Brazil: A History

When the Portuguese caravels arrived, the territory that became Brazil had already been occupied for thousands of years by millions of people, split into hundreds of peoples with very different languages, gods and social organization. Tupis on the coast, Jês in the interior, Amazonian groups with their own agriculture: there was no single Indigenous people, there was an enormous diversity that the newcomers decided to call all one thing, "Indians," out of convenience.

These societies were not an empty space waiting for civilization to show up. They had trade between villages, war, religion and hierarchies of their own. Seeing 1500 as a blank page turning into civilization is an old mistake: in reality, two worlds that didn't know each other met, and one of them arrived armed and carrying new diseases.

Many people don't realize it, but a good share of the names of cities, rivers and even everyday foods in Brazil come straight from these Indigenous languages, not from Portuguese. It's a trail that survived, even after so much violence against the people who spoke those languages first.

Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet left bound for India and sighted land in southern Bahia in April 1500, an episode old textbooks called the discovery of Brazil. Historians still argue over whether it was a navigation accident or an already known route that Portugal kept hidden so as not to hand an advantage to the Spanish.

In the early years, Portuguese interest was low: brazilwood produced a dye for cloth, but that seemed too little to justify truly colonizing the land. It was the threat of other countries cutting timber along the coast without a license, especially France, that pushed the Crown to occupy the territory for real.

Jesuit priests arrived in the very first decades with the mission of converting the native peoples, and they became, at the same time, defenders against the most violent enslavement and agents of a conversion that dismantled whole villages from the way of life they had before.

Without the money to fund colonization on its own, the king divided the coast into enormous strips, the hereditary captaincies, handed to donataries who invested their own resources in exchange for the right to exploit the land and pass it on to their children.

Most donataries failed, with no settlers, no cash and under constant Indigenous attack. Only Pernambuco and São Vicente truly prospered, largely thanks to sugar. It was this widespread failure that led the Crown to create, still in the sixteenth century, a centralized general government in Bahia.