Peopling as Strategy

José Juan Pérez Meléndez

doi:10.1017/9781009281874.004

1 - Peopling as Strategy

Appeasement and Preemption in the Joanine Court

from Part I - Colonization’s Statecraft

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2024

José Juan Pérez Meléndez

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José Juan Pérez Meléndez: Affiliation:
University of California, Davis

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Summary

Directed migrations supported the Luso-Brazilian government’s efforts to navigate the geopolitical challenges of the post-Napoleonic world. In order to correct the perceived dearth of population in the new seat of an exiled Portuguese Court, government officials went to great lengths to jumpstart migratory flows to Brazil. Peopling served many purposes, allowing the prince regent to cement royal authority through subsidies and concessions while responding to pressures to curtail slavery. Yet, as various groups made their way to Brazil, they lay bare the challenges in long-distance migrant conveyance as well as the diplomatic liabilities involved in directed migrations. The Luso-Brazilian government thus began to defer migration drives to private, mostly German, individuals gearing for profits. This chapter traces the emergence of a strategic exchange between the Joanine government in Rio and foreign petitioners who began to shape peopling as a profitable business sphere, which allowed the Luso-Brazilian administration to quell pressures stemming from Vienna and London, but opened the way for numerous unforeseen consequences.

Keywords

Joanine period population (peopling)João VI Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho Rio de Janeiro Congress of Vienna Leopoldina Nova Friburgo Lisbon Courts German migrations Napoleonic wars Holy Alliance

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Type: Chapter
Information: Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil
Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization
, pp. 27 - 51

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009281874.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2024
Creative Commons: This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

1 Peopling as Strategy Appeasement and Preemption in the Joanine Court

On arrival, the weary traveler approaching Brazil after 1808 encountered the radiant verdure of rugged coasts. Following an uneventful 35-day trip from Liverpool to Pernambuco in 1809, Henry Koster, who stayed in Brazil for several years, gushed at the sight of Olinda: “Its appearance from the sea is most delightful … its gardens and trees … hold out expectations of great beauty.” Further south, voluptuous hills framed the entrance to Guanabara Bay and cradled Rio de Janeiro, the capital of colonial Brazil since 1763 and the home of the Portuguese royal family after 1808. In that year, the Bragança household arrived in Rio fleeing Napoléon’s storming of Lisbon. As an obligatory token of appreciation for British aid in the transfer of the entire Lisbon Court to Rio, the Portuguese prince regent João de Bragança opened Brazilian ports to foreign commerce for the first time. A new era seemed to dawn. “In a few years,” exclaimed a well-traveled British observer, Brazil would become “the Granary of the Universe!”Footnote ¹

Yet wartime needs, not splendid vistas or dreams of prosperity, defined the political economy of the besieged Luso-Brazilian state once it landed in Rio. During João de Bragança’s thirteen years in Brazil (1808–1821), strategic imperatives for the survival of the Portuguese Empire initially overtook long-term aspirations for economic growth. In this context, peopling rose as a chief expedient to bridge governmental concerns over defense and development. Luso-Brazilians and foreigners alike understood that a dearth of population both represented a military vulnerability and economically curtailed Brazil’s potential. If Benjamin Franklin came to Brazil, quipped counselor José da Silva Lisboa to João in 1816, he would cast a glance “over its tenuous and facticious [sic] population of slaves, blacks and mixed-colored peoples and would exclaim–everything is so empty.” Peopling these domains thus became a safeguard against external threats and a prescription for ideal futures.Footnote ²

Upon arrival, the Luso-Brazilian government, defined here as the entire Portuguese imperial apparatus, continuously redeployed peopling practices modeled after eighteenth-century reformist precedents to keep itself afloat. But as statesmen applied new colonization models, they incorporated piecemeal innovations that gradually shifted peopling away from the arsenal of defensive measures concocted during the Napoleonic crisis. Their peopling measures began to inch toward developmental ends such as populating agricultural frontiers and reinvigorating mining. After 1815, the Crown leveraged migration to confront the conflicting pressures of British liberalism and Holy Alliance absolutism. Experimenting with Crown-directed peopling drives and with more indirect forms of royal sponsorship, Luso-Brazilians primed themselves for the more entrepreneurial kind of private colonization attempted by German empresarios trained in the cameral sciences. Establishing their own colonies, these foreign travelers and scientists played a central role in transforming ancien régime peopling into the business of colonization. By 1821, when João returned to Portugal, by then crowned as João VI, peopling had undergone a dramatic transformation. From a centennial old-regime tradition of either punitive banishment or periodic and languid directed migrations from the Azores, peopling came into its own as an invaluable tool of modern royal statecraft and one that opened windows of collaboration with private actors. This combination solidified the uses of peopling toward urgent geostrategic ends but also traced the contours of a new kind of peopling for profit.

Population, Prosperity, and the Political Economy of the Luso-Brazilian Court

“In Multitudine populi dignitas Regis” – “from the multitude of people [comes] the dignity of the King.” So exclaimed a chief chronicler of João’s time in Brazil, celebrating the prince regent’s authorization of foreigners and their industries after 1808. Citing only the first half of the Book of Proverbs 14:28, the chronicler cleverly omitted the rest: “et in paucitate plebis ignominia principis” – “and a dearth of people ruins the prince.” Prince João was well aware. Arriving with shiploads of courtiers, bureaucrats, and servants, the royal family had performed a daring demographic feat that justified the chronicler’s enthusiasm. In the early 1800s, Brazil had an approximate population of 3.33 million, with the city of Rio holding over 54,000 inhabitants. The sudden influx of at least 10,000 Portuguese to Rio, and the many foreigners in their wake, represetented a significant demographic injection that heightened the contrast between a populated Brazilian littoral and vast but sparsely inhabited hinterlands.Footnote ³

Low population density turned Brazil into an ostensibly blank canvas for European visions of prosperity partly fueled by an ongoing “agricultural renaissance.” Throughout Brazil’s captaincies, new commodities accompanied the recovery of the more traditional sugar industry as old colonial products such as gold, pau-brasil, and whale oil declined. In Maranhão, cotton and rice had a promising start. In the south, the sub-captaincy of Rio Grande de São Pedro began to produce wheat as it conquered internal markets in beef and hides. And coffee began to be cultivated on a small scale in the mountains around Rio de Janeiro. By 1806, Brazilian products constituted 62.4 percent of Portugal’s combined exports and re-exports.Footnote ⁴

Eighteenth-century statesmen latched expectations for such economic prosperity to population. Royal officials routinely shipped cohorts of young casais (couples) from the Azores and Madeira to start povoações (population nuclei) across Brazil, setting precedents that nineteenth-century observers would look back upon. In 1809 and closer to Rio, an English traveler described the plantation of an Azorean-born landowner who had managed to plant 5,000 coffee bushes with the help of six slaves and two sons, and whose example would “stimulate the emulation of his neighbors.” Still in 1830, and farther north, one geographer attributed the populous nature of the Amazonian town of Bragança to a considerable “white population” of “Azorite” descent.Footnote ⁵

Grafting populations onto an ostensible Arcadia had been a slowly developing royal project. In 1747, a royal provision minutely defined the conditions for transport and settlement of Azorean colonos in Santa Catarina, systematizing what had previously been a largely unstructured practice. Then, with the accession of José I to the Portuguese throne in 1750, the king’s notoriously sanguine minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello, future marquês de Pombal, incorporated a more diverse roster of colonization modalities into his imperial reform program. He redirected convict exiles to Mato Grosso and the Amazon basin and established the Directorate of Indians (1757) to “protect” and “civilize” indigenous peoples in aldéas (villages) meant to acculturate them, exploit them for labor, and marry their women to incoming colonos.Footnote ⁶

Most importantly, Pombal created two pathbreaking monopoly companies in the Brazilian north and northeast that would function as the earliest points of reference for nineteenth-century colonization companies. The Companhia Geral de Grão-Pará e Maranhão of 1755 and the Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba of 1759 propelled Pombal’s imperial vision as “company-states.” Similar to, but less powerful than, the British East India Company, the Companhias Gerais sought to structure entire Brazilian regions thanks to the significant governance power outsourced to them by Pombal.Footnote ⁷ Significantly, these Companhias Gerais pursued very diverse peopling policies toward two guiding objectives: increasing labor pools and establishing revenue-generating population nodes. In doing so, they indistinguishably folded very different kinds of populations – colonos, convicts, Indians, newly imported enslaved Africans – into an integrated vision guided in the main by a drive for fiscal gains, on the one hand, and private dividends, on the other.

