The Regency that followed Pedro I’s abdication in favor of his son in 1831 stoked unprecedented political violence. Restorationist forces calling for Pedro’s return rose in arms in Ceará, Maranhão, and at the Court. Bahia and Pernambuco in turn witnessed Lusophobe exaltado revolts. The enslaved also rebelled in Carrancas, Minas Gerais (1833), while malês (enslaved West African Muslims) tried to take over Salvador (1835). Revolts grew lengthier and bloodier as they spread. The Cabanada in Pernambuco (1832–1835), the Revolução Farroupilha in the southern provinces (1835–1845), the Cabanagem in Pará (1835–1840), the Sabinada in Bahia (1837–1838), and the Balaiada in Maranhão (1838–1841) made it hard to imagine that the Brazilian Empire would survive until the slated accession of Pedro II on his eighteenth birthday in 1843. And yet, starting in 1831 too, the Chamber of Deputies approved the slave trade law promised to Britain, a National Guard came into existence, and Brazil’s first Criminal Process Code overrode Pedro I’s earlier press gag law, bringing forth a barrage of newspapers. Without a doubt, the Regency turned into a tense but productive political “laboratory.”Footnote ¹

In this climate of promise and peril, associations united what factions wrenched apart. Brazilian intellectuals and statesmen founded new scientific societies, charities, presses, clubs – and companies. Banks, insurance firms, and subscription-based beautification works proliferated, transcending old restrictions and aligning Brazil with business trends across the Atlantic. The first Brazilian colonization companies epitomized this associational efflorescence, all the more so as intellectuals of different generations reprised conversations about how to best people Brazil.Footnote ² Companies held the answer, especially after an ambitious London-based enterprise targeting the Rio Doce compelled Brazilians to launch their own joint-stock companies in the likeness of those operating in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Two companies in Bahia and Rio took the lead in 1835, riding on the political openings brought about by the constitutional reform known as the Additional Act.

These novel colonization companies expanded shareholding to new sectors and pioneered experiments in corporate voting rights to accommodate them. However, they did not come to embody the “shareholder democracies” that scholars have identified in parallel company booms in the United Kingdom, United States, and France that mirrored broader processes of relative political democratization.Footnote ³ In Brazil, rather, new company undertakings galvanized the privileges of the few. Even when these joint-stocks placed middling classes next to planters and statesmen, they hardened the hierarchies inherent to Brazilian society and reinforced marks of distinction and patrimonial patterns of wealth formation. In appearance, they harbored inclusivity, but their internal organization and their very missions consecrated them as shareholder oligarchies.

As touchstones of elite entrepreneurialism, the first homegrown colonization companies also churned emigration into a niche market by taking advantage of what I refer to as the colono trade from the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores.Footnote ⁴ The new Brazilian colonization companies cashed in on Azoreans fleeing conscription and conditions of scarcity after the Portuguese Civil War. In doing so, these companies established lasting mechanisms of recruitment, transport, and reception that indelibly shaped the colono trade and hooked Azorean communities to migration for decades. In parallel, they awoke Brazilian empresarios to an accessible and putatively culturally familiar labor pool. As these novel enterprises commodified Azoreans and other foreign colonos by indebting their livelihoods and using them as dividend generators, they publicized migrant workers as cost-effective alternatives to enslaved laborers.

In reality, however, the distinction between colonos and slaves proved less clear. To begin with, in contrast to enslaved Africans, Azorean and German colonos arrived with pre-accorded contracts akin to indentures. Still, many colonos would end up working side by side with the enslaved or in roadworks employing liberated Africans. Even more significantly, the colono trade often overlapped with and served as cover for slave trafficking. Ship captains and their factors took advantage of bourgeoning directed migrations to periodically intersperse colono transport with slave shipments, confounding authorities on their maritime routes and justifying their suspicious preparations at port on the climbing number of passengers they would carry on their alleged return voyages from the Azores.

Scholars have seldom examined these colonization companies and tend to subsume them within an overarching, inexorable “transition” to free labor when not simply casting them into the dustbin of failed experiments.Footnote ⁵ Some have looked more closely at similar migration dynamics but only later in the century, without accounting for these little known companies’ early formation and evolution due to their relative obscurity.Footnote ⁶ Based on the most extensive archival evidence to date, this chapter surveys the internal constitution, operations, and broader context of the earliest of these companies in Brazil. It demonstrates that private colonization activities flourished during the Regency despite the suspension of government funds for colonization and that they set in motion a corporate colonization ethos whose significance was far greater than historians give them credit for.Footnote ⁷ These companies buoyed their principals’ fates. Incorporated or not, they allowed members to explore markets, burnish public credentials, and advance their careers, a facet of their success that calls into question normative expectations regarding the value and uses of the corporate form in Brazil. Most importantly, however, these companies supercharged the colono trade in advance of any serious effort to transition away from slave labor. As a result, they not only contributed to the fastest growing population segment at the Court, they spurred new regulations meant to promote – and control – migrant inflows. In the end, these companies balanced the old trope of peopling with a new profit motive. Crowning colonization as a respectable pursuit, they set an example for numerous similar companies for decades to come.

Johann Jakob Sturz: The Spirit of Association and a New Model for Peopling Brazil

In the early 1830s, Brazilian politicians continued to adhere to antiquated peopling ideas. Their goals were dwarfed by far bolder rationales of managed population movements elsewhere. British experiments in the Cape, the Canadas, and Australia marched on, for example. Liberated Africans were resettled to Sierra Leone and other nearby settlements. French Saint-Simonians concocted a supposedly tolerant colonization regime for Algeria. And Russian tsar Nicholas I’s issued his edict of 1830 to impose a martial colonial order across Transcaucasian borderlands.Footnote ⁸

By contrast, Brazilian statesmen simply preferred the convict colonies known as degredos. According to empire minister Nicolau Vergueiro, “national colonies of poor men sentenced to hard labor or banishment in remote places” were more convenient than “government-led foreign colonization” because they would “improve communications … and compensate for the dearth of prisons.”Footnote ⁹ Minister Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho agreed and stealthily siphoned government funds toward degredos while pushing for “measures tending toward colonization with capitalists, agriculturalists and foreign artisans.” Forced settlement schemes, in his view, would buy time to build a prison in Rio, promote consumption, and protect muleteer routes to the interior.Footnote ¹⁰ A mineiro deputy, Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, likewise saw degredos as substitutes for correctional facilities but proposed transforming them into “agrarian asylums” like the famous Hofwil “reform school” started in Switzerland in 1799. This was, he believed, a model suitable to the sertão of Guarapuava west of Curitiba or the Rio Doce valley, an area where the war against Botocudos had just recently ended in 1831.Footnote ¹¹

As these discussions about convict settlements dragged on, however, a nascent “spirit of association” began to rouse lawmakers from their antiquated ways. In France, as polymath Alexandre Laborde described it in 1818, this spirit had rallied French liberals to abandon commercial individualism for collective forms of business organization such as sociétés en comandite par actions or the limited-liability joint-stocks with re-saleable shares and larger capital pools known as sociétés anonymes. The latter of these had bankrolled massive projects such as the Becquay plan for a national canal network.Footnote ¹² Similar undertakings in the United States had astounded Brazilians. The first Brazilian ambassador to the United States, José Silvestre Rebello, enthused about the Ohio Canal seeking to connect the Mississippi to New York City.Footnote ¹³ On his return to Brazil, he tried to transpose that vision of connected waterways in the first issue of the AIN, extolling Brazil’s natural “associational principle” – its rivers – as prefiguring the confluence of men into new associations. “One man alone,” he wrote, “suffices for nothing; but many men with a bit in their pockets are good enough for anything.” Soon, Minas Gerais politicians coalesced around developing the Rio Doce valley, with the provincial council issuing a call for foreign colonos to settle along the river and their counterparts in the Chamber of Deputies calling for “speculators” to help in the process.Footnote ¹⁴

A Prussian businessman by the name of Johann Jakob Sturz met these growing calls with a consequential proposal that would change the trajectory of Brazilian peopling efforts: the Companhia de Navegação, Comércio e Colonização do Rio Doce (Rio Doce Company for Navigation, Commerce, and Colonization, hereafter Rio Doce Company). When Sturz arrived in Brazil in 1830 to work with British mining companies, he rapidly discovered the generous concessions they enjoyed.Footnote ¹⁵ Aiming for similar privileges, Sturz scaffolded his company drive by prospecting locally, securing municipal support in Minas, then moving on to lobby political figures at the Court to then petition other provincial governments.

He began by trying to recruit Guido Thomas Marlière, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars who in 1824 became commander of Brazilian military forces and general director of Indians in the Rio Doce.Footnote ¹⁶ Aged 66, Marlière turned down Sturz’s offer but helped Sturz with a Botocudo lexicon he had compiled, a map of regional sesmarias, and useful contacts with other entrepreneurs in the region. Sturz then conferred with Itabira’s, Ouro Preto’s, and Sabará’s district councils, all within the watershed that he believed would eventually replace old muleteer trails. Locals held share subscription meetings in their homes and wrote favorably to the Chamber of Deputies.Footnote ¹⁷ As authorities in Rio got news of his plans, Sturz turned competitors into collaborators by associating with John Henry Freese and George [Henrique/Henry] Miller, two English merchants long settled in Rio whose own colonization pursuits, participation in the coffee trade, and ties to prominent politicians like Vergueiro were worth their weight in gold.Footnote ¹⁸

When requesting favors, Sturz insisted on the Company’s “collateral advantages”: “spontaneous emigrations to those parts” and the “land sales that would accrue from the increased land values as population grew.” Weaving together land, peopling, and revenues, he offered a timetable for “an essential colonization” of “well behaved and industrious colonos” that few experienced politicians would turn down.Footnote ¹⁹ His strategy succeeded in obtaining a 40-year navigation concession for the Rio Doce under the commitment to settle approximately 2,880 colonos across 24 square leagues of government land grants within 7 years.Footnote ²⁰ By August 1835, 327 subscribers purchased all but 462 of the 2,500 shares available for Brazilians.Footnote ²¹ Among the top shareholders figured renowned patriarchs, seasoned statesmen, liberal spokesmen, and scions of the most powerful provincial family clans. Even Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, who had fought similar efforts in the past, purchased shares and advised Sturz to remain “independent from government regarding contracts.”Footnote ²²

Rounding up Brazil’s high society represented a necessary step for Sturz to successfully court his primary targets: potential shareholders back in London. Sturz’s plan reserved three-quarters of all shares for British subscribers, who, Sturz claimed, would be “greatly pleased by having some of the most distinguished gentlemen of this country as Associates.” In London, he won the approval of Brazil’s resident minister, who celebrated the Rio Doce Company as the harbinger of the first “regular system of colonization.” At about the same time, Sturz published an impressive digest on Brazilian commercial statistics with a final chapter that peddled poor emigration to Brazil. All of these preparations, he hoped, would facilitate signing on big financiers like the Baring house, which Sturz approached for pecuniary assistance.Footnote ²³

Sturz’s spirited lobbying notwithstanding, a string of complications beset the Rio Doce Company. An intractable topography, ill company staff, plummeting share values in London, and bureaucratic delays in Rio took their toll. Minas provincial officials began doubting the river’s navigability while Sturz, undeterred, overreached for concessions in Bahia, commissioning a map of the Bay of All Saints from veteran Leopoldina colonos Bussche and Peter Weyl, publishing improvement pieces, and conferring with Bahian notables.Footnote ²⁴ In the end, the concession Sturz sought went instead to a more successful Liverpool-Bahia trading company that later launched the Companhia Bahiana de Navegação a Vapor, which continued to operate until 1892.Footnote ²⁵

The Rio Doce Company limped on until finally dissolving in 1849, yet Sturz’s work only became more central to colonization projects in Brazil after this apparent failure. Naturalized Brazilian in 1839, Sturz concocted a string of projects including an indigenous aldeamento in the Rio Doce, a cattle-ranching colonization company in Ceará, and a navigation enterprise in the Amazon. He also got in touch with John Russell, British secretary of War and Colonies, offering his services as a consultant in Rio and sharing a copy of his German Emigration to British Colonies, which underscored the profit-bearing effect of “emigrants, in a twofold manner, as interesting to commerce … and as an article of ‘freight’” and thus highlighted the myriad profits to be had of directed migrations.Footnote ²⁶ In 1842, Sturz attained Brazil’s consulship in Berlin and went on to become the longest-serving foreign colonization advocate for Brazil until he resigned in 1858. In his new post, Sturz published emigration propaganda, shipped printed matter on colonization to the IHGB, shared colonization regulations from South Australia with statesmen, and gracefully hosted Brazilians sojourners.Footnote ²⁷

Still, this tireless service paled in comparison to Sturz’s signal achievement: providing Brazilians with a crash course in how to organize a colonization company, which readied them to launch their own. Thanks to his early efforts to pave the way for corporate pursuits geared toward colonization, Brazilian businessmen and statesmen looked beyond the antiquated framework of convict settlements and imagined something far bigger and more lucrative. Sturz’s pioneering work therefore readied a new cadre of Brazilian entrepreneurs to try their own hand in the business of colonization.

Unincorporated Loopholes: The Companhia Colonizadora da Bahia (CCB)

Sturz’s efforts made a significant impression on Miguel Calmon du Pin e Almeida, a Rio Doce Company subscriber from Bahia and die-hard devotee of technological and agricultural improvement. Following closely in Sturz’s footsteps, Calmon began to organize a colonization company in 1835, the Companhia Colonizadora da Bahia (Bahia Colonization Company, hereafter CCB). Yet in contrast to Sturz’s belabored attempts to secure incorporation in Rio and London, Calmon opted for a different form of business organization that bypassed the onus of obtaining a charter, choosing instead to assemble the CCB as an unincorporated company. As such, the CCB emerged untethered from strict government vigilance, as it did not seek official approval at the outset. And it made use of that legal loophole to operate with relative freedom – if also with greater risks that it would have to shoulder on its own due to its lack of contractual commitments with the imperial government. Ultimately, the contagious business spirit of the CCB would stoke numerous other companies into existence, although the financial, political, and diplomatic crises that beset it also rang a note of caution regarding the dangers of foregoing central-government oversight and support for colonization matters.

A sterling trajectory prepared Calmon, who eventually became one of the longest-serving ministers in imperial Brazil, to keep the balance between risk and reward and brave the hazards of becoming a pioneering colonization empresario.Footnote ²⁸ Born in the town of Santo Amaro in 1794, Calmon was educated in Nazaré under his maternal uncle, a Jesuit veteran of the Pombaline purge who had quietly returned from Rome. At 18, he left for Coimbra, graduating with a law degree just as Brazilian delegates arrived to the Lisbon Courts of 1821. Commissioned to convey an independence consultation to Bahia, Calmon served in the provisional government council in 1823 and oversaw rebel supply lines during the successful siege of Salvador.Footnote ²⁹ Elected to the first legislature, he traveled to England and met with senior statesmen and then stayed in the Swiss Alps to write a series of anonymous “letters” surveying Malthus and David Ricardo for ideas about how to maximize government revenues and resolve food shortages in Bahia. Avidly hoping to build a “tropical England,” Calmon joined the Chamber in 1826 and was quickly invited to take the Finance portfolio in the cabinet of 1827, the first to include deputies.Footnote ³⁰

As minister, Calmon had many close brushes with colonization. He shored up Cisplatina War expenditures involving German and Irish mercenaries and backed a government takeover of the Banco do Brasil, which would finance the transport of Portuguese emigrados from London.Footnote ³¹ He fielded complaints from the Prussian consul in Rio regarding the mistreatment of German colonos, and dove into government records to reconstruct Schäffer’s activities.Footnote ³² Most importantly, he induced diplomats to engage with colonization. In 1830, he asked Antônio Menezes de Vasconcelos Drummond, a José Bonifácio’s protégé serving as chargé d’affaires in Prussia, to “gather and contract industrious and willing men … to cover the Empire’s territory.” He was to do so by publicizing Brazil’s work contract law of 1828, approved during his stint in the Finance ministry, and by “conveying the immense profits that await them.” Three years later, Menezes sent a powerful memorandum on colonization from Hamburg, recommending land grants, fast-track naturalization, and collaborations with emigrant protection societies to load ships otherwise heading to Brazil in ballast.Footnote ³³ Other diplomats followed suit. From Washington, DC, Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti (brother of deputy Holanda Cavalcanti) wrote of the need to distribute land to “national or foreign Associations … tied to Government by contractual obligations” to “recruit and transport colonos.” Special envoy to Mexico Duarte da Ponte Ribeiro reported on Anglo-American settlers in Coahuila and Texas and sent news on colonization enterprises such as the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company. Calmon not only stoked this bourgeoning circuit of news and policy models but also became one of its leading beneficiaries, especially as the diplomatic network expanded with the addition of vice-consuls in 1834.Footnote ³⁴

Calmon’s idea for a company in fact originated from the completion of a colono conveyance scheme facilitated directly by this diplomatic expansion. After the Portuguese Civil War, Brazil’s general consul in Lisbon, Antônio da Silva Júnior, began inquiring about the new Portuguese government’s emigration requirements and appointed vice-consuls on the Azorean islands of Flores, Terceira, Faial, and São Miguel. These new officers obtained their first instructions from Foreign minister Manuel Alves Branco in early 1835: to do everything in their power to help a captain by the name of Lourenço Justiniano Jardim in a colono recruitment drive already underway.Footnote ³⁵ The trip was organized by Baptista Caetano de Almeida, a stalwart of São João d’el Rei’s first public library, a close friend with Aureliano, and one of the deputies from Minas Gerais hoping to lure companies to the Rio Doce.Footnote ³⁶ The captain he hired, who may have been a casual slaver, had long covered routes between Brazil, Portugal, and Cape Verde and now turned his recently purchased copper-lined 380-ton barque Maria Adelaide toward Faial. Arriving in April, Jardim and the vice-consul at Faial took a month to board migrants. The mayor at Terceira, however, prevented emigrants from boarding, insisting they had to apply for passports individually. Even though Jardim had recruited about 300 colonos, civil authorities reportedly refused to expedite passports, forcing the Maria Adelaide to sail without colonos.Footnote ³⁷

But the ship arrived safely in Rio by September with 215 colonos onboard, a sign of its clandestine workings. Jardim spent the next two weeks hiring out these islanders, many of whom were “field hands and young men apt as shop assistants.” The feat earned unanimous praise. Alves Branco personally commended the efforts of Faial’s vice-consul, who then loaded four more vessels with colonos before year’s end.Footnote ³⁸ Two weeks after the arrival, senator conde de Lajes advanced a bill to replace the government’s enslaved workers with free laborers via migrant conveyance and another awarding the Imperial Order of Cruzeiro to captain Jardim “for being the first recruiter to import free hands to Brazil at such a scale.”Footnote ³⁹

Inspired, Calmon launched a new colonization company drive by publishing a memória doubling as a prospectus. After his first ministry, Calmon got better acquainted with colonization. He visited London for a second time, coinciding with parliamentary debates on emigration and “home colonization.” Upon his return as part of the pro-monarchical bloc in the second legislature, he supported a bold blanket naturalization for the São Leopoldo colonos. Taking the vice-presidency of the Sociedade de Agricultura, Comércio e Indústria da Bahia (Bahian Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Society, SACIB), he subscribed to international periodicals like the Journal des connaisances utiles and Charleston’s The Southern Agriculturalist while writing a barrage of improvement pieces and reprinting Portuguese philosopher’s Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira “Das colonias estrangeiras” (“On Foreign Colonies”).Footnote ⁴⁰ Calmon’s memória, which was printed first in the JSACIB, then in pamphlet form, and finally reproduced in various newspapers, expanded a bourgeoning improvement agenda with global underpinnings.Footnote ⁴¹

The memória laid bare its models by opening with an epigraph by Bandana, the pseudonym of John Galt, the controversial administrator of the Canada Company (est. 1826) and the British American Land Company (1832). “The business of settling a new Country,” it read, “is much better managed by private adventurers than by governments.” However, in Calmon’s translation to Portuguese, “adventurers” was replaced by “Companies” in order to link up those exemplars with the private enterprises “already promoting Colonization with free people” in Rio with recent colono shipments from Azores and Macau. Calmon tried to persuade readers that “a well-organized Company” would only bolster such efforts by lone-wolf captains if it followed the model of the South Australia Colonization Company (1831) or Canadian ventures such as the New Brunswick & Nova Scotia Land Company (1834).Footnote ⁴²

In addition to provocative references to dashing new companies, Calmon could leverage his cachet as a veteran minister, current deputy, and recently elected provincial assemblyman to rally fellow Bahians to his proposed enterprise. At least 78 of an initial pool of 143 subscribers attended the CCB’s launch in early November 1835 in a formal ceremony at the Santa Teresa convent in Salvador. The provincial vice-president and archbishop Romualdo Antônio de Seixas (then deputy for Bahia), hosted the ceremony next to other notables. Attendees elected Calmon as director, plus two vice-directors: José Cerqueira Lima, a provincial deputy and slave trafficker, and the former provincial president. A local customs officer was appointed secretary and two English merchants became advisers. The meeting drew 449 share subscriptions and within a month the board had a total of 370 members and a capital of 67:900$000.Footnote ⁴³ In the main, the CCB adopted “democratic” measures such as a low entrance threshold of 100$ per share and graduated voting in the likeness of firms such as the Canada Company. No shareholder list has survived, but membership revolved around the SACIB, which purchased 20 shares and made its members indirect participants. Membership included powerful surnames like Aragão Bulcão and Teive Argolo but also merchants, slave traders, and professionals. Participation with kin was common.Footnote ⁴⁴

Technically, this varied membership found an equal voice in company decisions. But from the outset, the board explicitly targeted “the wealthiest property owners of the Recôncavo,” and the CCB’s procedural rules, particularly its voting system, subsumed small to large shareholders. The CCB thus replicated existing social hierarchies. In comparison to the Canada Company, which probably inspired Calmon, and whose voting scale was scaffolded by broad intervals and capped at four votes, the CCB adopted a scale with smaller intervals between votes up to a 10-vote maximum. Under this system, a top investor would have 10 times greater weight in company decisions than a member with the least number of shares. Compounding the undemocratic profile of the CCB, Calmon was both the director and the most powerful shareholder, commanding his own shares as well as the seven votes of the SACIB, over which he now presided. In short, collapsing management and ownership onto the figure of Calmon showed that the CCB not only preserved but also maximized the dominance of the already powerful (Table 3.1).

