The Northeast coast

The first European occupants of Brazil settled in the early 16th century among the coastal Indian villages or at the trading posts that they established at Salvador and at Cabo Frio (now in Rio de Janeiro state). They exchanged hardware and trinkets with the Indians for brazilwood, which was used for making a valuable, fire-coloured dye (brasa is Portuguese for “live coals”). Sugarcane began to dominate the colonial economy in the second half of the 16th century, giving rise to a scattering of urban centres, among which Olinda and Salvador were the most important. By that time the coastal Indian populations had been decimated, and slaves from Africa were being imported to work on the rapidly expanding plantations, which flourished particularly during the early and mid-17th century.

The Southeast: mining and coffee

During the first two centuries of Brazilian colonization, little attention was paid to the nearly inaccessible and seemingly unproductive highlands, although parties of explorers, known as bandeirantes, traversed them from time to time, capturing Indians for slaves and searching for precious metals and stones. Some of the bandeirantes settled in the interior and introduced small groups of cattle that eventually expanded into large herds; cattle raising came to dominate Brazil’s economy from the caatinga to the Pantanal. The first gold strike occurred in what is now Minas Gerais in 1695, and during the 18th century Brazil furnished a large portion of the world’s gold reserves. Diamonds were found in the same region in 1729, and visions of instant wealth attracted many plantation owners, with their slaves, from the Northeast. They spent money lavishly on the construction of fine towns, such as Ouro Prêto and Diamantina, and also invested in small industries to supply the mines and farms, which were soon producing a surplus for export. Brazil’s economic and political centre shifted from the Northeast to the Southeast after settlers built roads over the Serra do Mar to the coast, and the royal government transferred the colonial capital from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. During the 19th century, great coffee plantations brought additional wealth into the region. The plantations developed chiefly in the Paraíba do Sul valley, which runs from eastern São Paulo to eastern Rio de Janeiro states. By the 1860s thousands of European immigrants, chiefly Italians, were flowing into the region, and two decades later their influx increased to some 40,000 per year.

Rio de Janeiro’s population had passed 500,000 by the time the slaves were fully emancipated in 1888, whereas the city of São Paulo, the entrepôt for all of Brazil south and west of Minas Gerais, was still a modest town of 65,000. That situation changed as the flood of European immigrants began to arrive. Some of the newcomers worked as tenants on the coffee plantations that were expanding across São Paulo and northern Paraná states, while others established themselves on small freeholds along the southern coast and in the forests. The southernmost group remained physically and culturally isolated until after World War II, but the immigrants in São Paulo played a key role in building railroads and industries that gave the city and the state their preeminence in the Brazilian economy.

The backlands and Amazonia

During the same period, the Northeast’s large population struggled to advance economically in the face of drought, high rates of unemployment, and an archaic landholding system that concentrated all of the best coastal lands in the hands of a few powerful landowners. The Northeast remained economically depressed throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and economic booms elsewhere drew people out of the region. Among the first groups to migrate outward were large numbers of farmers who had settled in the sertão, or backlands, of the Northeast; they abandoned their lands in the 1870s and ’80s because of severe drought but found employment by resettling in the Amazon region to the north and west, where they tapped rubber trees. Northeasterners took part in another mass migration in the mid-20th century, primarily to the central interior of the country to help construct Brasília. Others began moving to the sparsely populated forests in the northern part of the Brazilian Highlands and to the frontier Amazonian zones of Rondônia and Acre. There they were joined by migrants from southern Brazil who had lost their livelihoods to the spread of mechanized agriculture.

The entire Amazon region had an estimated population of merely 40,000 in the mid-19th century, but the population exploded after Northeasterners and other Brazilians poured into the area during the rubber boom, which reached its apex between 1879 and 1912. As a result, Belém and Manaus grew from somnolent villages into modest cities, and by the end of World War I the region’s population rose to some 1.4 million. In the late 1950s Japanese settlers began raising jute and black pepper along the lower Amazon, and in the process they created a temporary economic boom. Brazilians also developed manganese deposits in Amapá from the mid-20th century, and a pioneer zone appeared along a newly constructed highway between Belém and Brasília. Forestry, cattle raising, and gold mining spread deeper into the region at the expense of the rainforest; nevertheless, the Amazon region remained the most underpopulated part of Brazil, and government attempts to lure more settlers there had limited success.