While Luso-Brazilian statesmen reflected back on these corporate precedents for decades, in the immediate aftermath of Pombal’s 1777 downfall, they continued their search for reformist models focused on transporting and managing populations, particularly in orphanages and poorhouses established across Europe. By 1794, Luso-Brazilian administrators had familiarized themselves with prospective bureaux de charité upon the Loire, subscription-funded hôtels in Lyon, the ozpedali, albergui, and retiri of Sardinia, and even Thomas Jefferson’s own iterations of these for Virginia. Such initiatives featured prominently in the outlay of the Arco do Cego, a royal publishing initiative established in Lisbon in 1799 focusing on the dissemination of practical improvements and scientific knowledge.Footnote ⁸

Punitive forms of population transport endured, as when João ordered vagrants from Pernambuco to be transferred to the African Portuguese outposts of Angola and Benguela.Footnote ⁹ Yet reformists like Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho soon began to spell out nonpunitive alternatives. In 1803, for instance, Souza Coutinho counseled populating the wastelands of Trás-os-Montes with poor peasants and decommissioned soldiers to alleviate poverty, one of a number of measures he proposed expressly “to see population grow.”Footnote ¹⁰ By the hand of Souza Coutinho and others, peopling gradually shed old-regime practices and began adopting novel trends in poor relief and Malthusian-inspired drives to promote population growth.

This change unexpectedly accelerated in 1807, when the royal household itself partook in an improvised and unintended transfer that Souza Coutinho had proposed as early as 1799. As Napoleonic troops marched toward Lisbon, the Braganças, their courtiers, and the entire imperial government hurriedly set sail to Rio in an escape that marked a profound political shift: the transformation of Brazil’s old colonial capital into the seat of the Portuguese Empire.Footnote ¹¹ The change had an immediate peopling effect because at least some 10,000 Portuguese arrived with the royal family, forcing the city into a sudden expansion beyond colonial-era confines. The prince regent saw this as an opportunity not only to adopt measures to regulate property but also to capitalize from its rising value. After requisitioning properties to house nobles and officers, João imposed the urban dízima, a 10 percent levy on property, and quickly extended it to inland towns in 1809. As historians have shown, the Bragança ruler would remain beholden to merchants and slave traders representing the wealthiest 10 percent of Rio’s population and the Crown’s leading creditors. But, from the moment of arrival, he also began implementing measures meant to leverage population growth while promoting it in a careful balance that buttressed Rio’s transformation from a city of about 50,000 to one of 100,000 inhabitants by 1820.Footnote ¹²

Defense and Development

Notwithstanding revenue-generating visions, military imperatives took precedence over long-term economic goals upon the Court’s arrival in Rio. The threat of a French invasion was compounded by the rising unrest across Spanish America following the crisis of 1808, when the Spanish king abdicated his crown under Napoléon’s orders. In the years ahead, the political situation in the Río de la Plata remained in flux, and the Portuguese Crown contemplated a host of possible scenarios, from carlotistas who called for João’s wife, the Spanish princess María Carlota, to claim the Spanish throne, to heterogeneous republican-inclined armies of indigenous peoples who could tip the balance of revolution one way or another.Footnote ¹³

Preempting these perils, Souza Coutinho submitted a master plan to the prince regent to protect Brazilian lands from French invasion and safeguard frontiers with Spanish America. Beginning with the construction of the first gunpowder factory in Brazil, Souza Coutinho’s plan strategically integrated imperial resources. Military expeditions from Mozambique would, in theory, seize the Île de France and Île Bourbon (Mauritius and Réunion), while Brazilian forces invaded French Cayenne. Meanwhile, a good supply of tropical hardwoods allowed Bahia’s shipyard to build eleven war vessels of varying tonnage within a year.Footnote ¹⁴ Souza Coutinho sought to multiply that level of production across Brazil by importing drought-resistant trees from Macao and Goa to the Amazon and the Brazilian northeast and seeding diverse pine plantations in southern Brazil to compensate for the loss of the Baltic timber trade . Hemp cultivation, a constant but elusive pursuit since Pombaline times, would in turn provide cordage to replace shipments from Riga.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, new foundries would produce anchors and copper laminates to galvanize a new Luso-Brazilian naval force.

Notably, Souza Coutinho’s plan also incorporated strategic peopling measures, recommending “the emigration of any loyal, industrious vassals that wish to come to add to the force and population of the Empire.” In 1808, the prince regent followed suit by ordering the transport of 1,500 Azorean families to Rio Grande do Sul in response to Souza Coutinho’s recurrent concerns with both “the need to people that … frontier captaincy” and the perceived overpopulation of the Azores. Interestingly, in order to carry out these directed migrations, Souza Coutinho proposed a partnership with “foreign capitalists” who could provide the necessary naval infrastructure in the Azores, signaling an early opening to the profit-oriented facets of peopling projects.Footnote ¹⁶

Souza Coutinho’s vision also guided the prince regent toward assertive military action. In 1809, a Luso-Brazlian land-and-sea operation took the French outpost of Cayenne. Portuguese forces then mobilized in the Banda Oriental (present-day Uruguay) in 1811, eventually taking control of Montevideo, which became the seat of the Brazilian Kingdom’s new Cisplatina province. As these plans played out, a cash-strapped Crown tried to tether new revenues to land occupancy by issuing ordinances in 1809 and 1810 that favored long-term cultivation and population growth. These ordinances increased taxes on forais (ecclesiastical and Crown lands receiving special privileges), distributed baldios (wastelands), and revived emphytheusis, a life-long lease on the use of government property.Footnote ¹⁷ In doing so, however, they incited ecclesiastical and mainland Portuguese objectors who stymied their application until Souza Coutinho passed away in 1812.Footnote ¹⁸ Nevertheless, Souza Coutinho had reared Brazilian acolytes who would uphold his legacy by bringing the lessons of their training to the service of the state with important ripple effects on peopling. José Feliciano Fernandes Pinheiro, for instance, translated works on agricultural improvement in British colonies and poorhouses in Munich at the Arco do Cego from 1799 to 1801 before turning to government service for years to come in Rio Grande do Sul, a newly opening and strategically important peopling frontier.Footnote ¹⁹

José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva was perhaps the most outstanding of the students endorsed by Souza Coutinho as he moved the needle of peopling from defensive to developmental applications. After studying at Coimbra under Italian Physiocrat Domingos Vandelli, José Bonifácio obtained a government bursary to train in numerous European universities, which allowed him to refine and actualize a practical vision of peopling as part and parcel of a broader strategy for state development. During his decade-long travels for study, no residency proved more consequential than his long stay at the school of mines at Freiberg, where he worked closely with faculty trained in the cameralist sciences developed at the University of Göttingen and other German centers of learning. Cameral sciences, or the “sciences of the state” as they were also referred to, encompassed a broad constellation of academic disciplines geared toward practical administrative knowledge.Footnote ²⁰ Cameralists prized population as both a means for and an end to their interest in perfecting administrative and economic practices to maximize government revenues. When José Bonifácio began applying the lessons learned at Freiberg, his ideas very much aligned with the populationism adopted not only in German kingdoms but also in empires like Russia.Footnote ²¹

José Bonifácio returned to Portugal in 1801 to teach at the Casa da Moeda and then at Coimbra as chair of mineralogy before being appointed intendant general of mines and forests. In this latter role, as he went about reorganizing mining endeavors and pine plantations in Portugal, he crucially recast peopling as the necessary flipside of mining, which in his view “populate[d] barren mountains … and fill[ed] them in time with villages, towns and cities” while producing state revenues through taxes on consumption.Footnote ²² When he returned to Brazil after decades studying and working overseas, he also championed private companies as those used “in Germany, Hungary and the Northern Kingdoms” to lead mining endeavors, bringing peopling and companies into the same developmental paradigm centered around mining.Footnote ²³

