Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen began to marvel at the potent concept of “colonization” in the 1830s. Drawing from ideas about population growth articulated by thinkers as different as Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, and William Godwin, many Brazilians had come to understand the advantages of stoking emigration. The best informed among them stood in awe at the colonizing boosterism of radical political economists like Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Robert Torrens and held them up as paragons against more familiar old-regime precedents such as the convict colonies known as degredos or the Crown-sanctioned peopling drives settling Azoreans across Brazil. In doing so, they filtered new ideas on the nature and value of colonization through an improvement tradition variously shaped by the Portuguese enlightenment, Italian and French physiocracy, and even German cameralism. Yet, rather than abstract ideas in political economy, two practical conceits drove Brazilian elites’ newfound interest in colonization: the belief that they could directly orchestrate migration and settlement processes, and that they themselves could do so at a profit.Footnote ¹

In 1834, Carlos Augusto Taunay – a French expatriate in Brazil – offered an early articulation of these expectations when he addressed fellow improvers at the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional (Society for the Aid of National Industry, SAIN). Taunay defined colonization as a “general word” that encompassed “innumerable social factors” that ultimately distilled themselves to one core element: emigration.Footnote ² His address was filled with novelty for his audience, perfectly reflecting the dawning realization that colonization was an art to be perfected or a science to be systematized in order to recruit, transport, and settle specific populations. Significantly for his audience, too, Taunay characterized colonization as a wealth-generating enterprise and one best carried out by companies.

The profit motive was, indeed, a key to Taunay’s vision for successfully peopling Brazil and, on paper at least, replacing enslaved labor. Rio de Janeiro, and the Brazilian Empire as a whole, ran on a steady supply of enslaved workers who remained the main target of British abolitionist pressures – something Taunay understood as soon as he set foot in the city in 1816. “Capitalists,” he believed, would soon realize that enslaved Africans cost twice as much as free workers and thus “many new enterprises would choose to transport colonos or engajados (indentured workers) from Europe.” Free workers would then boost agricultural production “in a way that [paid] the investment with notable interests.” The government simply had to empower colonization companies “[to] speculate over … colono establishments” not only in order to replace slave labor but to import an additional – and cheaper – labor pool through a process that in and of itself delivered hefty windfalls.

In many ways, Taunay’s vision came to pass. Thirty-odd years later, novelist Joaquim Manuel de Macedo quipped that colonization had become synonymous with illicit self-enrichment abetted by government. Despite the “thousands of contos” spent on it, the result, he claimed, was “an emigration of money from the National Treasury to the pockets of a happy few, who with good reason found that the colono-dimes (colonos-patacões) and the emigrant dollars (onças emigrantes) that populated their coffers were of great use to the country.”Footnote ³ By then, colonization had become a mainstay of Brazilian political and social life. Amid successive international crises and internal turmoil, elites in Brazil had rallied around a concept whose appeal derived from its malleability as a political application as much as its promise of future dividends.

Certainly, by the 1860s much had changed domestically and abroad in economic and political terms. But colonization, as the recruiting, transporting, distributing, and settling of foreign migrants was generally referred to, only crystallized into its true form: a peopling scheme built on directed migrations and driven by opportunism and profit. As Macedo observed, colonization advocates very often reaped handsome rewards – both material and immaterial. Even when colonization companies appeared to fail, their directors and top shareholders rose through the ranks of imperial government, attaining parliamentary seats, senate appointments, ministries, honorific titles, and even subsidies for other endeavors.

As such, the business of colonization had a powerful impact in the development of the Brazilian Empire and of Brazil’s future more generally. Colonization companies in particular became potent collective actors. By inciting migratory flows, these companies shaped the very form and function of the state. When they enticed authorities to approve the policies necessary to sustain migrations to Brazil, they spurred new regulatory powers into existence. Companies thus became ideal government partners, attuning statesmen to colonization and turning slaveholders into shareholders.

These nineteenth-century dynamics lay the building blocks for the impressive demographic transformation of Brazil by 1960. A century following Macedo’s critical observations on the business of colonization, Brazil had entered the ranks of the world’s most populous countries, huddling itself among the top 10 largest demographies for decades. Certainly, improvements in medical care and general social markers in the twentieth century facilitated this demographic leap by bolstering fertility rates and life expectancy estimates.Footnote ⁴ But, in the main, that population expansion rooted itself in those earlier orchestrated labor and peopling schemes that brought coerced, semi-coerced, and free migrants to Brazilian lands.