As an unincorporated company, the CCB operated freely without a charter from government to define its obligations. Still, it initially benefited from support at various levels of government. Regent Diogo Feijó issued instructions for provincial presidents to promote colonization once companies had been installed.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bahia’s provincial government allowed Calmon to use military barracks as a migrant hostel (depósito), while the vice-president wrote to the Foreign Affairs ministry to bolster Calmon’s request for vice-consular support.Footnote ⁴⁶ A little later, the consul in Lisbon requested the company statutes to inform “speculators” and vice-consuls set swiftly to work. In Faial, Alves Guerra requested confirmation of his appointment as he recruited 105 workers who landed three months later in Bahia and Rio.Footnote ⁴⁷ From Genoa and Rome, resident minister Menezes organized other colono shipments, including one of political convicts kept by the Vatican in the seaside prison of Civitavecchia. By early 1837, the CCB had managed to import 472 colonos and accept another 332 from private speculators.Footnote ⁴⁸

Despite diplomatic support, the CCB faced growing difficulties. About 46 shareholders failed to meet the payment schedule in 1837, and many consistently skipped company meetings, the last of which fell short of the required quorum but was held as an exception. In addition, some colonos deserted upon arrival. Others waiting to be hired became a financial burden. In a sign of its growing needs, the CCB authorized contractors to pay in installments, implementing a 9 percent annual interest on delayed payments.

Portuguese officials also created new hurdles. When the Portuguese brigantine Comêta arrived in Bahia in late April 1836, the consul at Salvador protested that its captain and consignee had imposed “harmful conditions” on colonos and charged “exorbitant freight costs,” accusing them of violating the Portuguese Commercial Code and demanding all contracts be redrafted in person at his office. The captain and the consignee invoked the 1830 law on service contracts (prestação de serviço) to justify their proceedings and claimed the jurisdiction of a Brazilian court of law rather than a consulate. To defuse tensions, Bahia’s president asked the Portuguese consul to cooperate with the CCB to “advantageously employ” the colonos, but Calmon protested that prompting such consular meddling risked jeopardizing colonization “by private speculation.”Footnote ⁴⁹

To complicate things for the CCB, three “miserably unhappy Italians” sent by Menezes from Rome wrote directly to Rio imploring the young emperor for help given their wretched fates after arrival in Salvador. This formal complaint put Calmon and the CCB in a very delicate position, as the colonos blamed them for their poor accommodations and for making false promises of employment. With a duty to respond, the imperial government initiated an inquiry into the matter. CCB vice-director Cerqueira Lima tried to handle the fallout by deflecting blame and signaling the hardships experienced by the company itself.Footnote ⁵⁰

Surprisingly, in the midst of this damage control response, Calmon unilaterally decided to dissolve the company. He informed shareholders of this determination in the CCB’s only surviving report, which disclosed company accounts to reveal a staggering deficit and a number of unpaid debts. Bahia’s president swiftly forwarded the report to imperial authorities in an effort to exculpate the CCB and clear its principals’ names. Calmon in turned proposed that the company wind up its commitments and then adopt a purely “philanthropic” role by offering advice to colonos and contractors.Footnote ⁵¹ Untarnished, a few months later Calmon was invited to take the Finance portfolio in the new “cabinet of capacities” (ministério das capacidades) organized by Pedro de Araújo Lima as part of a sharp conservative turn known as the Regresso.

However, ensuing events prevented Calmon from glossing over the CCB experience so easily. Starting in November 1837, the Italian colonos recruited by Menezes in the dungeons of Civitavecchia participated in a violent uprising in Salvador by which discontented regiments of pardos (persons descended from Black and white parents) averse to the Regresso’s recentralization took over the city for the span of four months. As the Sabinada rebellion unfolded and the news spread, the Foreign minister pointed his finger at the Holy nuncio in Rio, warning him that the “Pontifical subjects who have partaken actively in the rebellion” should not abuse Brazilian hospitality. But public opinion attributed responsibility instead to Calmon and his company.Footnote ⁵² One Bahian paper called him the “great trainbearer for the Portuguese!,” conflating his promotion of Azorean colonos with his past support for Pedro I and a recently approved Luso-Brazilian commercial treaty.Footnote ⁵³ Going further, O Chronista, an incendiary paper headed by Justiniano José da Rocha, excoriated Menezes for recruiting “the dregs of Italy” and censured the CCB’s “colonization commerce” as a reprehensible “new means of making a profit,” which put in manifest the company’s true motivations.Footnote ⁵⁴

The CCB’s top figures not only survived these attacks but painlessly transcended them. Menezes received orders to enact a military recruitment plan in Portugal following the Chamber’s authorization of such conscriptions to face off the Farroupilha rebellion in southern Brazil. To this end, interestingly, he relied on contacts from previously maligned colonization campaigns, specifically a retired German veteran of Pedro I’s mercenary ranks.Footnote ⁵⁵ Calmon in turn saw his reputation restored with the Sabinada’s defeat, opening the way for a reappraisal of his company’s activities, with observers blaming exogenous factors for CCB shortcomings including colonos’ incapacity “to bear the Sun’s intensity and other hardships in our fields.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The CCB’s unincorporated status insulated Calmon and others from its public liabilities and shielded the Brazilian government from responsibility as well. Having assembled the upper crust of Bahian planter and merchant society, the company further bolstered Calmon’s standing with an elite esprit de corps that only strengthened during the Sabinada and that manifested the CCB’s power as a shareholder oligarchy. Indeed, Calmon’s career soared to new heights, and even though he unilaterally decided to liquidate the company’s assets, no subscriber sued despite the move amounting to an expropriation by a “corporate insider.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The experience held valuable lessons. For one thing, combining the joint-stock form and the colono trade could buoy political trajectories. For another, unincorporated status made companies nimble in the face of political adversity. However, Calmon’s CCB was not the only company formation tried in the wake of Sturz’s early pathfinding. And just as the unincorporated model yielded important lessons for future entrepreneurs, so too did parallel efforts to pursue operations under a government charter and at a far grander scale.

Colono Trades and Government Partnership: The Sociedade Promotora de Colonização

In 1835, as Calmon was getting the CCB off the ground, the spirit of association also visited the French consul in Rio, Jacques-Marie Aymard, conde de Gestas. His epiphany was “a system of colonization” run by a SAIN affiliate and based on a three-pronged process identical to the CCB’s: recruiting colonos from ship captains, “guarding them in a warehouse” for distribution, and producing dividends from the costs of transport and daily maintenance. Gestas’s idea took center stage in a SAIN meeting that November in which a special commission improved his proposal by opening the projected company’s membership to anyone beyond the SAIN who purchased one of its 100-milréis shares. A subscription drive committee was appointed that included not only Januário da Cunha Barbosa and the SAIN secretary but also, as a testament to his influence, Johann Jakob Sturz.Footnote ⁵⁸ By mid-January, the new Sociedade Promotora de Colonização (Society for the Promotion of Colonization, hereafter SPC) had launched. Justice minister Limpo de Abreu showed immediate support by publicizing its statutes together with an ordinance for the public works inspector to hire free workers.Footnote ⁵⁹ The SPC board organized in the first company meeting in February 1836 included the same Menezes who had helped Calmon with the CCB; a Coimbra-trained lawyer named Diogo Soares da Silva Bivar, editor of Brazil’s first gazette, A Idade d’Ouro (1811), who was elected secretary; and Araújo Lima, the renown Pernambucan at the helm of the Regresso, who took the SPC’s presidency. Despite anonymous allegations that the company would “become a mercantile and usurer operation,” the SPC signed up 355 associates who purchased a total of 572 shares.Footnote ⁶⁰

The SPC demonstrated a responsiveness to government directives as it launched its daily operations. To begin, it turned a warehouse into a migrant “depot” (depósito) where locatários (contractors) came to hire workers (locadores). The locale was situated in Lapa, a neighborhood notorious for petty crime and prostitution. Soon municipal authorities flagged the depot as a potential epidemiological hotspot. Granted the facilities were not ideal, the SPC continued its pioneering efforts to define the depot or hostel as an institution for migrant reception and distribution and, in response to the municipality’s concerns, took measures to keep it empty by daytime and police colono movements in its vicinity.Footnote ⁶¹

Beyond everyday operations, the SPC also collaborated closely with imperial and city authorities in the face of unexpected crises. When the overcrowded Spanish ship Libertad arrived from the Canary Islands on June 1836 with 580 colonos, it also brought a bout of cholera in its hold. In response, the SPC dispatched two of its members, doctors Joseph François Xavier Sigaud and Manuel do Valadão Pimentel, to assess the situation and coordinate with the imperial government to quarantine colonos, strengthening its role as a reliable government partner.Footnote ⁶²

Indeed, the SPC functioned as much more than a mere joint-stock company. It agglomerated services and useful social liaisons in a relatively expansive membership that included port merchants and service providers. As such, it functioned as a “consumer cooperative” that pooled resources and services for its shareholders. This web of reciprocity encompassed a broad spectrum of participants from different provinces, professions, and nationalities and facilitated access to a wealth of resources, including commercial know-how to negotiate with colono carriers, currency exchange, tips for Azorean recruitments from Azorean-descent members, and land leases in the proximity of the hostel in Lapa.Footnote ⁶³

Moreover, a surviving list of 67 top shareholders (those owning at least six shares and thus eligible for board positions) hints at the middle- and high-class backgrounds of the SPC’s uppermost membership. In this regard, the SPC served as what two legal scholars refer to as a “subscriber democracy,” a company that gave urban professionals a relatively “democratic” training ground, allowing these middling sectors leading roles in company operations, specifically in clerk duties and middle management, while still subjecting them to the politics of patronage. Hence, these second-class members still had to balance class-based deference to powerful politicians or planter families like the Souza Breves or the Nogueira da Gamas with their company participation, in the end reinforcing the SPC’s character as a shareholder oligarchy, albeit a less rigid one than the CCB.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such dynamic and relatively porous membership allowed the SPC to import 2,112 colonos from 1836 to 1838, mostly from Portugal except about 226 Germans originally destined for Sydney. Even a colonization naysayer like minister Vasconcelos lauded its progress.Footnote ⁶⁵

Notably, the SPC sustained a mutually beneficial engagement with the government thanks to the fact that its own president, Araújo Lima, also presided over the Chamber of Deputies. From his perch, he helped the SPC to overcome opposition and carefully shepherded favorable policies. For example, when a special commission in the Chamber expressed support for granting lands to the SPC, with northeastern deputies demanding similar benefits for the CCB, mineiros Carneiro Leão and Vasconcelos averred that special favors would harm private enterprise.Footnote ⁶⁶ But Araújo Lima still pushed through a budget law incentivizing the colono trade by enshrining anchorage fee exceptions for vessels with more than 100 white colonos of any creed. Vice-consuls in Azores quickly publicized the law, but Portuguese officials just as quickly applied new exit fees. Some Brazilians then advocated that only a broader anchorage exception that included smaller colono voyages could override the new fees.Footnote ⁶⁷ Araújo Lima’s and other deputies’ backroom dealings thus had a multiplier effect in terms of raising awareness for the need of more expansive colono-friendly policies, and one that began to reflect beyond the colono trade itself when the Chamber reauthorized foreign enlistments and sent Barbacena again to the British Isles and later to Hamburg, where he enlisted 454 men.Footnote ⁶⁸

Close government ties and growing support among deputies emboldened the SPC to propose a bill that coursed through the legislative docket in less than a year to become the 1837 lei locação de serviços (service contract law). This new law overrode its more generic precedents of 1828 and 1830. But its main purpose was to resolve the Portuguese ambassador’s allegations against the SPC contracting of minors without the oversight of a curador (guardian). Even though the Portuguese diplomat saw himself as the rightful guardian, the lei de locação assigned guardianship instead to colonization associations or juízes de órfãos (literally “orphan judges” who oversaw minors and inheritances) and further authorized juízes de paz to oversee any contractual feuds that could elicit diplomatic involvement.

The law did not deliver equitable outcomes in colono-led suits, but it did codify a legal language of rights and responsibilities that, among other things, required patrons accused of withholding wages to deposit the contested amount before being heard in court. In one case, a merchant opted to flee when his caixeiro demanded two years of backpay rather than deposit an equivalent bond.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time, the law freed police chief Eusébio de Queirós to aggressively police workers’ lives and counter a perceived criminal wave accompanying rising migrant entries to Rio. Of the 5,163 foreigners estimated by the Police Intendancy to live at the Court in 1834, close to half (2,445) possessed no passport or registration. In 1836, Eusébio turned his attention to two internal ordinances from 1824 and 1832 mandating fees for foreigner residency permits that had remained uncollected and instructed juízes de paz to begin collecting them. The permits, similar to the July Monarchy’s permis de séjour, allowed the Police Intendancy to arrest undocumented migrants and dramatically expand the type of individually identifiable information available about them. If in earlier times alleged vagrants or colonos in breach of contracts had to sign pledges to seek honest jobs (termos de ocupação honesta) before walking free, the new residency permits destined them to work at the Navy yard or the Casa de Correção, similarly to the fate of liberated Africans under the Justice ministry (Figure 3.1).Footnote ⁷⁰

Figure 3.1 Residency permit for foreigners, 1836

The new lei de locação de serviços dramatically expanded Eusébio’s ability to round up alleged idlers and undocumented Portuguese men, and the Municipal Code of 1838 soon reinforced this new exercise of authority.Footnote ⁷¹ In addition to furnishing coerced labor for government dependencies, these interventions sought revenues, too. Eusébio, for instance, pondered raising the cost of residency permits to 800 réis, almost doubling the price set in the 1832 guidelines. Similarly, Finance minister Calmon imposed a 60-milréis annual tax on foreign shop assistants at the Court, Salvador, and Pernambuco, and 30 for those in other capitals, which, despite criticisms, promised to yield a steady stream of public earnings given the multitude of Portuguese caixeiros in port cities.Footnote ⁷²

Brazilian authorities’ stratagems emboldened the SPC to adopt rogue practices initially with government support. Secretary Bivar, for example, publicly declared that the company only accepted colonos with certificates of good conduct while Brazil’s vice-consul at Terceira offered these freely to “all the farmers who … wish to go live in the Brazilian Empire.” Increasingly, however, the SPC engaged in duplicitous actions with a degree of autonomy from government, as when its agents actively sabotaged colonization enterprises headed to New Zealand and Australia. When their vessels stopped in Rio, SPC agents cajoled their emigrants to stay.Footnote ⁷³ The captain of one such ship, the Justine, was offered 20 contos to surrender his Australia-bound German colonists in 1838, which he declined. But when his passengers obtained weapons from Brazilian agents and threatened mutiny, he accepted a lower offer. Days later, the SPC gleefully advertised 226 German colonos for hire, including “couples with families” and many “field hands by profession.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Brazilian agents also beguiled competitors in mainland Europe’s busy ports. One Brazilian ship owner in Hamburg even seized a contract intended for an Australian colonization company in 1836.Footnote ⁷⁵

The growing autonomy with which the SPC abetted or directly carried out such actions allowed it to adapt to an overwhelming challenge when Portuguese authorities decried a “traffic in the slavery of whites” after deputy Manuel da Silva Passos read Calmon’s memória.Footnote ⁷⁶ Earlier in 1835 civil governors in the Azores had received orders to hinder the exit of agrarian laborers from the islands. Now, in response to an accelerating colono trade, Queen Maria II herself issued an ordinance to counter “speculators and even Foreign Companies employed in promoting emigration from the Azores,” ordering the provincial prefect to enforce passport controls and disseminate news about “the misfortunes that emigration holds in store” as means to stem the traffic. Local newspapers followed through, telling of abused Azorean women and of a “Colonization Society” cramming islanders in a “warehouse like that of the blacks, to later sell them.” As newspapers amplified these stories, the Portuguese Crown cited the 1758 ordinance that originally instituted passports in Portuguese insular territories to justify a new prohibition forbidding young men eligible for military service from leaving.Footnote ⁷⁷

The SPC had given rise to a furtive colono trade as much as to poignant and desperate reactions by Portuguese officials at different levels of government. Azorean district authorities improvised more obstructionist measures, demanding lower passenger ratios, examining water rations, withholding passports from emigrants conscripted for Brazilian military service, and charging bail until colonos disembarked at their final destinations.Footnote ⁷⁸ Lisbon officials pursued more subtle tactics. Foreign minister Sá da Bandeira, for instance, blocked Brazil’s vice-consular appointments at Terceira and Graciosa on the grounds that the appointees promoted emigration against the islanders’ best interest. Because the new Portuguese constitution of 1838 adopted a more dissuasive approach that did not infringe on subjects’ right of exit, Portugal’s foreign ministry shifted to an intimidation campaign. Portuguese officials warned Brazilian authorities of the embarkation of “suspect persons” among colonos, which appeared to confirm Brazilian ministers’ concerns that escalating arrivals would allow “suspect people into the country,” including counterfeiters who could exacerbate currency problems.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1839, Portuguese authorities intensified their efforts with new ports and customs regulations explicitly designed to curtail colono recruiters. Efforts to counteract this deterrence campaign proved fruitless. As Menezes reported from Lisbon, no newspapers wished to publish his ripostes to senators speaking against Azorean emigration to Brazil.Footnote ⁸⁰

These difficulties notwithstanding, ship captains, vice-consuls, and colonization agents resorted to illegal subterfuges to work around Portuguese obstruction and continue to supply the demand for colonos generated by the SPC. As soon as the Queen’s first ordinances took effect, colono vessels eluded inspection by real or feigned island-hopping. Already in late 1836, the Portuguese consul in Bahia reported this ploy when the Tarujo e Filhos arrived in Salvador with 113 colonos from Graciosa. Only a few of these colonos had passports, but the real problem was that the passports were for other Azorean islands, not Brazil.Footnote ⁸¹ Terceira’s General Administrator openly complained that colono carriers with overcrowded ships recurred to “the stratagem of reporting other islands as their layover or destination, so they can board people and take them to their originally intended destination.” At first, local officials understood this as a tactic to avoid paying passport stamp duties, since vessels could defer payment until their last stop in the archipelago. But then vessels and colonos also began to forego passport requests altogether by engaging in covert recruitment and boarding practices. During 1837 and 1838, one ship after another took on all sorts of colonos without passports.Footnote ⁸² In São Miguel, district authorities responded by enforcing passport mandates and boarding soldiers as escorts when ships claimed a close-by island as destination. Officials instituted more aggressive inspections to ensure that vessels possessed an infirmary and sufficient food and water for their voyage, had complied with tax provisions, checked passports for passengers going to Brazil for personal reasons, abided by a 24-hour prior boarding requirement, and departed on schedule.Footnote ⁸³ And yet, despite these forceful measures and local pressure on the Crown to enact “more positive laws” to curb emigration, ministers in Lisbon learned that “new agents of the Brazilian Colonization Company” had “spread around these islands.” Moreover, they had co-opted petty officials and important local merchants networks into the colono trade.Footnote ⁸⁴

Clandestine colono voyages continued to climb to alarming levels as Portuguese and Brazilian vessels kept arriving in Salvador and Rio with undocumented colonos. Brigantine Senador Vergueiro traveled from Faial to Terceira, where it requested leave for Lisbon but instead turned toward Tenerife and then Rio, where it arrived with 87 colonos. The Recuperador followed, landing 105 colonos in Recife, and the Brazilian brig Pedro Segundo delivered 118 colonos in Salvador.Footnote ⁸⁵ These arrivals flagged local connivance in the Azores in the eyes of the Kingdom minister, who believed it was “impossible that the embarkation of such a high number of people occurred … without the knowledge of pertinent authorities.” If Portuguese statesmen had already recognized the colono trade as a speculative and illegal traffic, they now had to reckon with the fact that their best efforts to curtail emigration catalyzed a massive and unstoppable clandestine migration.Footnote ⁸⁶ While not directly leading the entirety of this migrant flow, the Brazilian colonization companies had goaded this traffic into existence, showing themselves to be remarkably astute adversaries to Portuguese authorities desperate to stem exits.

