Brazil

History

Europeans first encountered Brazil on April 22, 1500, with a fleet of ships led by Pedro Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese noble, military commander, navigator, and explorer. Initially, the Portuguese called it Terra de Vera Cruz (Land of Vera Cruz) and the territory was claimed by Portugal after its discovery, although colonization was only effective in the early 1530s, when the first settlement was founded.

By the time of the Portuguese arrival, the territory was already occupied by different indigenous people divided into more than 2,000 nations and tribes. These people were traditionally semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, and agriculture. Fossil records show evidence that the area had been inhabited by indigenous groups for at least 8,000 years. Some of these tribes were assimilated by the Portuguese, while others were enslaved or exterminated during various periods of war. The indigenous people were also affected by different types of European diseases (such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza) to which they had no immunity, killing tens of thousands. The Portuguese saw the natives as “noble savages,” and miscegenation of the population was commonplace.

After years trying to enslave the native people in order to use them as labor to exploit the abundant natural resources and in sugar production, which had become Brazil's most important export and economic activity in the 16th century, the Portuguese started to import African slaves to work in the sugarcane plantations. Portugal controlled the African slave trade by the time of the sugar expansion. These processes are important to acknowledge as they have profoundly shaped the country's social structure and economy, and the cultural and ethnic diversity that still characterizes Brazil in the 21st century. Historical data show that about 3 million Africans were brought to Brazil from the 16th to the 19th century, when Brazil was officially a Portuguese colony. This process lasted until 1888, when slavery was finally abolished in the country by the Lei Áurea (the Golden Law), a legal act of Princess Isabel, Empress of Brazil. Brazil was the last nation in the Western world to abolish slavery.

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