José Bonifácio’s administrative, company-friendly, and peopling-oriented meliorism helped him organize a network of collaborators familiar with or trained in German mining sciences. This network led the first company effort involving the importation of foreign specialized labor. Thanks to his friend Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira, who was then the Portuguese chargé d’affaires in Berlin, José Bonifácio contracted Wilhelm von Eschwege, a mining specialist trained in Göttingen, and Friedrich Varnhagen, a military engineer from Hesse, to serve as foundry directors in Portugal and later brought them to Brazil when his brother, Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, another Arco do Cego alumnus, revived plans for the São João do Ipanema foundry near the iron deposits of Sorocaba, São Paulo.Footnote ²⁴ Seeing the possibility of domestic weapons manufacturing, Souza Coutinho approved the incorporation of the foundry into a joint-stock company strongly backed by the prince regent. However, this opportunity soon soured when the racketeering of the personnel recruiter in Stockholm led to losses equivalent to 19 percent of total production costs in 1813. Varnhagen then assumed command and by 1820 steered Ipanema to full operations with a roster of several German molders and 89 enslaved workers under their orders.Footnote ²⁵ The experience laid bare the fact that, despite cameralist ideals, economic plans involving new companies and imported foreign workers remained vulnerable to self-enriching opportunists due to their nature as profit-oriented enterprises.

The troubled but ultimately successful effort at Ipanema foundry accompanied other efforts that combined peopling with ambitious economic pursuits on both sides of the Portuguese Atlantic. In Brazil, the Impressão Régia threw its weight behind a bourgeoning populationism by publishing Herrenschwand’s cameralist-infused ideas on population growth. In 1815, a local judge in Lisbon ordered vagrant youth sent to the Alentejo to populate and revive a moribund Portuguese hinterland.Footnote ²⁶ In Brazilian sertões like Guarapuava and the Rio Doce valley, the war against itinerant Indians decreed by the prince regent in 1808 to free up land for settlement raged on as he ordered the transport of Azoreans to the region. Still in 1813, the Crown authorized importing Chinese workers at the behest of Miguel de Arriaga Brum da Silveira, ouvidor-geral of Macau. These workers were originally intended as field hands and naval carpenters but ended up in the new Botanical Gardens and in the royal fazenda of Santa Cruz, where they worked alongside a diverse labor pool and received relatively better treatment than their indigenous or African counterparts. In 1819, a planned contingent of a hundred Portuguese arrived at Desterro (present-day Florianópolis), settling Nova Ericeira, an avatar of their eponymous seaside hometown and a royal-funded homestead that flourished into multiple towns.Footnote ²⁷ These diverse peopling pursuits added up in time to turn the initially defensive, military applications of peopling initiatives into more regionally targeted strategies for economic improvement.

However, the most dramatic shift in peopling from defensive toward development-oriented goals occurred at the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, where the Portuguese Crown fell squarely between two contending camps negotiating the borders and balance of a new international order.Footnote ²⁸ On one side, Russia, Austria, and Prussia defined an absolutist bloc intent on restoring monarchies and later officialized as the Holy Alliance. On the other side, Great Britain championed a liberal world order freed from the slave trade. The Portuguese plenipotentiaries participated in negotiations only partially and were forced to deliver hard concessions like extinguishing the trade north of the equator while aggressively pursuing indemnification for British-apprehended vessels. From the sidelines, the Portuguese envoys also reciprocated the overtures of conservative powers.Footnote ²⁹ Russia, which had amicably appointed a consul, Georg von Langsdorff, to Rio in 1813, offered to return Portuguese territories lost to Spain after the Treaty of Badajoz (1801). Prussia in turn considered softening slave trade sanctions and guaranteeing mutual protection for religious liberties in Prussian and Portuguese domains.

Meanwhile, the prince regent took bold steps to insulate his empire from the pressures arising in Vienna. He elevated Brazil to the status of kingdom on a par with Portugal and the Algarves in a nod to the marquis de Talleyrand, the French ambassador to Vienna who allegedly suggested it, but kept the French in thrall by withholding Cayenne as collateral for later negotiations.Footnote ³⁰ After Queen Maria I’s death in 1816, a newly crowned João VI occupied Montevideo, which would soon become Brazil’s new Cisplatina province. His strategic maneuvers concluded in 1817 with his son Pedro de Bragança’s marriage to princess Leopoldina, daughter to the Austrian Hapsburg king and head of the old Holy Roman Empire Francis II.

The Congress of Vienna spelled multiple binds for the Luso-Brazilian government, but the overtures of conservative allies and João VI’s strategic offensives generated fresh opportunities. This dynamic unintendedly repurposed peopling paradigms by providing an overture into Brazil for private actors from Holy Alliance countries. As part of the new state of affairs, German-speaking travelers, diplomats, and artists began streaming in, including Langsdorff and the Austrian scientific expedition that accompanied princess Leopoldina across the Atlantic. These men would soon establish “colonies” in Brazil that expanded peopling beyond government uses and redefined it as a lucrative sphere of business, or more concretely, as the business of colonization.Footnote ³¹

The German Connection

German visitors to the Kingdom of Brazil benefited from the groundwork laid out by Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, the consul general appointed by Russia in 1813 who went on to anchor an expansive network of German-speaking colonization entrepreneurs. Born in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Langsdorff hailed from a region with high levels of emigration after the Napoleonic wars, so he was no stranger to the forces behind migratory dynamics. In 1797, he obtained a medical degree from the University of Göttingen, an epicenter of German cameral sciences and the common alma mater for many of the German travelers to Brazil.Footnote ³² At Göttingen, Langsdorff studied natural history under Johann Blumenbach and witnessed the consolidation of administrative disciplines related to statistics and the “sciences of the state” more generally. In 1798, he went to Portugal accompanying one of the many nobles of smaller German states attending Göttingen. Although his patron suffered a fatal edema, Langsdorff stayed in Lisbon as a private physician at the insistence of the Portuguese War minister. However, five years later, he rushed to Copenhagen to join captain Adam J. von Kruzenshtern, a Baltic German about to set out on the first Russian circumnavigation of the world.Footnote ³³ With stops at Rio and Desterro, this voyage launched Russo-Brazilian relations and offered Langsdorff his first brush with Brazil.

Notably, the voyage was funded by the Russian-American Company, a state-chartered private enterprise established in 1799 for fur-trading and settlement activities in Alaska and northern California. In this regard, the trip proved instructive for Langsdorff, as it introduced him to the power of companies in relation to settlement activities. The voyage also exposed him to the most varied geographies, rounding Cape Horn to stop at Nuku Hiva (Marquesas Islands), Hawai’i, the Kamchatka peninsula, Japan, and the Kuril Archipelago before reaching the Company’s headquarters in Sitka. In 1805, Langsdorff accompanied Nicolai Rezanov, one of the Russian-American Company’s founders, on another expedition to northern California. Leaving famine-stricken Sitka behind, he visited the Franciscan missions of San Francisco, San José de Guadalupe, and Santa Clara before returning north and eventually traveling by land across Siberia to St. Petersburg.Footnote ³⁴

Setting sail to Rio in 1813, Langsdorff brought along not only firsthand knowledge about long-distance trade and management of settlements but also an equally enterprising colleague in the person of Georg Wilhelm Freyreiss, a naturalist from Frankfurt. Freyreiss soon fashioned himself into a colonization empresario together with a number of other German speakers seeking to establish their own plantations, or colonies, in southern Bahia, a task that he undertook with the help of key contacts and the reconnaissance travels they facilitated. Botanist friends from Stockholm and Uppsala referred him to Lorenz Westin, the Swedish-Norwegian consul in Brazil. Upon Freyreiss’s arrival, Westin funded his first scientific voyage from Juiz de Fora to Vila Rica in the company of Eschwege, then working as director of mines. In 1815, he undertook a second voyage along the southern Bahian districts, this time funded by João VI himself and, thanks to Langsdorff’s connections, accompanied by a team of scientists under the command of prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, another Göttingen alumnus. Freyreiss learned about Brazilian plant specimens as well as semi-itinerant peoples like the Aymorés, Coroados, and Patachós. Then, he set his mind to settlement efforts similarly to other travelers and expatriates.