Labor, Colonization, and the “Inverse Proportionality Thesis”

Few terms elicit such self-assured historical definitions as colonization, which often summons images of helmeted conquistadors or, alternatively, inexorable processes of territorial and cultural domination. Often, colonization gets easily confounded with “settler colonialism” theories and their limited casts, which invariably pit “settlers” against indigenous peoples and only occasionally make space for third-party actors.Footnote ⁵ When historically understood, colonization eludes such simplification. Etymologically, the term is both complex and profound. Brazilian critic Alfredo Bosi traced the concept to archaic agrarian practices of productive occupancy and its cultural derivations: colo, cultus, cultura. Eventually, the model of the Roman colony inherited from classical antiquity structured aggressive peopling drives in Spanish America, although in Brazil colonization responded primarily to Portuguese imperial aims to increase population density rather than systematically organize settlement.Footnote ⁶

Colonization bore even more intensively on the Luso-Brazilian world in the nineteenth century as political economists “consciously twist[ed] the word ‘colony’ into a new sense” that defined it as a potent governmental application and an alluring business pursuit.Footnote ⁷ Colonization became a concrete implement, a plan or scheme or policy to be applied rather than a diffuse dynamic or ideology of colonial occupation spread across centuries. Grounded contextual definitions such as Taunay’s or Macedo’s thus allow for a more exact historical profiling of colonization and its effects and help to flesh out this book’s three overarching arguments.

The first argument is that modern migrations to Brazil were carefully orchestrated affairs that began much earlier than suggested by conventional narratives, picking up as early as the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. These directed migrations thus started long before abolitionist initiatives gathered steam and population tallies or systematized port registries became the norm. Notably, this earlier era of irregular migrations at times meshed with the slave trade rather than compete against it. Remarkably, directed migrations also outlived slavery itself by close to a century after abolition. These complex, overlapping dynamics call out for a more thorough accounting of migratory processes and the factors that mobilized them.

From a colonial backwater decried as sparsely populated, Brazil became the very center of the Portuguese Empire in 1808 when, fleeing Napoléon’s forces, the Bragança dynasty turned Rio de Janeiro into its new abode. As a result, from then and through the mid-1800s, slavers sustained one of the most rapidly expanding influxes of enslaved persons in the Atlantic, landing an estimated 1.7 million African prisoners in Brazil, a significant population input despite the high mortality rates of the middle passage and the first years of arrival. As British abolitionist campaigns intensified, slavery became the cornerstone of a fledgling Brazilian state after 1822, determining the rise and fall of cabinets and parties and eventually opening way for a bourgeoning internal slave trade and a more curated reproduction of an enslaved work force.Footnote ⁸

Historians widely assume that a second major demographic input began around 1871, when a Free Womb Law confirmed an impending falta de braços (dearth of labor) prophesied by planters. This was, after all, the beginning of a gradual emancipation process. Significantly, the first national census completed in 1872 facilitated a more consistent accounting of both enslaved persons and foreigners present in Brazil at the time. Not only did this inaugural census dramatically reflect the foreign-born free population compared to the number of enslaved persons at the time, it illuminated the sheer scale of the migrations that followed. From 1872 until 1914, Brazilian ports welcomed at least 2,685,837 foreign arrivals, and, after a lull induced by global war, another 1,112,751 arrived by 1930. This massive influx transformed Brazil into the fourth largest receiving society in the Americas during the era of transatlantic mass migrations.Footnote ⁹

Because migrant entries climbed after 1871 and peaked closely after abolition, it is generally understood that foreign migrants came to Brazil as part of a labor substitution process. Migrations, from this perspective, rose as a function of the dwindling ranks of the enslaved. This is a scholarly conclusion that I refer to as the “inverse proportionality thesis” first articulated by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Caio Prado Jr., two São Paulo intellectuals who unwittingly applied historical colonization processes from their home state to craft sweeping understandings of Brazil as a whole. Later historians inherited and updated their views in the 1980s and ‘90s, adding that a generalized penchant for whitening guided planters’ migration promotion endeavors from the start.Footnote ¹⁰

However, while useful and partly accurate, these approaches have often depended on limited evidence and incurred in misinterpretations. For instance, while São Paulo did welcome record numbers of migrants after 1880, it is not true that it was the leading colonization pioneer among provinces nor that its model became hegemonic across the Brazilian Empire. Moreover, while the racism of many planters and statesmen who advocated colonization is obviously clear, besides inconsistent ad hoc contractual stipulations, statutory racial restrictions were enacted – and then only briefly – exclusively at the tail end of the century. Thus, it is important to reexamine the conventional storyboard of colonization to identify the other factors, statutory and otherwise, that directly shaped the course of events.

