To extend map of Colonial Brazil

 

INDIGENOUS ANTECEDENTS

Esteem that the territory of Brazil has been inhabited for at least 8.000 years. The origins of the first Brazilians, that were called “Indian� by the Portuguese, still are a matter of study by the archeologists. The traditional vision is that they were part of the first wave of hunting immigrants who came to the Americas from Siberia, through Straits of Bering. According to the data that control the first natives who inhabited Brazil went to the north: the Arawak and Caribbean; on the coast this and amazonian river basin: the Tupí-Guarani; installed in the Eastern and southern regions of the country: GE; to the west: the Cloth, to the west. One calculates that when was shortages it had between 2 and 3 million natives, who in 5 centuries were reduced to present the 280,000 natives, according to FUNAI (National Foundation of the Indian), since many of them succumbed to the massacres, diseases, and the hard consequences of the slavery and the displacement, others were absorbed within the Brazilian population. Most of these tribes were semi-nomads and lived on the hunting, the harvesting and a primary agriculture, seeded tobacco, maize, sweet potato, yucca, ayote… The Portuguese introduced other cultures like the rice, cotton and cane of sugar.

THE DISCOVERY OF BRAZIL

Although the majority of publications aims at the Portuguese like the discoverers or the first European who discovered Brazil, certain one is that numerous data justify that first the European that Brazilian earth stepped on Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the Spanish navigator. After his to cross the Atlantic, stepped on earth near the present Recife, the 26 of January of 1500. It sailed next bordering the coast, towards the north, until the mouth of the Orinoco river, also discovering in that day's work the most spectacular opening of the world, the one of the Amazon river. Nevertheless, by virtue of the decisions of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), that modified the line of partition restored in 1493 by Alexandre Pope I SAW to delimit the Portuguese and Spanish empire, the new territory was given to Portugal. Spain did not vindicate then the discovery of Pinzón. 

 In April of 1500, the Portuguese navigator Pedro �lvares Cabral also reached the Brazilian coasts, that the possession from these earth to Portugal proclaimed officially. The territory was called Terra gives to Side Cross (in Portuguese, “Earth True de la Cruz�). The country went away gradually colonizing with Portuguese whom they looked for to escape of the poverty, and by noble that granted colonial privileges to them by Corona. The colonial administration in next the two centuries was based on a feudal system in which the favored individuals received earth picture titles enormous called captainships; many of these dominions finally became the present Brazilian states. In 1501, the Italian navigator Américo Vespucio directed an expedition on this new territory by instructions of the Portuguese government. In the course of these explorations, Vespucio recognized and put name many ends and bays, among them the one of Rio de Janeiro. It returned to Portugal with “Pau-Brazil�, tree from which the red one very quoted in Europe was obtained coloring, it was one of the first extracted wealth and origin of the name of the country. The Terra gives to Side Cross took, as of this date, the name of Brazil.

History registers a peculiar detail with respect to the origin of the name of the city of Rio de Janeiro. One affirms that 1° of January of 1502 a Portuguese navigator: Gonzalo Coelho, disembarked in the bay of Guanabara he confused and it with the mouth of a river, and baptized the place like Rio de Janeiro (River of January, in Castilian).

THE COLONY

The colonial period begins with the expedition of Martim Afonso de Souza, in 1530, the king of Portugal, Juan III the Pious one, undertook a program of systematic colonization of Brazil, mainly the northeast, establishing sugar plantations and extracted valuable wood of the forests. In 1549 Martim Afonso de Souza it started up a central government whose capital paid attention to the new city of Salvador de Bahia, created a new administration and reformed the judicial power. In order to protect to the country of the French threat, establishing a system of coastal defense.

 
The colonial economy was integrated to the process of expansion of mercantile Capitalism. Portugal had the monopoly of the commerce of the colony. The production fell to the monoculture of the sugar (due to the increasing demand of Europe), in the large estate and in the use of enslaved manpower, first of all, the colonists tried to enslave the Indians to work the fields. (The initial exploration of the interior of Brazil had enormously to paramilitary adventurers, the Bandeirantes, who entered the forest in search of gold and Indian slaves.) Nevertheless, the Indians were nonapt like slaves, and thus the Portuguese owners of earth watched towards Africa, from which they concerned the slaves.
The Bay of Guanabara would not be populated until a French expedition settled down there in 1555, few years later a Portuguese force destroyed the French colony.

As of 1559 the negrero traffic intensifies the Portuguese Crown authorized that the owners of the sugar plantations to buy up to 120 slaves to the year. The governing Strap of Sá makes official the black traffic in 1568, Only in Pernambuco, in 1590, registered the entrance of 10.000 slaves. The indigenous slavery will be used in different regions from Brazil until the end of century XVIII.
The Portuguese founded on the 1567 on the same place city of Sao Sebastiao do Rio de Janeiro. The name later was simplified. Later it was the capital and the main city of Brazil. From Rio de Janeiro river is the main one of the city and ends at the bay of Guanabara. It is called from Rio de Janeiro to the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro by that reason.

In 1580, Felipe II, king of Spain, inherited the crown of Portugal. This period of union of both kingdoms, until 1640, was marked by frequent English and Dutch aggressions against Brazil. Thus, in 1624, a Dutch fleet seizes of Salvador de Bahia. But the following year, the city was retaken by an army composed of Spaniards, Portuguese and Indians
The Dutch continued their attacks in 1630. In this occasion, an expedition subsidized by the Dutch company of the Western Indians took Pernambuco, the present Recife, and Olinda. The territories between the island of Maranhão and the zone river under the São Francisco fell thus into the hands of the Dutch. Under the competent authority of Jean-Maurice de Nassau-Siegen, the part of Brazil occupied by the Dutch prospered during several years. But in 1644, Nassau-Siegen resigned to protest against the operation directed by the Dutch Company of the Western Indians. Shortly after their game, the Portuguese colonists, maintained by Portugal, that had become independent from Spain from 1640, were rebelled against the Dutch power. In 1654, after ten years of fights, the Netherlands capitulated and, in 1661, they resigned officially to his territorial vindications on Brazil.

In 1640, after the rupture of the union between the two crowns of Spain and Portugal, Brazil returned then under the Portuguese sovereignty and happened a virreinato. Spaniards and Portuguese lived pacifically then in South America until 1680, date of a Portuguese expedition in the south of the Eastern shore of the River of the Silver where they founded a colony. That was the cause of one long series of problems that did not finish truly until 1828 with the creation of the Republic of Uruguay.