From roughly 1870 to 1914, an estimated 36,890,000 migrants, mostly from Europe, arrived at major ports in the Americas, swept in by a confluence of global and local forces. Demographic growth, increasing agricultural yields, the rise of steamship transportation, and the consolidation of liberal regimes allowed for such freedom of movement as to trigger what Aristide Zolberg called the “exit revolution.” Family and neighborhood ties in the sites of departure completed the picture, as did migrant recruitment networks and their agents.Footnote ¹ Together, these dynamics contributed to an unprecedented era of mass migration that prompted the rise of seemingly new governmental controls over people and territory. National and local governments responded to migrant arrivals as they could, often on the heels of public health crises, diplomatic hustles, popular pressure, or elite machinations in favor of or against particular types of migrants.

Across national scenarios, governments managed and standardized arrivals through the establishment of port entry stations, temporary migrant shelters, and, later, the restrictions and quotas that came into vogue after World War I.Footnote ² Among these, migrant reception centers best signaled the institutionalization of reception measures, as they proliferated across the Americas including along Brazil’s vast littoral in the form of hospedarias. In São Paulo, the Hospedaria de Bom Retiro was built in 1881 and was followed by the Hospedaria da Ilha das Flores (1883) in Rio de Janeiro; the Hospedaria de Imigrantes in Salvador (c.1886); the Hospedaria da Pedra d’Água, in Vitória (constructed 1887, opened 1889); the Hospedaria do Cristal, in Porto Alegre (1890); and the Hospedaria de Imigrantes do Outeiro, in Belém (1895). Each of these came to its own out of discussions at different levels of government. The Ilha das Flores came at the hand of the central government; the province of São Paulo developed its own hospedarias; and that in Salvador was operated by a civil association, the Sociedade Bahiana de Imigração. The life spans of these institutions likewise varied. The one in Rio Grande do Sul functioned for 8 years, while Espírito Santo’s went on for 30. São Paulo’s second hospedaria, opened in 1887 in the Brás neighborhood after the Bom Retiro location experienced a smallpox outbreak, shut down close to a century later in 1978, after more than two million migrants passed through its doors.Footnote ³

Significantly, the first of these hospedarias – and the most important at the time – had originated in Rio rather than São Paulo and had risen straight out of the profiteering inherent to colonization. In 1876, an IIFA commission examining senator José Ignácio Silveira da Mota’s pisciculture experiments at the Ilha das Flores in Guanabara Bay produced glowing reports of the island’s natural endowments. The commission convinced the central government to purchase it for the estimable sum of almost 5 contos. Ilha das Flores was then repurposed into a migrant hospice that substituted the laborious removals of fresh incomers to inland depots. While migrant entries into Rio dipped from 24,493 to 19,608 in 1884, its first year, immigration boosters would soon flood the city with more migrants than ever.Footnote ⁴

It was precisely at this expansive time for foreign arrivals and migration-reception infrastructure that a new colonization association began operations, emulating – and soon transcending – its colonization company forebears. In 1884, three prominent German residents, members of a migrant intelligentsia reared in state-sponsored colonies, issued a call for government officials and businessmen to bolster immigration propaganda: Herman Blumenau, the diligent empresario behind the eponymous colony in Santa Catarina; Hugo Grüber, editor of the Rio-based Allgemeine Deutsche Zeitung; and Karl von Koseritz, the first German to take a seat at the Chamber for Rio Grande do Sul in 1874. Notably, von Koseritz was also the former editor of the Deutsche Zeitung, in whose pages he incited the violence leading to the massacre of Jacobina Maurer and countless other colonos in what became known as the Mucker War of 1873–1874. A short time after this initial meeting among empresarios, the Sociedade Central de Imigração (Central Immigration Association, hereafter SCI) was formed, issuing the first of many successive manifestos and launching its own periodical.Footnote ⁵

The SCI soon became an avid propagandist for mass migrations to Brazil and a powerful lobby pushing for the necessary policies to sustain them. In consequence, leading scholarly characterizations of the SCI depict it as a salient reformist group that tried to stoke migrations and bolster small property holding and in doing so set itself apart from large landholding interests. Historian Michael Hall more specifically describes the SCI as a kind of middle-class club that ultimately fell short of its goal of subverting planters’ aims. However, the SCI was not in fact the site of an inter-class conflict but rather a curious intellectual amalgam that brought together high and middle classes who understood and agreed on the potential values of migratory processes. Moreover, far from ineffectual, its robust and unceasing lobbying efforts boiled down the lessons of prior colonization experiments into policy proposals that broadly carried through the abolition of slavery in 1888 and a coup in 1889. Many of the SCI’s recommendations, including but also exceeding those related to land tenure, went on to become leading policies of the early republican regime.Footnote ⁶ And, finally, far from inimical to planter interests, the SCI actually helped shape them, serving as the incubator for a private colonization company established in São Paulo in 1886.

The real hindrances to SCI’s vision lay not in planter opposition but in factors well beyond Brazilian borders. Eventually, the Italian Kingdom adopted emigration restrictions that significantly reduced the flow of Italian colonos, the SCI’s main migrant pool. Scholars tend to attribute the restrictive Prinetti decree of 1903 to the Italian government’s concern for reported abuses in Brazil. But a closer look reveals that Italian authorities’ motives stemmed from a reconceptualization of migratory processes as business-oriented opportunities for national revenue as well as from the strategic use of migration as a bargaining tool in stalled negotiations for an Italo-Brazilian commercial treaty. In other words, thanks in part to the vision laid out by the SCI and its offshoots, Italian migrations became a crucible for state-level calculations on profits, revenues, and competitive advantages.

In the end, the situation arising from the famous Prinetti decree shone a light on the boundaries of corporate colonization boosterism in Brazil. It also threw into question whether abuses against colonos were sufficient in themselves to mobilize policy responses from their home states or whether larger geostrategic and economic concerns drove those responses. Yet the episode also illuminated the impressive resilience of the business of migrations and the regulations it spawned. As Italian arrivals slowed down, SCI-inspired policy transformations in the early republic opened the way for other migrations to carry forth.