The SPC fostered this blooming colono trade but did not profit from all voyages. Rather, from early 1837, it had to weather a global financial panic that reverberated in Rio, where credit practices such as consignation and parceled payments had only recently taken hold thanks to resident English firms.Footnote ⁸⁷ The SPC’s credit mechanisms were particularly vulnerable both because of their timing and their nature as depreciable scrip. As the crisis of 1837 began to brew, secretary Bivar announced the arrival of the SPC’s “neatly printed” apólices (bonds) from London. Because these were transferable, holders could resell them to third parties and even use them as tender given the dearth of circulating currency. Indeed, unidentified subscribers resold company shares throughout the Court as early as August 1836, when a business on Direita street announced two SPC shares for sale, while a nearby paper store put out a call to buy several on the same day. A few months later, a bookseller around the corner offered “a reasonable price” to anyone selling SPC shares. Even during the 1837 crisis, a business bureau on São Pedro street announced such shares for sale, going as far as guaranteeing dividends.

Yet, by 1839, SPC shares had depreciated to 25$000, a fourth of their original value. Sweeping personnel changes compounded the dwindling value of the company to the point that respectable members refused to take up elected posts. Shipyard owner Antônio Lage gracefully turned down the invitation to serve as SPC treasurer after shareholders elected him in 1837.Footnote ⁸⁸ Later that year, the company president, Araújo Lima, took leave of his position when regent Feijó succumbed to political pressures and handpicked him as his successor. Holanda Cavalcanti, a founding board member, replaced fellow Pernambucan Araújo Lima as SPC president, bringing with him a similar level of prestige but with some important differences: he was a rising Liberal who had succeeded José Bonifácio as grandmaster of the Grande Oriente do Brasil and who was runner-up in the 1838 elections for regent, which he lost to Araújo Lima. Nevertheless, like his contender, Holanda Cavalcanti also enjoyed a swift promotion, as he soon won a lifetime Senate appointment. The SPC itself had a sorrier fate as it failed to sign up enough colonos in 1837–1838 to make ends meet, and dwindling contract commissions and interest on colono debts magnified its budgetary deficit despite contracting out more than half of its colonos (Table 3.2).

In its first year and a half, the SPC had used 10 times the value of its start-up capital, which yielded insufficient returns (15 contos). Bivar recommended curtailing colono flight and mortality to cut costs as well as increasing company capital by debenture, but he resigned shortly after Holanda Cavalcanti arrived and was replaced by German engineer Julius Friedrich Koeler. A short time later, Holanda Cavalcanti also abandoned his post.Footnote ⁸⁹ By 1839, the SPC was broke. An audit commission headed by Francisco Jê Acaiaba de Montezuma reported on the SPC’s “lack of method” and particularly on the absence of treasury records and shareholder rosters. The 52 accounting books that the SPC did possess at least contradicted the “false and calumnious assertions” propagandized by “the foes of free colonization.” Apparently, colonos had not suffered: the SPC had provided them with 47,000 food rations at a cost of 16:450$726 (more than the 15 contos in returns mentioned above) and spent 7:567$060 on other goods. In addition, it had invested in its hostel, especially in its sleeping quarters. Even though its active debt remained equivalent to its start-up capital of 75 contos, and a total of 969 colonos still owed 78.5 contos, only 70 percent of that debt was seen as recoverable.

Despite an operational deficit of almost 20 contos and a limited capacity to recoup its debts, the SPC could still come afloat by reducing expenses. Thus the commission recommended that the SPC carry on, believing that “if on this day its balance offers no profits, we should expect them soon.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Still, the SPC began to fold soon after. It entrusted the 61 colonos at Lapa depot to Henrique Laemmert, an important German publisher in Rio who would see to their pay as they worked as a construction crew for the provincial government’s Public Works department. In April 1840, provincial vice-president and SPC shareholder visconde de Baependi stepped in for Laemmert and formalized the province’s tutelage over the colonos, placing them under sergeant Koeler’s direction in the construction works for the Estrela road linking Rio to Minas, and taking over the SPC’s accounts to administer expenses.Footnote ⁹¹ Thereafter, references to the SPC tapered off.

The SPC closed down, but both of its presidents only saw their political capital increase in the decades ahead. Similarly, the colono trade carried on, giving continuity to shady overlaps between migrant and slave trafficking until the end of the latter in 1850. The SPC’s apparent failure could not erase the fact that many had benefited from its services by obtaining colonos for special tasks or crafts. Many more had profited from the example, enlightening themselves by identifying the necessary elements and workings of a colonization company while at the same time deepening their respect and support for the likes of Araújo Lima and even secretary Bivar for their selfless sacrifices, even if in the end theirs was a public service expected to render dividends.

* * *

Having attained important gains for their top principals, the first Brazilian colonization companies challenged normative expectations regarding how – and for whom – a company should have worked. They also interrogated whether innovations such as graduated voting could in practice shield business associations from unilateral decisions by management or the risks inherent to a nascent niche market such as the colono trade. Still, these companies provided a sobering learning experience and haunted lawmakers’ discussions for years. Shortly before the 1840 Majority Coup that put Pedro II on the throne, senators heard multiple requests by private companies that brought prior disappointments to the fore. One senator claimed that “shareholders lost their investment” in the CCB because “the company did not have the system it required.” Holanda Cavalcanti explained that “everyone who joined these associations came out losing” because administrators “took property that was not theirs to take and got away with it.” “And still,” he thundered, “we dare speak of associations!”Footnote ⁹²

Yet, casual criticism aside, the most poignant legacy of these early colonization companies was their complex interaction with slave trafficking, especially considering how their profit motivation fundamentally unsettles traditional characterizations of colonization as a labor replacement mechanism. To begin with, the Azorean colono trade emerged on the coattails of “African colonization” schemes that peaked in 1834 and died down after 1837, whereby traffickers reexported enslaved men and women from Montevideo to Rio as “African colonos.” Some as far north as Bahia championed this gimmick in a bid to revive a proposal harkening back to Pedro I’s reign.Footnote ⁹³ But, in the main, this remained a rare activity if compared to a broader set of trafficking ploys, including the recourse to the colono trade, both formal and clandestine, as cover for illegal slave trading.

The conceit voiced by Calmon and others that enslaved workers would be substituted with free hands at a time when slave trafficking hit record highs obscures the fact that the slave trade ban of 1831 barely affected the colono trade. The colono trade was in fact far more informed by political contingencies and, if anything, by the Portuguese law prohibiting slave trafficking in 1836, which increased Portuguese vigilance over speculators. A good example is that of Faial native João Severino de Avelar. Tagged as “one of the authors … of this infamous [colono] traffic” by an exasperated Kingdom minister in 1839, Avelar was later apprehended off the African coast for slave contraband and spent the next 17 years building a furtive trafficking ring linking Brazilian, Angolan, and Cuban shores. His range sporadically included the Azores and his methods at times relied on colono voyages to elude surveillance. Unclear tonnage, inconsistent vessel names, and missing captain names pose obstacles to define the correspondence between slave-trading and colono-trading vessels, but evidence dispersed across newspapers, government records, and at least one court case offer sparse examples of traffickers who also engaged in colono voyages.Footnote ⁹⁴

The complex relationship between colonization and slave trafficking went beyond the voyages themselves. Colonization advocates obfuscated the realities of the colono trade and its many functions by celebrating colonos as slave substitutes. At the same time, however, they racialized occupations in the belief that certain colonos excelled at specific forms of labor. Holanda Cavalcanti, for instance, celebrated colono-run industrial establishments such as the Italian glass factory in Rio and blithely described the hundred or so Azorean colonos employed in his household as “the most hard-working, tame, and of the best character.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Because of their reputation as skilled seafarers and fishermen, Azoreans ostensibly fit in Calmon’s plans to enhance Salvador’s nascent industries – including a soap factory that would benefit from Azoreans’ reputed skills at whale-hunting – and port warehouses with a “maritime population” that revived local fisheries and replaced dried meat imports from “faraway provinces” to feed the enslaved.Footnote ⁹⁶ Notably, at the height of the colono trade, most Azoreans avoided agricultural work. Of at least 3,819 documented entries into Rio from 1828 to 1842, only 12 perent claimed rural work while 41 percent reported urban sector occupations (Table 3.3).Footnote ⁹⁷ As the fastest growing segment of Rio’s population at the time, Portuguese migrants worked as craftsmen, falueiros (small-craft local sailors), caixeiros, and domestic servants in response to rising demand, and they often did so side by side with libertos and enslaved workers. This means that, as the leading colonos of this emergent trade, they were not really the slave substitutes trumpeted by some contemporaries.

Besides uplifting political careers and confounding easy distinctions between the slave and colono trades, the first homegrown colonization companies left another legacy in the form of a knock-on effect on new colonization undertakings. Their example roused a new colonization impulse even in Portugal. As they launched, Portuguese minister Sá da Bandeira began plans for Asseiceira, a colony close to Benguela to be populated with Azoreans. In 1838, Queen Maria II decreed that destitute Portuguese migrants in Brazil or Montevideo would receive free passage to Angola but signaled the need for them to clear any debts with the SPC, therefore revealing the nature of such initiative as a direct response to the Brazilian companies’ efforts. And many other schemes followed this first mirror reaction to the SPC’s colono trade. After the definitive suppression of the Portuguese slave trade in 1839, a new colonization company in Mozambique organized a shipment of degredados from Portugal. Some years later, a Portuguese official offered plans to populate Cape Verde with Azoreans and rivers Dande and Kwanza near Loanda with “intertropical colonos” from the Portuguese-controlled port of Goa.Footnote ⁹⁸

In the Brazilian Empire itself a coterie of new colonization enterprises followed in the SPC’s and CCB’s footsteps. In the northernmost province of Pará, a Brazilian merchant with London connections proposed a colonization society to convey Azoreans to an island he owned across from the port city of Belém. Then came proposals for a colonization company for the “Goyanna Brasileira” in 1836, a colonization company for Ceará in 1838 proposed by Joaquim José de Sequeira (see Chapter 2), a mining contract with colonization stipulations in 1838, an 1839 London-based colonization company for São Paulo, and a partnership headed by Antônio Carlos de Andrada (José Bonifácio’s brother) for “an agricultural and industrial colony” also in São Paulo in 1840.Footnote ⁹⁹

A company organized in Santos by Nicolau Vergueiro’s son surpassed all such proposals both in prestige and in its importance for later events. In early 1836, Göttingen alumnus Luiz Vergueiro assembled a highly select group willing to pay 800$ per share. In association with Miller & Co. of Rio, and one George Benjamin, captain of brigantine Créole, Luiz Vergueiro summoned kith and kin to his company, including his brother’s father-in-law, Bernardo José Pinto Gavião (whose own son would pursue colonization contracts with the imperial government in the 1870s); Luiz’s father-in-law, João Silva Machado, future barão de Antonina (see Chapter 6); and ex-provincial president, cousin and brother-in-law Francisco Antonio de Sousa Queirós. Antonio and Joaquim da Silva Prado, scions of a Paulista dynasty who would organize subsequent Italian migrations in the 1880s, also joined, as did São Paulo Law School director José da Costa Carvalho, founder of the first provincial newspaper, O Farol, regent in the Triple Permanent Regency (1831–1835) and future marquês de Monte Alegre.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

This Santos colonization company had its own ripple effects. Gavião for instance, soon became provincial president and purchased 10 shares on the province’s behalf while organizing a separate colono drive for the province itself. He hired Johann Bloêm for the task, the same major who had directed the old São João de Ipanema iron foundry as well as improvement works in Pernambuco employing German colonos. The 170 workers brought from Bremen to build the São Paulo-Cubatão road for muleteer caravans to access the port at Santos confirmed the company’s influence on further schemes. Most important, however, is that the Santos company represented the Vergueiros’ first foray into colonization. More than a decade later, the family rose to become the leading colono purveyor in the province of São Paulo and established an innovative sharecropping (parceria) system in its Ibicaba plantation that garnered such renown to the point that historians have taken such efforts as self-evident proof that São Paulo was ground zero in the development of colonization. But the fact that the Santos company remained a replica of the SPC and CCB – not least because the Vergueiro family firm held shares in the former –resets the historical timeline and recenters Rio and Bahia as the proper loci of colonization’s beginnings.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The first Brazilian colonization companies’ and the avatars in their wake propped up the business of colonization with their migrant depots, registries, and clandestine migration stratagems. They also forced the imperial government’s hand, turning colonization into a mainstay in the Empire ministry’s annual reports and instigating the creation of a new ministerial section to oversee the “admission, settlement and naturalization of foreigners.” Impelled by their energy and his own experience with them, regent Araújo Lima drafted a bill to “attract and establish foreign colonies in Brazil,” whose failure stirred other lawmakers to pen their own. In 1838, deputy Manuel Maria do Amaral advanced one bill for a massive government-run colonization system funded by government debt bonds whose value almost matched the Empire ministry’s budget. Two years later, deputy Bernardo de Souza Franco put forth another bill substituting bonds with land sales and including colonization companies as essential beneficiaries. While neither bill moved forward, both set the stage for land law debates from 1843 on.Footnote ¹⁰² In final sum, then, the SPC, CCB, and their many offshoots jumpstarted a niche market that comfortably coexisted with and sometimes overlapped with slave trafficking. Concurrently, they showed their worth as government partners, policy-making engines, and, crucially, private collectivities that bolstered personal finances and political trajectories. As such, they became essential reference points for subsequent generations, crowning colonization as a viable endeavor and inaugurating companies as imperfect but malleable vehicles of political agency and personal profit.

In 1840, a group headed by the Andrada brothers outmaneuvered the conservatives in power since the 1837 Regresso. They convinced young prince Pedro de Alcântara to claim the Crown earlier than his eighteenth birthday and against constitutional mandate. The fourteen-year-old’s gleaming acceptance tipped the scales of power to their favor. But what followed was a relentless partisan see-sawing for the rest of the decade. Less than a year after the golpe da maioridade (Majority coup) of 1840, liberals were replaced by a conservative cabinet with its own election tricks in store, which prompted liberal revolts in 1842 headed by the Vergueiros in São Paulo and Teófilo Ottoni in Minas Gerais. Liberals only returned to power after a general amnesty in 1844, which inaugurated a so-called liberal quinquennium (1844–1848) before the pendulum swung back to the conservatives. Hardening monikers attested to the mutual skewering that marked the decade: liberals became luzias, after Santa Luzia, the famed site of their defeat in 1842, and conservatives came to be known as saquaremas, in reference to a sugar town east of the Court where reactionaries battled attempts by one of their foes, Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho, to steal the elections of 1844.Footnote ¹

Despite searing partisan infighting, colonization not only flourished in the decade following Pedro II’s rise but even transformed itself into a hallmark of the imperial state. The new emperor himself was partly responsible for colonization’s ascendancy. His presence rekindled courtly dynamics important to colonization enterprises and strengthened state-led initiatives to oversee such pursuits. Indeed, requests for special privileges and subsidies to import foreign settlers and start new colonies surged with the return of monarchical patronage. Yet, more than the emperor himself, it was a loyal posse of palatial figures who worked in his shadow that plied those proposals into the imperial and diplomatic policies to support a new reason of state. Seeing how directed migrations and planned settlements spurred the economy, mollified pressures to end the slave trade, and personally benefited those involved, palace insiders known as áulicos ramped up governmental involvement in the business of colonization. Taken together, these áulicos render moot Holanda Cavalcanti’s famous dictum that “there is nothing more saquarema than a luzia in power.” Even if áulicos identified with factions or parties, their allegiance to the emperor’s moderating power remained their primal compass.

These palatial creatures blurred the lines between conservative and liberal tenets by welcoming schemes geared to produce fiscal revenues and personal gains, most of which were led by private enterprises under their regulatory oversight. Three individuals in particular defined this emergent market in private colonization and the regulatory tools to oversee it: Pedro de Araújo Lima, by then ennobled as visconde de Olinda; Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho; and Miguel Calmon, by then visconde de Abrantes. In their hands, colonization became a policy tool to strengthen imperial authority, which they understood as tied to Pedro II in profound and personal ways. Together, the three cut an odd group, as each possessed singular political sympathies, kinship networks, and distinct regional alliances. But a deeply seated commitment to the emperor, and an outstanding concern with colonization, united them over their differences.

This chapter details how these palace insiders defined colonization above and beyond factional clashes as quintessential to the most pressing policy pursuits of the early Second Reign (1840–1889). In doing so, they reprised regulatory measures and diplomatic overtures promoting private colonization schemes under enhanced government purview and to the benefit of Brazilian geopolitical aims. The chapter first follows Araújo Lima’s tenure in the reactivated Conselho de Estado as he championed procedural and administrative regulation over governmental giveaways to colonization cronies. Araújo Lima recognized the limitations of government patronage and paved the way for a consequential land bill in 1843 meant to streamline colonization procedures among other things. As the bill stalled in the Senate, the chapter continues, Aureliano and other áulicos like the emperor’s own valet, Paulo Barbosa, took it upon themselves to furnish a model colony in the emperor’s name. The chapter closes by examining how these efforts strengthened Miguel Calmon’s diplomatic mission to Europe on the heels of the Aberdeen Act crisis (1844–1846). Tasked with pressuring Britain to accept treaty renewal terms favorable to Brazil, Calmon did not succeed in his first remit. But then, for the most important segment of his mission, he used colonization as a tantalizing bargaining chip to court Prussia as a potential commercial partner.

Ultimately, by nestling itself in áulicos’ visions, colonization acquired prominence in diplomatic talks, land law debates, and piecemeal efforts to hold empresarios to account and thereby strengthen the Brazilian state. Moreover, Petrópolis and a later colony in the lands of Pedro II’s sister, princess Francisca, offered models worthy of emulation, crowning imperial patronage as the main locus of legitimacy for colonization endeavors. Near the end of the decade, new enterprises emerged thanks to áulicos’ efforts, including two helmed by liberal leaders like Vergueiro and Ottoni. Yet, however bold or famous, new endeavors remained derivative, indebted as they were to a palatial drive that transformed Rio de Janeiro into the epicenter of colonization earlier than Vergueiro’s ultimately more notorious experiments in São Paulo. Together, áulicos steadied the state’s hand and prepared government to adopt a more assertive role in guiding colonization to its own advantage.

The Conselho, the Belgians, and the Land Bill

Reinstated in 1842, the Conselho de Estado quickly became the main government body judging the merits of foreign colonization proposals and weighing the necessary policies to regulate them. However, the diverse nature of proposals challenged the Conselho’s capacity to process them on an individual basis, prompting the body to favor regularizing colonization concessions, contracts, and oversight. But how could an ostensibly neutral organ of the moderating power contribute to statutory law? The Conselho was first and foremost in charge of keeping the administrative machinery of the Empire oiled and running. As part of its functions, it assessed provincial legislation to correct constitutional discrepancies, especially after the Interpretive Law of the Additional Act of 1840 passed during Araújo Lima’s regency reined in provincial governments’ liberties. By issuing opinions on provincial laws, the Conselho effectively curbed liberal excesses while maintaining its role as neutral overseer of jurisdictional or substantive legal conflicts submitted in the form of consultas (consultations) by any government office. In addition, by creating regulatory protocols, the Conselho indirectly oversaw the execution of codified law. In principle, then, this was a privy council, a supplementary body to the emperor’s “moderating power” meant to counsel more than govern. But, in truth, the Conselho became both Pedro II’s personal brain trust and a political powerhouse in its own right.