Visiting the plantation of Dutch engineer Peter Weyll, in the Almada region, Freyreiss fantasized about a colonial establishment and identified a potential site near the source of River Peruípe. The location fell squarely within Botocudo territory, but Freyreiss espoused notions of coercive indigenous tutelage and apprenticeship even though he bemoaned African slavery. In fact, within three years of arriving, Freyreiss took up an “indigenous attendant” and bartered a Puri boy away from his family during his expedition with prince Maximilian. By the time he requested royal lands for a colony in southern Bahia, he probably envisioned an agrarian establishment run on the backs of indigenous laborers.Footnote ³⁵ He obtained a sesmaria in the district of Porto Seguro, near Vila Viçosa, as did a varied group of Germans and northern Europeans including Weyll and his associates; W. F. baron von dem Bussche, a noble and one-time Mason who served in Jérôme Bonaparte’s short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia; and Peter Peycke, a Hamburg merchant eventually named consul to Salvador in 1821. Later, too, came the family of Charles-Louis Borrell, a merchant from Prussian-controlled Neuchâtel.Footnote ³⁶ Though not organized as a company, these Swiss and German colonos concertedly lobbied state authorities for favors and found a receptive patron in princess Leopoldina, in whose honor they named their colony.Footnote ³⁷

These private colonization efforts incited others to try their hand, including a Bavarian doctor also trained at Göttingen who had served in the Russian army, received an honorary barony from tsar Alexander I, and worked for the Russian-American Company. Anton von Schäffer had a lot in common with Langsdorff, who he sought when he called port in Rio on his way to Hawai’i and China aboard a Russian-American Company ship. Langsdorff introduced his countryman to the royal household before his departure to the South Seas. On his return from Macau in 1818, Schäffer spent a month in Rio and befriended Leopoldina. Profiting from her protection, by 1820 Schäffer arrived in the vicinities of the Leopoldina colony with forty-odd fellow compatriots from Franconia to begin settling his own sesmaria, which he aptly called Frankental.Footnote ³⁸ Schäffer and his neighbors in Leopoldina quickly turned to indigenous labor and, increasingly, to slavery in order to attain unprecedented production levels for the region (Figure 1.1).Footnote ³⁹ In 1832, as the municipal chamber of Vila Viçosa attempted unsuccessfully to expropriate its lands, Leopoldina numbered 86 whites who altogether owned 489 slaves and produced more tax revenue than the city of Vila Viçosa itself. By 1858, about 200 whites held 40 plantations on the backs of 2,000 Black slaves.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 1.1 Slaveholding colonos: Fazenda Pombal in Colônia Leopoldina, c. 1820s–early 1830s

Jean-Frédéric Bosset de Luze (1754–1838), “Fazenda Pombal, Colonia Leopoldina, Bahia,” (undated).

Courtesy of Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Even though its colonos’ slaveholding contradicted João VI’s expectations, Leopoldina promised to harness peopling toward productive industries and efficient commodity chains. As the press celebrated in 1818, German newcomers in southern Bahia had produced enough cotton and maize to bring to port at Canavieiras via the Jequitinhonha and Salsa rivers that these could soon resemble the Elbe, “the busiest river in the world …!” Southern Bahia’s concessions in fact joined the concurrent flurry of directed migrations authorized by João VI. The king welcomed Chinese horticulturists, Portuguese fishermen, German smiths, and even Spanish royalists emigrating from the River Plate. He chartered an agriculture and navigation company to open up the Rio Doce basin – the first of a series of enterprises over the next half century. And he sanctioned myriad migrant settlements that in a few years went from ramshackle establishments to towns or parishes contributing government revenues.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet the German connection facilitated by Langsdorff and soon responsible for a region-wide entrepreneurial push anticipated a different approach to colonization, one that required less government input but would produce, in theory, equal or greater gains for all involved. The problem was that with great promise came great perils, and the Luso-Brazilian government had yet to develop the tools to manage them.

The Start of a Learning Curve

A fresh cohort of capable royal counselors led by Pombal’s pupil Tomás Antônio de Vilanova Portugal shepherded new colonization endeavors. At the command of numerous ministries from 1808 to 1821, Vilanova Portugal promoted peopling initiatives and resolved the frequent complications dredged up by directed migrations.Footnote ⁴² In 1817, authorities in Lisbon uncovered a Masonic conspiracy aiming to sever ties between Portugal and Brazil and executed the ringleader, Vienna-educated general Gomes Freire de Andrade, together with 11 others, while banishing four of the accused. Among those who avoided the galleys was Friedrich Christian von Eben, baron d’Eben, a Hanover-born officer who fought with the Portuguese against Napoleon’s forces in the Upper Douro. When d’Eben relocated to Oldenburg, he began recruiting conscripts for revolutionary armies in South America and soon confounded local authorities who found it hard to differentiate his activities from João VI’s emigrant drives. As a result, in 1819 Vilanova Portugal determined that it would be ill-advised for the Royal Treasury to directly engage in colono recruitment at the time.Footnote ⁴³

Such complications laid bare the hazards of government-directed migrations and predisposed Luso-Brazilians toward other modalities of official involvement. Empires elsewhere offered useful models. The press in Rio took note, for instance, of Spain’s efforts to populate its Caribbean colonies starting in 1815, when the king offered generous subsidies to migrants coming to Puerto Rico on the condition that they be white and from the mainland, the Canary Islands, or allied Catholic countries in Europe. Imperial Russian policies offering generous subsidies for German emigrants to populate newly conquered territories in Transcaucasia provided another example. Following a similar logic, colonies in Brazil could serve as a frontline for evangelization or even as a low-cost frontier militia against Indians in the likeness of the Landwehr, the national guard devised in Prussia to accommodate war veterans and reduce army sizes. Some of these ideas would only come to fruition if João VI allowed foreign entrepreneurs to take the lead or at least level private initiative with royal concessions and oversight. Soon, the Crown gave in to an offer along these lines that resulted in the establishment of Nova Friburgo, a colony populated by Swiss migrants that quickly gained notoriety.Footnote ⁴⁴

Conditions of duress across Europe and demographic pressures generated by decommissioned armies at the closing of the Napoleonic wars made Nova Friburgo possible. The end of military service, food shortages, and heavy taxation policies in German polities had sapped artisans’ purses and strengthened emigration as an option.Footnote ⁴⁵ Contingency also tipped the global scales. On 11 April 1815, a volcanic peak in Indonesia known as Mount Tambora sustained the most potent volcanic eruption in recorded history, generating a sulfur dioxide mantle in the upper atmosphere that blocked sunlight and sent temperatures dipping around the world for months. The eruption made 1810–1820 the coldest decade in half a millennium and generated harvest failures across Europe until 1818. In the German Palatinate and the Swiss cantons, craftsmen lacking subsistence plots suffered the most from the resulting food scarcity, which led stonemasons, tailors, and bakers to emigrate in record numbers.Footnote ⁴⁶