Hybridizing a Nineteenth-Century Model: The SCI as Company, Lobby, and Cultural Association

The SCI differed from prior colonization enterprises in important respects. By statute, it was a civil association rather than a company, and it tiered membership into four classes on the basis of voluntary contributions rather than share purchases. Anyone contributing 10$ could become a member; those who paid 100$ rose to “redeemed associates” (sócios remidos), and to “well-deserving associates” if they offered 1:000$ or more. In addition, the General Assembly conferred honorary memberships.Footnote ⁷ In form and structure, then, the SCI set itself apart from the colonization companies of the previous half century by skirting the issue of profits and suspending internal voting hierarchies.

Despite the SCI’s nonprofit character, its operations and policies stood to benefit its figureheads in various ways, as old enterprises did. The SCI’s dashing vice-president, Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, for instance, already possessed a distinguished lineage entangled with the history of Brazilian colonization. Both his grandfathers had long served Brazilian interests – Alexandre d’Escragnolle by accompanying prince regent João to Brazil in 1808 and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay as part of João VI’s “French artistic mission” in 1816. Moreover, Taunay’s uncle, Carlos Augusto de Taunay, had laid one of the cornerstones of colonization in Brazil with his 1834 address to the SIAN meeting that opened this book. Still, d’Escragnolle Taunay made a name for himself as first lieutenant and secretary to the conde d’Eu in the Paraguayan War and as author of La retraite de Laguna, a chronicle that won acclaim as the conflict raged. Later, he sat briefly for Goiás in the Chamber before receiving Santa Catarina’s presidency in 1876 and leaving for Europe in 1877. From 1880–1884, he returned to the Chamber for Santa Catarina, championing SCI’s sweeping migration, land, and naturalization reforms.Footnote ⁸

Although d’Escragnolle Taunay lost a bid to represent Rio in 1885, he had his SCI work to recommend him, thanks to which he landed Paraná’s presidency. In 1886, he made it back to the Chamber and was soon selected to the senate for Santa Catarina, using his pulpit to advance a reformist program resting on twin pillars – “European immigration, national colonization.” Through this role, he aimed to naturalize foreigners en masse, adopt a homestead law modeled after Australia’s Torrens Act, and overhaul the lei de locação de serviços of 1879, which he held responsible for the Heydt Rescript still being in force.Footnote ⁹ By the end of his Paraná presidency, d’Escragnolle Taunay had started his own colony in the province of Espírito Santo, the “núcleo Barão de Taunay.”

Others also reaped the fruits of SCI involvement, especially d’Escragnolle Taunay’s own relatives, including a grand-uncle (SCI president Henrique Beaurepaire Rohan) and his brother Goffredo, who stood to benefit from land sales if SCI’s policies of establishing land taxes to break up existing latifundia came through. Having obtained a special provincial subsidy from Espírito Santo in 1882, Goffredo had established a central coffee cleaning mill featuring his very own Taunay-Telles coffee dryer in the ex-colony of Leopoldina as its coffee planters’ sold lands to colonos. The proliferation of small properties would in theory entail an expanded clientele for his mill. Clearly, self-interest informed the collective enterprise of the SCI especially around the more aristocratic members.Footnote ¹⁰

International modernizing discourses of what French anthropologist Arthur Bordier called “scientific colonization” guided the SCI as much as individual entrepreneurialism and self-interest. By the 1880s, literature on colonization consistently defined its subject no longer as an art, as Edward Wakefield did earlier, but as a science, a tendency exemplified by Jules Duval’s Histoire de l’émigration (1862) and later Paul Leroy-Beaulieu’s La colonisation chez les peuples modernes (1866), both of which shared a belief that population movements could be directed and methodically perfected or, as the latter later asserted, replaced with movements of capital.Footnote ¹¹ This streamlining of colonization as an applied science occurred across southern Europe and the Americas.Footnote ¹² In Brazil, besides Menezes e Souza’s Theses sobre colonização (1875), the work of Portuguese intellectual Augusto de Carvalho contributed decisively to colonization’s development into an applied science. Flush with migration statistics, the first volume of Carvalho’s O Brazil: Colonisação e emigração (1875) surveyed private and state-led colonies ahead of a second volume on contracts and systems essayed in Brazil to that date. A third volume would have offered reform proposals for the problem of emigration but never went to press. This and similar publications served as reference works for new analyses of colonization and migration such a Rego Filho’s comparative study of immigration to Brazil and the United States.Footnote ¹³

Notably, the newer texts’ eugenic and racist overtones distinguished them from earlier colonization literature and manifested in the SCI’s rejection of Chinese and later African-American immigrants. Indeed, the SCI’s racial biases merit a closer attention than that previously afforded by historians.Footnote ¹⁴ While blatant, its racism was also adaptably selective. The SCI reflected race science precepts and planters’ general preference for white immigrants. The association was also rabidly anti-Chinese. At the same time, as part and parcel of its overlaps with the abolitionist movement, the SCI embraced Brazilian-born pardos, free Blacks, and soon-to-be freedmen and women as protagonists of its reform program. Moreover, the SCI counted among its membership distinguished pardo individuals who achieved great success in relation to the association’s own goals. The prominent abolitionist André Rebouças, for instance, championed new kinds of establishments such as the 190-strong freedpersons colony in the lands previously belonging to the countess of Rio Novo, which he visited with a special SCI commission in 1884. Such establishments became precursors to the orphanages Rebouças brazenly promoted after 1889 as pursuits that could usefully absorb the philanthropy of the “Brazilian plutocracy.” By closely studying and promoting these alternative colonies as part of a broader policy platform, the SCI contributed directly to discussions that led to the Sexagenarian Law, which was approved shortly after Rebouças’s visit to Rio Novo.Footnote ¹⁵

