International Conference “Empires: Towards a Global History”

University of Delhi, December 3-5, 2017

 

Brazil and its Worlds: an analytical inventory of Brazil's position and global connections within the world arena of the early nineteenth century.[1]

 

João Paulo Pimenta (LabMundi-USP)

 

This paper is a preliminary attempt to identify and analyze the different space-times, material, intellectual, and symbolic dimensions that connected Brazil with many regions of the world in the early nineteenth century. Underlying this truly global insertion was the Portuguese Empire. It was through this empire that it was possible to establish, in different and dynamic ways, hierarchically unequal and historically changing relationships between all the continents of the globe and the various parts of what was at the time generically called Brazil – that is, before it became an actual nation-state, independent from Portugal. Considering this crucial moment in the history of Brazil and of the Portuguese Empire, is it necessary to develop a broader understanding of the position Brazil exerted in the global arena of the nineteenth century. This fundamental theme has not yet been sufficiently explored by historiography.

 

Introduction

For centuries, the Portuguese Empire was a protagonist in the establishment of a global world. This protagonism began to take shape at the beginning of the 15th century, with the first Portuguese incursions into the African continent. At the end of that century, the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India demonstrated the possibility of the creation of a vast commercial, military, political, and cultural network inspired by an expansionist model previously practiced by Italian city-states like Geneva, Florence, Venice, and Milan; a model that, following Giovanni Arrighi, had typified a first systemic cycle of hegemonic accumulation and capital expansion in the European world-system.[2] The Portuguese Empire consolidated as a global empire with the establishment of commercial trading posts in Africa, Asia, and in America; but in the New World, the Portuguese presence would soon lead to a practice of colonization that was territorially broader and more fixed, with a base in the production of agricultural goods for export, and in the exploitation of an enslaved workforce of African origin. In terms of its capacity to lead international competition for markets and products, the Portuguese Empire would be a minor agent, but not one to be disregarded. In the seventeenth century, the disputes between Spain and the Netherlands for their territories, spread across three oceans and four continents, led to a war that, according to Charles Boxer, “deserves much more to be called the First World War than the holocaust of 1914-1918, to which this dubious honor is generally attributed.”[3] And if these disputes considerably limited the extension of the Portuguese Empire, above all on the Asian continent, they permitted a definitive emphasis of this empire on the south Atlantic; that is, in the African slave trade and in the exploitation of exportable goods from Brazil. In the eighteenth century, gold from Brazil organically connected the Portuguese Empire to the British Empire in a durable alliance that, with some exceptions, strengthened not only the emergence of that which would become the great capitalist power of the nineteenth century, but also contributed to a new pattern of international competition and organization of the world-system. In the beginning of the 19th century, while the resolution of the Napoleonic wars led the way in defining British protagonism in this scenario, Brazil was the central space of the Portuguese Empire. Focus of Portuguese Enlightened Reform policies; the political seat of the Empire between 1808 and 1815; kingdom, united with Portugal and Algarve between 1815 and 1822; and independent and sovereign national state since 1822, in this period, Brazil was still a collection of “Brazils”. There was no political, administrative, or territorial unity, much less Brazilian national identity. After the separation of Brazil from Portugal, made official in 1822, this unity would be consolidated in a process over the course of many decades.[4]

However, if during the centuries of Portuguese colonization in America, Brazil was a collection of “Brazils”, this is not to say that certain tendencies toward unity weren’t taking shape earlier. The extraction of gold in the regions of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso e Goiás, initiated in the first two decades of the 18th century, moved the Portuguese colonization process, previously almost exclusively littoral, to the interior, to interlink, in a regular and consistent way, the migratory flows and commercial routes in the interior of Portuguese America, where the establishment of settlements also grew in a significant way. The imperial enlightened reform policies, already outlined at that time, but accentuated after 1750, came to think of the Portuguese Brazils as a political administrative unit.[5] But none of this was able to eliminate the tendency towards colonial dispersion, a tendency clearly contrary to the formation of any design or project of Brazilian national consciousness, completely nonexistent until 1808, the year in which the transformation of Rio de Janeiro into the seat of the empire began to transform this state of things.[6]

Between 1808, when Brazil became the seat of the Portuguese Empire, and 1822, when Brazil became an independent state, the various Portuguese Brazils had asymmetrical connections with each other, and themselves with other regions of the world. From this point forward, we will outline the architecture of these relations, since this architecture is fundamental for understanding not only the emergence of the Brazilian national state, but also for analysis of the conditions of the insertion of the Portuguese Empire and of Brazil in the global arena of the early 19th century, an arena that was being partially modified by these two important agents.

