Empire of Brazil

Politics and institutions

The Empire of Brazil was a monarchy born from a colony's fear of re-colonization. When the Portuguese court fled to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, Brazil became the seat of the empire; in 1815 it was raised to a kingdom united with Portugal, and in 1822 the regent Pedro declared independence and was crowned emperor. The constitution of 1824 gave Brazil a bicameral parliament, a life senate, indirect elections and a fourth, 'moderating' power vested in the emperor, who could dissolve the chamber and appoint the council of state. Pedro I abdicated in 1831 in favour of his five-year-old son, and the regency that followed was shaken by provincial revolts — Cabanagem, Farroupilha, Balaiada — until Pedro II was declared of age in 1840. Under him the crown rotated Liberal and Conservative cabinets in a parliamentary monarchy, and the empire's politics was a narrow game of landowners, magistrates and courtiers that ended with the military coup of 15 November 1889.

Economy and finance

Coffee built the Brazilian empire. The hills of the Paraíba valley, and later the terra roxa of São Paulo, produced the beans that conquered the world market after 1830; sugar, cotton, tobacco and later Amazonian rubber added exports, but coffee financed the railways, banks, ports and the imperial court. The labour was enslaved: Brazil imported more Africans than any other country in the Americas, and in 1822 perhaps a third of its population was in bondage. The end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850 pushed planters toward the internal trade and, eventually, toward European immigration, which transformed São Paulo's labour force after 1880. The state lived on coffee tariffs, borrowed abroad and spent heavily in the Paraguayan War; the land law of 1850 and the banking reforms of the 1850s and 1860s created a speculative economy of credit, land and rail, while the northeast stagnated on sugar and the Amazon waited for rubber.

Society and culture

Brazilian society was slaveholding and hierarchical, and its culture was built across that divide. The imperial elite — planters, merchants, magistrates, the court — cultivated French letters, Italian opera and the natural sciences; Pedro II, a patron of astronomy and philology, lent his name to the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (1838), while Romantic writers invented an Indianist national past. The Catholic Church, under the padroado, controlled parishes, schools and charitable brotherhoods; Afro-Brazilian religion, music and dance — Candomblé, the congadas and the ancestors of samba — survived and shaped a national culture. Slavery was justified by a racial ideology and softened by manumission and clientage, and abolitionism grew slowly from the 1860s, with the Law of the Free Womb (1871), the Sexagenarians (1885) and finally the Golden Law of 13 May 1888. The empire's culture was cosmopolitan in the capital and brutal on the plantations.

Military and frontiers

The empire's army and navy were its weak point until the Paraguayan War made them political. The navy, built with British officers such as Cochrane, secured independence and fought the Cisplatine War (1825–28), while the army was small, provincial and used mainly against rebels — the Cabanagem of Pará, the Farroupilha republicans of Rio Grande do Sul, the Sabinada of Bahia and the Balaiada of Maranhão. The war against Paraguay (1864–70) changed everything: Brazil mobilized tens of thousands of soldiers, many of them enslaved men promised freedom, and lost perhaps 50,000 dead; the army emerged professional, positivist and self-conscious, and the 'military question' of the 1880s turned officers against a monarchy that refused to reform. On 15 November 1889, Deodoro da Fonseca's troops surrounded the imperial palace, and the republic was proclaimed with almost no resistance.

Foreign relations

Brazil's diplomacy was shaped by its dependence on Britain and its rivalry in the Río de la Plata. Independence was recognized by Portugal in 1825 through British mediation, and London's navy and capital underwrote the new state; the price was pressure to end the slave trade, which Britain enforced by the Aberdeen Act of 1845 until Brazil abolished the traffic in 1850. In the south, the empire intervened repeatedly in Uruguay and Argentina, against Rosas and Oribe, and its victory at Caseros in 1852 and the long Paraguayan War (1864–70) made Brazil the dominant power of the Plata basin. Boundary disputes with Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela were negotiated in the late nineteenth century, and the empire's claims to the Amazon were fixed by exploration and treaties. After 1889 the republic inherited the same diplomacy, but the monarchy's fall removed a personal diplomacy that had made Pedro II a familiar figure in European courts.

Legacy and influence

The Empire of Brazil left the largest and most cohesive state in Latin America. It preserved the territory of Portuguese America — unlike Spanish America, which fragmented — and gave the Republic of 1889 its borders, its capital, its army and its legal order. Coffee, railways and immigration built the economy of the southeast; the abolition of slavery in 1888, achieved by a monarchy that then fell, made Brazil the last country in the Americas to end the institution, and left a legacy of racism and inequality that the republic did not repair. The empire's parliamentary experiment, its moderation and its patronage politics shaped Brazilian institutions; the positivism of its officers shaped the republic that followed. Rio de Janeiro remained the cultural capital of the Atlantic world's tropics, and the image of Pedro II as a philosopher-king still colours how Brazilians remember the only monarchy in their history.