Ideas like Rebouças’s acquired a life of their own that transcended racial identification. They became popular, in particular, among Portuguese expatriates wishing to bolster small property holding. In 1880, the Portuguese consul had publicly defended institutions like freedmen colonies or agricultural schools as stepping stones for emancipation. Thus, Portuguese-born doctor Valentim José da Silveira Lopes, a graduate of Bahia’s medical school, offered the SCI a proposal for the Companhia Progresso Agrícola to train planters, colonos and national workers, including freedmen, in improvement methods in São Paulo. Some years later, a Portuguese-born Brazilian citizen tried to set up a company to start “burgos agrícolas” throughout the Empire with the SCI’s blessing. However, Antonio Prado, then minister of Agriculture and head of a São Paulo planter dynasty, strenuously dissented, acting as spokesman for large landholders favoring land concentration.Footnote ¹⁶

Scholars have paid close attention to the SCI as a forerunner to the era of mass migrations, straddling as it did the fall of the Empire in 1889 and the subsequent climb in migrant arrivals. But several misconceptions endure. One pertains to the nature of SCI membership, which was described by historian Michael Hall as conformed by a rising middle class of professionals. Certainly, many journalists, lawyers, and engineers who found it hard to elbow their way into government jobs reserved for the sons or in-laws of the more privileged channeled their energy and ideas through the SCI. Reared in literary salons, they shared with government officials the perception of immigration as a civilizing force.Footnote ¹⁷ However, in the SCI bulletin, they geared this mindset to endorse distributive and reformist interventions, including parceling large estates, taxing property, improving centers for immigrant reception, easing naturalization parameters, and approving civil marriage to the benefit of non-Catholic incomers. And, surprisingly, the high-ranking officeholders, noblemen, and extremely wealthy individuals who completed the SCI roster consented to these proposals, including the prominent “sons” who sat on the board, men such as Beaurepaire Rohan, Rebouças, José Vergueiro, and Antônio Luís von Hoonholtz, the son of a Prussian engineer who served Pedro I during the Cisplatina war in 1827.

As available lists in A Immigração show, the SCI initially numbered 258 members, of whom 7 were beneméritos and 55 redeemed members. There were 8 barões, 3 viscondes, and 6 senators, among whom figured Silveira da Mota and the former president of São Paulo for 1882–1883. Membership included colonization polemicists such as Nicolau Moreira as well as commercial firms, the most prominent of which were H. Laemmert & C. and the Amazon Company. Prestigious scions graced the list, including the younger visconde de Barbacena, and Manuel Antônio Pimenta Bueno, son of José Antonio Pimenta Bueno, marquês de São Vicente. Besides a multitude of Germans, new foreign speculators such as Charles Linklater and his son joined older ones such as Herman Schlobach. Such diverse participation enlarged the SCI’s ranks, which in 1887 expanded to 382 members, of whom 8 were beneméritos and 101 redeemed.

The SCI became one of the most durable colonization associations in Brazil, carrying its platform into the new Republic. At the heart of its resilience lay time-tested notions and policies.Footnote ¹⁸ Service contract laws and indigenous colonization also revived in the pages of the SCI’s periodical. And most strikingly, like the ACC before it, the SCI spawned avatars all across Brazil starting in 1885, with immigration associations popping up in Porto Alegre and Pelotas in Rio Grande do Sul; Tubarão in Santa Catarina; Morretes, Curitiba, Campo Largo, Paranaguá, Guarapuava, Ponta Grossa, and Guaraquesava in Paraná; São Paulo, Campinas, Sorocaba, and Taubaté in São Paulo; Corumbá in Mato Grosso do Sul; and Ilhéus and Salvador in Bahia. Pará, Bahia, Espírito Santo, and Paraná also set up province-wide associations in their capitals. Eventually, even Maranhão published its own guide for migrants.Footnote ¹⁹

Among regional associations, the ones in São Paulo evinced the greatest rate of development. At the hand of the wealthy Prado family, these societies came together in 1886 under the umbrella of a provincial conglomerate, the Sociedade Promotora de Imigração (SPI), buoyed by the provincial law of 28 Oct 1885 promising to reimburse travel costs to colonos. Historians have remarked on the competition that arose between the Rio-based SCI and the São Paulo–based SPI, emphasizing the clash of visions regarding the role of the state and private capital in stoking and managing migratory flows.

Scholars agree that the SPI represented São Paulo coffee planters seeking to brush aside any government intervention in their labor recruitments abroad. Evidently, the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, shepherded by Antonio Prado as Agriculture minister, together with the abolitionist campaigns and mass walkouts of enslaved women and men from coffee plantations, threatened São Paulo’s unrivaled productivity and lit planters’ interest in seeking field hands in Europe. However, it serves to underline that the SCI and SPI had common ground and a common past as far as social linkages went. For instance, one of the board members of the SCI owned the Colégio Tautphoeus attended by Antonio Prado in his youth.Footnote ²⁰ Far more significantly, however, was the fact that the SPI’s component parts – the associations in Santos, Sorocaba, and the provincial capital – had in fact splintered from the larger, SCI-stoked constellation of immigration societies. In the main, then, the SPI derived directly from SCI endeavors.Footnote ²¹

The SCI served as the origin point and conduit of other migration associations because it reprised and crowned eight-decades worth of colonization advocacy strategies. Its proposed reforms traced their language and content as far back as 1808 but melded the older language of peopling with vigorous calls for “liberating” (libertar e povoar).Footnote ²² The SCI also tracked the meetings and resolutions of German emigrant societies, as Olinda and other statesmen had done in the 1850s, and, just like them, d’Escragnolle Taunay pushed to repeal the Heydt Rescript. In all, the SCI bookended colonization ambitions harkening back to Brazilian independence. Invoking colonies like Blumenau and Dona Francisca and putting to rest any support for Chinese migrations, the SCI recalibrated colonization toward a post-abolition future.Footnote ²³

The SCI’s strategic focus on immigration allowed it to strategically update substantive regulatory questions. In 1885, one board member drafted a new emigrant transport ordinance that set a high bar of 300 passengers for emigrant steamships to be considered as such, expanded levy exemptions, reset fines, and offered new prescriptions relative to health and hygiene aboard vessels. A Immigração also revisited colonization companies, issuing a model prospectus for the incorporation of regional “immigration companies.” With a capital floor of 10 contos and a very modest universal share price (10$) “within the reach of lesser economies,” these companies concurrently functioned as immigration enterprises, savings banks, and mutual aid societies. This new colonization company model would also rely on immigrants themselves as agents for recruiting their countrymen.Footnote ²⁴