In 1817, an opportunist from Gruyères named Sébastien-Nicolas Gachet incorporated a societé en commandite to establish farmsteads and dairy farms in Brazil. Gachet had served as secretary to Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, suffered captivity in Algiers, and worked as customs inspector at Naples before returning to his home canton of Fribourg right at the height of its crisis. Fribourg syndics persuaded him to siphon hungry craftsmen to Brazil and appointed him as a diplomatic agent to get it done. Once in Rio, Gachet secured an audience with João VI and convinced him of the benefits of welcoming Catholic families who would promote industry, grow grain, and educate “savages.” With more than a thousand enslaved workers at his fazenda Santa Cruz by 1816, João VI now had a chance to stage royal support for free labor and patronize an establishment supplying the Court with special crafts and foods. As Dr. Ritter, a Prussian emigrant, enthused to the German press, the Swiss colony would soon provide “fresh butter, rye and wine!” thanks to João VI’s endowment of “all the Privileges and benefits accorded to free Fairs” for the fledgling colony.Footnote ⁴⁷ Seeing Nova Friburgo as an opportunity to innovate, João VI appointed his first Colonization Inspector in father Pedro Miranda Malheiro. Together with Gachet, and under the purview of Vilanova Portugal, Miranda Malheiro authored instructions to welcome the Swiss emigrants, which serve perhaps as the first migrant reception policy in Brazil. The instructions tasked authorities to board ships with citrus fruit to palliate scurvy and disembark migrants away from the city to minimize illnesses. Colonos were to quarantine for two weeks at Macacu on the northern end of Guanabara Bay before overland travel. At the proposed site of Nova Friburgo, Vilanova Portugal and Miranda Malheiro also envisioned demarcating plots to distribute among the newcomers, sidestepping the archaic legal code that had governed property rights since 1603.Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite the preparations, the Swiss migrants faced a litany of complications. After a long trip down the Rhine from the cantons of Fribourg, Berne and Valais, they had their baggage stolen in Holland and fell prey to smallpox and a diarrheal malady referred to as the “Rotterdamer.” Of 2,382 migrants, 43 died in Holland, 314 en route to Brazil, and 35 upon disembarking at Macacu. The remaining colonos made the twelve-day ascent up the Sea Ridge to the proposed site of the colony in Cantagallo, where further illnesses and crop failures awaited them in following years. By mid-1820, Nova Friburgo had recorded 536 deaths. Keeping its word against all odds, the Crown continued to nurse the moribund colony.Footnote ⁴⁹

Meanwhile, propaganda unabatedly stoked emigration drives in the Swiss cantons and German territories. An important Berlin daily celebrated the arrival in Rio of 800 individuals from Fribourg and encouraged commoners to follow suit, offering information about ship departures, advance payments, and Swiss emigration agents. By June, another 800 or so emigrants from Darmstadt, Wittgenstein, and the Palatinate (all close to Freyreiss’s hometown of Frankfurt, which suggests his or his associates’ involvement) awaited voyage to Bahia. Due to forest fires and drought conditions across the Swiss cantons, the newpaper estimated that 1,000 more would emigrate to Brazil over the summer, which incited all classes of speculators to spring to action. Gachet himself began charging a per capita surcharge as part of his profit-seeking practices.Footnote ⁵⁰ The radius of recruitment expanded in lockstep with opportunities for self-enrichment. From November 1819 to February 1820, nine ships entered Rio from Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Le Havre, carrying 2,228 colonos.Footnote ⁵¹

Yet these voyages still confronted significant hardships, providing important cautionary tales for Luso-Brazilian statesmen. Prussian galleon Deigluckhache Reise landed in Rio from Rotterdam with 432 colonos after 68 days at sea, a dangerously long voyage for a packed vessel. The Trajano, which carried colonos’ baggage and implements, arrived more than a month later than scheduled due to inclement weather. Leaving Amsterdam with a full passenger load, the Camilus ran into a sand bank, unnecessarily lengthening the trip. A Swiss committee in London accused these shipments’ organizers of prevaricating, citing their thriftiness on travel accommodations and failure to measure lands in advance at Nova Friburgo.Footnote ⁵² Worried about such recriminations, Vilanova Portugal cautioned his Hamburg minister, “only once this [colony] has consolidated will we try others.”Footnote ⁵³

These new reservations against government involvement in emigration drives buoyed private efforts of a more exemplary nature such as those led by Langsdorff. Having set up his own fazenda, which he called Mandioca, at the feet of the Serra da Estrela in Guanabara Bay, Langsdorff set out to Europe to recruit colonos in 1820. He published a guide for emigrants in Paris and an expanded German edition in Heidelberg by early 1821. His goal, he claimed, “was not to hire colonists, nor to encourage European migrations to Brazil, but simply to bring incontestable facts … to those who may be interested.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He reproduced a decree by Vilanova Portugal defining admission rules and favors for colonos as well as travel costs. In the German edition, he also added a section with “Special Thoughts” on the utility of Unternehmer (middlemen or contractors), recommending one by the name of H. G. Schmidt. Langsdorff returned to Rio with somewhere between 80 and 103 German colonos in tow.

At Mandioca, Langsdorff built a profit machine propelled by these workers needs, labor, and debts. Colonos paid 10 percent of their production, a 10 percent government tax legally supposed to begin after ten years of residency but charged by Langsdorff to cover property and transport expenses, and yet another 10 percent for using Mandioca’s waterways for milling. In turn, they had access to tools, lumber, food rations, communal plots, and a few beasts of burden. Langsdorff intended Mandioca as a model, and to that end he hosted and aided his countrymen in scientific and colonization pursuits, especially other Göttingen alumni like Eschwege, prince Maximilian, and Schäffer. However, his setup in fact required an excessive degree of close management and inevitably entailed significant inequities. When Langsdorff left on a pioneering river voyage from Porto Feliz in São Paulo to Belém in 1824, his colonos rapidly absconded, including some substitutes he had brought from Nova Friburgo. In 1826, the imperial government bought his property and closed lingering contractual obligations with remaining workers. A short time later Langsdorff’s hired manager published a scathing account of the Mandioca experiment.Footnote ⁵⁵

* * *

Langsdorff’s enterprise coincided with momentous political transformations, and together with them crafted a definition of colonization that endured into Brazil’s independence. In 1820, as Langsdorff sailed to Europe, the Liberal Revolution broke out in Porto. Its victors quickly recalled João VI to Portugal to attend a constituent Courts in Lisbon, which, especially when the king arrived in August 1821, threatened to roll back years of political gains for Brazil, as metropolitan deputies considered reverting the kingdom to a colonial status.Footnote ⁵⁶ Interestigly, Brazilian representatives responded with a repertoire of proposals rooted in colonization, much of it informed by German ideas and acquaintances over the prior decade. Representing São Paulo, José Bonifácio, for instance, suggested replacing sesmarias with land sales to yield revenue for “colonization with poor Europeans, Indians, mulattos and free blacks.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Colonization, he believed, could also prepare a new seat for the Court in Brazil’s interior, where rivers and roads would connect the Brazilian capital to coastal ports, and forest preservation and land surveying would make way for “Cities and Settlements.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In April 1822, as Pedro de Bragança declared Brazil free from Portugal, the Unterhammer mentioned in Langsdorff’s tract, H. G. Schmidt, coindicentally sent a proposal to the Courts suggesting how to direct migrations to Brazil in ways that surpassed Russia or the United States.Footnote ⁵⁹ Having lived in Holland, the United States, Germany, and Brazil, Schmidt authoritatively listed his simple recommendations: speedier embarkations to lower mortality rates, fixing transport costs, appointing a plenipotentiary colonization director in German lands. Yet his most important proposal hinged on organizing colonization juntas at the provincial level to cover transport costs, distribute land and supplies, naturalize colonos upon arrival, and eventually collect a portion of colonos’ production. In short, Schmidt had drawn the blueprint of a country-wide system of colonization administration that defined Brazilian statesmen’s post-independence aspirations thanks to the fact that a deputy from Bahia, Domingo Borges de Barros, took up these ideas when he addressed the Lisbon Courts.

A proven improver, and a founding honorary member of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, Borges did not explicitly cite Schmidt, but he called for an identical system as that proposed by Schmidt – a centralized five-member colonization junta would oversee provincial efforts, each revolving around regional caixas (treasuries) tasked with administering colonies and Indian villages.Footnote ⁶⁰ Importantly, Borges also made space for private entrepreneurs to run colonization drives at their own expense. The proposal audaciously synthesized recent colonization lessons with the unmistakable mark of German involvement, but ill-fated disagreements at the Courts foreclosed discussion.