By examining the little understood migration patterns established prior to the 1872 census, this book advances a different and more nuanced narrative. It illuminates the many changing contexts and efforts of the pioneering for-profit colonization companies to untether migration from mechanistic understandings that reduce it to a late-century labor substitution project. In doing so, my aim is to provide a historical understanding of colonization as a policy expedient, a sociopolitical process, and a niche market that indelibly shaped the Brazilian Empire and established the conditions for Brazil’s demographic leap.

Colonization and Government Formation

Peopling for Profit’s second and third main arguments revolve around the significance of colonization as a heretofore underrecognized for-profit, company-making pursuit with significant implications in post-independence political development. During the early and mid-nineteenth century, directed migrations became a business, and one whose execution Brazilian statesmen deferred on and off to private companies, in which process the government developed varying degrees and modes of oversight. Indeed, as a powerful feedback loop between migrations and government formation evolved, it provided openings for private entrepreneurs and, in time, corporate actors to court government favors in exchange for migration recruitment and transport services. As a result, an avid niche market in migrants emerged at particular junctions in the nineteenth century that served government interests while cultivating enormous profit for shareholders. Directed migrations underscored by profit motives and organized variously by emergent networks of colonization agents and companies gradually, if haphazardly, gave shape to the large-scale reception capacities that eventually facilitated the era of mass migrations in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

This book’s third and closely related argument is that migrations imprinted themselves in Brazilian political development profoundly and by accretion as they converged under the general rubric of colonization by the mid-nineteenth century. Due to its versatility, colonization embedded itself in the fabric of the Brazilian Empire, dovetailing with old-regime policies of povoamento, or peopling, of the kind long practiced by the Portuguese Crown and perfected during the reformist era headed by minister Sebastião José Carvalho e Melo, marquês de Pombal (1750–1777). Practices of populating imperial hinterlands came roaring back after 1808, in response to defensive needs, fiscal ambitions, and a broadening repertoire of improvement ideas meant to “perfect” agricutlure and industry.Footnote ¹¹ Quickly, these imperatives opened the way for statesmen and foreign entrepreneurs who understood that they could exploit privilege-seeking dynamics characteristic of old-regime societies both to meet government needs and reap personal rewards. Once independent from Portugal, the political elites of the new Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) began to learn from prior directed migration efforts and implemented those lessons as they treaded an administrative learning curve of managing populations. Theirs was a meandering and often jagged learning curve, but the twists and turns in this governmental learning process projected distinct attributes onto a fledgling Brazilian state grappling with “colonization” as a catch-all term that encompassed the planned recruitment, transport, and/or settlement of specific populations by the 1820s and ‘30s.

Just as a “policy of slavery” congealed after independence, a “colonization policy” also crystallized in the Brazilian Empire. And it adapted to continuous crises and underwent numerous permutations as the century wore on, informing governmental capacity-building in ways that legal and diplomatic constraints prevented slavery from doing.Footnote ¹² Scheme by scheme and plan by plan, colonization became a tested script, domestically and internationally adaptable. Initially, it obtained its thrust from the twin forces of royal beneficence and business ambitions but quickly grew to depend on global crises that diversified the migrant pools on offer for colonization enterprises. While in dynamic engagement with events overseas, colonization also grew in counterpoint to and sometimes overlapped with slavery. As slave trafficking expanded up to 1850, Brazil also received more colonos, which I define broadly as migrants, settlers, and/or foreign-born workers according to the multiple meanings given to the term by nineteenth-century observers.Footnote ¹³ This emergent market in migrants, which I refer to as the colono trade, grew larger and more sophisticated in the following decades, generating opportunities for private gain that complemented other elite sources of profit, including slave-based investments.

As an alluring business pursuit bridging governmental aims and private interests, colonization had a formative function in the politics of the Brazilian Empire on many different scales. In terms of political culture, colonization reinforced old-regime petitionary dynamics in the absence of adequate commercial legislation up to 1850. Gradually, it became a pervasive conceit among political elites by surpassing partisan divides over slavery and eventually generating considerable consensus around the value of directed migrations. Colonization thus transcended planters’ labor concerns to articulate understandings about the function of the state, the role of political elites in producing entitlements to state resources, and the place of private business in reaping benefits from such access. Colonization’s many crises also led to innovation by spurring the creation of new government bureaus and even an entirely new Agriculture ministry by 1860. At a more granular level, colonization also forced new policies directly pertinent to migrant transports and settlement but also many others dealing with issues as varied as the management of indigenous groups, commercial legislation on companies, land policies, work contract rules, and policing mechanisms.