At the dawn of the belle époque, SCI ideations primed Brazil for the era of mass migrations by building on the foundational precedent set by colonization. At a personal level, the association cemented its most distinguished members’ reputations and perpetuated their self-flattering appraisals of immigrant legacies. Koseritz, for instance, helped consolidate the image of German colonos as well behaved while Taunay himself devised a list of “illustrious foreigners” in 1894.Footnote ²⁵ Meanwhile, spaces emblematically championed by the SCI underwent significant makeovers. After initial drawbacks, the hospedaria at Ilha das Flores, for example, became a top-of-the-line migrant processing center while the Agriculture ministry led new incomers to it with the help of a Guia do Emigrante translated into German, Italian and French.Footnote ²⁶ Entry logs became a mainstay – by 1887, the hospedaria welcomed 38,680 migrants. Mortality rates dipped except for babies. In 1891, two years after a republican coup ousted the imperial government, a total of 191,151 migrants landed in Rio and 25,503 in Santos, totaling 216,659 arrivals for that year alone. Lucrative modernization efforts included the installation of water ducts and sewage pipes in the island by 1900.Footnote ²⁷

The SCI also prepared Brazil for a post-abolition future of similarly technocratic tenor. While its periodical did not overtly discuss the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, it did refer to freedmen and the necessary means to offer them land allotments or work contracts, particularly in the discussions of the Sociedade Bahiana de Imigração and the efforts of its members to establish colonies with nationals.Footnote ²⁸ As members discussed freedmen colonies or dual foreign/national colonies, they brought colonization processes previously focused on foreigners full circle to national domestic populations, envisioning agricultural education for freedmen against the grain of conceits positing European immigrants’ superior agrarian knowledge or craft skills.

Crossing the Threshold of Mass Migrations: The Pangs of Regulation

With the republic came a statutory revolution that in many ways realized the SCI’s policy wish list and led Brazil past the threshold and into the era of mass migrations. One day to the month after the proclamation of the Republic, for example, the provisional government of Deodoro da Fonseca approved a blanket naturalization decree conferring Brazilian citizenship to all foreigners resident in Brazil as of 15 Nov. 1889 (and up to 1891) unless they expressly stated their preference to preserve their original nationality in the presence of municipal authorities within a six-month period. Subsequently, they could also reject becoming Brazilian nationals before a notary, chief of police, or consular agent. The Constitution of February 1891 formalized this prescriptive naturalization approved “in the spirit of broad hospitality” under the new Foreign minister, Quintino Bocaiúva, the SII’s colonization agent in New York in 1867 (see Chapter 7).Footnote ²⁹

Within the first year of the Republic, numerous other laws followed the SCI’s program. The “Torrens Law” of May 1890 and ulterior decrees regulating its rapid implementation sought to streamline processes of land surveying and demarcation, titling, and transference, thus facilitating the organization of colonial nuclei, as colonies were now called, around the principle of small-holding. The Torrens Law heeded SCI calls for landed property reform that appeared unattainable but a few years prior. Moreover, it responded, finally, to land distribution schemes explored by Brazilian lawmakers since the very moment of Brazilian independence and dovetailed with reformist efforts such as those led by jurisconsult Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, who in 1882 produced an annotated compendium of landed property laws that dealt extensively with regulations for state-run colonies and naturalization, and included land-titling prototypes for colonos that served as models for the SCI during its early days.Footnote ³⁰

Procedural and institutional changes accompanying these new republican laws further bolstered migration management. A new ordinance regulating overseas transportation and hiring of immigrants updated passenger limits and imposed strict sanitary and hygienic measures aboard steamships. A reorganized General Inspectorate of Lands and Colonization completed the picture. In its streamlined form, the first of its four sections would focus on landed property, including in new foreign colonies, while the second section centered exclusively on immigration oversight. In 1890, a total of 107,100 immigrants arrived in Brazil via Rio de Janeiro, Santos, and Porto Alegre. This was the second largest number of entries for any single year since Brazilian independence, right behind 1888, when 131,745 immigrants had landed.Footnote ³¹

It is important to pause, however, and examine the significance of the new ordinance regulating immigrant transports. It represented the first formal statute in Brazil that explicitly barred Africans qua immigrants (the trafficking bans of 1831 and 1850 had prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans), and it was also the first to officialize anti-Asian restrictions. Known as the Glicério Law in acknowledgment of its chief promoter, then Agriculture minister Francisco Glicério, this decree epitomized a salient SCI motif. As its first article stated, besides criminals, any “indigenes” from Asian or African countries could only enter Brazil with direct authorization from the National Congress. Criminals were the only other class of immigrants with similarly stringent restrictions.

While scholars have remarked that the Glicério Law congealed racial selection parameters long held by Brazilian lawmakers and migration promoters, the law in fact lacked statutory precedent. Nor did it become a far-reaching precedent itself, as two years later a new law overrode some of its provisions. Under a new administration, in 1892 the Brazilian government authorized the entry of Chinese and Japanese subjects in order to honor the Sino-Brazilian Treaty of 1880 and to open the way for a treaty with Japan, which was signed in 1895. Hence, while racism tinged the Glicério law, it did so formally only for a limited time before quota restrictions took shape in the 1920s and ‘30s – an important point to make given that the continued scholarly focus on “whitening” as the guidepost for colonization and immigration promotion. As it did here, peopling for profit often took precedence over racial selection in statutory form.Footnote ³²