Seeing themselves outnumbered, the Brazilian deputies at the Lisbon Courts fled in secret, rushing to Brazil to join the campaign for severing ties with Portugal. After Brazilian independence in 1822, they would attempt to implement versions of Schmidt’s and Borges’s ideas for decades to come. By then, they held a keen, if incipient, awareness of colonization’s evolving arcs. In its form as peopling, it had mutated from an old-regime governmental tool into an urgent defensive stratagem when the royal household most needed it, before turning into an instrument for long-term development. All the while, these statesmen believed, peopling had served to preempt an attack on the Crown’s new abode and to appease both the British and the Holly Alliance. After 1815 and especially with Leopoldina’s arrival two years later, German ideas and interests invigorated colonization as an emergent sphere of private speculative pursuits. Bearing in mind the innumerable variables of that dynamic, some understood the need for a novel governmental approach, one that preserved directed migration as a profitable business without relinquishing the involvement of the newly independent government.

Footnotes

¹ Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 1–3; AN, Junta do Comércio-cx. 386, Charles Frazer, “Observations on the Agriculture of Brazil with Suggestions for Improving and Increasing That Useful Art” (14 June 1810); José Jobson de Andrade Arruda, Uma colônia entre dois impérios: a abertura dos portos brasileiros, 1800–1808 (Bauru: Edusc, 2008).

² José Luis Cardoso, “Free Trade, Political Economy and the Birth of a New Economic Nation: Brazil, 1808–1810,” Revista de História Económica 27, no. 2 (2009): 183–204; José da Silva Lisboa, “Parecer dado por ordem superior sobre os expedientes necessários ao progresso e melhoramento da população do Brasil,” (c. 1816) in Política, administração, economia e finanças públicas portuguesas (1750–1820), ed. José Viriato Capela (Braga: Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade do Minho, 1993), 320.

³ Luiz Gonçalves dos Santos, Memórias para servir à história do Reino do Brasil (Lisboa: Impressão Regia, 1825), vol. 1, 111; Douglas Graham and Thomas W. Merrick, Population and Economic Development in Brazil: 1800 to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 26–36; “Memória estatística do Império do Brasil,” (1829), RIHGB 58, no. 1 (1895): 91–99.

⁴ Dauril Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil, 1750–1808,” in Colonial Brazil, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 284–343; Fernando Novais, Portugal e Brasil na crise do antigo sistema colonial (1777–1808) (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1979); Jorge M. Pedreira, “Economia e política na explicação da independência do Brasil,” in A independência brasileira: Novas dimensões, ed. Jurandir Malerba (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2006), 55–97.

⁵ Ignácio Cerqueira e Silva, Corografia paraense, ou descripção física, histórica, e política da Província do Gram-Pará (Bahia: Typographia do Diário, 1833), 247; John Mawe, Travels in the Interior of Brazil (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme, and Brown, 1812), 119.

⁶ “Provisão de 9 de agosto de 1747,” in Imigração e colonização. Legislação de 1747–1850, ed. Luiza Horn Iotti (Caxias do Sul: EDUCS, 2001), 38–41; José de Souza Azevedo Pizarro e Araújo, Memórias históricas do Rio de Janeiro e das províncias anexas à jurisdicção do vice-rei do Estado do Brasil, vol. 9 (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Nacional, 1822), 276–279, 335; Manoel Domingos Farias Rendeiro Neto, “Denying Sovereignties: Empires, Maps, and Runaway Indigenous People and Maroons in Amazonian Borderlands (1777–1800),” (MA thesis, University of California, Davis, 2018).

⁷ José Ribeiro Júnior, Colonização e monopólio no nordeste brasileiro: a Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba, 1759–1780 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2004 [1976]); Antonio Carreira, As companhias pombalinas de Grão Pará e Maranhão, e Pernambuco e Paraíba (Lisboa: Presença, 1983); Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–14; Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

⁸ AN, Diversos-cód. 807, vol. 21, ff. 81–93; Walter Fraga Filho, Mendigos, moleques e vadios na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1996); Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18, 35–62; John Howard, História dos principaes lazaretos d’Europa, trans. José Ferreira da Silva (Lisbon: Arco do Cego, 1800).

⁹ Kenneth Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil and Portugal, 1750–1808 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 206–239; Timothy J. Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

¹⁰ Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, “Discurso para se ler na sessão da Sociedade Marítima …” (1803), BNd, Manuscritos-col. Linhares, I-29,13,25, doc. 23; Agostinho de Sousa Coutinho, O conde de Linhares, dom Rodrigo Domingos Antonio de Sousa Coutinho (Lisbon: Typographia Bayard, 1908).

¹¹ Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do império: questão nacional e questão colonial na crise do antigo regime português (Lisbon: Edições Afrontamento, 1993), 161.

¹² João Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura: acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro (1790–1830) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992), 255–261; Manolo Florentino and João Fragoso, O arcaísmo como projeto. Mercado Atlântico, sociedade agrária e elite mercantil no Rio de Janeiro, c. 1790–c. 1840 (Rio de Janeiro: Diadorim, 1993); Santos, Memórias, vol. 1, 209, 232–236; Maria B. Nizza da Silva, “Medidas urbanísticas no Rio de Janeiro durante o período joanino,” RIHGB 161, no. 407 (2000): 95–108; Jurandir Malerba, A corte no exílio. Civilização e poder no Brasil às vésperas da Independência (1808–1821) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000), 187–193; Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 101–110; Andréa Slemian, Vida política em tempo de crise: Rio de Janeiro (1808–1824) (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2006), 55–57.

¹³ João Paulo Pimenta, A independência do Brasil e a experiência hispano-americana (1808–1822) (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2015); Karina Melo, “Historias indígenas em contextos de formação dos Estados argentino, brasileiro e uruguaio: charruas, guaranis e minuanos em fronteiras platinas (1801–1818)” (PhD diss., Unicamp, 2017); Marcela Ternavasio, Los juegos de la política: Las independencias hispanoamericanas frente a la contrarrevolución (Zaragoza: Siglo Veintinuno/Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2021).

¹⁴ BNd, Manuscritos- I-33,28,010, Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, “Memorial a S.M., respondendo aos seguintes quesitos solicitados” (1808); Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro no. 39 (15 May 1811).

¹⁵ Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, with Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 367. On the southern borderlands, see Fabrício Prado, Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Río de la Plata (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

¹⁶ Decree (1 Sept.), CLIB (1808), vol. 1, 129; Souza Coutinho, “Memorial.”

¹⁷ Decree (25 Nov.), CLIB (1808), vol. 1, 166; Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 8–11.

¹⁸ Alexandre, Os sentidos, 232–243; Paquette, Imperial Portugal, 69–73.

¹⁹ For a full list of his translations, see José Feliciano Fernandes Pinheiro, Anais da província de São Pedro (história da colonização alemã no Rio Grande do Sul) (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1978 [1819–1822]), 44–45.

²⁰ Alexandre Mendes Cunha, “Cameralist Ideas in Portuguese Enlightened Reformism: The Diplomat Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho and His Circuit of Intellectual Exchange,” in Cameralism and the Enlightenment: Happiness, Governance and Reform in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ere Nokkala and Nicholas B. Miller (London: Routledge, 2020), 201–223. For varying definitions of cameralism, see Keith Tribe, Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse (1750–1950) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–31; Andre Wakefield, “Cameralism: A German Alternative to Mercantilism,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 134–150.

²¹ Roger Bartlett, “Cameralism in Russia: Empress Catherine II and Population Policy,” in Cameralism and the Enlightenment, 65–90.

²² José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, Memória sobre a necessidade e utilidades do plantio de novos bosques em Portugal, particularmente de pinhaes nos areaes de beira-mar (Lisbon: Typografia da Acadêmia Real das Sciencias, 1815), 129–133.

²³ José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, “Mineralogia,” O Patriota 2, no. 1 (July 1813); no. 2 (Aug. 1813); no. 3 (Sept. 1813).

²⁴ BNd, Manuscritos-I-32,26,7-no. 8 “Atestado do mestre mineiro do distrito Feldner de entrada nas minas reais de Portugal” (30 Jan. 1803, certified 23 Oct. 1806); Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, Pluto Brasiliensis: Memórias sobre as riquezas do Brasil em ouro, diamantes e outros minerais, 2 vols., trans. Domício de Figueiredo Murta (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1944); Friedrich Toussaint, “Baron von Eschwege and His Bloomery Ironworks, Fábrica Patriótica,” Steel Times 223, no. 12 (1995): 482; Alex Varela, “Juro-lhe pela honra de bom vassalo e bom português”: Análise das memórias científicas de José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva (1780–1819) (São Paulo: Annablume, 2006), 159, 177–179.