 

Brazil and its Worlds

Relations with England (soon, Great Britain) began to become a priority for Portugal after its independence from Spain in 1640. The signing of the Treaty of Metheun, in 1703, made these relations even stronger, and with some exceptions, they continued for all of the 18th century.[7] In 1807, when the Portuguese Court decided to break its neutrality in the Napoleonic Wars and flee the French armies that occupied Portugal, it was the British Navy that protected it during the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. In exchange, the Portuguese Court decreed the official end of commercial protection, which went into effect in American ports as soon as it arrived in Brazil, in January of 1808, which in practice benefitted Great Britain and its products, which in Europe faced the barrier of the Continental Blockade. From that point on, British commercial, political, and military interests increasingly took root in Brazil.[8] Even so, the slave trade between Brazil and Africa would be maintained until 1850, when Brazil was already an independent and sovereign nation. This occurred thanks to the successful resistance of the big merchants, producers and landowners who, in Brazil, maintained themselves against British pressures and in defense of their interests.[9] This resistance, by the way, was one of the political consensuses responsible for the success of Brazil’s own independence, occurring in 1822.[10] On that occasion, not only was there no open conflict with the British government, but as a matter of fact, this was one of the diplomatic assets leveraged in gaining the international acceptance of Brazilian independence, recognized by London and by Lisbon on the same occasion (1825). All of these situations configured asymmetrical connections and dynamics between Brazil and distant regions of the British Empire.[11]

The end of the Portuguese monopoly over Brazilian ports in 1808 also positively impacted the commerce of Brazil with other European countries. But it was on the political plane, with the formation of the Holy Alliance between 1814 and 1815, that relations between Brazil and these other countries grew stronger. While Rio de Janeiro was the seat of the Portuguese Court, diplomatic representatives, merchants and artists from Spain, Austria, Prussia, Russia and France were frequently present in the city. The elevation of Brazil to the status of kingdom, in 1815, seems to have been a recommendation of the head Austrian diplomat at the Congress of Vienna. King João VI, who lived in Rio de Janeiro until 1821, was married to a Spanish princess; their son, the future emperor of Brazil Pedro I, was married first to an Austrian princess, and second to a German princess (from Bavaria), which facilitated the generalization of European recognition of Brazilian independence.

                On the American continent, the United States of America was the first government to recognize the independence of Brazil, even before Portugal and Great Britain, which signaled political and commercial interests that in the 1820s contributed to the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine.[12] But to the south, Spanish America formed a set of territories that, for the most part, as they became independent from Spain, exerted great influence over Brazil, as much as in terms of borders and commerce – with emphasis on the regions that until 1810 had been incorporated within the Viceroyalty of Rio da Prata – as much as in terms of politics and ideology.[13] Independent Brazil would establish formal diplomatic relations with many of the new countries formed from the collapse of the Spanish Empire on the American continent.[14]

                All of these contacts between Brazil and other parts of the world depended, primarily, on commercial, geographic, and historical factors. Shared borders, interconnected port cities, and shared ideological environments, all modified in accordance with traditions and historical circumstances of the moment, explain not only with which regions Brazil was connected and for what reasons, but also why Brazil continued to be, although increasingly less from 1822 on, a collection of diverse Brazils. Its relations with Africa demonstrate this well. The slave trade to Brazil, initiated in the second half of the 16th century, supplied the regions of export-oriented production for centuries, but formed peripheral regions in which this labor was not predominant. In the beginning of the 19th century, this asymmetry had greatly diminished: slavery and the slave trade had already become widespread everywhere, and even still they continued to grow.[15] This growth helps to explain the aforementioned articulation of political and economic interests that formed the basis of the project of Brazilian independence, and that united powerful interests from several points of the territory. It also explains why, in the 1820s, slave traders based in Angola and Guinea considered joining the project of independence articulated on the other side of the Atlantic, which could have led to the integration of these African regions into the Empire of Brazil;[16] and even if such a hypothesis never was realized, the fact is that in the aforementioned treaty of recognition of independence signed between the governments of Brazil and Portugal under British mediation, Brazil agreed to give up any pretension of effective incorporation of Portuguese territories in Africa. Angola and Guinea (also Mozambique), by this time, were strongly connected with the Brazilian ports of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife.

                But no situation seems to better exemplify the asymmetry of relations between Brazil and other parts of the world – asymmetries that were also internal within Brazil as it began to form as an independent and sovereign nation – than the wars of independence, occurring between 1821 and 1824. In them, important regions of Brazil such as Pará, Maranão and Bahia, experienced divisions that led to military conflicts around the question of either joining the government of Rio de Janeiro, seat of the newly-formed Brazilian Empire, or of maintaining traditional ties of belonging to the United Portuguese Kingdom based in Lisbon. The victory of the project of Brazilian independence in these regions did not immediately reverse these traditional ties, and in all of them direct communication with Portugal and with parts of Europe were easier than with other parts of Brazil.   