With the aim, precisely, of “peopling our most vast territory,” Agriculture minister Henrique Pereira de Lucena, barão de Lucena, organized a special commission in 1891 to improve immigration and colonization services while decentralizing government controls. The goal was to “circumscribe federal intervention as much as possible.” The commission was notable on a couple of counts, the first of which was its strong northeastern accent. To begin with, as an Olinda Law school graduate from 1858, Lucena came from the marquês de Olinda’s world. Moreover, as the commission’s director, he chose José Avelino Gurgel do Amaral, a journalist and deputy who started out as a liberal in the late 1860s before seeking the patronage of reformist conservative João Alfredo in the 1870s, and ultimately becoming a close collaborator of Rebouças, José do Patrocínio, and other abolitionists.Footnote ³³ As a Cearense, Amaral seemed an unorthodox pick to lead an immigration commission, considering the general boosterism that favored southern and southeastern Brazil. Yet, the northeast was not entirely behind the rush to create structures of migrant reception. The state of Pernambuco, for instance, expediently organized its own immigration service after 1890 to oversee the núcleo colonial Suassuna and the hospedaria da Jaqueira. In Maranhão, instead of a state-level regulatory office, a private enterprise, the General Improvements Company, launched its own colony.Footnote ³⁴ Still, with Amaral as its head, the commission embodied an official interest in bringing the northeast up to speed in immigration reception capacities.

Another member of the commission brought the far north to the heart of deliberations. Salvatore Nicosia was an Italian merchant and publicist with business dealings in Pará that included importing Italian colonos. Nicosia reflected an essential characteristic of the commission: its pairing of regulatory efforts to profiteering. Having married a Brazilian after serving as Uruguay’s consul in Perú, Nicosia partook in a few SCI meetings in 1890 before receiving the invitation to join the commission. Already, he had found a lucrative niche both in Belém and in Rio where, together with Italian partners, he secured a contract for a Metropolitan Rail while cozying up to figures like Rui Barbosa, whose plan for a National Mortgage Bank he publicly supported. All of this was possible thanks to the speculation fostered by the new Republican government that preached integrity as it spawned its own patronage networks. Nicosia himself praised Lucena for his “moralizing administration, destroying the old camorras that secretly watched over contracts.” He also stood by Lucena and other government officials at the inauguration of construction works for the new Metropolitan Rail line, offering pen and inkblot for them to sign the official record of attendance.Footnote ³⁵

Steeped in Leroy-Beaulieu, Nicosia wrote a lengthy address to his colleagues in the commission in which he synthesized what was needed to secure immigration: a powerful banking institution, demarcated plots, a permanent land and colonization commission, stronger oversight of contracts, official propaganda delegated to young journalists, and new agricultural schools.Footnote ³⁶ If tried and tested, these proposed initiatives remained lofty in the unstable political atmosphere that enveloped the early republic. Indeed, within seven months of the commission’s activation, a military coup led by Floriano Peixoto dashed its objectives. Yet, as Lucena’s web dissipated with Deodoro da Fonseca’s government, the business schemes already underway found the means to persevere. In 1891, for instance, a Minas Gerais magistrate, Francisco Alvares da Silva Campos, and his son submitted a proposal to Lucena to start a colonization enterprise aligned with many of the commission’s recommendations. Its proponents pleaded for the continuation of government subsidies to cover colonos’ travel costs and for the central government to rear agricultural companies while refraining from a direct participation in those businesses. In 1894, two years after the coup, the same individuals forwarded a colonization project to the Chamber of Deputies, bringing the resilience and obduracy of colonization schemes to high relief.Footnote ³⁷

Nicosia also weathered the political turn. After 1892, he continued to work his way among the powerful as a journalist in O Paíz, and as correspondent for the New York Herald, the Argentine Prensa, and the Chilean Tarde in Rio and the Jornal do Brazil in Pará. Despite allegations that he called Brazilian people “burros” in the inauguration ceremony for the Metropolitan line, he ingratiated himself with the new Republican intelligentsia. On a parade of the Italian community marking the 57th anniversary of the Farroupilha in 1892, he perorated from the balcony of the offices of O Paíz in honor of Quintino Bocaiúva, who was not even in attendance. Availing himself of government favors, he set out in 1898 to organize two colonies: Anita Garibaldi and Ianetama, in Castanhal, Pará. During a migrant recruitment trip to Italy, Nicosia proved persuasive but not nearly enough. While he received, and turned down, an invitation from a political party to run as deputy for Messina, the Italian government refused to support his colonies, claiming Pará’s climate was inadequate for Italians.Footnote ³⁸ Nevertheless, by 1904, Ianetama and Anita Garibaldi figured among 11 núcleos coloniais selling lands in Pará.Footnote ³⁹ Whereas São Paulo received the largest share of foreign, particularly Italian, immigrants in the 1890s, Nicosia’s story shows that other regions of Brazil were still very much in the game despite political odds, even if desired outcomes remained beyond reach.

The change to a new regime concretized many of the policies lobbied for by the SCI. Nonetheless, the formulation and enactment of new migration-related measures remained very much in flux in those early years of the new government. Far from a steady regulatory development, policy reverses as with the Glicério Law, and policy commissions shuttered due to political shifts laid bare the pangs of regulation in the very midst of the era of mass migrations. These domestic troubles dragged on in the early republic, but were soon overshadowed by a greater hindrance when Italy, the main source of colonos for Brazil, approved a potent emigration restriction decree.

Italian Counterpoints: The Many Faces of the Prinetti Decree

In 1902, the Italian government issued a ban on subsidized migration to Brazil known as the Prinetti decree after its author, Foreign Affairs minister Giulio Nicolò Prinetti. Migration from Italy continued, though none of it could be pre-arranged or paid for by Brazilian recruiters. A serious setback for Paulista planters and other pro-immigration advocates, this restrictive measure laid bare the international barriers blocking the fulfillment of SCI legacies. But the Prinetti decree did not signify that the SCI platform had failed or that planters’ and recruiters’ abuses had ultimately eclipsed the achievements of the SCI apostolate – though such abuses are often seen as the primary motivation behind the ban. Instead, the Prinetti decree demonstrated that investigations into abuses by themselves did not trigger migration interdictions that in turn entailed hefty diplomatic consequences. Abuses did call forth Italian investigators. But ultimately it was the failed commercial treaty negotiations with Brazil that catalyzed the Prinetti ban. The failed negotiations amply demonstrated that migration could be weaponized in the quest for greater national revenues. And greater revenue hinged on exploiting emigration as both a colonial and national enterprise, as the Italian Kingdom sought to do.