²⁵ Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, “Diário de uma viagem mineralógica pela província de São Paulo em 1805,” RIHGB 2, no. 9 (Oct.–Dec. 1847): 527–547; Nicolau Vergueiro, “Sobre a fundação da Fábrica de Ferro de S. João do Ypanema, na Província de S. Paulo,” in Subsídios para a história do Ypanema, ed. Frederico A. P. de Moraes (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1858), 1–150; João Pandiá Calógeras, As minas do Brasil e sua legislação, vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1905), 79–88.

²⁶ Jean-Daniel Herrenschwand, Discurso fundamental sobre a população. Economia política moderna, trans. Luiz Prates de Almeida e Albuquerque (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Régia, 1814); ATT-Conde de Linhares, mç. 24-doc. 7, “Proposta para a colonização do Alentejo, empregando na agricultura os rapazes vadios de Lisboa” (1815). The plan envisioned marrying young males trained in industries with women housed in a nearby religious charity.

²⁷ “Carta Régia” (1 Apr.), CLIB, vol. 1 (1809), 36; Carlos F. Moura, “O projeto de Brum da Silveira, ouvidor de Macau, de envio de carpinteiros chineses para os arsenais reais do Brasil,” Navigator 10, no. 20 (2014): 21–28; Decree (26 July), CLIB (1813), vol. 1, 20; Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, no. 103 (25 Dec. 1819). The number of Chinese migrants imported during the Joanine period is estimated at 500, in Robert Conrad, “The Planter Class and the Debate over Chinese Immigration to Brazil, 1850–1893,” International Migration Review 9, no. 1 (1975): 41–55. The 41 or so Chinese workers at Santa Cruz received tools, compensation for trips to the city, land plots of their choosing, and food rations slightly adapted to their dietary preferences, which led to tensions with enslaved laborers. AN, Fazenda Santa Cruz-cx. 0507137; 0507181; 507130; 507158; 507155; 507180; 507169.

²⁸ Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan, and Brian Vick, eds., Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

²⁹ Fernanda Bretones Lane, Guilherme Santos, and Alain El Youssef, “The Congress of Vienna and the Making of Second Slavery,” Journal of Global Slavery 4 (2019): 162–195; Tabella das perdas e damnos experimentados pelos negociantes portuguezes (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Nacional, 1822); Convenção entre os muito altos, muito poderosos senhores o Príncipe Regente de Portugal e El Rei do Reino Unido da Grande Bretanha e Irlanda (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Régia, 1815).

³⁰ Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, no. 4 (8 Mar. 1813); BNd, Manuscritos-Linhares, I-29,14,55-no. 11, count of Nesselrode to conde do Funchal (20 May 1814), nos. 22–24, conde de Palmela to Funchal; Vick, Congress of Vienna, 162, 204–206; Janet Hartley, “War, Economy and Utopianism: Russia after the Napoleonic Era,” in War, Demobilization, and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions, ed. Alan Forrest, Karen Hagemann and Michael Rowe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 84–99; “Oyapock, divisa do Brazil com a Guiana Franceza á luz dos documentos históricos,” RIHGB 58, no. 2 (1895): 215–223.

³¹ Maria de Lourdes Viana Lyra, “União dinástica e relações científico-culturais,” RIHGB 180 (2019): 89–100.

³² David Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 39–41; Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68–80.

³³ Georg von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World, during the Years 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, and 1807 (London: Henry Colburn, 1813), vii–xi.

³⁴ Russell Bartley, “The Inception of Russo-Brazilian Relations (1808–1828),” HAHR 56, no. 2 (1976): 217–240; Mary Wheeler, “The Origins of the Russian-American Company,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 14, no. 4 (1966): 485–494; Anatole Mazour, “The Russian-American Company: Private or Government Enterprise?,” Pacific Historical Review 13, no. 2 (1944): 168–173; Joshua Paddison, ed., A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1999), 95–134.

³⁵ B. J. Barickman, “‘Tame Indians,’ ‘Wild Heathens,’ and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” The Americas 51, no. 3 (1995): 325–368; Maxmilian Wied-Neuwied, Travels in Brazil in the Years 1815, 1816, 1817 (London: Henry Colburn & Co., 1820), 41, 121–122; Georg Wilhelm Freyreiss, Beiträge näheren Kenntniß des Kaiſerthums Brasilien nebst einer Schilderung der neuen Colonie Leopoldina (Frankfurt: Johann David Sauerländer, 1824), 141–170. Indigenous slavery was pervasive even among scientists like Johann Spix and Carl von Martius, two members of Leopoldina’s Austrian Scientific Expedition who took an Indian boy and girl back to German lands in 1820, where they quickly fell ill during their first winter: Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, no. 157 (30 Dec. 1820). For more, see Hal Langfur, The Forbbiden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 277–278; Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 49–62; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 218–294.

³⁶ Carlos Oberacker “A colônia Leopoldina-Frankental na Bahia meridional: uma colônia européia de plantadores no Brasil,” Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 24, no. 1 (1987): 455–479; Béatrice Veyrassant, Réseaux d’affaires internationaux, émigrations et exportations en Amérique Latine au XIXe siècle: Le commerce Suisse aux Amériques (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1993); Mary Ann Mahony, “The World Cacao Made: Society, Politics, and History in Southern Bahia, Brazil, 1822–1919” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1996), 123–127; Lucelinda Corrêa, “O resgate de um esquecimento: a colônia de Leopoldina,” GEOgraphia 7, no. 13 (2005): 87–111; Alane do Carmo, “Colonização e escravidão na Bahia: a colônia Leopoldina (1850–1888)” (MA thesis, UFBA 2010); Miki, Frontiers, 37–48. On Peycke, see ATT, Estrangeiros, cx. 120, pasta 2, Hamburg’s Syndic to Portuguese minister José Anselmo Corrêa (1 Dec. 1820); AHI-MDB-Berlin/Hamburg, 202/02/13, Eustaquio Adolfo de Mello Mattos to visconde de Inhambupe (30 Apr. 1826).

³⁷ Oliveira Lima, Dom João VI no Brazil, 1808–1821, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia do Commercio, 1908), 81. On German merchants, see Sylvia Ewel Lenz, Alemães no Rio de Janeiro: diplomâcia e negócios, profissões e ócio (1808–1866) (Bauru: EDUSC, 2008).

³⁸ Richard Pierce, Russia’s Hawaiian Adventure, 1815–1817 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 215; Angel Bojadsen, Bettina Kann, and Patrícia Souza Lima, eds., Cartas de uma imperatriz: D. Leopoldina (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2006). For excellent analysis of Schäffer and his background in a global context, see Miquéias Mügge, “Building an Empire in the Age of Revolutions: Independence and Immigration in the Brazilian Borderlands,” Topoi 23, no. 51 (2022): 870–896.

³⁹ On the lumber trade from Leopoldina, see Oberacker, “A colônia Leopoldina-Frankental,” 458–460; Carl August Tölsner, Die colonie Leopoldina in Brasilien (Göttingen: W. F. Kaestner, 1858), 59, 75. Tölsner resided in Lepoldina and eventually graduated from Göttingen University in 1858. Bosset de Luze, the author of the painting, was the “mâitre bourgeois” and president of the Chamber of Forests and Game in the principality of Neuchâtel, a Swiss canton neighboring Fribourg, and under the purview of Prussia and its long forestry tradition. État des emplois et offices de la souveraine Principauté de Neuchâtel et Valengin, et des personnes qui en sont revêtues pour l’an 1791, 20.

⁴⁰ AN, Agricultura-IA⁶154, Hanse consul in Rio to Foreign minister Francisco Carneiro de Campos (3 July 1832); Swiss consul in Rio Auguste Tavel to Campos (17 July 1832); Tölsner, Die colonie Leopoldina, 3–4. Local officials accused the colonos of harboring republican ideas and cited the need for lands for Indians as a justification for the expropriation, but colonos countered that the colony generated higher revenues than Vila Viçosa.

