocked country, the autocratic yet charismatic leader of Paraguay declared war on all three. Bad idea! He managed to unite the erstwhile enemies who coordinated an invasion of their much major smaller neighbor. By declaring broad war aims of deposing Paraguay’s “dictator”, the Triple Alliance turned the easy mission of turning back an aggressive incursion into a six-year quagmire of exterminating insurgencies in the jungle. Worse idea! The costs to Paraguay were immense. The consensus estimate is that half of the entire country’s population (men, women, and children) died during the war.
Though less traumatic, the changes in Brazil were also profound. The cost of the war was 11 times, the central government’s entire budget in the year before the war’s start. Not to mention, the creation of a large central army that had never really existed before. Slaveholders had the option of sending slaves in their place, and they availed themselves of the opportunity. The Brazilian contingent was almost entirely black, which lead the Paraguayans to mock the army as the “Little Monkeys.” In a classic case of war making the state, what had been promised as a quick war would transform the central government’s budget and military power. But, the society was perhaps more affected. Blacks who had left as soldiers would return as officers and having borne the burden of the day came back expecting Brazil’s racial hierarchy to change.
(The above is Paraguayan war propaganda depicting the fleeing Brazilians as entirely black and squat except for their fallen general.)
Why did Brazil Abolition Slavery
Brazil is often condemned for being the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery. However, from another perspective, Brazilian abolition was an amazing achievement. Most of Latin America had a much smaller share of their workers enslaved (at least as chattel slaves) and abolished in the enthusiasm of the Bolivarian independence struggles. North American abolition required a bloody civil war. With the exception of Haiti, Caribbean abolition required an Imperial metropole to force the issue and then generously compensate the slaveholding minority. South Africa abolished slavery after a military defeat by the British Empire in 1901, but it would be heard to say that the issue was settled then... In general, where slavery was a smaller institution it was easier to eliminate. Yet, Brazil, a society where before the twentieth-century slaves or the descendants of slaves were a super majority of the population, managed to abolish slavery without bloodshed, the supervision of a European Empire, or even a change of government.
How?
First, Brazil had limited suffrage. The United States’ commitment to universal male suffrage made abolition uniquely thorny, as ending slavery would entail not just a complete reinvention of the region’s economic model but also the complete surrender of political power in the black majority states of the Deep South. By tying the franchise to literacy, Brazil was prepared for a much more gradual shift in its politics.
Second, fluid race roles made a process of gradual abolition viable and created an anti-slavery constituency within the Brazilian elite. The South African historian Hermann Giliomee argues that Dutch marriage laws guarding the rights of wives perversely led to a much more rigid conception of race amongst the Afrikaners. The husband’s children from outside the marriage were verboten and received no property. Meanwhile, on an American hacienda, the mixed-race children of the landholder could expect a seat at the dinner table, to inherit some money, and a career as an overseer. Then, compared to English-speaking America or Boer South Africa, many more single men traveled over seeking fortune rather than intact families crossing together. Together this created a pardo (mixed-race) strata that broke the binary that plagued other societies. Brazil’s great Nineteenth Century novelist Machado de Assis (pictured below) was the descendant of slaves and was a powerful voice against the institution. Everyone could acknowledge the achievements and contributions that the descendants of slaves had already made to the country.
Third, I think there was an indispensable role for peer pressure.
Portugal is the Western European country least likely to go with the flow. The British Navy had to interdict Portuguese slave vessels making the middle passage in 1850, at a time when the only Western societies still practicing slavery were Brazil, the Boer Republics, and the American South. They ferociously clung to their colonial exclaves in Angola, Goa, and East Timor, long after the other Europeans had semi-voluntarily decolonized. Even today, Portugal continues its quiet life as a rogue state, staking claim to most of the North Atlantic as its exclusive economic zone.