The story of the ban began in part with a report by Adolfo Rossi, a native of the Veneto region who had emigrated to the United States and became chief editor of the Corriere della Sera after returning to Italy. As a special commissioner of the Commissariato Generale dell’Emigrazione established in 1901 in the Italian Foreign ministry, Rossi inspected the hospedaria at Santos and then headed northwest from São Paulo to coffee fazendas as far west as São José do Rio Preto. Rossi’s field reports confirmed the hardships encountered by Italian colonos across the state: unpaid wages and mistreatment from their patrons. Italian coffee pickers who protested wage withholding often received death threats in exchange. When pressed by diplomatic agents, planters in turn offered vague promises of later payment, which went largely unfulfilled – a reflection of their casual reliance on colono work as a substitute for credit. Conversely, the consul in Recife reported receiving no complaints from the 13,700 Italians in northern and northeastern states during his first few months on the job, a reflection that “the actions of local authorities are correct and inspired in a feeling of justice” as well as of the “good quality of the Italian immigrants.”Footnote ⁴⁰

In the main, then, with São Paulo absorbing the vast majority of Italian migrants, the abuses resonated as particularly glaring. But, considering that in some regions Italians were doing well, abuses did not yet elicit a blanket prohibition of subsidized migration to all of Brazil. However, the Italian government had consistently raised its guard against the peasant recruitment onslaught led by the likes of Antonio Prado. The mounting wave of directed emigration imperiled not only the protectionism of the new Italian government of 1887, as historian Antonio Annino remarked decades ago, but also minister Francesco Crispi’s expansionist plans in the Horn of Africa. Almost a full year before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, Crispi forwarded a law project to the Camera dei Deputati that signaled a desire to stem migratory flows. Objections to the slow pace of discussions emphasized that, while benefiting Brazil, “the state from which this current flows provides no profit.” Like “arresting the eruption of a volcano or the wave-like movement of the sea,” keeping emigrants from leaving was to no avail, according to the jurist and deputy Attilo Brunilati. Brunilati, notably, had supported spontaneous colonization toward South America since his heyday directing the Giornale delle Colonie, the periodical of the Società Geografica Italiana founded in 1867. But the disquieting rhythm of exits compelled even enthusiasts like him to support curtailing the peasant exodus and the losses it entailed for the Italian economy.

At the close of 1888, Crispi sanctioned a groundbreaking law that followed the largely liberal but strongly regulatory turn suggested by Brunilati. The law established strict oversight over agents and recruiters, who now required a patent from the Foreign ministry or a license from local authorities. It also abolished parceria contracts, imposing fines on governments or colonization companies offering any advances to emigrants. It established parameters for damages owed to emigrants due to stopovers or unforeseen nautical problems. And at least in appearance it liberalized the right to exit. “All emigration,” read its first article, “is free, except for the obligations imposed on citizens by existing laws.” Among those exceptions figured men under 28 obligated to military service.Footnote ⁴¹ This particular prescription acquired imperial connotations when Italy formalized the colony of Eritrea in 1890 in line with the expansionist discourses the Società Geografica had long fostered. Vigilance over military service of would-be emigrants loosened only after the disastrous defeat of Italian forces in Adwa, Ethiopia, in 1896, which foreclosed colonial ambitions for some time.Footnote ⁴²

For critics like jurist and statistician Augusto Bosco di Ruffino, emigration regulations in Italy were a dead letter. Abuses carried on, and emigration companies and speculators continued their deceptions unimpeded until new efforts to enact effective emigration regulations got underway with the parliament of 1896. At that point, Bosco and others not only advocated for more resolute oversight over the nautical industry by standardizing and limiting freight costs to the benefit of passengers but got the opportunity to enact this and other measures with the promulgation of the Emigration Law of 31 January 1901.Footnote ⁴³ The new statute established the Emigration Commissariat, which began issuing tables establishing the maximum ticket prices allowed for the Transatlantic steamship lines authorized to operate in Italian ports.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bosco became its vice-commissary. His longtime mentor, Luigi Bodio, who had headed statistical services for the Italian ministry of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce since 1873, and oversaw the General Directorate of Statistics from 1883, served as lead commissary.Footnote ⁴⁵

Under the direction of figures like Bodio and Bosco, emigration wed data and policymaking in Italy. The new Bollettino dell’emigrazione published by the Commissariat periodically until 1927 became the principal means for the dissemination of freight price controls, migration statistics, ordinances, and accounts of Italians’ experiences in the United States, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and, of course, Brazil. Emigration also brought together disparate interests. In particular, Bodio attempted to bridge the gap between protectionist sectors that sought to curtail emigration and the imperialists and liberals who saw emigration as a means to bolster Italian shipping and secure a foothold in Africa. At the time, landholders entertained the notion of an internal colonization. Some advocates even borrowed from Brazilian experience in alluding to sharecropping (mezzadria) or parceria colonies (colonias parziarias) as ideals for the occupation of uncultivated lands in the Mezzogiorno. Angelo Guffanti, an agrarian booster who owned lands in the Staffora valley north of Genoa, also called for large landholders to adopt colonias parziarias to end unemployed peasants’ seasonal migration to Turin.Footnote ⁴⁶

