History of Brazil: The Sugar Era

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Everything changed with the discovery and cultivation sugar cane, Brazil’s most important cash crop to this day. The Portuguese invested in the colonization of this wild land and created fifteen separate territories which were given to fifteen sea captains to govern and populate. They had varying degrees of success. João de Barros never set foot on his lands in the north and Francisco Pereira Coutinho shipwrecked off the coast of Salvador and was eaten by the Tupinambá Indians.

In the second half of the 16th century, a different tactic was attempted and in 1549 Tomé de Sousa was given governance of the entire colony. He setup his capital in Salvador da Bahia with about one thousand workers, three key administrators, and a handful of prostitutes. He also counted on the help of the Jesuits to help dominate or convert the native tribes and little by little both the natives and their land came under the domination of the Portuguese. Native people who did not convert to Christianity were enslaved and sent to work in the sugar trade.

Where there were once as many as five million native individuals, today there are only around 70,000. Sugar grew from a small, boutique item into a huge export to Europe and turned key production areas (Salvador and Olinda mainly) into major trading centers with their own social and political structures. There emerged plantation owners, religious leaders, artists, architects, and governors from Portugal. For the most part, society was divided into two groups: the rich (plantation owners and governors) and the poor (slaves and poor European workers). Besides these two groups, there remained a great many native people who were neither enslaved nor converted to Christianity by the Jesuits. They regularly attacked the Portuguese settlers. The Jesuits were eventually expelled from the colony for their anti-slavery attitudes concerning the aboriginal people.