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Independence of Brazil

Founding of independent Brazil

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Independence or Death , by Pedro Américo , oil on canvas, 1888. Displayed in the Museu Paulista .
Pedro Américo · Public domain

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In 1807, the French army invaded Portugal, which had refused to participate in the continental blockade against the United Kingdom. Unable to resist the invasion, the Portuguese royal family and government fled to Brazil, which was then the richest and most developed of the Portuguese colonies. The installation of the House of Appeals and other public bodies of the Portuguese government in Rio de Janeiro represented a series of political, economic and social transformations that led to then prince regent John of Braganza (later King John VI of Portugal), to elevate the State of Brazil to the status of a kingdom on 16 December 1815, united with its former metropole.

In 1820, a liberal revolution broke out in Portugal and the royal family was forced to return to Lisbon. Before leaving Brazil, however, the now king John VI named his eldest son, Pedro of Braganza, as prince regent of Brazil. Although Pedro was faithful to his father, the desire of the Portuguese courts to repatriate him (including demoting him from prince regent to governor-of-arms, that is, a mere military commander of the Portuguese Army, no longer holding any political position) and returning Brazil to its former colonial status led him to stay in Brazil and rebel.

During the war of independence that ensued – which began with the expulsion of the Portuguese troops from Pernambuco in 1821 – the Brazilian Army was formed by hiring mercenaries, enlisting civilians and some Portuguese colonial troops. The army immediately opposed the Portuguese forces, which controlled some parts of the country, namely, in the then provinces of Cisplatina (present-day Uruguay), Bahia, Piauí, Maranhão and Grão-Pará. At the same time that the conflict was taking place, a revolutionary movement broke out in Pernambuco and other neighboring provinces, which intended to form their own country, the Confederation of the Equator, with a republican government, but it was harshly repressed.

After four years of conflict, Portugal finally recognized Brazil's independence and the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed between the two countries on 29 August 1825. In exchange for recognition as a sovereign state, Brazil committed to paying a substantial compensation to Portugal and signing two treaties with the United Kingdom by which it agreed to ban the Atlantic slave trade and grant preferential tariffs to British goods imported into the country.

Officially, the date celebrated for Brazil's independence is 7 September 1822, when the event known as the Cry of Ipiranga took place on the banks of the Ipiranga brook in the city of São Paulo. Prince Pedro of Braganza was acclaimed Emperor of Brazil on 12 October 1822, being crowned and consecrated on 1 December 1822, and the country became known as the Empire of Brazil.

Background

The land now called Brazil was claimed by the Kingdom of Portugal in April 1500, on the arrival of the Portuguese naval fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral. The Portuguese encountered Indigenous peoples divided into several tribes, most of whom shared the same Tupi–Guarani language family, and shared and disputed territory. But the Portuguese, like the Spanish in their North American territories, had brought diseases with them against which many Indians were helpless due to lack of immunity. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza killed tens of thousands.

Though the first settlement was founded in 1532, colonization only effectively started in 1534 when King John III divided the territory into fifteen hereditary captaincies. This arrangement proved problematic, however, and in 1549 the king assigned a governor-general to administer the entire colony. The Portuguese assimilated some of the native tribes while others slowly disappeared in long wars or by European diseases to which they had no immunity.

By the mid-16th century, sugar had become Brazil's main export due to the increasing international demand. To profit from the situation, by 1700 over 963,000 enslaved Africans had been brought across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the plantations of Brazil. More Africans were brought to Brazil up until that date than to all the other places in the Americas (and the entire Western Hemisphere) combined.

Through wars against the French, the Portuguese slowly expanded their territory to the southeast, taking Rio de Janeiro in 1567, and to the northwest, taking São Luís in 1615. They sent military expeditions to the northwest of the South American continent to the Amazon River basin rainforest and conquered competing English and Dutch strongholds, founding villages and forts from 1669. In 1680 they reached the far southeast and founded Colônia do Sacramento on the bank of the Río de la Plata, in the Banda Oriental region (present-day Uruguay).

At the end of the 17th century, sugar exports started to decline, but beginning in the 1690s, the discovery of gold by explorers in the region that would later be called Minas Gerais, current Mato Grosso and Goiás saved the colony from imminent collapse. From all over Brazil, as well as from Portugal, thousands of immigrants came to the mines in an early gold rush.

The Spanish tried to prevent Portuguese expansion northwest, west, southwest and southeast into the territory that belonged to them according to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas division of the New World by the Bishop and Pope of Rome, Alexander VI (1431–1503, reigned 1492–1503) and succeeded in conquering the Banda Oriental region in 1777. However, this was in vain as the Treaty of San Ildefonso, signed in the same year, confirmed Portuguese sovereignty over all lands proceeding from its territorial expansion, thus creating most of the current Brazilian southeastern border.

During the French invasion of Portugal by Emperor Napoleon I in 1807, the Portuguese royal family (House of Braganza) fled across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of the British Royal Navy to Brazil, establishing Rio de Janeiro as the de facto capital of the Portuguese Empire during the ensuing worldwide Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815). This had the side effect of soon creating within Brazil many of the institutions required to exist as an independent state; most importantly, it freed Brazil to trade with other nations at will.

After Napoleon's Imperial French army was finally defeated at Waterloo in June 1815, in order to maintain the capital in Brazil and allay Brazilian fears of being returned to colonial status, King John VI of Portugal raised the de jure status of Brazil to an equal kingdom and integral part of the new United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, rather than a mere colony, a status which it enjoyed for the next seven years, appointing his son, Dom Pedro, as prince regent.

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