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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unincorporated Loopholes: The Companhia Colonizadora da Bahia (CCB)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colono Trades and Government Partnership: The Sociedade Promotora de Colonização

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 3.1 Residency permit for foreigners, 1836

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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