Bodio responded to these concerns seriously and rigorously, calculating that available uncultivated land would only suffice for 280,000 coloni, or the equivalent of the number of exits for one or two years. This ostensible limitation in the carrying capacity of unused lands rendered senseless any idea of halting emigration.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet the emergent policy framework integrated rather than swept aside landowners’ concerns. Two days following the enactment of the 1901 Emigration Law, another law mandating protections over emigrant savings and remittances from abroad bestowed primary responsibilities for managing them to the Banco di Napoli. A few months later, the Banco di Napoli was also authorized to offer agricultural credit to Italian landholders, right before the law mandating the execution of the Emigration Law was approved. The synchrony and overlap among government dependencies and institutions such as the Banco di Napoli began to signal that emigration no longer had to divide those who looked at it as a resource drain and those who saw it as a necessary prime for Italian global ambitions.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Prinetti decree targeting subsidized migration to Brazil in 1902 fit oddly within this thickening trelliswork of emigration laws, commercial incentives, imperial aims, and agrarian development policies in the Kingdom of Italy. But the unusually restrictive measure makes sense when seen as a strategic response to diverse concerns by a budding Commissariat vested in both the welfare and the value of Italians abroad. Significantly, with its eye set on the future, the decree came at the pinnacle of ongoing negotiations for the renewal of an Italo-Brazilian commercial treaty. In fact, besides Rossi’s reports from São Paulo, the most prevalent type of reference to Italy in Brazilian official communications (and to Brazil in Italian reports) pertained to the terms and proposals for this treaty, which never materialized. As Prinetti himself explained to the Italian minister in Rio days after issuing the decree, “suspending free emigration was decided upon at this moment because with the termination of the old contract a new one has yet to be stipulated, therefore this provision does not have any serious consequence as it represents a prudent prevention to what may come and first opportune notice for the Brazilian government to modify its attitude.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Yet, while business trumped most other considerations, the Italian government did not wholly abandon a concern over the issues threatening the well-being of its subjects abroad. Throughout 1902, for instance, the Bollettino announced preventive sanitary measures in response to reports of bubonic plague and smallpox in several Brazilian ports.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this sense, the Prinetti decree also served as an emergency prophylactic, responding with particular urgency to epidemic outbreaks rather than to abuses themselves. Still, while these sanitary crises passed, the commercial treaty still failed to materialize, and so the decree remained in place until 1921, signaling the predominance of economic considerations over incidental migratory matters.

Compared to Italy, its elusive commercial partner and top source of migrant workers, the Brazilian Republic struggled to consolidate the institutionalizing push of the early 1890s. The groundbreaking laws approved under Deodoro da Fonseca continuously stumbled for years, complicating the transfer of migration management to state governments. Critics like Elpidio de Mesquita cut through the fog to reveal the juridically inconsistent and often even illegitimate management of migratory issues. In 1895, for instance, Mesquita vehemently protested the arbitrary detention and summary deportation of 16 foreigners of various nationalities held as political prisoners.Footnote ⁵¹ This was nothing short of a draconian application of the lessons learned with regard to the planned movement of populations and of foreigners in particular.

This infrequent shift from using logistical capacities originally intended to bringing in special groups or classes of people to use them for expulsions or degredos found its inflection point in mass removals to the territory of Acre in the early 1900s. As revealed by historian Francisco Bento da Silva, authorities in Rio took to removing anywhere from 1,453 to 1,647 of the working-class participants of the vaccine revolt in 1904 to the westernmost Amazonian region of Acre, which many took to calling Brazil’s “tropical Siberia.” In 1910, 436 sailors involved in the Revolta da Chibata (Revolt of the Whip) suffered the same fate. It was no coincidence that, at the time, Acre was contentious territory over which Brazil and Bolivia had yet to draw a boundary. Populating these contested borderlands with sailors and carioca expatriates calculatedly strengthened Brazilian claims.Footnote ⁵²

Deferring non-punitive colonization and immigration logistics to state governments conjured new blunders. Mesquita, again, offered a telling example when he defended Vittorio Carenzi Gallesi, an emigration agent who had directed northern Italian colonos to Brazil since 1888. Having secured a contract to supply 20,000 immigrants for Minas Gerais who would go into the employ of the new Companhia Metropolitana, Carenzi Gallesi began recruitment activities and was in a good place to fulfill his contract given that Italians still constituted the largest group of incomers in 1895 and most of them were still exiting from Genoa, which he knew from experience. Having prepared the first group of one thousand for embarkation, the agent of the Metropolitana shipping company refused to board them at the expense of the Brazilian government, arguably because he had not received any orders to do so. Minas authorities responded to a couple of Carenzi Gallesi’s requests for contract extensions but turned a deaf ear to his questions about indemnification.Footnote ⁵³

The very political form of the early republic arced tensely over these inconsistencies. As the dust of early power contests settled, Minas Gerais and São Paulo became the gatekeepers of the new political compact, taking turns in directing a hollowed out federal administration. Migrants continued to land in Brazil even as policy areas previously under central government control precipitated into state-level jurisdictions. But especially in the economic upswing that preceded Afonso Pena’s presidency, the central government continued to operate not only as arbiter of new colonization proposals but also as broker among entrepreneurs, diplomats, state-level lawmakers, and national statesmen. A naturalized Brazilian from Italy by the name of Pedro Setragni, for instance, sent a “new colonization plan” to president-elect Pena in 1905 that had stalled in a lame-duck state-level congressional session in Paraná. Adhering to the late Nicolau Vergueiro’s colonization system of “agglomeration” – that is, of territorial occupation around population centers and communication networks – Setragni proposed attracting migrants with offers of land and a robust propaganda campaign based on the distribution of his pamphlet at the International Exposition in Milan. Where Paranaense lawmakers had failed to act, Setragni hoped Pena would step in to vigorously promote his plan both in Paraná and abroad.Footnote ⁵⁴

Brazilian politicians experienced in colonization continued to see the central government as an important concessionary. Antonio Prado, for example, also wrote to Pena in 1907 to introduce him to a longtime acquaintance, José Antunes dos Santos, whose ample knowledge on immigration would serve the government’s interest in “peopling new territory.” It went without mention that dos Santos served as an SPI recruiter. He netted up to 4,600 Portuguese islanders by 1888 and obtained state-level contracts under the Republic while at the helm of São Paulo’s leading migrant recruitment firms at least until 1901.Footnote ⁵⁵ And if the Republic gave ample room to colonization associates of old, it also opened the door to new overseas proponents. Returning from the second Peace Conference in The Hague in 1908, Rui Barbosa wrote to President Pena to forward a proposal from his friend, the Colombia delegate Santiago Pérez Triana. The Colombian journalist wished to introduce Barbosa to the representative of the South American Corporation. This British company interested in immigration to Brazil was headed by a Scotsman who had served as commissioner of Crown Lands and Public Works in the Cape of Good Hope under Cecil Rhodes and for whom Brazil may have been something like a promising colonial outpost.Footnote ⁵⁶