In both the short and long term, colonization weighed on the formation and evolution of political elites themselves. Brazilians and their foreign agents enacted colonization as a policy expedient and hailed it as a political panacea, even though the colonization project and companies very often plunged into logistical chaos and political nightmares. And yet, despite those frequent lapses, colonization seemed to win the day. Companies wound down, no doubt. But their benefits and perks continued to rain down on their leading empresarios, as I refer to colonization promoters and company-men in the likeness of the speculators involved in the land-grants process in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas in the 1820s and ‘30s.Footnote ¹⁴

Colonization, then, burnished political images and furnished politicians with valuable social and cultural capital (in addition to hard capital from company dividends) to cement upward political trajectories. Very often, political hopefuls found professional or political advancement via appointments, elections, or general promotion through the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy closely following their experience at the head of a colonization scheme or company. With time, however, senescent politicians, and their sons and protégés, saturated political seats and even the bureaucratic positions that embodied, in the words of historian José Murilo de Carvalho, “everybody’s vocation.” Despite diminishing opportunities for advancement within the imperial state, colonization still provided an escape valve for emergent entrepreneurial elites composed of urban professionals who did not find space at the trough of state benevolence but nonetheless crafted opportunities of their own.Footnote ¹⁵

Brazil was not alone. Similar dynamics unfolded around the globe in old-world empires and American republics alike. From the Russian steppes or the Great Plains to the broadleaf forests of New Zealand or Chile’s lakes regions, from the Canadian taiga to the drylands of French Algeria or Mexico’s far north, and from the Mongolian borderlands of the Qing Empire to the British antipodes of South Australia, orchestrated migration and peopling processes took root everywhere that evinced new forms of statecraft – and violence – powered by the shared ambitions of government officials, consuls, emigration agents, and entrepreneurs. Brazil stood out among these emergent migrant societies because it opted to become an imperial monarchy after independence from Portugal and because it preserved slavery until 1888. And yet, as an American empire of its own and a slave society no less, Brazil pursued colonization at a far greater scale and with much more ambition than neighboring Latin American republics and with a zeal comparable to that of other empires.

Unsettled Revolutions: Imperial Parallels and Global Counterpoints

Selecting and transporting specific groups of people to distant sites, whether inland or overseas, became a fad among political elites around the world in the nineteenth century. Empires and republics alike gravitated away from criminal banishment practices and poor relief establishments toward intensive forms of colonization often anchored in the “associative emigration” that led Saint-Simonians to settle along the Gulf of Mexico, Italian republicans to join pro-independence armies in the Río de la Plata, and pupils of Charles Fourier, one of the utopians castigated by Karl Marx, to move to southern Brazil. Meanwhile, new coercive labor regimes transplanted thousands. Jamaican Maroons were “repatriated” to Sierra Leone, Liberated Africans transferred from Rio to Trinidad, Mayan rebels deported to Cuba after the Caste War, and Chinese laborers tagged as coolies embarked to the Americas during the Taiping rebellion.Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, globe-trotting employees of the Russian-American Company called port in Rio or Desterro on their way to headquarters in Sitka, and in passing brought news of tsar Nicholas I’s military colonies in the Transcaucasian borderlands with the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁷

Indeed, several empires displayed a broad repertoire of planned migrations and settlement modes instructive for Brazilians increasingly connected to the wider world. Brazilian statesmen found the most audacious exemplars of colonization enterprises in British colonies in the Cape of Good Hope, the Canadas, and Oceania. Their close attention to and even emulation of these “settler revolution” frontlines have led historians to generalize that Brazil remained a kind of “adopted dominion” of an emergent “Anglo” world order in a variation of decades-old interpretations positing the existence of British informal imperialism over the Brazilian Empire.Footnote ¹⁸ After surviving the market crash of 1825, Brazil did become the third largest market for British manufactures and Britain’s sixth largest supplier of raw goods by 1830, in part as a result of preferential commercial treaties between the two countries. But Brazilians were no mere cogs in an expanding “free-trade imperialism.” Rather, they actively and purposefully learned from British business along two tracks. On the one hand, they cultivated an instructive firsthand engagement with British mining firms operating in Minas Gerais, which provided them with a crash course in shareholding and regulating companies that ultimately served them for colonization experiments of their own. On the other hand, Brazilians paid heed to colonization companies in Canada, South Australia, and New Zealand with an eye to replicating them. As some of these enterprises benefited from British workers expelled by the Poor Laws, Brazilians also contemplated how colonization companies could absorb philanthropic institutions modeled after Dutch reformatories and work colonies and the “domestic colonies” that later sprang in the British Isles and elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁹

British colonization paragons enthralled Brazilian officials though not as much as the record migrant entries attained in the United States. Brazilians had reasons for seeing a closer model in the United States, where migration policies also blended with forms of population control targeting homeless, free Black, and indigenous people.Footnote ²⁰ But Brazil remained a heavily centralized monarchy and, as such, concentrated migration governance in Rio much earlier than the US centralized migration regulations in the federal government and over a significantly vaster surface area at the time. US states like New York or Massachusetts preserved local control of entry and expulsion rules until the Passenger cases of 1849 began to lose their grip and open way for federalization of migrant controls. By then, the Brazilian Empire had firmly anchored regulatory powers over incomers and their circulation in offices directly appointed by the central executive and had undergone a process of bureaucratic specialization resulting in colonization directories, special commissions in the Chamber of Deputies, and newly created ministerial sections.

Colonization for Brazil was not just a conceit modeled on lessons learned from other empires. It was also part of a broader series of colonization efforts across Latin America and the Caribbean that offer productive points of comparison. The Brazilian Empire surpassed its Latin American counterparts in the sheer scale and uninterruptedness of its colonization agenda but also produced intriguing connections to those other scenarios. Brazil, for instance, quickly outdid its southern neighbors when the speculative colonization pursuits of Bernardino Rivadavia and others in the Provincias Unidas de la Plata screeched to a halt with the rise of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s protectionist Argentinian Confederation (1829–1851). Migrations and colonization efforts resumed after 1852 with the rise of leaders with close relations to Brazil, like Justo José de Urquiza, who fought next to Brazil in the Ejército Grande to topple Rosas and then organized colonies in northern Argentina, or Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an exile of the “generation of 1837,” who visited Brazil’s royal colony of Petrópolis before he began writing about emigration to the Río de la Plata and establishing agricultural colonies. During their respective presidencies, Urquiza’s and Sarmiento’s Brazil-inspired initiatives cleared way for Nicolás de Avellaneda’s immigration and colonization law of 1876, an opening salvo for mass migrations.Footnote ²¹ Sarmiento also influenced colonization in Chile, writing pro-emigration tracts with Göttingen University professor Dr. Wappäus that the Chilean government translated to Spanish in advance of Vicente Pérez Rosales’s settlement schemes in the southern province of Llanquihue.Footnote ²²

Meanwhile, in Gran Colombia, early experiments with Irish mercenaries by Simón Bolívar set a precedent for unsuccessful attempts to recruit immigrants from the United States and the British Isles. Colonization aspirations remained unfulfilled until railways and coffee dragged internal colonos with them.Footnote ²³ Mexico, in contrast, saw colonization evolve into a speculative market in ways reminiscent of Brazil. After 1821, adventurers like Tadeo Ortiz organized for-profit and ultimately disastrous colonization drives for the Tehuantepec isthmus, although his efforts paled in comparison to those pursued by the likes of Mexican independence hero Lorenzo de Zavala, who cofounded the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company to colonize the province of Coahuila and Texas with “Anglo” settlers and ended up contributing to the Texas secession war of 1835. Interestingly, colonization staged a comeback in 1864 during the Second Mexican Empire headed by Maximilian I, who had also previously traveled to Brazil and witnessed the colonization efforts of his cousin, Pedro II.Footnote ²⁴

Lastly, while not independent, Cuba and Puerto Rico – the two remaining Spanish colonies in the Caribbean after 1810 – shared important features with Brazilian colonization, starting with the benefits offered for Spaniards or Catholic subjects to settle in Puerto Rico in 1815 and in Cuba in 1817.Footnote ²⁵ However, in the 1830s, Peninsular officials’ fearful of insular overrepresentation in a new constitutional assembly clamped down on the vibrant colono trade from the Balearic and Canary Islands. Over the following decade, colono arrivals declined due to a combination of draconian measures like the 1849 régimen de la libreta (workbook regime) that policed dayworkers’ whereabouts in Puerto Rico and new regulations in Cuba that drastically cut canario arrivals by the 1850s. Special laws stipulations in successive Spanish constitutions continued to drown out Puerto Rican and Cuban representatives’ pleas for the importation of white workers, while Brazil, in turn, experienced a steady influx of Azorean colonos.Footnote ²⁶