⁴¹ Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, nos. 51, 88 (27 June, 4 Nov 1818). On an earlier shareholding association for Goiás and Pará, see Santos, Memórias, vol. 1, 282, 311; vol. 2, 220–224, 246–248. AN, Agricultura-IA⁶179, “Hespanhoes emigrados”; BNd, Manuscritos, Col. Linhares-I-29,14,4 no. 10, doc. 25, Villanova Portugal to conde de Caza Flores (9 May 1818). On João VI’s colony fever, see decrees (18 Oct.), CLIB (1817), 17; (19 May), CLIB (1818), 53; (13 Nov.), CLIB (1818), 98; (10 Dec.), CLIB (1819), 82; Alvará (3 Jan.), and (25 May), CLIB (1820), vol. 1, pt.1, 1, 35; (20 Apr.), CLIB (1824), 31.

⁴² Arnold Burgess Clayton, “The Life of Tomás Antônio de Vilanova Portugal: A Study in the Government of Portugal and Brazil, 1781–1821” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1977).

⁴³ ATT, Estrangeiros, Hamburgo-cx. 120, pasta 1, Syndic Oldenburg to Corrêa (1 Dec. 1818); Vilanova Portugal to Corrêa (28 Apr., 20 Aug. 1819); Camilo Martins Lage to Corrêa (26 Oct. 1819); Vilanova Portugal to Corrêa (15 June 1820); Joaquim de Freitas, Memória sobre a conspiração de 1817, vulgarmente chamada a conspiração de Gomes Freire (London: Richard & Arthur Taylor, 1822).

⁴⁴ Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 9–14; Vick, Congress of Vienna, 138–149; Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, nos. 42, 15 (27 May 1818, 19 Feb. 1820), and for evidence of the colony’s potential military uses, nos. 1, 92, 133 (1 Jan. 1817, 2 Oct. 1821, 5 Nov. 1822).

⁴⁵ Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, no. 48 (14 June 1817). On the levy wars among German polities, see W. O. Henderson, The Zollverein (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1959); Leighton James, “The Experience of Demobilization: War Veterans in the Central European Armies and Societies after 1815,” in War, Demobilization, and Memory, 68–83.

⁴⁶ K. R. Briffa et al., “Influence of Volcanic Eruptions on Northern Hemisphere Summer Temperature Over the Past 600 Years,” Nature 393 (1998): 450–455; Jihong Cole-Dai et al., “Cold Decade (AD 1810–1819) Caused by Tambora (1815) and Another (1809) Stratospheric Volcanic Eruption,” Geophysical Research Letters 36, no. L22703 (2009); Wolfgang Behringer, Tambora and the Year without a Summer: How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 73–169; Martin Nicoulin, La genèse de Nova Friburgo: Emigration et colonisation suisse au Brésil, 1817–1827 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1981); Walker, Germany, 28.

⁴⁷ Mawe, Travels, 107–110; José de Saldanha da Gama, “História da imperial fazenda de Santa Cruz,” RIHGB 38, no. 2 (Oct.–Dec. 1875): 165–230; Berlinische Nachrichten, no. 121 (7 Oct. 1820), no. 136 (11 Nov. 1820); Theodor von Leithold and Ludwig von Rango, O Rio de Janeiro visto por dois prussianos em 1819 (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1966), 49–52, 137; Decree (12 July 1819); Nicoulin, La Genèse, 33–42; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1982), 28–40, 82–94. Nova Friburgo colonos also became slaveowners: Rodrigo Martins Marretto, A escravidão velada: Senhores e escravos na formação da vila de São João Batista de Nova Friburgo (1820–1850) (Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 2018).

⁴⁸ Pedro Machado de Miranda Malheiro, Providências para a jornada da Colonia Suissa desde o pôrto do Rio de Janeiro até á Nova Friburgo (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Régia, 1819); Thomé da Fonseca e Silva, “Breve notícia sobre a colonia de suissos fundada em Nova Friburgo,” RIHGB 12, no. 2 (Apr.–June 1849): 137–142.

⁴⁹ Nicoulin, La Genèse, 170–171, counts 2,013 departing emigrants with 311 dying during travel, but I base my calulation on AN, Agricultura-IA⁶120 “Registro Geral para a Colonia dos Suissos” (5 Nov. 1819).

⁵⁰ Berlinische Nachrichten, nos. 2, 42, 55, 61, 62, 68, 70 (5 Jan., 8 Apr., 8, 22, 25 May, 8, 12 June 1819).

⁵¹ Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, nos. 89, 7, 101 (6 Nov., 4, 18 Dec. 1819); Correio Braziliense 22, no. 133 (Jan. 1819): 646; 24, no. 140 (Jan. 1820); no. 12 (9 Feb. 1820); BNd, Manuscritos-I-33,26,015, Estevão de Rezende, “Mapa dos estrangeiros cujos nomes se acham descritos nos livros da matrícula feita pela Intendência Geral da Polícia até o dia 30 de outubro de 1817.”

⁵² Correio Braziliense 27, no. 160 (July 1821): 338–340.

⁵³ ATT, Estrangeiros-Hamburgo, cx. 120-pasta 1, Vilanova Portugal to Corrêa (28 Apr. 1819).

⁵⁴ Georg von Langsdorff, Mémoire sur le Brésil, pour servir de guide à ceux qui désirent s’y établir (Paris: L’imprimerie de Denugon, 1820); Bemerkungen über Brasilien: mit gewissenhafter Belehrung für auswandernde Deutsche (Heidelberg: Karl Groos, 1821); Débora Bendocchi Alves, “Langsdorff e a imigração,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, no. 35 (1993): 167–178.

⁵⁵ Guenrikh Manizer, A expedição do acadêmico G. I. Langsdorff ao Brasil, 1821–1828 (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1967); Roderick Barman, “The Forgotten Journey: Georg Heinrich Langsdorff and the Russian Imperial Scientific Expedition to Brazil, 1821–1829,” Terrae Incognitae 3, no. 1 (1971): 74; Friedrich von Weech, Brasiliens gegenwärtiger Zustand und Colonialsystem, besonders in Bezug auf Landbau und Handel, zunächst für Auswanderer (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1828), 225–227; Renata Menasche, “O guia de Friedrich von Weech; impressões de um imigrante alemão no Brasil do século XIX,” Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura 5 (1995): 132–140.

⁵⁶ Gladys Sabina Ribeiro, “A construção da liberdade e de uma identidade nacional. Corte do Rio de Janeiro, fins do XVIII e início do XIX,” in História e cidadania, ed. Ismênia Martins et al. (São Paulo: Humanitas, 1998), 487–503; Antonio Penalves Rocha, A recolonização do Brasil pelas Cortes (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2009).

⁵⁷ Márcia Motta, Direito à terra no Brasil: A gestação do conflito, 1795–1824 (São Paulo: Alameda, 2009), 201–207, 219–227, 240.

⁵⁸ IHGB-(jb), Lata 175-pasta 62, José Bonifácio to Vilanova Portugal (18 May 1820); lata 192-pasta 52-doc. 2, “Notas sobre administração e agricultura” (undated); José Bonifácio, Lembranças e apontamentos do governo provisório da província de São Paulo para os seus deputados (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1821). See also Ana Rosa Cloclet da Silva, Construção da nação e escravidão no pensamento de José Bonifácio, 1783–1823 (Campinas: Unicamp, 1999).

⁵⁹ AN, Diversos-cod. 807, vol. 11, ff. 95–106.

⁶⁰ Diários das Cortes Geraes, Extraordinárias, e Constituintes da Nação Portugueza, vol. 5 (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1822), 538–542; The Laws of the Philadelphia Society for Agriculture (Philadelphia Society for Agriculture, 1819); Motta, Direito à terra, 221–227.

Figure 1.1 Slaveholding colonos: Fazenda Pombal in Colônia Leopoldina, c. 1820s–early 1830sJean-Frédéric Bosset de Luze (1754–1838), “Fazenda Pombal, Colonia Leopoldina, Bahia,” (undated).