Conselheiros wielded enormous authority after all. Many served as ministers and held lifelong appointments in the Senate, and so perfectly understood work in the Conselho as a higher calling above nasty ministerial and legislative affronts. Notably, even though the Conselho sought to perfect governance impartially through administrative interventions, its consultas reserved space for disagreements. Its four specialized sections often produced split opinions depending on the matter at hand, especially if the outcome affected conselheiros’ home provinces or personal interests. Yet this new Conselho was generationally different from that of 1823, which was populated by aging Portuguese-born or Luso-Brazilian statesmen. After 1842, the typical conselheiro was best represented by a white, wealthy Brazilian educated at Coimbra, on average between 48 and 52 years old and prone to obtain a noble title.Footnote ²

Remarkably, colonization interests also united many of these functionaries. Among the seven longest-serving members of this new batch, several had significantly interacted with the SPC and CCB in the 1830s, including Limpo de Abreu, who went on to serve in the Conselho for 35 years, Araújo Lima (28 years), Calmon (22), and Holanda Cavalcanti (13). In all, over half of the first members of the new Conselho had purchased shares in private colonization ventures during the Regency. This background prepared conselheiros to deal with a caseload teeming with permit requests for colonization endeavors. Maria Martins estimated that consultas explicitly touching on colonization made up 7.3 percent of the total seen by the Empire section of the Conselho from 1847 to 1863, but if one adds other areas in which colonization played a part, colonization may have been present in up to 54.6 percent of the net total of consultas.Footnote ³ Also, other Conselho sections could see colonization-related consultas, including consular protests over the unlawful enlistment of foreigners routinely redirected to the Conselho from the Justice and Foreign ministries.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, even though the Justice ministry did keep track of missing migrants and managed foreign dignitaries’ queries on colonos’ fates in Brazil, only the Conselho could resolve jurisdictional conflicts in those queries, especially any involving colonos’ estates. In the process of handling such cases, the Conselho began to identify colonization issues in need of greater oversight.Footnote ⁵

A spate of Belgian proposals at the start of the Second Reign strengthened conselheiros’ resolve to remedy procedural issues clogging the advancement of colonization endeavors and establish stronger regulations. After independence from the Netherlands in 1830, Belgium had rapidly built railroads that traversed emigration-prone regions, which motivated Belgian colony prospecting across Latin America.Footnote ⁶ In 1840, Benoît Jules Mure, a medical graduate from Montpellier, requested and obtained lands for a settlement in the Saí peninsula in Santa Catarina, in addition to a government commitment to cover colono transport costs from Dunkirk. Initially, the Chamber of Deputies sent his request to a commission, but then a 64-conto subsidy for his project was sandwiched into the Empire ministry’s budget for 1842–1843, which fast-tracked his project. The first 84 colonos arrived in 1841, and another 79 left Le Havre in 1843 for the new colony.Footnote ⁷

However, even when granted extremely favorable terms, including a 30-conto loan for transports, Mure failed to make adequate preparations. Moreover, Mure’s ideological inclinations soon made the Empire minister uneasy. Mure referred to his colony as the phalanstère of Saí, revealing his alignment with the utopian teachings of Charles Fourier. His devotion to Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, further characterized him not only as a Socialist but also as a quack in the eyes of Brazilian statesmen. Soon, the Brazilian government began to withhold funds, sending Saí into an inevitable tailspin. In the years after the colony’s demise, nonetheless, Mure’s career continued to grow and to demand further interventions by the Conselho. By 1848, Mure had trained a number of Brazilians and even the first Belgian consul in Rio in homeopathy, which incited a medical establishment concerned over his cult-following to ask the Conselho to shut down his plans for a homeopathic school.Footnote ⁸

Successive Belgian projects continued to flag a need for a uniform set of incentives and procedures for the Conselho. Dr. Jules Parigot, a geology professor from Brussels and an old aide to king Leopold, came to Rio in 1841 with plans for a Belgian “Colonization Society” focused on mining, which quickly stalled due to deputies’ uncertainties about whether the Brazilian government should issue special privileges to companies and whether it should favor national over foreign ones.Footnote ⁹ Another Belgian, Joseph Ludgero Nelis, obtained a contract with the central government in June 1842 to establish the colony of Pedra Lisa in Campos, but he lost momentum despite the favors offered by Rio’s provincial government. Clearly, these projects required a consistent system of vigilance to see them through.Footnote ¹⁰

The lack of a system led to convoluted results even for proposals supported by the Conselho by allowing profiteers to take advantage of existing loopholes. This eventually prompted conselheiros to reflect on how their regulatory shortfalls generated undesired outcomes, as exemplified by the company drive of another Belgian empresario, Charles van Lede. Van Lede had worked for a mining firm in Mexico and in Chile before he set out to organize the Société Belge-Brésilienne de Colonisation with some help from Parigot, who became his emigration agent.Footnote ¹¹ Van Lede baited Brazilian officials with references to Java, Canada, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, New Zealand, and Algeria and tried to impress them by organizing an “emigration protecting council” manned by Belgian grandees. Van Lede soon obtained positive appraisals from Santa Catarina’s provincial assembly and by August 1842 an initial contract with the imperial government committing him to importing 100 families in exchange of per capita prizes.

A few months later, van Lede incorporated the company in Belgium as a société anonyme with a projected capitalization of 6 million francs (1.872:000$000) underwritten by professional, political, and commercial elites from Brussels and Antwerp. In 1844, king Leopold recognized its statutes.Footnote ¹² The Conselho recommended government purchase of one-quarter of available shares. Comparatively, Brazilian proponents encountered far less favor. For instance, the tireless Joaquim José de Sequeira requested an appointment as “chargé of foreign colonization for the northern provinces” in Paris or London, only to be rejected. Matheus Ramos, a trader of Chinese goods, proposed a company to furnish Asian colonos to the government, but his bid similarly failed. Yet, even if it wished to, the Conselho could not realize these plans. While it could vet laws, it could not legislate at will and was ultimately hamstrung when it wished to favor colonization enterprises due to the absence of clear procedures for weighing company merits and corresponding privileges.Footnote ¹³

What the Conselho could do was exercise its attribution to submit its own bills to the Chamber’s consideration. And in doing so, the Conselho prioritized colonization at Pedro II’s behest. In mid-1842, the emperor tasked Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos and José Cesário de Miranda Ribeiro in the Conselho’s Empire section with drafting a bill on land grants and followed up a month later asking for another on foreign colonization. The conselheiros gathered old files from ministerial and legislative archives that documented colonization projects over two decades and set the tenor for the debates that followed. The papers included H. G. Schmidt’s plan of 1821, defended by Domingo Borges at the Lisbon Courts; a British company proposal to establish colonies in the Cisplatina in 1825; four different versions of the 1827 colonization bill drafted by Barbacena’s commission; two additional bills of 1838 and 1840 (Amaral’s and Souza Franco’s); a colonization project for Maranhão “undersigned by a great number of people”; and more recent proposals from two French subjects and from Georg Friedrich Schmidt, an employee at Brazil’s legation in Hamburg. The Conselho also wrote to the British consul to inquire about British emigration to Brazil and included his response among the papers.Footnote ¹⁴ This impromptu archive ended with the latest pamphlets on Australian and Canadian colonization sent by Brazilian diplomats, many of which celebrated the ideas of the radical political economist Edward Gibbon Wakefield regarding the necessity of land sales in lieu of land grants to ensure the success of colonization enterprises.Footnote ¹⁵

Conselheiros used Wakefield as a guidepost for their revisions of Vasconcelos’s and Miranda Ribeiro’s draft bill. These revisions stipulated strong executive powers to organize public land sales, demarcate land, prohibit sesmarias and informal squats (posses), and prevent colonos from purchasing land, renting plots, and owning businesses or peddling within three years of arrival, after which they could naturalize and buy land whose proceeds would be dedicated to importing more workers.Footnote ¹⁶ The revised bill also empowered district courts to oversee sales and contract feuds. It further authorized provincial presidents and the central government to handle appeals.Footnote ¹⁷ As it entered the Chamber in 1843, the bill incorporated a land tax and a registration fee for posses and pre-1822 sesmarias, established size limits for existing posses while prohibiting all future posses, and obligated landowners to survey and register their property within six months. In order to protect national territory, government preserved a right to grant public lands along Brazilian borders as needed, allowing some flexibility to the Wakefield principle of strictly replacing land grants with land sales.Footnote ¹⁸

The Conselho’s revised bill arrived at the Chamber for discussion as projeto no. 94. Historians have long understood that the ensuing debates hinged on the interests and stratagems of wealthy slaveholding coffee elites from the Brazilian southeast. But, with its emphasis in shaping a land market, the Conselho-crafted projeto no. 94 in fact accomplished three notable achivements that upend traditional explanations. First, far from cementing an exclusive class of land “barons” opposed to reform, the projeto no. 94 in fact facilitated cross-regional and inter-party alliances based on deputies’ agreement on the value of colonization. Expectedly, conservative Navy minister Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres, who introduced the bill, and Diogo Vasconcelos, brother of the conselheiro who had drafted the bill, adamantly supported projeto no. 94. But the most eloquent defender of the bill was a junior liberal deputy from Pará, Bernardo de Souza Franco, who had already advanced his own land bill stipulating significant corporate advantages in 1840 and openly invoked Wakefield’s ideas in his addresses as provincial president of Pará in 1841 at the tail end of the Cabanagem rebellion.

Secondly, the debates upheld the Conselho’s imperative by enshrining profit as the driving force of land reform and of colonization in particular. As Souza Franco asserted, “in this project the most essential thing is money …. Colonization is the end; money, the means.” The project’s conservative supporters agreed, with Diogo Vasconcelos positing that “raising land values is the first rule of colonization” and even a staunch conservative like Rodrigues Torres defending land re-sale and speculation as entirely legitimate. Lastly, these debates consecrated companies as some of the leading beneficiaries of the projected bill. Some deputies raised important concerns, with one warning that under the proposed law “nothing would be easier than a foreign company taking over a great portion of some important territory.”Footnote ¹⁹ The projeto no. 94 plowed through those worries and passed the Chamber. However, once in the Senate, it stalled in a special commission until 1847, when Miguel Calmon called for discussing it once again.

Olinda, the Reluctant Regulator

In the intervening years, some conselheiros refused to idly wait for a land law to materialize and decided to draft an exacting ordinance to facilitate migrations in the meantime. The ordinance followed up on the 1843–1844 budget law, which had already expanded anchorage duty exemptions for colono vessels by overriding a previously set minimum of 100 colonos and instead stipulating exemptions in proportion to any number of passengers. The conselheiros’ ordinance was undersigned by Araújo Lima, who was very likely its leading author as suggested by similarities with policies he adopted later in 1857–1858. Other undersigners included Calmon, José da Costa Carvalho (the president of the Santos colonization company, see Chapter 3), and the authors of the initial projeto no. 94 draft – a roster that promised pathbreaking innovations.

Indeed, the ordinance broke new ground by defining what types of migrants counted toward anchorage exemptions. And for the first time it mandated the collection of individual information from colonos including age, gender (to identify unaccompanied young women purposefully disqualified from exemptions), smallpox scars, employment history, and family status. It also defined consular officers’ responsibilities, which included abiding by contractually agreed colono quotas and producing quarterly tallies of incomers. In exchange, consuls were incentivized with money prizes for arriving colonos at a rate of 100$ for every ten. In all, this innovative and ambitious ordinance exemplified the Conselho’s capacity to extra-legally shape the means of policy implementation and offered a path forward for ongoing colonization proposals.Footnote ²⁰ The timing proved crucial as three important proposals made their way to the Conselho in 1844: one from Dr. Carl von Martius, another from a German empresario, Hermann Blumenau, and a third from Pedro II’s sister, dona Francisca, princess of Joinville, who wished celebrate her marriage by establishing a German colony with the help of a Hamburg-based emigration society.Footnote ²¹

Araújo Lima, visconde de Olinda, stood out among his peers in handling these proposals by embracing a nuanced regulatory ethos best exemplified in his opinion on von Martius’s proposal. Surely, he would have preferred that the Chamber possessed the necessary codes to process such requests, but, absent those, Olinda took on the role of a reluctant regulator, and one who tempered his more reactionary peers’ spirits vis à vis complex requests such as the one at hand. Dr. Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius, the veteran botanist from the Austrian Scientific Expedition of 1817, wanted to know if he could start a colony in Brazil and asked Brazil’s consul in London whether he could “form associations to promote emigration to the Empire.” Von Martius knew Brazil well and had long corresponded with Brazilian savants and diplomats like Bento da Silva Lisboa. More practically, he had also consulted the 1840 and 1843 land bills and had already found a patron in count Adalbert von der Recke, a famous literato who owned an establishment for poor children. He thus proposed his conditions for a colonization enterprise by requesting automatic naturalization of emigrants, local control of a district council and standing military corps, and the exclusion of Brazilians, who would require special license to live in his colony. As would be expected based on this last condition, the Conselho strenuously rejected the scheme. Vasconcelos and Miranda Ribeiro even equated any such concession to “ceding a portion of the Empire’s territory” to “an independent society” bent on exploiting Brazilians.Footnote ²²

Olinda, in turn, issued a separate, more subtle, opinion. Indeed, his assessment evinced impressive learning gains that allowed him to propose potential correctives to colonizing efforts to date by establishing a balance between private requests and government expectations. “The two companies formed in this city and in Bahia to promote [colonization],” he recalled, “are nonexistent: and the colonos they brought did not behave in a way that would make it desirable for others to come.” Olinda acknowledged that colonos were necessary to strengthen the country through their “agglomeration.” Discarding the United States and Canada as viable models for Brazilian colonization, he looked instead to Russia as a more suitable exemplar and to Australia, particularly the Swan river colony, where the government granted land to a company that in turn sold it to private individuals under certain obligations. In Olinda’s view, government had to provide concessions to continue “to excite private interests” while acknowledging that “establishing a colony entails enormous investment.” With these ideas in mind, Olinda interpreted many of von Martius’s ideas positively, agreeing with establishing German schools, Protestant churches, and a local district council elected by popular vote, but objecting to Brazilians’ exclusion and military exemptions if colonos naturalized.Footnote ²³

Olinda’s nuance did not preclude the Conselho’s stringent exercise of its gatekeeping attributions, both in this case and when van Lede’s speculations around the Société Belge-Brasilienne came to light. After the 1842 decree that authorized him to proceed with organizing a company, van Lede had tried to sell his rights to a third party and then incorporated the enterprise in Belgium without having done so in Brazil. In the new company statutes approved in Belgium, the company’s operating capital was one million francs lower than the amount approved in Brazil with the 1842 decree, allegedly because that was the quantity claimed by van Lede as compensation. In response to these irregularities, the Empire minister canceled obligations toward van Lede, arguing that the Chamber had rightfully authorized similar privileges to another proponent. Van Lede protested that he had incorporated the company in “good faith” and had already entered obligations to creditors and emigration agents. He also warned that this unilateral contractual withdrawal would cast a grave shadow over the “Imperial signature.”

The Conselho issued a withering – and sobering – response. Approved statutes in Belgium, it clarified, did not extend to Brazil, and if van Lede made promises to any future shareholders he “would only fool them regarding the true state of affairs.” Conselheiros questioned the attempt to relay the privileges to third parties and the negligence involved in commencing an emigration drive without having demarcated lands or launched share subscriptions. These “preparatory acts to organize companies” fell on the Société’s agents, the Conselho concluded. Nevertheless, the Conselho agreed that the Société deserved governmental protection but only as long as van Lede submitted new statutes to both legislative houses for consideration.Footnote ²⁴

As an adamant regulatory watchdog, the Conselho de Estado compensated for the absence of codified colonization regulations by avidly identifying procedural problems and designing protocols to solve them. In doing so, it helped to refine the form and function of the government’s administrative powers. Still, its interest in streamlining petitionary and concessionary processes left many questions unanswered, even if it produced only tentative responses to the questions of how much decision-making the government should cede to company managers and shareholders abroad (very little) and what status overseas incorporations should enjoy in Brazil (none, unless sanctioned by imperial authorities). More importantly, however, in its engagement with colonization the Conselho demonstrated that it was not an extra-political entity designed exclusively to preserve conservative dominance, enhance monarchical power, and stubbornly block industrial and corporate development. Rather, as the regulatory body most closely linked to the monarch, the Conselho, and reluctant conselheiros like Olinda in particular, sought to modernize migrant-recruitment protocols and safeguard government interests from contractual breaches by companies incorporated elsewhere. Paradigmatically, Olinda’s efforts synthesized decades of political experience and business experiments into uniform policy responses.

Rio de Janeiro: Colonization Central

Rio de Janeiro stood to benefit disproportionately from the new anchorage rules as the busiest port region in the country, and it would do so thanks in large measure to Aureliano de Souza Oliveira Coutinho. Aureliano had served as judge, president of São Paulo, and minister. He was a popular public works advocate although he also tainted his reputation by allegedly orchestrating the Majority coup from the shadows, earning the moniker of the “Achilles of the majority movement.” Yet, from his years in the majority cabinet as well as the conservative ministry that followed, and through his long stint as Rio’s provincial president from 1844–1848, Aureliano devoted his energy to institutionalizing colonization activities in ways that strengthened and aggrandized the Crown. His closeness to the emperor incited further accusations in 1847 that he led a “palace faction” keeping Pedro II under thrall. In fact, the emperor and his close friend had much uniting them, including their commitment to colonization.Footnote ²⁵

Throughout the 1840s, Aureliano gave pride of place to colonization matters. With the help of his diplomatic officers and his brother Saturnino as the head of customs in Rio, he sought to repurpose government-directed colonization. When the chargé d’affaires in the Hanse Cities informed him of the exponential growth of emigrant exits from Bremen and of growing competition of Java coffee in Hamburg, Aureliano targeted Hamburg syndic Karl as a potential investor and patron of emigration to Brazil.Footnote ²⁶ As an emigration promoter, Sieveking believed that durable emigration flows required the receiving country to cover travel costs and sell land to emigrants, but rather than Brazil, he was then negotiating with the New Zealand Company to establish a German colony on Chatham island. His plans changed when the British prime minister prohibited the company from selling colonial lands to a foreign power and incorporated the islands to New Zealand territory.Footnote ²⁷ Brazil’s chargé took advantage of this and followed up on Sieveking’s earlier interest in acquiring land near São Paulo, Santa Catarina, or other ports, suggesting that Aureliano’s ministry was ready to compete with some of the top colonization companies of the time.

Aureliano also hired a colonization agent, Dr. Georg Friedrich Schmidt, who became a most productive paid employee of the Brazilian delegation. Where Schäffer and others had incited public flare-ups, Schmidt stamped out fires with his memórias and press releases. In mid-1842, he even publicly confronted the US consul in Bremen, an “improvised agent” of the New Zealand Company, over his attacks on Brazilian emigration drives.Footnote ²⁸ And he learned how to sell Brazil’s advantages. In 1844, he ordered Brazilian soil samples to study their properties and inform emigrants about potential crops and yields. Schmidt’s work even continued to regale Aureliano with prized information long after his ministry, including on the Texas German Colonization Society’s recruitment ploys in 1844.Footnote ²⁹

Aureliano indeed paid close attention to Bremen’s and Hamburg’s growing importance as emigrant exit ports. All the same, he eyed emergent industrial regions such as Belgium, where he authorized Charles van Lede’s appointment as vice-consul, paving the way for his company run, and issued instructions for the consul general to aid Parigot with migrant recruitment in Brussels.Footnote ³⁰ Aureliano’s ministerial exit interrupted and complicated this avid colonization advocacy. Yet, against his conservative foes’ wishes, Aureliano was still able to leverage the emperor’s favor. He not only kept his brother as top customs officer but also managed to obtain Rio’s presidency by the emperor’s direct indication.Footnote ³¹

At the head of Brazil’s top province, Aureliano continued to shepherd colonization, especially Belgian endeavors like the Pedra Lisa colony. He made good use of the provincial law of 30 May 1840 authorizing Rio’s president to contract companies for the establishment of agricultural colonies and inaugurated the Comissão Central Directora da Colonização (Central Commission for Directing Colonization). This organ aligned the provincial government with the Empire ministry after its 1843 reform, particularly with its new fourth section focusing on “agriculture, cattle-ranching, mining, colonization and indigenous civilization.” As provincial president, Aureliano directly managed the Comissão, setting it up for a relatively long institutional life, as it remained in operation as a stand-alone provincial bureau until 1876.Footnote ³²

With the new Commissão at hand, soon into his presidency Aureliano mobilized plans for a grand model colony. If, as Vasconcelos famously said, “Aureliano sculpted his name on the foundations of our monarchy” due to his inside influence, to repay the favor Aureliano sought to sculpt the emperor’s name on the fluminense palisade. Petrópolis, or “Pedro’s city,” as the projected royal colony was christened, would become Pedro II’s summer retreat and a model colony for Brazilian and foreign entrepreneurs. Its altitude and distance from the Court provided a sanitary respite from the fevers that periodically beset Rio. It was also close enough that, while staying there, the emperor could quickly return to the Court to attend to emergencies. Petrópolis also gave visibility to multiple road construction projects beyond the Estrela road and well into Minas.Footnote ³³ Its layout was the work of Julius Friedrich Koeler, the German engineer supervising the Estrela road, who designed a seigneurial city with a bucolic touch – long mainstreets surrounded by German-named districts, each traversed by canals or streams feeding well-demarcated smallholds (Figure 4.1).Footnote ³⁴

Figure 4.1 Projected land plots and canal works in Petrópolis (1846)

AMI, Cartografia-RJ-PT-1846, “Planta de Petrópolis do ano de 1846, mandada levantar pelo então presidente da província do Rio de Janeiro, Aureliano de Souza e Oliveira Coutinho” (1846).