                The entire picture sketched to this point, involving Brazil and its “Brazils” in a mosaic of relations that directly involved parts of the European, American, African, and - more indirectly – Asian continents, poses a problem: how to establish the hierarchies among these asymmetrical relations? Which relations were stronger, and, in the end, most important? Even considering that such relations were dynamic, and, therefore, that they changed over the course of the period considered here, an outline of these hierarchies is possible. Let’s take as a methodological strategy what we can see from a systematic study of the press that existed in Rio de Janeiro – the main city of Brazil – between 1808 and 1822.[17] The first regular, edited newspapers in Brazil appeared during these years, and very quickly their number increased, contributing to a thickening of public spaces of political discussion. One of the striking features of these newspapers is the fact that they mention – in news stories, documents, etc. – various parts of the world. In this way, they profoundly altered the horizons of geopolitical imagination for inhabitants of Brazil who, by reading these newspapers, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, came to see themselves as part of an “imagined community” of global contours.

Taking as a starting point the references to places (cities, countries, regions, ports, continents, seas and oceans, etc.) found in 35 periodicals in six different provinces of Brazil, and among many quantitative treatments that can be applied to these references, let’s look at just two things.

Of a total of 1274 references exclusively to continents, 43% make reference to Europe, 33% to the Americas, 13% to Africa, and 9% to Asia (the other 2% are alternative or imprecise references.)[18] This division clearly defines, in terms of continents, the hierarchy of the global relations of Brazil and its regions in the period under discussion here. The European continent is most important, but this importance is not exclusive: Brazil and Europe are part of a wider world.

                Among the thousands of total references to all places, and considering only the first 50 words that organize such references, 1963 refer to France, 1716 to Great Britain, 1706 to the Americas, and 3747 to other European countries (Spain, Germany, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands and Prussia). Africa appears in 172 references, all to Angola. These figures reinforce and detail the previous observation concerning the continents, with prevalence of regions with which Brazil maintained political, military, commercial and cultural relations (France, Great Britain, Germany, the United States, Angola, etc.) Even so, there are many Asiatic regions mentioned in the total sample, for example, India (with 251 references, which may speak with respect to European colonies in general), Turkey (with 220 references), China (117 references), Persia (39 references) and Japan (10 references).[19] And we know almost nothing about the significance of these references.

 

Conclusions

                Criticism of national histories is not exclusive to the current approaches related to so-called “Global History.” In many historiographical environments, there appears to be broad consensus about the limits, distortions, and mistakes that result from the persistence of histories that have in their national orientation their beginning and their end. As far as the colonial empires of the fifteenth to twentieth century are concerned, it is basically impossible to study them without, in some way, practicing some kind of Global History.[20] Still, the current emphasis on this type of history has great potential for the exploration of relevant themes and problems, as of yet little examined by historians. With respect to the global features of nineteenth-century Brazil outlined here – their asymmetries, their hierarchies and their dynamics – much has been written about their European and African imprints, but we know almost nothing with respect, for example, to the Asian presence in Brazil.[21] Conversely, little has been studied about the presence of Brazil in American spaces,[22] or African and Asiatic spaces,[23] at the start of the nineteenth Century. Investment in this research agenda can not only benefit from approaches to Global History, but can also strengthen such approaches.

 

[1] Translated by Rachel Steely.

[2] (Giovanni Arrighi, cap.2).

[3] (Charles Boxer, p.115 – check).

[4] (István Jancsó).

[5] (Iris Kantor).

[6] (István Jancsó & João Paulo Pimenta).

[7] (Bibliography).

[8] (Valentim Alexandre; Alan Manchester, etc).

[9] (Rafael Marquese; Tâmis Parron, etc).

[10] (Luiz Felipe de Alencastro).

[11] Two interesting examples with respect to the journalist Hipólito José da Costa and the merchant/historian John Armitage. The first was a character involved in the networks of political sociability in the United States and Europe, and between 1808 and 1822 edited the newspaper Coreio Brasiliense in London, this being a newspaper of enormous openness to subjects from all over the world. The second was a coffee producers in Ceylon, and in 1836 wrote a pioneering History of Brazil (Thaís Buvalovas; Flávia Varela).

[12] (Bibliography).

[13] (João Paulo Pimenta).

[14] (Luís Cláudio Villafañe Santos).

[15] (Luiz Felipe de Alencastro; Manolo Florentino).

[16] (J. S. da Silva Dias). For this period, the slave trade to Brazil also came from Mozambique, in the Indian Ocean.

[17] (Edú Levati).

[18] (Idem).

[19] (Idem).

[20] (Rafael Marquese & João Paulo Pimenta).

[21] (chinese in RJ – Marcelo Maccord).

[22] (Maria Júlia Neves; Camilla Farah).

[23] (suggestion made by Sugatta Bose).