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

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

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

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

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

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

Trafficking and the Colono Trade after 1850

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Campaign against the Furtive Trade and Grassroots Colonization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paraíba Valley Planters vs. the Imperial State’s Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wedging Brazil in the Coolie Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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