Portuguese rule over the vast territory that became the independent Empire of Brazil was marked by endeavors “to people,” including convict labor schemes and royally sanctioned migrations from Portugal and the Azores. The statemen who forged Brazil’s constitutional monarchy recognized both that the imperative of peopling persisted after 1822 and that old-regime approaches to achieving it were inadequate for a nineteenth-century world of capitalism, war, global migrations, and abolitionist politics. As this meticulously researched and vividly narrated book shows, beginning as early as the 1810s they, together with other Brazilian elites, pursued various projects to recruit, transport, and distribute migrants, known as colonos, across Brazil. In doing, they transformed ad hoc directed migration dependent on royal largesse into a versatile tool of statecraft and the business of colonization.
Drawing on a range of sources, Pérez Meléndez reconstructs decades of schemes, novel corporate arrangements, investments, and companies, many of them short-lived, to reveal the contingencies, opportunism, and individual interests that implicated the business of colonization in nineteenth-century state formation. Leveraging patronage, for-profit enterprises often relied on state resources. When such enterprises foundered, statesmen and investors responded by innovating within both the administrative state and private operational structures. National and provincial regulations thus took shape, but slowly and fitfully, in some cases in response to reported abuses. And if, in a new constitutional order, the project of colonization had to be wrested from executive control (especially Pedro I’s military recruitment abroad) in becoming a business, colonization privileged elite entrepreneurs. Rather than laying the ground for a shareholder democracy, Pérez Meléndez explains, in Brazil “new company undertakings galvanized the privileges of the few” (82).
Pérez Meléndez expertly attends to the regional and global contexts for directed migration to Brazil. Amid broader migration flows to Latin America and the Caribbean, the Brazilian Empire, he observes, surpassed its regional “counterparts in the sheer scale and uninterruptedness of its colonization agenda” (13). Promoters navigated diplomatic relations, competition for migrants, and financial arrangements with transatlantic, and by the last quarter of the century, transpacific dimensions, as statesmen assessed the possibilities of Chinese migration to Brazil.
In tracing for-profit colonization locally and globally, this book asserts a more complex linkage between immigration and abolition than some histories of Brazil’s nineteenth-century socioeconomic transformations have recognized. While both abolitionists and colonization proponents pointed to migrants as an alternative source of labor, Pérez Meléndez argues that colonization for profit was part of a patchwork of trafficking and labor schemes that included enslaved as well as coerced and exploited free migrant labor. As the transatlantic slave trade was shut down, illegal slave traffickers then seized on migrant transport as a cover. While some coffee planters did pursue directed migration schemes, colonization projects that extended across Brazilian territory, and beyond agricultural labor, call into question a narrow history of southeastern labor substitution.
According to Pérez Meléndez, the question of racist frameworks for directed migration, or a pursuit of migrants perceived to abet a whitening of Brazilian society, also demands more scrutiny. Race provided a “lens” for understanding immigration (265), but the history of colonization projects and companies encompasses pragmatic investors on the lookout for “sudden windows of opportunity” (226), as wars and other disasters created new migrant pools. Notwithstanding the orientalist rants that circulated in print, Pérez Meléndez concludes that directed migration proponents responded to unfavorable “financial dynamics, not political ones” when they relegated the pursuit of Chinese laborers (285). In the end, the array of companies, policies, and institutions that supported colonization for profit produced mixed results. Yet they prepared Brazil for mass migration at the turn of the twentieth century, even as eugenicist restrictions began to hold sway. Although the lived experience of colonization at times recedes here, this book is essential reading on the intertwined histories of slavery, abolition, and migration and of the social, political, and financial transformations that marked nineteenth-century Brazil’s integration into a burgeoning capitalism.