Regional and global rapprochements to the central state suggest that important aspects of government authority washed away from Rio only on paper. Indeed, efforts to centralize migration persisted. In 1907, a new government dependency, the Directoria Geral do Serviço de Povoamento (the General Directorate of Peopling Service) rekindled the centralizing impetus of the SCI under the axiom of peopling. Almost 20 years after the abolition of slavery, managed migrations and colonization thus staged a comeback that invoked the centenary beginnings of both policy applications back to 1808, when population and territory became the pillars of defense, diplomacy, and the political economy of a new tropical empire. Reorganized in 1911 as the National Soil Peopling Service, this new office instituted the Immigration Service, which put the central government in charge of immigrant reception in the federal capital of Rio de Janeiro. In addition, it set the rules governing state-led colonies and colonization endeavors led by transport, land, and other kinds of private companies. In short order, then, this new government agency, overseen by none other than transport minister Miguel Calmon du Pin e Almeida, the grand-nephew of the eponymous Bahian notable who presided over the CCB of 1835, restored regulatory governmental powers that depended on private companies as coequal partners in development, unspooling a century’s worth of lessons learned in crafting migration logistics and legitimate means to profit from them.Footnote ⁵⁷

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The formation of the General Directorate of Peopling Service in 1907 represented the endpoint of a centennial learning curve that had, since 1808, attempted to rein in directed migrations toward peopling purposes and to do so for fiscal gain. It also capped a running process of defining who rightfully counted as an “immigrant.” As early as 1885, the SCI had defined “immigrant” status as exclusive to third-class passengers. By 1888, the Lands and Colonization Directorate employed the same definition in its annual report while Agriculture minister Prado confirmed to senators that “only 3rd class passengers [were] considered immigrants eligible for State favors.” Two decades later, this definition found its way into the bylaws of the new Directorate and was further reinforced by Italian policymakers’ own categorical definitions.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1901, for instance, a popular compendium of Italian emigration regulations referred to first- and second-class passengers as “simple travelers and not repatriated emigrants.” Later, the Direzione General della Statistica began to apply this definition to its regular emigration tallies.Footnote ⁵⁹ In general, this budding passenger-oriented approach to migration accounting resulted in greater differentiation with the category of “colono,” which allowed for higher-class migrants to continue to leave despite exit restrictions. At the same time, this emergent approach also created class-based wedges among migrant groups by reifying the notion of the immigrant as a third-class passenger who, upon arrival, would remain moored to the state through debt-payment service. Therefore, as it carried forth the SCI’s class-based conception of immigration, the Peopling Service sundered previous generations of incomers and later cohorts of migrants, relegating the latter to a lower status accorded fewer privileges.

Curiously, at this point, too, racial or ethnic parameters lost salience in migration policy after their brief paramountcy in the early Republic. Migrations indeed continued to diversify. In 1908, for instance, the first Japanese cohorts arrived. But rather than to simply fill the void left by the reduced number of Italians coming to Brazil, Japanese migrations had their own political considerations and profit-oriented company rationales behind them. When the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 stemmed Japanese migration to the United States, Japanese authorities crafted new migration policies driven by what historian Sidney Lu has referred to as a “Malthusian expansionism.” Having learned from prior agrarian colonization efforts on the northern island of Hokkaido and the later re-directioning of migrant flows to California, Japanese businessmen and intellectuals began to peddle the idea of Brazil as a frontier for shokumin, or colonial migration.Footnote ⁶⁰ Already in 1914, figures like Kawanda Shirō, from the Kyoto Imperial University, advocated a concerted process of colonization in Brazilian lands rather than the simple emigrant schemes of the past. Having undertaken migrant imports into São Paulo in 1907–1908 under a company known as the Tokyo Syndicate, empresario Aoyagi Ikutarō spearheaded the formation of an even larger enterprise under this new pretense, the Burajiru Takushoku Gaisha, or Brazil Colonization Company. In 1919, the company merged with another, the Kaigai Kōgyō Kabushiki Gaisha, the Overseas Development Company, itself a consolidation of four separate migration companies.Footnote ⁶¹ This bourgeoning foreign entrepreneurialism found its target particularly in Iguape, São Paulo, an area previously scouted by the Confederados. Up until the 1950s, Japan sent consecutive migratory cohorts to Brazil, making the latter home to the largest overseas Japanese population beyond Tokyo’s jurisdiction.Footnote ⁶²

The lessons of nineteenth-century colonization prompted logistical innovations and policy proposals that facilitated the advent of mass migrations. New and larger hospedarias embodied a seemingly expanded receptivity to growing migrant numbers. Meanwhile, a new civil association embodied the ethos and praxis of colonization companies of old in its interest in orchestrating migration and settlement toward profitable ends. Synthesizing colonization experiences that harkened back to the independence era, the SCI refined ideas on migrant recruitment, conveyance, and retention that curdled into policy with the Brazilian Empire’s fall and the rise of the republic. These new policies coincided with the first statutory race-based migration restrictions in Brazil. However, those restrictions proved relatively short-lived, as they were forced to cede vis à vis a host of pressures and contingencies. Internal power struggles interrupted efforts to develop migration policy frameworks while foreign restrictions against emigration to Brazil disrupted expectations of a continuous provision of Italian laborers. Policy impasses and political reversals compounded the weight of colonization precedents to make the era of mass migrations look not only less spontaneous but also less consistent than it would appear at first sight. And yet, all throughout, the business of colonization evinced remarkable resilience. As policy negotiations, racial selectivity, and diplomatic tussles crested and waned, company-driven and profit-oriented dynamics – both in Brazil and beyond – continued to power directed migrations.