Colonization embedded the Brazilian Empire in a complex global constellation of ideas and practices during momentous political transformations. Even though historians of empires seem to relegate post-independence Brazil as old-regime flotsam, colonization demonstrates that Brazil should be examined on a par with other nineteenth-century empires. Indeed, its embrace of an internal colonization powered by directed migrations from overseas mirrored and marched in lockstep with the colonization initiatives of other world empires as they scrambled to reinvent themselves in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, while scholars of Latin America brush Brazil aside as a peculiar exception in a sea of republics, the Brazilian Empire offered its neighbors a towering example of colonization as a feasible enterprise, establishing sporadic but meaningful connections to key individuals from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, or Mexico enmeshed in networks that took a page out of the Brazilian colonization playbook.

In the Company of Companies

If the Brazilian Empire rose above its hemispheric counterparts in the rate and magnitude of its engagement with colonization projects, it did so thanks to the succession of colonization companies convincing officials and shareholders of their worth. Interestingly, however, for most of the period under study, companies in Brazil were not well defined. Corporate rules only arrived late and in piecemeal fashion, playing catch-up with practices already afoot. As in the United Kingdom and the United States, Brazilian entrepreneurs selected from a simple menu of business organizational forms. Among their options, the limited-liability corporation with transferable stock known as sociedade anônima became the standard after the first proper company law in 1849.Footnote ²⁸ A year later, the new Commercial Code made available another option, the joint-stock form known as the sociedade em comandita, first crafted in France in 1807.Footnote ²⁹ But these statutes did not produce immediate normative effects. Brazilians continued to employ various forms of business organization as suited them. Some went through the onerous process of incorporating companies by charter. Others avoided the costly fees and wait times associated with incorporation, opting instead to operate without liability protections. Still others adopted business partnerships with joint-stock attributes without formally incorporating. The result was a rich, though underregulated, landscape for incubating Brazilian companies.

Legally nimble, companies in Brazil emerged with unprecedented force even before the mid-century as a new type of collective political actor and as agile government partners for specific tasks.Footnote ³⁰ They were shrewd and incredibly adaptive as entities nominally geared to the public good but heavily reliant on personalist forms of patronage and political influence. Among the many companies established between 1820 and 1860, when more restrictive incorporation rules kicked in, colonization companies distinguished themselves by a broader remit than the more numerous insurance firms that dotted the landscape.Footnote ³¹ While the latter offered specific services, colonization companies allowed government to outsource an expanding list of tasks – from populating hinterlands to conscripting specialized labor for roadworks.

Brazilian statesmen eventually harnessed companies to advance their vision of empire-wide prosperity, exploiting their autonomy as a liability-free, trial-and-error means to develop migration-related policies. A revolving door between the political establishment and companies ensured a seamless transit between both spheres and a symbiosis that could often result in smooth company operations and novel public policies. With time, the constant traffic between colonization endeavors and political work standardized directed migrations. Government figures paid attention to errors past and devised regulations to lessen government risks, quell international criticism of migrant treatment in Brazil, expedite reception mechanisms, and distribute colonos according to perceived needs.

However, while these companies remained capacious, they were self-interested creatures. As a collective actor, a company exceeded the sum of its parts. Incorporated or not, it tapped into other collective forms of social organization such as kinship networks, factions, parties, and scientific associations but was never pigeonholed by any one of them. These enterprises thus leveraged several channels of patronage to the benefit of not one interest group but several at once. Concomitantly, the wealth and political capital of leading company men – often statesmen themselves – worked to the advantage of both company membership and principals. Company organizers mustered considerable funds to launch their enterprises under limited oversight.