Image courtesy of the Arquivo do Museu Imperial.

Koeler’s contributions to prop up Petrópolis put in evidence important continuities with prior colonization efforts and underlined the role of private initiative. Koeler had already interacted closely with the SPC when, years prior, he took in the German colonos from the Sydney-bound Justine for the Estrela road works (see Chapter 3). At that time, he found out about Córrego Seco, one of the emperor’s properties up in the mountains, and petitioned the central government for permission to start his own colonization business. As his partner for the proposed venture, Koeler chose colonization agent Louis Friedrich Kalkmann, one of Schäffer’s protégés (see Chapter 2).Footnote ³⁵ The Conselho responded with a cold reminder that such a petition “should be regulated with a general law, and not through favors.” But Olinda figured among the conselheiros overseeing this request and as a devout monarchist may have sympathized with the plans already voiced by mordomo (chamberlain) Paulo Barbosa, the undeclared patron of Petrópolis as an imperial colony. Koeler did not receive a company charter but did obtain an appointment as director of the colony, which he held until his suspicious death in 1847.Footnote ³⁶

For years following its founding in 1845, foreigners marveled at Petrópolis. Fleeing the yellow fever at the port, Argentinian exile Domingo Faustino Sarmiento spent several weeks there in 1852, meeting frequently with Pedro II. On his return to Rio, he discussed immigration with minister Carneiro Leão and reported being “enchanted” by Petrópolis. He included glowing remarks on the colony in his famous recollection of the war against Rosas published in Brazil, even if he later published unflattering opinions about Brazilian migration policy.Footnote ³⁷ By then, the colony had grown considerably to a population of 2,959 individuals, of whom almost half were Prussian, 45 percent minors (1,336), and only 24 percent Brazilian (715).Footnote ³⁸ With time, Petrópolis facilitated colono settlement along road projects into Minas, as recounted by a student of von Martius who visited Brazil in 1865. Telling of how the trip from Petrópolis to Juiz de Fora could be completed in 10 or 12 hours along a macadam road, Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz spoke of the rest stops along the way, all styled like Swiss chalets and marking numerous German colonies. Like many Brazilians at the time, Agassiz remarked that “colonization schemes assumed a more definite and settled character” only after the abolition of the slave trade in 1850, when in fact plans for Petrópolis had already laid the groundwork in 1845–1846, as had a special diplomatic mission to Europe that tasked Miguel Calmon with exploring potential partnerships beyond the United Kingdom, for which he used colonization as a powerful intermediary.Footnote ³⁹

Colonization’s Diplomacy

Calmon’s long ministerial record prepared him for a mission to expand Brazil’s fledgling “economic diplomacy” and maneuver around British pressures as the Anglo-Brazilian treaty of 1827 and the commercial treaty of 1831 expired.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the United Kingdom jockeyed for treaty renewals to include a slave trade ban, Brazilian ministers weighed approaching Prussia, then at the head of the German customs union known as the Zollverein, as a potential partner to counterbalance British influence. In response, British ministers calculated a more forceful approach. As Anglo-Brazilian relations deteriorated, Calmon set out on a mission with multiple remits, including lobbying in Britain for the abolition of differential duties, obtaining British and French support against Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and producing a new commercial treaty with Prussia. Calmon set out as a seasoned statesman and, importantly, as one conversant in the art of colonization, a powerful lever in the negotiations ahead.Footnote ⁴¹

From the outset, the British government appeared unswayable. A mounting free trade movement worried British ministers about how to preserve a competitive edge for colonial products, especially sugar, if protectionist barriers fell.Footnote ⁴² Yet Brazilian markets remained important to British commerce, as a Liverpool shipping lobby reminded the prime minister Robert Peel by pleading for a treaty renewal as British preferential duties expired. To oppose restrictions on Brazilian sugar and coffee in new negotiations, Liverpudlian merchants highlighted that slave imports were already illegal and that US cotton was imported at a nominal duty despite being produced by slaves.Footnote ⁴³ Other Brazil-related British industries piled on this pressure. The English manager of the Imperial Mining Association, George Vincent Duval, foresaw that higher import duties could apply to the company in the United Kingdom because of its dependence on slavery and concocted a British government–subsidized emigration plan to whitewash the company’s reliance on slavery and avoid higher duties. Imperial Mining was already plagued by reports on the conditions of its enslaved laborers, the children of whom Duval once suggested placing on treadmills to power machinery.Footnote ⁴⁴ If his ruse worked, the company would have likely avoided higher duties. At the opposite end of these pressures and proposals, Lord Ripon, the Board of Trade secretary, championed a tougher stance to replace Brazil altogether. Ripon coaxed Peel to look for alternatives to Brazilian commodities. In his view, lifting Java sugar prohibitions in India would channel the surplus to Britain at affordable prices, and Java would consequently displace Brazil as a market for British manufactures.Footnote ⁴⁵

Preferential rights or differential duties, depending on how the question was posed or by whom, were at the root of these considerations and of international commercial accords more generally at the time of Calmon’s mission. Yet his instructions encompassed strategic aims that transcended tariffs and duties. One of his prime goals was to secure British and French support for a joint intervention in the southern confines of Brazil and Uruguay, then under threat of invasion by Juan Manuel de Rosas. As soon as Calmon arrived in London in mid-October 1844, he sought out Lord Aberdeen, only to be kept waiting for weeks. Meetings did not produce the expected outcomes, as Calmon failed to secure military commitments from the British and later from the French, with the former dead set on the slavery question and the latter still harboring resentments over border skirmishes between Pará and Cayenne.

Berlin, however, held higher hopes. For years, Sturz had recommended Prussia as a potential partner based on his close assessments of the rapidly expanding Zollverein customs union. In addition, the Brazilian Empire already possessed commercial ties with the Hanse cities and had considered proposals for reciprocal navigation rights from the German kingdoms of Oldenburg and Hanover. Calmon arrived in Berlin in the middle of winter in 1845, with the British government and Ripon himself following his every move out of concern that Brazil would secure a partner that did not distinguish between slave- and free-grown sugar.Footnote ⁴⁶

Negotiations in Prussia moved slowly at first but were greatly aided by the topic of emigration. Abrantes speculated that the foreign minister, baron Heinrich von Bülow, purposely delayed his dealings to obtain rights beyond mere reciprocity. Bülow recriminated Brazil’s failure to seek an earlier accord, considering its statesmen knew that Prussia possessed no colonies of its own. He lowballed initial offers: in exchange for improved differential rights, Prussia would turn a blind eye to emigration to Brazil, a concession both symbolic and unnecessary. Indeed, at the time, Petrópolis had restored some prestige to Brazil as a destination, thanks in part to promoters like Günther Fröbel, a printer who opened a Brazil-focused emigration agency in Rudolstadt (Thuringia) in 1845 and started a promotional newspaper, the Allgemeine Auswanderung-Zeitung.Footnote ⁴⁷ And in 1844–1845, as Abrantes noted, at least thirty “patriotic associations” dedicated to emigration were active in German territories. The one remaining concern for Abrantes was the continuing reports of abuses by emigration agents and the endless allusions to “white slavery.” In response to these, the Great Duchy of Hesse, Bavaria, Prussia, and Württemberg began demanding pre-approved contracts and proof of solvency on the part of emigrants – Bülow could certainly help to roll these back. Gradually, the two statesmen found common ground under the assumption that any treaty would depend on emigration “to establish the closest relationships between the two countries and increase the consumption of German products.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet, as if by a fit of jealousy, exactly as Prussian negotiations moved forward, the British Parliament passed the Aberdeen Act on 8 August 1845. Long seen as an aggressive ultimatium against Brazilian slave contraband, the new law disincentivized Prussian interest in a Brazilian treaty by implicitly calling the German kingdom to its own treaty obligations against the slave trade. Further diminishing Abrantes’s prospects, Bülow’s deteriorating health led to his replacement with baron Karl Ernst von Canitz, a veteran envoy to Istanbul and Vienna whose primary interests were to reconstitute a German Confederacy with Austria and treat all countries trading with the Zollverein on an equal footing.Footnote ⁴⁹ Abrantes adapted by returning to negotiations with smaller states like Oldenburg, Hanover, and Belgium, while offering new incentives to von Canitz, including access to Paraguayan markets. But all this was to little effect. A new Sugar Duties Act approved in London in 1846 repealed the British Corn Laws and opened the way for phasing out sugar duties, including slave-grown, which also took the wind out of the Abrantes mission.

Geopolitical and commercial calculations shifted tremendously during Abrantes’s travels, but colonization remained a bedrock concern whatever the outcome of the mission. In 1846, Abrantes published Memória sobre meios de promover a colonização in Berlin, a propagandist exposé peddling Brazil as a safe destination and borrowing ideas from the Frankfurt Geographical Society, regional gazettes, and European diplomats. This memória marked an important shift from Calmon’s earlier focus on a single private company. Rather than rave about company-led colonization, even as the CCB’s ex-president, Abrantes now advocated for government oversight, believing that companies could expedite government aims but required judicious oversight given their dysfunctional tendencies. Providing “free land concessions and other favors to Companies” was fine. But Abrantes cautioned against the “many catastrophes” of prior efforts, singling out “the spirit of speculation and profit, the waste of funds, patronage, and the conflicts and discords among Agents” as “vices inseparable from companies.” Far from a mea culpa, the memória mentioned van Lede’s Société as an example of a company employing “tricks and intrigues” that justified a more concerted “public protection and direction for emigrations.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Abrantes also referred to a disastrous recruitment drive that gave his mission one last but very meaningful objective, namely, to restore public trust in emigration to Brazil.

This disastrous drive, which I refer to as the Delrue affair, began on 17 June 1844 when Aureliano’s provincial government commissioned an emigrant drive to the merchant house of Charles Delrue, Brazil’s vice-consul in Dunkirk and the Paris agent for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. Within months, the firm recruited 1,823 Germans and shipped them to Brazil via Ostende in 13 different voyages billed at 134:531$000 – almost two-and-a-half times the special loan obtained by the province to supply its annual budget for colonization and the Estrella roadworks.Footnote ⁵¹

Irregularities immediately arose that revealed attempts by Delrue and his men to maximize their earnings. Delrue’s agent Carlos [Charles] Haack reportedly paid the dues owed by one widowed colono who had helped his children escape from the depot at Estrela.Footnote ⁵² Haack also solicited a 5– to 6–league property under provincial law no. 226 of 30 May 1840, which authorized the president to grant lands, and asked for permission to transport colonos directly to the port nearest to his lands. He demanded exemptions from imports and land sale taxes and a property title to facilitate leasing parcels to colonos. These indiscretions paled in comparison to colonos’ and officials’ reports that Delrue’s agents were double-billing by obtaining reimbursements from Rio’s provincial government and charging colonos up to 60 francs before embarkation.Footnote ⁵³ Doing this allowed Delrue to cut losses in the event of an unforeseen accident as befell one of the vessels, the Marie, which hit an Atlantic storm on its way to Rio but whose repairs Delrue’s insurers refused to cover, alleging that their cost exceeded those needed to revamp the brig to its previous state (Delrue sued and won).Footnote ⁵⁴

Delrue’s profiteering was germane to colonization, but Brazilian statesmen would not tolerate it this time. They suspended further contracts with Delrue and instructed Sturz to attack him as a scammer in the press. In a Cologne gazette, Sturz claimed Delrue had lured 700 emigrants to Dunkirk only to overcharge them. In response, Delrue cited lack of witnesses and dismissed Sturz as a jealous competitor and a failed emigration promoter. But a colono writing to the same newspaper later blamed Delrue for false promises and lamented the impact his schemes had on Petrópolis.Footnote ⁵⁵ In truth, however, Petrópolis also fostered fraudulent practices, as major Koeler himself had appropriated lands titled to a colono in order to benefit a close friend.Footnote ⁵⁶ Colono discontent against false promises and abuses manifested in growing unrest. Some housed in the Police quarters at Estrela inflicted “damages [to] the farm plots and crofts close to the city” and were swiftly shipped to the southern provinces. And, as jobs began to run short in Petrópolis, rivalries arose between German and Portuguese dayworkers in 1847.Footnote ⁵⁷

With the Delrue affair at least, the authorities made haste to contain the emergency. Aureliano’s brother Saturnino personally housed many colonos. Provincial vice-president Cândido Baptista de Oliveira tried to find accommodations for them, housing some at the Police station, employing others in waterworks around the Court, and pushing the rest toward Petrópolis. He also repurposed the SPC’s old depot in Rio, opened a new one in Niterói and in the Estrela port, and vigorously subcontracted for services for these locales, beginning with clean water providers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Migrants drove some changes by actively demanding better conditions. Those still unemployed after a few months requested allowances to rent their own living quarters, as their debt grew daily as long as they stayed in government-run facilities. They also suggested payment plans by monthly installments, rather than on sight upon exit.Footnote ⁵⁹

Remarkably, other provinces reached for a Delrue contract even after the scandal. A São Paulo law in 1846 authorized the provincial president to contract Delrue directly, but the Conselho struck it down eight months later. Nonetheless, the incident gave the Vergueiros of São Paulo enough of a head start to enter negotiations with Hamburg senator Christian Mathias Schröder, who eventually became their colono recruiter. By March 1847, Schröder had readied 190 colonos to send to Santos, jumpstarting the Vergueiros’ colono-provisioning emporium, which centered in São Paulo but – contrary to the accepted narrative – had derived directly from Rio’s colonization dealings and more specifically from the fallout of the Delrue affair.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Abrantes mission to London, Paris, and Berlin did not attain its objectives in part due to the difficulty inherent to negotiations, in part due to active British attempts to sabotage them. Nevertheless, Abrantes succeeded in spurring emigration at a key juncture before the 1848 revolutions. This propagandist push did come at a high price, as one of the resulting migrant conveyance schemes quickly devolved into a scam. The Delrue affair forced some Brazilian statesmen into an emergency response but at the same time inspired others to seek contracts with the same commercial house or other similar ones. In many ways, then, Abrantes and his pro-emigration campaigning propitiated a renewed colonization proposal rush by the end of the decade, which in turn exerted the necessary pressure for a Land Law approval at last.

Palatial Ripples in the Business of Colonization

When the projeto no. 94 resurfaced in the Senate in 1847, Bernardo de Vasconcelos poked fun at Nicolau Vergueiro’s change of opinion since 1826. “Quantum mutatus ab illo! [how much (he) has changed],” he exclaimed, in reference to Vergueiro’s recent support for “that city, or whatever they call it, of Petrópolis.” But Vergueiro in fact had little sympathy for recent Rio-centered colonization initiatives. He claimed the province was “set on transporting as many miserable Germans as exist in Europe” to the detriment of private colonization pursuits.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet, in reality, Vergueiro was deeply indebted to the palatial drive for colonization, out of whose vestiges his own family fortunes rose steeply in 1847.

Disgruntled liberals were not the only ones opposing a palatial brand of colonization. Conservatives Rodrigues Torres, Araújo Viana, and Miranda Ribeiro tried to cut down on such efforts by motioning for the indefinite deferral of any colonization bill involving negotiations with companies until a land demarcation system was established.Footnote ⁶² Their success would have indeed constituted a “veto of the barons,” as José Murilo de Carvalho referred to coffee planters’ sabotaging of the eventual Land Law of 1850. But, by then, áulicos had succeeded in turning the tide in favor of colonization, spurring new plans that obligated remaining holdouts to finally approve a law gridlocked for a quarter century.

As Petrópolis began construction and Calmon finalized his mission, a trove of domestic proposals streamed in. In 1845, Joaquim José de Sequeira yet again advanced a proposal, this time for a Colonization Bank for Maranhão’s cotton growers.Footnote ⁶³ The following year, Eduardo Racine and Pedro Affonso de Carvalho floated a new company to establish a colony named after the prince Affonso Pedro, born in 1845. Affonsiada would house 6,000 German-speaking colonos while espousing recruitment practices opposed to “the most sordid and soulless avarice of certain commercial houses and ship captains.” The Conselho turned down Affonsiada almost exactly as Pedro II’s firstborn died, but similar enterprises carried on, including one led by the brothers Ottoni in Minas.Footnote ⁶⁴ Concurrently, Brazilian intellectuals of different ages took to the pages of the AIN, with a younger generation of Auguste Comte readers like Frederico Leopoldo César Burlamaque and followers of traditional political economy like Carlos Augusto Taunay mulling how to “transition” from slave to free labor. Foreign minister Limpo de Abreu ordered his second-in-command, Joaquim Nascentes de Azambuja, to translate parts of Wakfield’s England and America and distribute a thousand copies.Footnote ⁶⁵ The “art of colonization,” as its opening read, thus became an obligatory subject of reflection for skeptical politicians. The pressure increased when they heard that the foreign companies that ran afoul in Brazil simply moved to more promising colonization settings: van Lede’s Société had apparently decamped for Texas, and Delrue began shipping emigrants from Ostende to Oran while pursuing a contract with the Venezuelan government.Footnote ⁶⁶

The rise of the Hamburger Colonisations-Vereins (Hamburg Colonization Society, hereafter HCV) consequentially vindicated áulicos’ activities and forcefully obligated their critics to fall in line. Emerging at a politically opportune moment of increasing emigration from Europe, the company’s involvement with the royal household preempted opposition. The company emerged also unexpectedly and accidentally from áulicos’ schemes and because it also implicated Vergueiro, it forced him to moderate his views. As mentioned above, with the collapse of the Delrue contract and São Paulo province’s effort to take it over, Vergueiro hired Christian Mathias Schröder, a liberal banking scion who succeeded his father in the senate of the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg in 1821 and who approached Abrantes during his mission with a plan for an Association for the Protection of German Emigrants to Brazil.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Vergueiro’s agent, Schröder acquired necessary experience and ingratiated himself to palatial figures like Bento da Silva Lisboa and Saturnino in the successive cabinets of 1846–1847, which also briefly included Vergueiro.Footnote ⁶⁸

Meanwhile, Schröder found opportunity in the emigrations spurred by the political and military upheavals of 1848. The First Schleswig-Holstein War between Denmark and Prussia displaced a great number of people while the February Revolution that toppled Louis-Philippe in France swept in from Paris and across German territories, propping up the liberal order of the new Frankfurt-based German Confederation. From 1848 onward, artisans began flocking from Silesia, Württemberg, the Grand Duchy of Posen, and other Prussian kingdoms to Texas, Guatemala, Chile, the United States, and New Holland. As numbers picked up, Dr. Schmidt publicized Brazil as a destination, sharing one colono’s testimony in the free-trade weekly Deutscher Freihafen. Writing to relatives in Hesse-Darmstadt, the colono recounted the warm reception and light workload in Vergueiro’s Limoeira plantation.Footnote ⁶⁹

This messaging instigating German emigrants prodded Hamburg’s free-traders to imagine a robust commercial feedback loop powered by migration and Brazilian coffee. As Brazil’s consul in Berlin, Sturz had already set the stage by drafting a prospectus for a Hamburg-Brazilian steamship line that was later taken up by leading Hamburg merchant and member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, Ernst von Merck. Furthermore, when Frankfurt eased taxes, it removed internal transport costs hobbling emigration; and when in 1848 it issued the “Fundamental Rights of the German People,” a charter stipulating that “the liberty of emigrating cannot be limited by the state,” the Assembly further propelled emigration, with entire guilds – from miners to weavers – weighing new destinations. The Brazilian chargé, Schmidt, called his superiors’ attention to Hamburg’s ascendancy as an outgoing port for migrations to Brazil and cautioned them regarding existing competition by flagging one “association of artisans” torn between Adelaide and São Leopoldo.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, hopes for a robust emigration from Hamburg came crashing down when a reactionary wave overtook the 1848 revolutions and shuttered the Frankfurt Assembly.

