Racial Violence and the End of Colonial Rule
The final century of colonial rule preceding Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822 brought a further acceleration of the slave trade, as captive workers poured in from west central Africa, the Bight of Biafra, the Bight of Benin and south-east Africa.
The discovery of massive gold and diamond deposits yielded a bonanza in the south-eastern inland captaincy of Minas Gerais. There, traders and merchants assembled what became the colony's single largest regional enslaved workforce. Gold rushes also flared farther to the west. The Portuguese Crown redoubled its efforts to settle Brazil's southern borderlands and colonise its northern Amazonian expanses. Following a period of decline provoked by Caribbean competition, a revitalisation of coastal agricultural production further fuelled this economic expansion. Scholars interested in the racial violence associated with this period have concentrated on peoples of African descent. However, inland expansion also entailed new threats to indigenous peoples. The same logic that justified violence against Africans deemed unfit for freedom similarly singled out still autonomous hunter-gatherers as fatally unequipped for an existence untutored by white European Christians. When native groups resisted conquest, as they often did, authorities sanctioned extreme countermeasures.One such case unfolded as the colonial period assumed its final form in 1808, when the ageing Queen Maria I, her son Prince Regent Joao, and thousands of members of the royal court took up residence in Brazil after fleeing Napoleon's invasion of Portugal. One of the prince regent's initial decrees harked back to the earliest days of the Portuguese presence in the tropical colony. Determined to incorporate the vast forested territory that separated the three major nodes of colonial settlement - Bahia, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro - he declared war on the semi-nomadic Botocudo Indians. Denouncing them as cannibals, he invoked the time-worn principle of just war, pledging a military offensive that would not cease until the Indians, ‘moved by just terror', learned to submit to the rule of law, accepting life as settled Christian vassals.[103]
On the eve of independence, in the realms of both indigenous and Afro- Brazilian relations, alterity, violence and pedagogy stood firmly linked. This tripartite reckoning remained indispensable, white elites reasoned, if they were to forge a harmonious society that preserved the just privileges of their class and race. Their creed, although challenged from below by those it forcibly subordinated, shaped the future of the new nation born in 1822, a nation destined to maintain legalised slavery until 1888, longer than anywhere else in the Americas. With its attendant naturalisation and thus effacement of a violent past, it echoed in the ideology of racial harmony that would come to dominate Brazilian social thought in the twentieth century.
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