Notably, most colonization companies did not last long. Yet, far from failures, they remained full-bodied vessels of collective action, organizing subscribers around profit-oriented activities and across class and party lines. Moreover, they consistently landed their patrons and principals considerable benefits, even when dividends dried up. In principle, regardless of their financial outcomes, company runs reinforced grandees’ prestige, consolidating the social rank of the most powerful Brazilian shareholders by means of an expanding membership. In other words, they galvanized existing patterns of wealth and power accumulation in ways that remain challenging to document.Footnote ³²

The Brazilian rash of company-making gave rise to what I call shareholder oligarchies, that is, companies whose structure mirrored and strengthened patrimonial hierarchies. Higher-ups with noble titles and government posts took up management positions and majority shares, blurring the lines between management and ownership, while also bending ostensibly “democratic” corporate features such as graduated voting to their own benefit. The impact of this significant facet of companies’ internal function has remained elusive to contemporary scholarship. Historians have certainly noted the role of a shared education and participation in appointed government offices as key aspects in the socialization of Brazil’s imperial elites. They have also analyzed the political impact of patrimonial corporations like the National Guard and of “interest groups” such as the commercial associations organized in Rio, Bahia, and Pernambuco in the 1830s. Yet, comparatively, colonization companies – and colonization more generally – have failed to receive similar attention in spite of their recurrence, pervasiveness, and political work throughout Brazil’s imperial period.Footnote ³³ This book enhances such scholarly explorations by offering a new and closer understanding of the colonization companies so popular among nineteenth-century Brazilian elites. These novel enterprises became significant means of elite socialization that not only surmounted Portuguese legacies but structured new forms of social privilege and a bureaucratic “vocation” in the fledgling Brazilian state for generations.

* * *

The narrative that follows offers a descriptive analysis of colonization as it transformed from an old-regime peopling paradigm into a malleable government tool and a business realm of its own. It details colonization’s arc from the 1808 arrival in Brazil of the Portuguese state apparatus to the decade following the Brazilian Empire’s downfall in 1889 and then offers a final reflection on colonization’s afterlives well into the twentieth century.

Derived from research in over twenty-five archival sites across Brazil and in Portugal, the United States, and England, the storyline offered has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it chronicles the events that gradually built colonization as a business and political application across local, regional, imperial, and international scales. Profit-seeking behaviors occurred at each of those levels and, at each, crises also foiled them. Meanwhile, companies perfected their ability to transit between each of these registers of scale and, in that process, contributed to state capacities that can be variously understood as tutelary, infrastructural, and governmental.Footnote ³⁴ Under the general mantle of peopling, colonization served as the building block of armies, cities, industries, and revenues. It purveyed recruits, forced lawmakers to codify landed property, informed state tutelage over indigenous settlements, weighed in on slave-trade suppression and commercial treaties, and contributed to the expansion of the diplomatic corps.

That colonization compelled governmental reforms often by private means suggests how state power and the pursuit of private profit were mutually constitutive. That it gilded the already privileged lives of its top exponents further underscores its role in perpetuating inequalities and enforcing domination by the few. As important as the individual lives of migrants are for historical analysis, this book centers on the statesmen, businessmen, agents, scientists, and intellectuals who orchestrated migrations and in doing so turned them into profitable pursuits with meaningful impacts on government formation and on Brazilian society as a whole.

Historians have tried hard to elucidate the dynamics of colonization, but challenges abound. In practical terms, the study of colonization presents archival difficulties. In contrast to the study of slavery, colonization cannot be traced to a singular or precise government office like the Justice or Foreign Affairs ministries that handled liberated Africans or slave trade diplomacy. Nor is it anchored by conventional documents that shed light on its private dimensions, as wills or manumission letters help to do with slavery. In conceptual terms, the best studies recognize the development of migration and colonization policies but generally circumscribe these to the latter half of the nineteenth century and to Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo, thereby narrowing the phenomenon’s true temporal and geographical scope.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, scholars have tried to taxonomize colonization by cleanly delineating presumably distinct modalities (provincial vs. central state-led, or state-led vs. private colonies, for instance) and by establishing periodizations determined by normative legal statutes such as the Land Law of 1850 or the Ordinance for State Colonies of 1867, which, presumably, dictated how colonization dynamics unfolded after their enacment.

This book, by contrast, offers a textured examination of colonization’s empire-wide nature from the early nineteenth century and brings into relief its different modalities and statutory benchmarks as products of, not the parting lines for, political showdowns, social processes, and rapacious business pursuits. The granular approach adopted here also unveils colonization’s influence on the iterative nature of the post-independent state, from the improvisational state crafted by João VI’s use of peopling as part of his political balancing acts to the Praetorian state in which Pedro I used colonization to cut himself in Napoléon’s cloth by mustering his own mercenary troops. Colonization’s weight in this iterative nature is just as clearly seen in the investor state of the Regency that replaced Pedro I, which outsourced colonization affairs to private enterprises. It is also seen in the opportunistic state of the post-1850 period, during which ministers like the marquês de Olinda relied on closing windows of opportunity to define watershed policies to regulate migration and settlement activities. These iterations would eventually give out to the sub-contracting state at century’s end, which facilitated mass migrations by allowing reception centers’ service providers and the shipping companies behind what I refer to as a bourgeoning “passengerism” to take over colono transport initiatives that the Brazilian government had once carried out by itself.