By then, however, the prince of Joinville, whose father Louis-Phillipe d’Orléans was the leading target of the ‘48 revolutionaries, had placed his sights on Brazil. Married in 1842 to Pedro II’s youngest sister, princess Francisca, the French prince had become co-proprietor of 25 square leagues in Santa Catarina as part of his wife’s dowry. The Joinvilles saw Schröder’s plans in particular as an appealing proposal to make use of those lands, and so they chose Léonce Aubé, the French vice-consul in Santa Catarina, to lead negotiations on their behalf. In their view, Aubé’s credentials as a graduate of the École Polytechinque, a Saint-Simonian hotbed responsible for renovating colonial policy in Algeria, qualified him perfectly for the task at hand.Footnote ⁷¹ On 16 March 1849, at the Château de Claremont in Surrey, where Louis Philippe and his family had exiled themselves, Aubé finalized a contract with Schröder in absentia, ceding eight square leagues to the company in addition to other rights unimaginable for enterprises with less prestigious patrons, including permission for vessels to disembark directly at the port of São Francisco close to the colony. Nonetheless, the contract heaped greater responsibilities on Schröder than on the Joinvilles, who could void it at will and would only respond to any feud through arbitration.Footnote ⁷²

Because the contract involved a member of the Brazilian royal household, the Conselho de Estado had to vet it. By the end of 1849, the Conselho’s Empire and Treasury sections heard a request from the Joinvilles for special favors for the projected colony, including anchorage and consumption tax exemptions; naturalization of colonos per the Decree of 7 September 1846, which conferred citizenship immediately on a voluntary basis; exemption of military duties for a decade; funds for a Catholic and a Protestant priest; guarantees on freedom of cult; authorization to prohibit slavery and to validate colono contracts; freedom for its customs house to engage directly with foreign ports; and municipal institutions such as those found in Petrópolis. Olinda, Abrantes, and one other conselheiro sanctioned requests regarding duties and resolved other issues by reference to existing legislation – foreigners were already barred from serving in the military and the 1837 lei de locação de serviços applied to contracts. The conselheiros, however, took issue with the proposed “burgomasters” and the “extraordinary novelty” of requesting funds for a Protestant pastor.Footnote ⁷³

In a separate opinion, Vasconcelos rebuked his colleagues’ support for the company and underlined the futility of colonization by referring to Cuba’s booming sugar industry, which depended on the continuing slave trade rather than a robust Canary-island colono trade. By “caressing” such companies, Vasconcelos claimed, the Conselho made Brazilians inferior to foreigners, especially given the proponents’ scandalous requests, which amounted to a desire to live in a country of their own. Chastising the HCV as a profit-seeking enterprise, he concluded that a company like this was exclusively concerned with “its pecuniary interest,” hitting the target of the company’s true raison d’être.Footnote ⁷⁴

Notwithstanding Vasconcelos’s scathing (if accurate) remarks, the HCV cleared the Conselho and obtained the Chamber’s and the emperor’s approval in early 1850, forcing even Vasconcelos to moderate his view. As if capitulating, he declared, “let in as many colonos as can come to Brazil” – though never, he added, at the treasury’s expense.Footnote ⁷⁵ A decree officializing the contract in May pressured Brazilian lawmakers to hasten discussion on the land and colonization bill, and by the time Abrantes rose to defend it, hardly any of his colleagues would have dared defy the royal household’s colonization designs.Footnote ⁷⁶

Brazilian lawmakers buckled under an imperial authority expanded and channeled by palatial statesmen and finally passed the Land Law in September 1850. Shortly after, Schröder arranged his first shipment of about 118 Swiss and German colonos who departed aboard the Colon for Santa Catarina. In 1851, these were joined at the colony by an expedition of Norwegian Gold Rushers who had financed their own voyage to California but got stuck in Brazil when their ship arrived in unseaworthy conditions. Schröder welcomed them with a banquet where Norwegians, Swiss, and Germans intoned victorious war songs like “Schleswig-Holstein” into the night.Footnote ⁷⁷

* * *

In the years ahead, the Dona Francisca colony grew substantially. The HCV board requested further favors, including permission for colono vessels to load with salt, coal, and lumber to be sold in other Brazilian ports before returning to Hamburg with Brazilian goods. The Conselho refused. But by 1853, a collective calling itself the “Communal Council” of Dona Francisca asked the provincial president to recognize the colony as a Commune and allow local elections. When the consultation reached the Conselho, Olinda and two other conselheiros relented, suggesting that perhaps a district council that translated all its laws to French would be feasible.Footnote ⁷⁸ By then, the HCV had settled 1,100 of the 1,500 projected colonos. After successfully renewing its contract and obtaining repeated deferrals for its colono quotas, by 1888 the company brought 17,408 settlers to Santa Catarina.Footnote ⁷⁹ This outcome reflected the favors enjoyed by the HCV, which had been sanctioned by the Conselho but were regularized and institutionalized by the Land Law of 1850 and the company-friendly ordinance for its execution in 1854. But the Land Law was not simply a precedent that made this royal colony possible. Rather, it too was the result of the activities of busy palatial figures who previously carried colonization to the center of imperial policymaking and set out the conditions for the company to come into existence in the first place.

The fate of colonization as a business sphere overseen closely by government was decided by 1845 more than with the Land Law of 1850. Indeed, by 1845, Olinda began to perfect his views in the Conselho and then advanced a pathbreaking ordinance to aid emigration. Aureliano brought Petrópolis to life. Calmon negotiated with Prussia and contributed to new emigration waves to Brazil. Surely, none of these endeavors worked to perfection, as each attempted to respond to often intractable diplomatic and political conditions. Yet, in the midst of the violent back-and-forths between liberal and conservative administrations that characterized the first decade of Pedro II’s reign, áulicos charted a different path, relying on colonization to confer uniformity upon the Empire’s laws and to orchestrate state-sponsored efforts meant to model the possibilities of colonization endeavors, which were seen as abetting a bold new Brazilian diplomacy. Áulicos skillfully and consequentially outlined the vision for a private but regulated colonization that ultimately crystalized in the law. And companies helped them forge that vision.

The mid-century mark witnessed great transformations in the Brazilian Empire. A Commercial Code, a definitive slave trade ban, and a Land Law approved in short consecutive order between June and September 1850 ostensibly set the country on a path to prosperity.Footnote ¹ In the historical imagination, this legal triad jumpstarted a labor transition that replaced the primacy of slave property with the primacy of land, aligned Brazil with international markets, and gave the definitive salvo for the rise of coffee as a leading commodity. But, upon a closer look, colonization complicates this picture. Colonization acquired myriad uses according to the interests of the many actors pursuing it. Its elasticity calls into question its purported role as a key factor contributing to a consolidation of market forces and the rise of “free labor” at this time. Brazil’s transformation into a market society may have occurred eventually after 1850 but not for the reasons nor under the conditions presumed by grand narratives of a structural labor substitution triggered automatically by the end of the slave trade. The state was indeed central to economic transformations, as scholars have confirmed.Footnote ² But colonization raises further qualms.

Because colonization responded to different agendas, the phenomenon also interrogates any direct correspondence between the Brazilian state’s imperatives and the necessities of its leading coffee elites. As some scholars have provocatively noted, up to 1850 the maxim held true that “the more capital in coffee, the more political capital.”Footnote ³ Indeed, planters associated to the bourgeoning plantation world of the Paraíba River Valley saw their political power grow in lockstep with their fortunes. But the rifts that followed after 1850 between the Brazilian state and these slaveholding interests suggest that the latter did not entirely hold the imperial apparatus in their thrall. Colonization helps to illuminate that misalignment, not because the promise of labor substitution did not materialize in some ways but because its many uses pointed to a complex interplay of interests that went beyond planters’ expectations.Footnote ⁴

Colonization indexed the divergent needs of planters and government in part thanks to the expansion of its meanings and uses brought about by the 1850s statutes. The new laws offered greater access to shareholding and established incorporation parameters beneficial to colonization enterprises, primed colonization as the most favorable means to compensate for an impending labor shortage, and empowered private companies (empresas particulares) to partake in an emergent landed property market.Footnote ⁵ However, while these developments may be seen as key to the transition away from the illegal slave trade and the accommodation of conservative planters’ priorities, colonization’s expanded sphere of action in fact contributed to the transformation of Brazil into a market society by interrupting rather than facilitating a smooth transition from enslaved to free labor during most of this decade.

To begin with, furtive slave trading carried on despite its ban, and often resorted to colonization as cover. Moreover, captured traffickers also began to embrace colonization to launder their reputations and in doing so further muddled the separation between the two activities. More sincere efforts to do away with slave trafficking found their grounding in an initially promising association, the Sociedade contra o Tráfico de Africanos e Promotora da Colonização e da Civilização dos Indígenas (Society for the End of the African Slave Trade and for the Promotion of Colonization and the Civilization of Indians, SCT). However, the SCT was ill-prepared to orchestrate a shift toward free labor. Its inconsistent agenda and an underwhelming single effort to conduct a colonization project of its own dulled is capacity to make a significant impact on a labor transition. Further complicating the relationship between slavery and colonization, a number of Paraíba Valley planters also took on experiments of their own, many of which were of considerable scale. All the while, however, their property in enslaved persons continued to grow in their plantations, which suggests that their embrace of colonization responded more to a desire to resolve the recurrent food scarcity crises that bedeviled this monocrop region.

The imperial state showed interest in planters’ colonization efforts in Rio de Janeiro and beyond but only up to a point. After Nicolau Vergueiro launched his notorious colonization enterprise in São Paulo in 1847, central government authorities ignored his family firm’s pleas for contracts. The Brazilian Empire, after all, had other concerns, concerns that colonization responded and adapted to. When Brazil sought to establish regional dominance through war, even the hardened conservatives of the Party of Order resorted to long-practiced mercenary recruitments in German territories to bring down the Argentine Confederation’s Juan Manuel de Rosas. Moreover, Brazilian victory in the Platine War later opened the way for new military colonies.Footnote ⁶ Authorities also showed interest in bolstering colonization proposals benefiting other regions of the Empire. Eventually, rather than directly aid coffee planters, they opted to experiment with the importation of Chinese workers in an attempt to revive the sagging sugar economy in the northeast and parts of Rio de Janeiro province.

To be sure, I do not wish to advance a theoretical point about historical capitalism where others have already pursued fruitful polemics.Footnote ⁷ Instead, I wish to highlight how a closer historical consideration of colonization fundamentally unsettles narratives propounded on the co-equation of elite interests and the state, particularly around the issue of slavery. Colonization bifurcated government interests and the needs of Brazil’s wealthiest groups, demonstrating a concern exclusive to the state of handling the Empire-wide liabilities wrought by market forces and their geopolitical tensions. And, yet, rather than replace the slave trade or slavery in the Empire’s most productive coffee regions, oftentimes colonization contributed to the continuation of slave-based dynamics. Hence, Brazil’s great transformation into a market society hinged on colonization not so much as a labor transition device but as a means to multiple, often contradictory ends. This dynamic resulted in important transformations in the role of the Brazilian state and ultimately forced the government to step back from the immediate interests of coffee elites and to adopt the role of arbiter, rather than executor, of migratory, labor-provision, and peopling processes.

Trafficking and the Colono Trade after 1850

Secretive slave landings on Brazilian soil continued after 1850. Ingenious stratagems allowed trafficking to live on, including contrabandists relying on the guise of the colono trade to cloak their real activities. For this reason, the ordinance implementing the slave trade ban required colono-trading vessels to obtain authorization from the Auditor General of the Navy before leaving port. In late 1852, for instance, the Auditor General vouched for Brazilian brigantine Amizade, which was carrying a number of tin plates, bread trays, and water barrels in such quantities as would raise suspicions of slave trafficking. Yet, as other vessels claimed to do, the Amizade was in fact heading to the Azores to board colonos.Footnote ⁸ In 1853, the owner of Brazilian galley Sophia similarly tried to convince the Navy Auditor that he was strictly transporting “colonos and passengers from the Azores,” when in fact nothing kept these ships from heading to less policed slaving ports upon hitting the high seas.Footnote ⁹

Ship captains also reprised old stratagems linked to colonization to circumvent the ban on slave trading. When British minister Henry Southern transferred from Buenos Aires in 1851, he discovered that coasting vessels were transporting enslaved Africans from Rio Grande do Sul to Rio as passengers with “fraudulent passports.” One of the famous contrabandist Manoel Pinto da Fonseca’s long-haul trafficking vessels, the Palmeira, joined others in claiming the Río de la Plata and southern Brazil as destination on their return trips from Africa in order to blend into the nautical transit to and from the region’s foreign colonies.Footnote ¹⁰

In many instances, slavers engaged in the colono trade – at least on paper – but only after they were captured. When Portuguese brig Audaz was intercepted offloading 600 Africans in Santa Catarina, its owners, the Ferreiras da Saúde, retrofitted it for the Azorean colono trade even as a liberal newspaper called them out on their ploy. The brig was rechristened Colonisador and equipped with food rations customarily used in the slave trade. Time would tell: if the vessel returned to Brazilian ports within five months, the press announcing its departure would prove correct. A longer travel time would otherwise indicate a voyage to Africa and from thence to Havana, signaling that, for planters and merchants, the slave and colono trades existed on a spectrum of opportunity, along which they could choose to partake in one or the other.Footnote ¹¹

On an individual level, traffickers also resorted to colonization to strategically cover up their misdeeds and in doing so further blurred the line between the slave and colono trades. One of the most illustrative examples is that of Bahian planter Higino Pires Gomes. On 29 October 1851, the Sardinian-flagged schooner Relâmpago arrived in Bahia from Onim (Lagos) on his orders with a shipment of up to 500 enslaved Africans destined to his fazenda Pontinha on the southern loop of the Recôncavo. The Brazilian navy caught on to its arrival and pursued it. The Relâmpago threw anchor near the mouth of river Jaguaripe and hastily rushed the enslaved to swim to shore. At least a dozen of the enslaved drowned. As Higino’s nephew took survivors inland, navy officers inspected the vestiges of disembarkation and rescued 49 Africans who had managed to hide in the brush – five of whom passed away. Police chief João Maurício Wanderley arrived at Pontinha the next morning, arrested Higino, and rescued 229 Africans.Footnote ¹²

Higino contested his charges, as he had done with prior accusations of embezzlement when he served as lieutenant colonel for the Sabinada rebels. And, in the end, two judges from Bahia’s higher court overturned his conviction due to lack of proof of his involvement and the alleged unreliability of slaves’ testimonies. Notably, the Conselho de Estado reversed the decision and suspended its judges for “prevarications.”Footnote ¹³ Still, Higino dodged prosecution. And as soon as he walked free, he turned to colonization activities to rebuild his reputation. In 1857, he submitted a grand colonization proposal to then prime minister marquês de Olinda, arguing that “the absolute dearth of labor … is one of the most urgent and imperious needs of the northern provinces.” Portraying himself as a champion of núcleos de colonização (colonization nuclei), Higino called for bancos da lavoura (rural banks) to furnish low-interest credit and nobiliary titles for colonization empresarios according to the number of colonos they settled. Higino completed his radical about-face from unrepentant slave trader to colonization empresario when he finalized a contract with Bahia’s government to import 1,000 European colonos. By 1858, he was hosting a banquet for the local police chief and also offered formal toasts to the previous one, Francisco Gonçalves Martins, also a colonization empresario hopeful. Slave traffickers and the authorities responsible for their capture now sat at the same table.Footnote ¹⁴

Traffickers elsewhere also reinvented themselves as colonization stalwarts like Higino. In 1851, Rio police chief Bernardo Nascentes de Azambuja (a soon-to-be colonization empresario himself, see Chapter 6) raided one of the properties on Marambaia island, west of Rio, owned by a renown planter. Yet the suspected trafficker, Joaquim José de Souza Breves, had also been a member of the SPC back in 1836. Soon after the raid, Souza Breves pivoted toward colonization without relinquishing his property in slaves. Whereas it is not known whether he also stopped trafficking, what is known is that in 1854 he imported 255 colonos from Madeira.Footnote ¹⁵

Cases of contrabandists with prior connections to colonization also came up. In Sirinhaém, Pernambuco, an illegal slave shipment landed allegedly by error near the plantation of police delegate Gaspar Vasconcelos de Drummond – brother to the diplomat Antônio Menezes of the CCB (Chapter 3). Yet Drummond failed to alert authorities and mobilize forces to apprehend the traffickers before they fled with many enslaved Africans in tow. Even though he did recuse the ship and the 165 Africans left behind, he later faced accusations of negligence and possible compliance at the Tribunal da Relação. In an effort to clear his name, he published a personal account of the events and a trove of official documents demonstrating his innocence. But his reputation was tainted by a small detail: his son, who had come to his aid that day, kept some of the Africans they “rescued,” perhaps to compensate for the slaves he had recently lost to cholera.Footnote ¹⁶ The actions of Drummond, together with Souza Breves, Higino, and the countless captains who pretended to sail for the Azores or return from Río de la Plata with colonos demonstrate not simply that the slave trade continued after 1850 but that it did so under the guise of the colono trade, that is, the very same commerce meant to replace it. Furthermore, this dynamic offered unrepentant traffickers a chance to reinvent themselves and continue making fortunes by partaking in colonization, support for which, as Drummond’s case showed, did not preclude willing participation in illegal slave landings.

The Campaign against the Furtive Trade and Grassroots Colonization

Abolitionists in turn mobilized against the illegal slave trade by coalescing around O Philantropo, a newspaper founded in 1849 and partly bankrolled by Britain’s Secret Service Fund.Footnote ¹⁷ Only four days before the enactment of the anti-slave trade law, the Philanthropo’s activists received official approval to establish the Sociedade contra o Tráfico (SCT) and set their sights on the die-hard furtive slave trade.Footnote ¹⁸ As a new civic organization, the SCT adopted organizational principles similar to those of colonization companies but functioned more like a lobby or interest group. As such, it clustered family, intellectual, and commercial networks bridging past and prospective colonization endeavors. Its varied, if odd, membership included Sirinhaém’s Drummond as well as liberals long defending colonization such as Bernardo de Souza Franco, Teófilo Ottoni, and Alves Branco. Members also featured a younger guard, including playwright Joaquim Manuel de Macedo, who later criticized colonization’s transformation into a rapacious business pursuit (see Introduction). British ambassador James Hudson, who provided funds for O Philanthropo, was a member, as was the Hamburger Colonisations-Verein’s Christian Schröder (Chapter 4). The SCT also contained strange bedfellows, grouping a palatial figure such as CCB president Miguel Calmon (Chapter 3), now visconde de Abrantes, with radicals from the Regency like editor Ezequiel Corrêa dos Santos and Inocêncio da Rocha Galvão, the vice-president in exile of the Sabinada rebels of 1837.Footnote ¹⁹

Due to its heterogeneous composition, the SCT did not fully articulate a coherent agenda. Its ultimate contribution was to reify an understanding that free labor would soon substitute slavery. Taking to the pages of other publications besides the Philanthropo, one SCT member extolled free work as the key to future prosperity, feeding the notion that enslaved and colono populations would gradually evolve in inverse proportion to one another.Footnote ²⁰ Under Abrantes’s presidency, the SAIN and its journal, edited by another SCT member, amplified the SCT’s free-work gospel. A month before the approval of the Land Law, the AIN published Abrantes’s own Senate speech regarding land sales and population growth in the United States, potential Brazilian adaptations of the Wakefield system from Australia, and “indirect means” to promote migrations beyond government subsidies.Footnote ²¹ Purposefully less erudite, SCT members’ AIN pieces focused on more immediate issues to get fazendeiros’ attention, predicated on agricultural schools and free work’s greater return on investment over slavery.Footnote ²² SCT activist Burlamaque even lavished praise on a Paraíba planter who hired Azoreans, calculating that each would produce twice as much as an enslaved person. He also emphasized that a colono’s death was 90 percent less costly than losing an enslaved worker.Footnote ²³

Beyond persuading the public mind that colonization would soon fill in for slavery, the SCT curtailed its potential impact in numerous ways. Like other colonization endeavors, the SCT placed a premium on profit-oriented proposals. But unlike other colonization enterprises, its ideas constituted a jumbled policy platform that at times even catered too closely to slaveholders’ imaginaries, as when it explored the removal of enslaved persons to Africa. Indeed, the journal frequently engaged with the topic of Liberia, beginning with a piece on “African colonies” translated from the Scottish journal Chambers’s Information for the People. O Philantropo made clear its support for the removal of liberated Africans to Liberia on the basis of the “moralization of the races” and even went on to insist on the need for the Brazilian Empire to establish a colony similar to Liberia in Cabo Negro, since its location near the Angolan port city of Namibe (rechristened by the Portuguese as the colony of Moçâmedes in 1840) lay beyond Portuguese authority and could be purchased from “indigenous Africans.” That Brazil sent its first diplomatic envoy to Liberia on a fact-finding mission in 1851 suggests that this was not an idle proposal.Footnote ²⁴

O Philantropo crammed together other contradictory ideas that precluded a clear colonization agenda of any particular kind. Its pages announced a new society called the Gymnásio Brasileiro advocating for “agricultural establishments” like Hofwil that blended an agricultural school for boys and a model plantation for unhoused people. They also published Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira’s writings on the education of industrial classes, which evoked the utopianism of Robert Owen, Henri Saint-Simon, or Charles Fourier rather than a project to substitute slaves.Footnote ²⁵ The journal focused haphazardly on agriculture or military colonies as the destination of either national or foreign colonos, showing a broad and undefined commitment to colonizing endeavors.