Conversely, Brazil might be the society most susceptible to foreign soft power in the world. The Brazilian flag still bears the positivist motto “Order and Progress” honoring the French Philosophical movement that developed a large Brazilian following. At the turn of the century, Brazilian writers followed the scientific racism of pensant-bien European opinion and developed immigration policies to whiten the country. Starling and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz describe Brazilian artists becoming romantics, realists, and bohemians on cue as soon as the era’s communications technology allowed fashions to travel. Brazil even faked becoming Fascist to match the developments in Portugal, but more on the Estado Novo later.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the country’s elite would receive their degrees in Europe and would absorb the prevailing mores. Then, having such a small educated population, most of what Brazilians read came from abroad. Contrastingly, South Africa was a world away from the realm of European letters, rallying to Paul Kruger their flat-earther-statesman in the 1901 war. In North America, John McCardell Jr.’s The Idea of Southern Nation traces the development of Southern a national conscience in the decades before the civil war and the role pro-slavery ideologists played in that construction. Around the time of the revolution, it was considered a minor scandal for a member of the Virginia legislature to say that slavery was a positive good, and most people seemed to believe it would eventually end. Yet, in a few decades, the writers of the rising Deep South began arguing for exactly that detestable moral proposition and convincing people that the end was not inevitable. Brazil lacked such a class of pseudo-intellectuals. Thus, abolition began in 1871. The South's defeat in America likely weighed on them to conform more. With a few more laws passed in between, the process was complete by 1888.
An Even Shorter Twentieth Century
Between 1885 and 1985, Brazil was ruled as an Empire, a limited suffrage Republic (5.6% of the population was eligible to vote in 1906), an allegedly Fascist state (more on that later), a Democratic Socialist government, a military dictatorship, and finally, an end-of-history democracy. Despite all this political turbulence, the economy followed a simple story: relative stagnation until the 20s, sixty years of consistent growth in one of history’s most remarkable development stories, and a good deal of stagnation from the late 70s onwards.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Brazil-Real-GDP-per-capita-since-1900_fig3_346923358
In part grounded in racist assumptions about the desirability of a whiter country and in part grounded in the need for a new source of labor after the end of the slave trade, Brazil began potentially history’s most aggressive campaign of subsidized immigration. Between 1890 and 1980, the USA’s population increased from 63 million to 227 million, a 3.5-fold increase. Brazil went from 14 million to 123 million close to a 9-fold increase. At the start of the century, Sao Paulo coffee growers and Minas Gerais miners traded turns selecting the next president. The Portuguese landowners controlling the country's two most important commodities would literally take turns.
However, the European and Japanese immigrants were flocking to cities and creating the possibility for industrial development there. Over the Twentieth Century, the country would again and again be governed by a son of immigrants transfixed with industrial modernization and conquering the interior. Juscelino Kubitschek of Polish extraction was a man of the union left and went on to build a glass-and-concrete, Corboussier-inspired capital as close to the geographic center as feasible in a country that had forever been connected by sea. Then, the military dictatorship brought to power Ernesto Geisel of German extraction. His white elephant project, a highway traversing the Amazon, was never completed and, in its completed parts today, is still impassable due to jungle mudslides and floods. While the left and right of Brazilian politics would disagree on collective bargaining, wage controls, and openness to foreign capital, a development strategy based on immigration, export subsidies, a weak currency, and massive public-private enterprises like the now infamous Petrobras worked for a remarkable run.
The confusion of Brazil’s political categories is most consummate in the career of Getúlio Vargas. Brought to power in the military coup that ended those trading presidencies from Sao Paulo and Minas Gerias, Vargas would serve as head of state in three non-consecutive stints. Winning popular election after that initial coup, he aimed to develop the country and curb what he saw as the pernicious influence of foreign firms. Constitutionally barred from the next term of office, he orchestrated a self-coup and inaugurated the allegedly Fascist Estado Novo, mirroring the name of Portugal’s fresh rightist autocracy. However, he sided with the Allies in World War 2 and governed with the approval of the left. So much approval, that after the defeat of the Axis in World War 2 discredited Fascism, the Estado Novo fell and Vargas would return to power leading the Social Democratic Party in a free election. Years later, his career ended as he fell out with the Army that had brought him to power so many years prior. Unable to face it, he shot himself in the chest rather than resign. Grandly emblazoned on his note, "Serenely, I take my first step on the road to eternity. I leave life to enter History."
Brazil is often accused of failing to live up to its historical destiny. De Gaulle quipped that Brazil is the “country of the future... and always will be.” However, having been dealt with the toughest hand of cards a country could imagine (most of its population scarred by slavery, a resource-addicted economy, and printing and higher education banned for centuries), Brazil managed a first self-transformation. What makes a second so implausible?