Chapters are grouped into four parts to highlight the major phases in colonization’s transformation from an old-regime peopling principle into a business sphere through which government and companies gave shape to migratory flows. The first part details how both the Luso-Brazilian government in Rio de Janeiro from 1808 to 1821 and Pedro I from 1822 to 1831 harnessed colonization toward state-building goals. In using colonization as part of an emergent governmental toolkit, the Portuguese emperor João VI sought to balance out different pressures from within and from without, as discussed in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 follows the politics revolving around his son, who as the new emperor of an independent Brazil summoned colonization to defend Brazilian sovereignty but also to uphold a controversial interpretation of his own powers as monarch, which a bourgeoning legislature countered by trying to seize jurisdiction over colonization affairs.

The second part of the book covers the emergence of a colono trade that ushered in the first Brazilian colonization companies and was then indelibly shaped by them. As explored in Chapter 3, these emergent companies reinforced new political hierarchies during the Regency and facilitated the transfer of erstwhile government prerogatives related to directed migrations to private, for-profit collectivities. The following chapters in Part II detail the efforts by Brazilian statesmen and businessmen to apply colonization as a solution to numerous imperial and foreign concerns that included but also went beyond the end of the slave trade. The lessons learned from these early companies led the imperial government to outsource colonization activities to numerous foreign petitioners and also, eventually, to lead colonization by example with the first imperial model colony and with a robust use of colonization as a diplomatic expedient, as discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 turns to the mid-century mark, when new regulations and dynamics brought into relief the state’s increasing autonomy in defining colonization’s uses for myriad purposes beyond political elites’ concerns with enslaved-labor replacement.

Part III examines how colonization companies became politicized from the 1850s onward, with Chapter 6 looking into the two dashing colonization companies that followed three important 1850s laws. The chapter examines how domestic quarrels could hinder such enterprises by cutting the essential lifeline provided by government funds. Curiously, these tensions allowed for the state to reprise a more regulatory role as authorities attempted to channel and oversee migrations more closely, exercising a version of what historian Aristide Zolberg called regulation by “remote control,” that is, enacting attributions that allowed government authority to extend overseas and influence how migrations were organized even in departure ports. Renovated efforts leading to a new colonization company in the 1860s lie at the center of Chapter 7, which looks closely at the opportunistic entanglements of Brazilian colonization with regional conflicts and crises around the world that brought Polish exiles, US Confederate veterans, Algerian settlers, and Cuban expatriates to Brazil. In Chapter 8, the coolie trade comes into full view as an instance in which private enterprise tried to bolster the Brazilian state’s capacity to enact and sustain new migratory labor flows, a goal frustrated by myriad business-related factors rather than simple racial aversion.

Part IV offers a denouement, surveying the transit into mass-migration promotion efforts in the midst of the abolition crisis and beyond (Chapter 9). The book ends with a Conclusion that details the persistence of peopling as a guiding governmental principle well into the 1980s, when the Brazilian dictatorship launched plans for Amazonian colonization. As these plans unraveled, they marked the sunset of colonization as a repurposed nineteenth-century trope and a long-standing intellectual tradition among political elites.

The research and writing for this book occurred under the shadow of a ruling that tendentiously ensconced constitutional rights deeper into the legal fiction of corporate personhood. Though far from Brazil, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) adumbrated the capacity of companies to throw their weight into political discourse and radically tip the balance of electoral outcomes. As such, corporate jurisprudence raises the specter of companies as political machines that act with full protections originally accorded to individuals as bearers of rights but with far greater might and far greater weight in the balance of history than any single human may muster. With this, and together with the crises engulfing Brazilian multinationals in the early twenty-first century, our era clamors for a serious consideration of the power of companies over historical events.

Similarly, the recurrent incidents of violence against foreign migrants in contemporary Brazil, especially those from Africa and other parts of Afro-Latin America, serve as potent reminders of the need to examine the history and meanings of migration policies and protections or lack thereof. Doing so illuminates searing discrepancies in Brazilian political and social life and contradictory experiences of migration – contradictions embodied by the precarious livelihoods and violent deaths of Congolese, Senegalese, and Haitian migrants while entire communities celebrate exceptional privileges ostensibly inherited from the work ethos of their immigrant forebears.