Ultimately, it fell upon the SCT’s colonization commission, composed of Bento da Silva Lisboa (barão de Cairu) and Ignácio da Cunha Galvão, to consolidate scattershot ideas into a proposal with staying power. Collecting three major proposals including their own and that of the Gymnásio, Cairu and Galvão produced a report in 1852.Footnote ²⁶ Their ideas funneled into an SCT pamphlet that remains the association’s primary and, besides the Philanthropo, almost exclusive contribution to colonization debates. The booklet advocated for the gradual extinction of slavery by importing free laborers from abroad to work, on the one hand, in urban services and, on the other hand, in agriculture. To accomplish this, the SCT called for the construction of a reception center for foreign colonos and the establishment of a government dependency in charge of keeping a registry of migrant arrivals and contracts.Footnote ²⁷

Also in 1852, the SCT’s most concrete attainment materialized in a modest colony it sponsored in partnership with a small-time fazendeiro in Campos – and even this yielded unimpressive results. A 45-year-old native of Leiria, Portugal, Eugênio Aprígio da Veiga had established a mixed foreign-national colony christened Valão dos Veados in 1847. As the firstborn of a late Supreme Court minister, Aprígio obtained the post of second lieutenant in the Imperial Navy and an appointment in 1835 as consul to Angola. Yet, when Luso-Brazilian diplomatic impasses foiled his consulship and his father retired and later passed away in 1843, Aprígio’s career took a downward turn.Footnote ²⁸ Still, in 1845 he signed a government contract to import colonos to Valão dos Veados, which he organized as a private colony based on land-leasing rather than parceria (sharecropping) by the time the initial contingent of 108 mostly Azorean colonos settled down in 1847.Footnote ²⁹ Drought in the early months of 1848 landed Aprígio 8:300$000 in government aid, a fraction of the 33:000$000 he had personally invested in the colony. But as the colony grew to 207 by 1851, he failed to acquire further help or indemnities for losses, as the Conselho and the Chamber rejected his requests.Footnote ³⁰ And then the SCT stepped in.

SCT activities had a mixed record in the years after the formal extinction of the slave trade. Nevertheless, its members amassed profitable opportunities departing from the Valão dos Veados experience. Aprígio incorporated his colony as an association in 1852 and brought in the SCT, of which he was a member, to help turn his fazenda into a model colony. Valão dos Veados did well under the new direction, with Nicolau Rodrigues dos Santos França Leite, a founding member of the Ordem dos Advogados (Lawyers Guild), as president, Manoel da Cunha Galvão (Ignácio’s brother) as secretary, and Caetano Alberto Soares as adjunct director of the company board. By 1853, it had grown to 305 colonos, who owed the company 4:720$000 in travel costs alone. As the colony surged to 414 the following year, França Leite asked the government to allow his colonos to disembark directly at Campos in order to cut the cost of transport from the Court.Footnote ³¹ Though frequently unsuccessful, these negotiations delivered personal benefits – França Leite obtained a 50-contos government loan in 1856 to set up his own colony in the Rio Doce valley, which he named Fransilvânia. And in 1863, he received a 37:500$000 rebate for investments in his then flailing undertaking.Footnote ³² Similarly, when the Imperial government finally opened a specialized directory for colonization affairs, the director chosen for the task was SCT secretary Ignácio da Cunha Galvão (see Chapter 7).

Emerging almost simultaneously with the 1850 ban, the SCT boldly attempted to undo the furtive slave trade and eventually take apart slavery itself. However, notwithstanding its initial bluster, the association fell short of accomplishing its ideals of abolishing trafficking and replacing the slave system with free labor. A heterogenous membership produced varied proposals that struggled to congeal into an easily actionable agenda. Moreover, the SCT took on a colonization experiment of its own that fared poorly before grinding to a halt in 1852. In the end, the SCT contributed to ingraining an intangible but enduring conceit in Brazilian public debates, namely that free labor could and would replace enslaved labor. And it reared personnel steeped in that belief who went on to lead other colonization pursuits and the government dependencies tasked with supporting them.

Paraíba Valley Planters vs. the Imperial State’s Needs

Meanwhile, planters in Rio de Janeiro inaugurated colonization experiments of their own at a scale that easily surpassed that of Valão dos Veados. Paraíba Valley coffee barons had begun importing Portuguese and German colonos with the help of the provincial president and the Brazilian minister in Berlin. These budding empresarios included planters from the first coffee frontier along the Paraíba and all the way to Minas Gerais. At the time, only the Senador Vergueiro colony established in 1847 in São Paulo could claim a similar magnitude and influence, having given rise to six other colonies with about a hundred colonos each by 1853.Footnote ³³ The Paraíba Valley colonies remained more numerous and marginally larger in their colono populations in the early 1850s. About 18 colono-employing fazendas reported to Rio authorities on their colono populations, which ranged from 33 to 540 colonos. Their productivity provided a quick return on planters’ initial investment in travel and maintenance costs while guaranteeing a margin of profits. In 1852, for example, 140 colonos at the visconde de Baependi’s fazenda Santa Rosa sent 16:728$129 worth of coffee to Rio, which exceeded colonos’ total debt to their patron by 597$754, that is, over half a conto.Footnote ³⁴

Antonio Clemente Pinto, barão de Nova Friburgo, was not only one of the wealthiest men in the Empire but also the owner of the largest colono complex in the Valley. According to Rodrigo Marretto, by 1873 the barão’s postmortem inventory revealed him to be one of the two largest slaveholders in Cantagalo district, with his property in slaves ascending to 1.999:200$000, or 29 percent of his fortune.Footnote ³⁵ Yet in the 1850s, without giving up on slavery, the barão undertook daring experiments. With the help of his future son-in-law and associate, Belgian engineer Jacob van Erven, the barão mechanized his plantations. Then, he began taking in successive colono cohorts so that by 1859 he had contracted 2,354 foreign workers across his fazendas.

Many who completed their contract – up to 1,560 among the barão’s workers alone – went on to work independently or in neighboring plantations while beaming accounts of their experiences reached the pages of German publications lauding Paraíba Valley planters. In Thuringia, liberal editor and emigration promoter Günther Fröbel printed this news in a pamphlet series he titled Fliegende Blätter für Auswanderer (“Flying Leaves for Emigrants”) in a supplement to the Rudolstädter Wochenblattes and in the Allgemeine Auswanderungs-Zeitung. Such accounts, which some argued were edited by planters, ensured a steady stream of colono relatives and compatriots as the first cohorts moved elsewhere in the region, to Petrópolis, or south to São Leopoldo. Meanwhile, those who stayed in the Paraíba Valley played an important role in the eyes of their employers, especially when they signaled a long-term commitment to remain in Brazil by applying for naturalization. In a single day in early 1858, for example, a scribe for the local police and a justice of peace certified scores of naturalization letters for colonos at Baependi’s Santa Rosa plantation.Footnote ³⁶

A series of JC articles published as a pamphlet in 1855 explained Paraíba Valley elites’ sudden penchant for colonos. The author, Luís Lacerda Werneck, was a planter from one of the most prominent fluminense clans, son of the barão do Paty do Alferes, and a law graduate from universities in Paris and Rome. Werneck’s Idéas sobre colonisação focused on the untenable state of the coffee economy as many planters neared their last productive coffee harvests. On average, plantations bore fruit for twenty years beginning three to four years after seedlings went to ground. After this quarter-century window, tired soils diminished yields, as did pests like the erva do passarinho and the saúva.Footnote ³⁷ To make matters worse, coffee monoculture and large landholding had increased food prices to levels that imperiled agriculture as a whole. Colonization, according to Werneck, would furnish laborers and small farmers to take up “good, if exhausted, land” and bolster food-crop production, and Germans and Swiss were particularly well suited to the task because of their familiarity with smallholding agriculture.Footnote ³⁸ A year after his publication, Werneck entered Rio’s provincial assembly and served until 1859, by which time he was also one of the directors of the Pedro II Railway and had followed other colonization advocates’ political ascent.

The imperial government was keen to Paraíba Valley planters’ worries and their undertakings to relieve them. From 1849 to 1853, Rio president Luiz Pedreira do Couto Ferraz began to periodically monitor and assess the needs of Paraíba planters hiring colonos. Ferraz had previously served as vice-president under Aureliano, having graduated from the São Paulo Law school in the 1830s and taking a provincial assembly seat in Rio in 1845. As a friend and confidant of Pedro II, Ferraz avoided partisan bickering and preferred, like Aureliano, a moderate reformism geared toward strengthening central government attributions. Ferraz’s fact-finding among planters thus pertained to a more encompassing effort to evaluate previous colonization experiments, some of which had been protected by his mentors. In that spirit, he even commissioned a report on Nova Friburgo to a rising district judge in Cantagalo, Alagoas-born João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbú, who soon became a colonization stalwart, while Ferraz went on to take the Empire portfolio in the marquês de Paraná’s conciliation cabinet in 1853.Footnote ³⁹

Despite efforts like Ferraz’s, the central government’s own concerns after 1850 transcended the immediate needs of the Empire’s most powerful group and led statesmen to focus on colonization applications that diverged from those of the Paraíba Valley planters. And so, for instance, as Werneck excoriated Chinese immigration, the imperial government signed a contract for 2,000 Chinese colonos. Even conservatives themselves showed willingness to partake in colonization for geostrategic purposes rather than for planters’ sake. In February 1851, a full six months before Juan Manuel de Rosas declared war, the Brazilian government installed a recruitment bureau in Hamburg manned by special envoy Sebastião de Rego Barros. A prominent deputy, Rego Barros was also ex-minister of War and brother to the provincial president who brought in German colonos to Pernambuco in 1838. With a math degree from Göttingen, Rego Barros was no stranger to German lands, which helped him recruit decommissioned Prussians from the Schleswig-Holstein War (1848–1852). Nonetheless, the drive was plagued with challenges. Last-minute desertions multiplied as the Argentine consul in Hamburg, Luiz Bahne, carried out his own recruitments. Other recruits preferred emigration to the United States, prompted by the Berlin-based Society for the Protection of Emigrants’ anti-Brazilian propaganda. Indeed, Rego Barros even uncovered the existence of a vast network of colono spies for Argentina already in place in the southern colony of São Leopoldo.Footnote ⁴⁰

In the end, Rego Barros secured 1,770 officers, soldiers, and craftsmen. Yet these “Brummers,” as they were called in reference to the payment given to mercenaries, largely refused to fight. They ran away or demanded that their contracts be rescinded. The chain of command frequently broke down and local officers routinely ignored orders. In spite of these issues, however, many Brummers stayed behind in Brazil at war’s end and founded newspapers and local institutions in Brazilian colonies like Dona Francisca and Blumenau. Some later became the first Brazilian deputies of German descent elected to the provincial assembly in Rio Grande do Sul.Footnote ⁴¹ Ultimately, the recruitment episode signaled to Brazilian statesmen that colonization, while sometimes fraught, could be deployed to address political problems domestic and foreign.

The Brazilian government took cues from the Paraíba Valley, but the scale and extent of its plans involving colonization easily surpassed the purview of fazendeiros. Imperial authorities focused instead on Empire-wide needs and province-specific applications. Military colonies furnish a clear example. Following the 1850 Land Law, two decrees signed by the visconde de Monte Alegre spelled out the contours of a bill that Brazilian lawmakers had debated for over twenty years. The first decree targeted the backlands of Pernambuco and Alagoas, alleged hideouts of recent Praieira rebels, with military colonies that doubled as smallholding homesteads. This initiative soon extended to other provinces, buoyed by the extraordinary credit of 25 contos conceded to the Empire ministry to implement the regulations.Footnote ⁴² The conciliation cabinet disbursed more than 27 contos to the province of Paraná alone to transport Portuguese colonos to new military colonies in Mato Grosso.Footnote ⁴³ Within three years, the imperial government had established 16 such colonies: 4 in Goiás; 3 in Pará and Mato Grosso respectively; and 1 each in Maranhão, Pernambuco, Alagoas, Minas Gerais, Paraná, and Santa Catarina.Footnote ⁴⁴ Accompanying this proliferation of military colonies, private schemes in multiple Brazilian regions further underscored colonization’s dissemination beyond the Paraíba Valley.

Paraíba Valley planters were a driving force in the early formation of the Brazilian state. But at the juncture when their concern over labor shortages mattered the most, imperial authorities’ interests parted ways with theirs. Wealthy planters like the barão de Nova Friburgo tested colonization but did not appear to rely on it to replace the ranks of the enslaved. Organic intellectuals of this class further underscored other concerns for which colonization afforded potential remedies, including food scarcity. With resources of its own, the planter class ultimately espoused a narrow application of colonization that contrasted with the more numerous and broader geopolitical and military concerns bedeviling the Brazilian Empire.

Colonization across the Empire: Foreign Networks and the Race for Favors

Provincial elites beyond Rio had other colonization schemes in mind and took advantage of the avid interest in colonization manifested by foreign consuls and merchants. In Bahia, sugar planters losing enslaved workers to southeastern coffee fazendas due to a bourgeoning inter-provincial trade found a champion in Francisco Gonçalves Martins, a son of the sugar parish of Santo Amaro. After serving as chief of police in Salvador and deputy for Bahia at the Court, Gonçalves Martins contemplated importing colonos for the Recôncavo’s cane fields, seeing the 1848 revolutions as a window of opportunity. Gonçalves Martins approached the visconde de Olinda’s cabinet with a proposal to import 3,000 from Europe and the Azores within five years. “Perhaps now more than ever,” he declared, “it’s time to … attract men and capital fleeing the disorder threatening all of Europe.” Though compelling, his proposal was not cheap. The deputy asked for 30 contos in advance for every 300 colonos, offering his 600-contos hostel facilities as collateral.Footnote ⁴⁵ The plan stalled, but not so Gonçalves Martins’s career, which rose first to Bahia’s presidency in 1851–1852 and then to the Empire ministry.

As Empire minister, Gonçalves Martins became a propitious gateway for the flurry of French interest in Brazilian colonization that commenced in the early 1850s and would continue throughout the decade.Footnote ⁴⁶ One of those who approached him was Gustave Oelsner de Monmerqué, the French consul in Santos. Having spent the 1840s in the Isle of Bourbon (Réunion) as a journalist and professor at the Collège Royale, Monmerqué believed European workers could gradually contribute to abolition. Yet his first business bid, which the Brazilian government did not authorize, was a life insurance company offering slaveowners coverage for their enslaved. His move to colonization was funded by one “honorable and rich capitalist” and veteran officer from the Orleanist regime dethroned in 1848 who advanced funds for Monmerqué to settle at Mainz and procure recruits in Baden, Hesse, and Bavaria during winter. As a collaborator of the Journal des Débats, Monmerqué planned to tour the capitals of German states and exploit contacts in the local press. “Little by little,” he claimed, he would find “a good number of brave people who, conveniently treated, would become loyal subjects to His Imperial Majesty, and the means toward a useful and laborious population.” In return, he wanted 124 francs per head. With travel costs as low as 3$125 for every colono, Monmerqué estimated that a thousand emigrants in the first year would contribute 200,000 Thalers, or 750,000 francs, in land acquisitions. If the Chamber approved a special credit for a second year, recruitments would rise and so would revenues. That Monmerqué also demanded a land concession and transferability rights for his contract suggests he was intending to profitably sell his concession rather than carry out the plan himself. Had he not died in 1854, and had Gonçalves Martins remained in the ministry, this plan would have yielded a windfall.Footnote ⁴⁷

The surge in lobbying and permit requests extended geographically as far north as Maranhão. In 1854, a Portuguese merchant resident in São Luís negotiated a provincial contract for a series of colonies. In this endeavor, insurance agent Francisco Marques Rodrigues was certainly aided by the fact that one of his brothers was an Olinda graduate and the renown editor of A Conciliação and later the Diário do Maranhão. Francisco hoped to establish a colony called Petrópolis by the town of Codó, peopling it with 200 Azoreans, and growing export and local consumption items including cotton, rice, manioc, and coffee.

These plans alarmed civil authorities in São Miguel, who began to crack down on recruitment activities, although Maranhão’s law of 19 April 1855, which organized a colonization directorate at the provincial level, mitigated some of their mistrust. In São Luís, the new directorate gave momentum to numerous company drives including that of the Prosperidade Company, whose chief empresario, the Azorean native Antonio Correia de Mendonça Bittencourt, had already conveyed 456 Azoreans to his colony, Santa Teresa, by the time the company announced its statutes. Comendador Isidoro Marques Rodrigues, Francisco’s other brother, was part of Prosperidade’s board, which signals that a local merchant network of Portuguese, and especially Portuense, descent found quick gain in the new wave of colonization gripping the province.Footnote ⁴⁸

This colonization resurgence marked a bourgeoning provincial entrepreneurialism embodied by Francisco Marques Rodrigues and his activities. In November 1855, galley Castro Segundo arrived in São Luís from Porto, its colonos sick despite a short three-week voyage, followed by barque Linda a month later with a total of 280 migrants. Colonos were quickly and roughly redistributed: 112 went to a mining and timber colony, Pericáua, 77 went to private service, and 91 headed to the new settlement of Petrópolis. In 1858, Marques Rodrigues was elected as one of the directors for the Bank of Maranhão, whose founding he had directly petitioned to the imperial government; and a year later, he started the Companhia Confiança Maranhense, a warehouse construction firm worth 80 contos.Footnote ⁴⁹ His rise made manifest colonization’s knock-on effects, as the conveyance and settlement of foreign colonos facilitated increasingly ambitious business leaps.

In a case of even greater ambition but less success, Vergueiro & Co., perhaps the most prominent colonization firm at the time, tried to stagger colonization drives to expand its participation in the colono trade. After monopolizing colono provisioning in São Paulo, the family firm sought to reach beyond its core market by approaching the central government with a proposal to introduce colonos “on a major scale.” Reviewing the company’s trajectory since its beginning in 1847, Nicolau Vergueiro’s eldest son, José, attempted to convince the Justice minister that the time was ripe for spontaneous migration. As the radical Know-Nothings repelled foreign incomers to the United States, he claimed, Brazil in turn invited them with measures like the exemption from onerous titles of residence required since 1841.Footnote ⁵⁰ Latching on to such liberal measures, José Vergueiro asked for a ponderous 200-conto, interest-free loan to import 10,000 colonos in eight years, with a bonus of 10$ per colono and 5$ for every child. In return, he projected each colono would yield a 6 percent annual return and migrant entries would drive up consumption of import goods at a rate that would annually deliver 90 contos to public coffers and so would pay back the value of the original loan more than threefold within the contract period.

However, Vergueiro overplayed his hand in attempting to monopolize Empire-wide colono supply in part because he ignored the government’s interest in ongoing experiments in other provinces. After his proposals went ignored by the Justice minister for months, Empire minister Ferraz assigned one of his deputies, Manoel Felizardo, to review the projected returns in Vergueiro’s proposal. Felizardo precisely objected to Vergueiro’s trademark parceria system as a “grand ideal” that could easily adapt to any province and raised other reservations that made it unlikely that the government would meet José’s requests.Footnote ⁵¹

Rebuffed by government officials, José Vergueiro understood that he had to pursue a different strategy.Footnote ⁵² He thus moved to offer his services to Bahia’s provincial government, eschewing the common practice of routing official communications through the Court and writing directly to president João Maurício Wanderley. Yet, when expanding beyond the safe confines of its provincial base, even a powerful company like the Vergueiros’ could end up flying blind to disadvantageous political shifts. The day after Wanderley took his seat as provincial president, shareholders for a Companhia Promotora da Colonisação de Chins (Company for the Promotion of Chinese Colonization) assembled in Salvador to approve statutes and elect the eminent barão de São Francisco as president. And a few months later, Wanderley became War minister, having paid no mind to Vergueiro’s proposal. Chinese colonization, it seemed, better suited the world of cane.Footnote ⁵³

At a time when free foreign laborers would ostensibly replace enslaved ones in the leading export-oriented regions, myriad migrant conveyance and settlement projects popped up in provinces beyond those focused on coffee. Colonization’s diversity and its Empire-wide applicability was not lost on the central government. On the contrary, imperial officials welcomed fresh proposals targeting southern Brazil, Bahia, or Maranhão and even showed greater interest in them than in planters’ efforts in the Paraíba Valley and São Paulo. This efflorescence of profit-bearing possibilities across the Empire limited the scope of the parceria system that the Vergueiros sought to establish as the hegemonic colonization model. In its stead, Brazilian officials and businessmen exhibited a greater openness to alternatives that inserted colonization into diplomatic and transatlantic commercial circuits as well as in an emergent global trade in workers from China.

