State of Brazil

The State of Brazil, or Government-General of Brazil, was the central administrative unit of the Portuguese Empire in America between 1548 and 1815. Occupation had begun in 1530 through hereditary captaincies granted to private donatários, but scarcity of resources, indigenous resistance and French incursions on the coast showed how fragile that model was. In 1548 the Crown therefore sent a governor-general, its own direct representative, to coordinate the civil, military, fiscal and judicial affairs of the captaincies, and chose Salvador as his seat for its position on the Atlantic coast and its centrality to the existing grants under Tomé de Sousa. The captaincies were not abolished but made subject to the governor-general, forming a hybrid of seigneurial decentralisation and royal centralisation. In 1621 the north was split away as the State of Maranhão. In the eighteenth century gold mining in Minas Gerais lifted Rio de Janeiro, and in 1763 the capital moved there under Pombaline reform. From 1808 the Portuguese court itself resided in Brazil, and the unit was formally extinguished in 1815 when it was raised to the Kingdom of Brazil, equal with Portugal and the Algarves, a step towards independence.