Wedging Brazil in the Coolie Trade

Chinese colonos were a developing novelty. As Brazilians knew through press coverage and their consul in Macao, the Taiping Rebellion had ravaged Chinese lands, especially after the takeover of Nanjing by the Heavenly Kingdom rebels in 1854 and the counterinsurgency led by secret societies in Guangdong province. The French siege of Canton made matters worse. As the epicenter of the conflict, Guangdong became the leading emigrant-sending region, with emigrants streaming down to the Pearl River delta, the ports of Macao and Hong Kong, and from thence to the world.Footnote ⁵⁴

Coolie importation schemes arrived in Brazil very quickly. In late 1854, John Forster, a member of the British House of Commons for Berwick, submitted a proposal to special Brazilian envoy in London Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo for importing Chinese workers. Minister Ferraz ordered Macedo to turn down the offer on account of the costs per colono, which at £25 exceeded that paid in British and French colonies. Ferraz then instructed Macedo to put out an open call for contractors for an initial trial of 2,000 coolies later expandable to 6,000.Footnote ⁵⁵

From 1855 to 1856, three ships hauled 969 Chinese workers to Brazil from Hong Kong and Singapore, almost three times more than the 360 previously estimated by scholars (Table 5.1).Footnote ⁵⁶ By early 1856, Brazil’s consul in Macao, the barão de Circal, felt compelled for the first time since his appointment in 1849 to brief Brazilian authorities on the bourgeoning, if often unauthorized, emigration of destitute Chinese from that port. As ships headed for Brazil loaded farther upriver at Whampoa (Huangpu) or even Cumsingmoon (Jinxingmen), just north of Macao, Circal tried to entice the Brazilian government to consider running its coolie trade by treaty obligations and under consular oversight from Macao. However, by 1857, this possibility came to a close with the British and French war against the Chinese Empire and particularly with the siege of Canton. The Franco-British blockade cut access to ports like Whampoa and effectively suspended the coolie trade to Brazil for several years thereafter.Footnote ⁵⁷

Yet, while the coolie trade still promised to make headway, much of its organization came at the hand of Manoel de Almeida Cardoso, a salt merchant in Rio capable of waiting out the long circular voyage to and from China to claim his profits and who organized at least two of three confirmed coolie trade voyages to Brazil. The first of these ships, the Portuguese galleon Soberana, left Rio on 6 November 1855, only to return almost a full calendar year later on 19 October 1856 with several hundred Chinese colonos and a cargo of rice, porcelain, and other items that Cardoso delegated to an auctioneer who had recently sold the house furniture of the banished slave trader Manoel Pinto da Fonseca. Upon arrival, the Chinese passengers headed to Sapucaia island in Guanabara Bay to a new “establishment to receive colonos” adjacent to the one in Bom Jesús Island and close to another in the Ponta do Cajú. There, the new colonos chins would wait until contractors procured their services at Cardoso’s bureau in the city.Footnote ⁵⁸

Another vessel, US galleon Sarah, stole the spotlight when it arrived in Rio from Hong Kong in March 1856 after only 80 days at sea. Its arrival was as much a logistical feat as a showcase for the financial liabilities inherent to the coolie trade. The 367 Chinese colonos onboard represented the first shipment of a projected total of 2,000 coolies the imperial government contracted for with the Boston-based firm of George R. Sampson and abolitionist Lewis W. Tappan as part of a £2,000 contract finalized in mid-1855 via the Brazilian minister in London. That first shipment was also the last of that onerous contract. Initially backed by the US commissioner to China, Sampson & Tappan’s operation took a turn when a new commissioner appointed in 1855 began an aggressive campaign to curtail the coolie trade. Writing insistently to the Boston merchants’ agent in Hong Kong and to Sampson himself, and aided by mounting public consternation in Boston over their involvement in the coolie trade, the new commissioner convinced the firm to rescind the contract after the Sarah. A contrite Sampson & Tappan sent an unsolicited affidavit with documents on the issue to be examined by the Boston Board of Trade, which concluded that its members’ commercial affairs were a private matter.Footnote ⁵⁹

Sampson & Tappan’s about-face became a hindrance to coolie importation plans in Brazil, as government officers confronted blowback as they tried to study the possibility of pressuring the Boston firm to complete its contract, especially because the Brazilian government had already paid the travel costs for 367 colonos to Sampson & Tappan’s consignee in Rio. Minister Ferraz recommended suing Sampson & Tappan and sought to pressure the firm by rejecting its consignee’s request to declare their contract null. But when the time came for Ferraz to report to the Chamber of Deputies, where anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant, Ferraz had to forcibly accept that the endeavor had cost the treasury 31 contos in losses.Footnote ⁶⁰

Despite the political fallout and financial mess left behind by the Sampson & Tappan contract, the arrival of Cardoso’s Soberana showed alternative pathways to continue with the trade and to craft a market for it in Rio. Slapping advertisements on major dailies, Cardoso reminded potential clients of the availability, skills, and character of these laborers, who were gradually hired for diverse undertakings in and around Rio. At least 30 Chinese men from the Sarah were quickly snatched up for the Mangaratiba roadworks, but the hiring was not as quick or easy as expected. Sinophobic reactions compelled Cardoso to publicly praise Chinese labor and publicize testimonials from satisfied clients including the barão de Mauá, the visconde de Ipanema, chief of police Jerônimo Martiniano Figueira de Melo, and one Joaquim Francisco de Lima, who reported he had no complaints and was planning to hire 50 more Chinese after his enslaved African workers contracted scabies.

These testimonials glossed over the harsh realities endured by Chinese workers under their patrons. Reportedly, one cool winter night in Valença, in the mountains near Rio, the ten Chinese colonos at Lima’s plantation put on their best clothes, bundled their money in their knapsacks, and hanged themselves. Lacking a translator, three survivors were unable to explain the event, whose definition as a collective suicide rather than as a potential crime the press did not question, attributing it to an “attack of nostalgia.” Chinese resistance to plantation labor puzzled many other fazendeiros, who best understood these colonos’ actions as obtuse and irrational. In their estimation, the Chinese were treated fairly in accordance to their standard five-year contracts. Another fazendeiro from Piraí, most likely Joaquim Manoel de Sá, whom the government had “entrusted” with 10 Chinese colonos, publicly expressed his bewilderment when these showed up at the Navy headquarters in Rio to complain of maltreatment. Sá pointed out that, having cut their hair and begun wearing shoes, the Chinese colonos at his fazenda had shown what he considered outward signs of progress at odds with their reported discontent.Footnote ⁶¹

In sugar-growing hinterlands northeast of Rio, the situation was no better. A number of the Chinese who arrived on the Sarah went to work for Jean-Baptiste Lacaille, a physician from Réunion who settled in Rio after retiring from the French navy in 1846. Lacaille had earned recognition from the French Legion of Honor and the Order of Isabel la Católica for attending French and Spanish victims of the yellow fever in 1849–1851.Footnote ⁶² But his benevolence did not seem to extend to Chinese workers. The 40 colonos arriving at his fazenda in Magé got two-days rest before Lacaille eased them into work by limiting their hours to morning and early afternoons. Ostensibly keen to his lenience, 34 workers soon demanded direct cash payments and pork instead of beef, but Lacaille objected. When the laborers refused to go to the fields and roughed up the Chinese foreman sent to scold them, Lacaille called in the district police, which could not bring them to work despite some arrests. The majority of the workers staged a sit-in, camping along the prison walls where their peers were held, until the police caved in and freed the prisoners. Lacaille promptly returned the Chinese colonos to Rio and dissolved his contract, while the workers upheld their complaints over inadequate food rations and wage withholding.Footnote ⁶³

Such incidents confirmed the Sinophobic imaginaries of the likes of Luís Lacerda Werneck, who reviled Chinese labor in his famous tract. But his younger brother, Manoel Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck, may have come to understand the other meanings of possessing a Chinese worker when he boarded the steamship Tocantins to “northern ports” just two weeks after a coolie voyage landing in Rio and contemplated the many wealthy men accompanied by their new coolie servants (criados). Notables like José Antonio Moreira, visconde de Ipanema, tagged Chinese as “submissive” and gladly put them into circulation in an economy of gifts and status markers, sending one to serve as a personal servant as a present for his son, who was then studying at the Olinda law school in Pernambuco. Forty additional Chinese onboard with the younger Werneck were slated for delivery to different contractors in the northeast. This seemingly incidental encounter between a soon-to-be Paraíba Valley grandee and anonymous Chinese indentured workers headed to the northeast lays bare that, since the approval of the slave trade ban of 1850 (whose author, Eusébio de Queirós, also happened to be a passenger on the Tocantins), Chinese servants did not represent slave-labor substitutes. Rather, among these well-to-do characters and alumni of the Olinda law school, the Chinese became status symbols, a kind of vogue that led many of them to gladly share their experiences with Chinese workers for Cardoso to publicize in the press.Footnote ⁶⁴

Beyond Rio, Chinese colonos made an appearance in the most diverse industries, often in undertakings organized as joint-stock companies. In 1856, Frederick Mangeon took 30 of the men who had arrived on the Sarah to Pará, where they worked for the Amazon Navigation Company (est. 1853) led by the barão de Mauá, who was also one of the appointed inspectors of onboard conditions when the Sarah first docked at the Court. In neighboring Maranhão, the Companhia Mineração Maranhense’s vice-president, Cândido Mendes de Almeida, accompanied the arrival of the first coolies. Mendes took in 40 coolies for work in the company’s mines at Maracassumé under two-year contracts. Enterprises more focused on colonization per se also took interest in the Chinese colonos. The Mucury Company in northeastern Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo hired 89 Chinese workers in 1856 as part of a diverse intake of migrants for both company work and settlement purposes. Close by, the Rio Novo colony had taken in 10 Chinese by the time of its second shareholder meeting that same year.Footnote ⁶⁵

Reports on the utility, behavior, and treatment of these colonos varied. Mucury Company director Téofilo Ottoni lauded the Chinese over others for their capacity to steer clear of bicho de pé (chigoe), a foot-boring flea that afflicted German and Portuguese colonos allegedly due to paucity of feet washing.Footnote ⁶⁶ In Maracassumé, the Chinese were not so lucky. Of the initial cohort of 40 colonos, 3 passed away (suicide, fevers, and, reportedly, “sloth”), and 2 allegedly ran away. The local director wrote to the company’s president, Antonio da Rocha Miranda (who happened to be his brother), complaining that Chinese colonization would be both useless and dangerous to the country if judged by his experience – “these people,” he added, “seem to live exclusively to sleep and eat.” The runaways had in fact headed to São Luís, the provincial capital, to report abuses by the director and others, which forced Rocha Miranda to publicly pledge actions to address those unjustifiable “irregularities.” In Rio Novo, Chinese colonos found strength in numbers, banding together to repel aggressions from Portuguese colonos to the point that on one occasion the director summoned police from Vitória.Footnote ⁶⁷

Bahia fostered one of the most robust provincial efforts to secure its share of Chinese colonos. Local empresarios and notables came together in Salvador intent on securing a direct supply of Chinese coolies in September 1854 and launched the Companhia Promotora da Colonisação de Chins (Company for the Promotion of Chinese Colonization). Managed by Bahian notables like its president, José de Araújo Aragão Bulcão, barão de São Francisco, the company scoured the city of Salvador for potential suppliers.Footnote ⁶⁸ A young doctor and longtime resident in the city, George Edward Fairbanks, responded to the call. As the first ship with Chinese contract workers called port in Rio, Fairbanks began to organize his own “new company for the introduction of Chinese colonos.” Rather than ask for favors in Rio, he even went to London to bank on a promise of support from Lord Clarendon. Fairbanks obtained orders for the British plenipotentiary envoy in China to aid him in his pursuit, but his trace got lost thereafter.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, Bahian elites went ahead with their own company, pushing the provincial president to contract with another supplier for the importation of a relatively modest, perhaps experimental, delivery of 50 Chinese. While tempting and potentially profitable, this contract may have fallen short of the other dealings of the new supplier, who was also the local agent for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and owner of two charcoal deposits in Salvador. Additional sources of income in effect allowed the supplier to rescind the contract in 1856 on the grounds that he could not meet the high demand for Chinese colonos in Bahia – another snag in the province’s avid attempts to set up its own coolie labor pipeline.Footnote ⁷⁰

With the arrival of the Sarah, however, provincial president Moncorvo Lima attempted to advance Bahian planters’ requests ahead of numerous others from other parts of the Empire vying for the 368 Chinese colonos under the purview of the imperial government. As Manoel Felizardo from the Directorate of Public Lands explained to the Bahian president, nine more shipments were expected. When other parties snatched up the colonos more quickly at higher prices, Felizardo consoled Bahians by saying their requests would be duly attended with the arrival of the following Chinese cohort. But Bahia officials persisted and gained some leverage with Wilson. According to the Correio Mercantil, in September 1856 the port of Salvador was expecting a vessel from Hong Kong consigned to Wilson Scott & Co. with 225 Chinese workers onboard. If not hired in Bahia, the firm had announced, they would continue on to Demerara.Footnote ⁷¹

The plodding commerce with East Asian ports continued despite the failure of the government’s contract with Sampson & Tappan, and so it stands to reason that further Chinese colono shipments may have landed in Brazil. The national galleon Souto, for instance, left for Singapore that very October, freighting a massive cargo of salt and Portuguese grinding stones, and may have returned the same way it left.Footnote ⁷² Whether or not this was the case, the imperial government’s efforts to jump-start a coolie trade revealed a deep interest in profitably sustaining the supply of these workers for sugar growers in provincial Rio de Janeiro and across the northeast. The value of such workers as status markers and harbingers of potential dividends called forth enterprising captains and the promise of new companies such as the one in Bahia. But business dynamics – faulty logistics, limited supply, and incompliant suppliers – also foiled this first Brazilian foray into the coolie trade, itself interrupted by political conflicts. Nevertheless, even if brief, this coolie importation episode brought into high relief the imperial government’s readiness to seriously consider alternative directed migration and colonization projects even if they did not fit neatly into a labor transition paradigm.

* * *

Scholars have long contemplated the mid-century mark as the starting point of transformative changes in Brazil’s political economy. Many assume the Brazilian Empire underwent sweeping transformations after 1850 as governmental action aligned ever more closely with international pressures and market forces. Wedged between these, migrations helped shape the public and private dealings of government authorities and businessmen alike. Yet, the assortment of colonization projects emerging across the Empire went beyond Rio and São Paulo, throwing into question traditional understandings of colonization as the lever of a southeastern labor transition. In this expanded Empire-wide geography, and in the diverse projects that tethered it to local contexts, colonization endeavors generated as many challenges as solutions to questions of development, food prices, land distribution, and other areas of regulatory oversight, including the regulation of labor and justice for colonos.

Government’s diverse distribution of colonos across numerous industries and services throughout the Empire reflected the multifarious nature of private colonization pursuits in the early 1850s. Yet that very diversity imposed logistical hurdles. When colonos remained under government care, authorities assigned them to haphazard tasks that produced new shortcomings. The Chinese colonos, for instance, were initially housed at Jurujuba, the Navy yard opposite Pão de Açucar at the entrance of Guanabara Bay. Issues of potable water delivery and an unreliable schedule of departures for ports expecting a cohort of those colonos, such as Paranaguá, in Paraná, resulted in some colonos staying behind at the Navy yards for several years. In 1858, a Chinese man still working at the Navy’s armory pleaded to be relieved of his duties. Footnote ⁷³

Similarly, government found itself unable to follow the fates of the other colonos even in the vicinities of the Court. In the neighborhood of Bemfica, residents reported seeing several Chinese “begging for alms, in a state of perfect misery,” while in the then rural parish of Engenho Novo, police arrested Chinese men allegedly brawling with one another.Footnote ⁷⁴ These flare-ups spurred anti-colonization animosities among previous supporters of agricultural colonization such as O Grito Nacional. So long as colonos of any provenance were subjected to beatings, the paper said, statesmen enabling the “humanitarian planters” responsible for such abuses would never satisfy “that pounding need – free colonos to substitute the slaves!” After another apparent collective suicide of Chinese workers, O Grito began to raise suspicions that they had in fact been murdered to hide a hideous beating. A Chinese man working for a “fulano Maia” in Botafogo, who had been kept in a room with no food for three days, had recently suggested as much in a testimony given to the Police chief at the Court.Footnote ⁷⁵

The central government’s role in facilitating the colono trade gave way to perfunctory oversight of worker treatment. This led O Grito to the conclusion that colonization was a term circumscribed to “speculative policy,” a “magic word that does great politically, and with which everyone speculates upon the impossibility of continuing the slave trade!”Footnote ⁷⁶ Whereas the journal maintained the conceit that colonization was about an eventual labor replacement, it struck a nerve in its depiction as a more immediate speculative market. Slave trading prohibitions did liberate a measure of business cunning on the part of slave traders willing to take risks for greater returns as the price for enslaved workers rose. But by 1856, many of those businessmen coalesced with others interested in colonos as an alternative or complementary market. When Vergueiro approached the Bahian president, Higino Pires Gomes was already well ahead in his plans for a colony of 200 European families at his fazenda at Jequiriçá.

The Vergueiros lacked such luck and poise in their drive to ingratiate themselves with the central government and Bahian provincial authorities. Spurned by Bahia’s president, then sidelined by Felizardo’s assessments, Vergueiro & Co.’s growth outlook beyond São Paulo seemed improbable in the last weeks of the 1855 legislature. During a routine discussion on the annual budget, Nicolau Vergueiro undertook perhaps his last defense of the parceria system he had championed since 1847. Acknowledging the “need for peopling,” Vergueiro stressed Brazil’s differences with the often cited examples of United States and Australia, advocating for a colonization not to “the hinterlands and forests, but … to established plantations” where their rate of production would exceed any potential gains from frontier settlements and the “years of misery” preceding their first harvests. Vergueiro complained that he had barely received any help from the central government and only a trifle at the provincial level, which he paid back earlier than contractually agreed. Condemning government measures that would only bloat useless bureaucracies in colonial nuclei, Vergueiro strenuously advocated for direct subsidies to empresarios like himself.

Felizardo, also in attendance, responded as the author of the Public Lands Directorate report censured by Vergueiro. Deftly but calmly rebutting Vergueiro’s objections, he pointed out that confining colonos to plantations would doom them to draw subsistence from exhausted lands. Then he demolished Vergueiro’s pleas for colonization funding by pointing that the state never bankrolled planters’ purchases of enslaved workers during the legal slave trade. “Is it fair,” he countered, “that 10, 20, 100 or 200 planters are supplied with workers at the entire country’s expense?”

Here Felizardo began to delineate the earliest definition of an official, indirect system of colonization promotion that would soon take hold. Subsidizing maritime transport lines and establishing reception centers to house migrants on arrival represented the principal means for government to sponsor spontaneous migrations in growing numbers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Still, overseas migrations would not get started on their own. Clues about necessary government steps to coax them into existence were already evident in Felizardo’s unfavorable response to José Vergueiro’s requests months before. Interestingly, Vergueiro insisted that colonization companies heralded prosperity as he warned against the expectation that “enterprises of that carat make do with private resources and without the aid of the Powers of the State or of an Association organized with strong capital.” In fact, this was precisely what Felizardo had in mind when he suggested awaiting the results of a “Central Colonization Company” then in the works.

The immediate years after the landmark laws of 1850 gave rise to a plethora of colonization paragons. Coffee planters privately pursued their own directed-migration and labor schemes. The government in turn threw its weight behind experiments such as Chinese colonization, meant in theory to displace slaves in domestic service and furnish workers for mining, sugar, and railworks, in line with the coolie rushes for Australia, British Guyana, and California. Government support for either track became a policy imperative as well as a swell of contention. Facing unexpected challenges, Ferraz, Felizardo, and others kept their faith in the government’s instructive role, which it could enact by endorsing model enterprises. The “central company” mentioned by Felizardo fulfilled this very need. Its emergence signaled that government and market had come full circle onto one another: the practices of company organizing and shareholding, together with market understandings of demand, now came to structure government decisions. As explained in Chapter 6, the launch of this government-sponsored company was bracketed by two electoral reforms. Under those circumstances, its development demonstrated imperial authorities’ objective learning gains in regulating the business of colonization while laying bare, ironically, that there was no such thing as a politically neutral approach to colonization companies.