128 CHAPTER 6 COLONIAL BRAZIL
defense against Spanish expansionist designs. Here
too vast land grants were made. The counterpart
of the vaqueiro in the south was the gaucho. Like
the vaqueiro, the gaucho was an expert horseman,
but he refl ected the blend of cultures in the Río
de la Plata in his speech, which was a mixture of
Portuguese, Spanish, and indigenous dialects; his
dress, the loose, baggy trousers of the Argentine
cowboy; and his chief implement, the bolas, balls of
stone attached to a rawhide rope, which was used
by the pampas natives to entangle and bring down
animals.
Portugal, like Spain (with which it was loosely
united, 1580–1640), pursued a mercantilist com-
mercial policy, though not as consistently or rigor-
ously. During this period, Brazil’s commerce was
fi rmly restricted to Portuguese nationals and ships.
The Dutch, who had been the principal carriers of
Brazilian sugar and tobacco to European markets,
responded with extensive smuggling and a direct
attack on the richest sugar-growing area of Brazil.
Following the successful Portuguese revolt
against Spain, the Methuen treaty (1703) was
made with England, Portugal’s ally. By this treaty,
British merchants were permitted to trade between
Portuguese and Brazilian ports. But English ships
frequently neglected the formality of touching at
Lisbon and plied a direct contraband trade with
the colony. Because Portuguese industry was inca-
pable of supplying the colonists with the required
quantity and quality of manufactured goods, a
large proportion of the outward-bound cargoes
consisted of foreign textiles and other products,
of which England provided the lion’s share. Thus,
Portugal, master of Brazil, itself became a colony
of Dutch and English merchants with offi ces in
Lisbon.
In the eighteenth century, during the reign of
Dom José I (1750–1777), his prime minister, the
marquis de Pombal, an able representative of the
ideology of enlightened despotism, launched an
administrative and economic reform of the Por-
tuguese Empire that bears comparison with the
Bourbon reforms in Spain and Spanish America
that were taking place at the same time. Pombal’s
design was to nationalize Portuguese-Brazilian
trade by creating a Portuguese merchant class with
enough capital to compete with British merchants
and a national industry whose production could
dislodge English goods from the Brazilian market.
The program required an active state interven-
tion in the imperial economy through the creation
of a Board of Trade, which subsidized merchant-
fi nanciers with lucrative concessions in Portugal
and Brazil; the formation of companies that were
granted monopolies over trade with particular re-
gions of Brazil and were expected to develop the
economies of those regions; and the institution of
a policy of import substitution through state assis-
tance to old and new industries. Despite mistakes,
failures, and a partial retreat from Pombal’s pro-
gram after he was forced out of offi ce in 1777, the
Pombaline reform achieved at least partial success
in its effort to reconquer Brazilian markets for Por-
tugal. Between 1796 and 1802, 30 percent of all
the goods shipped to Brazil consisted of Portuguese
man ufactures, especially cotton cloth. But the fl ight
of the Portuguese royal family from Lisbon to Bra-
zil in 1808 as a result of Napoleon’s invasion of
Portugal, followed two years later by the signing
of a treaty with England that gave the British all
the trade privileges they requested, effectively “dis-
mantled the protective edifi ce so painfully put to-
gether since 1750.” Britain once again enjoyed a
virtual monopoly of trade with Brazil.Government and Church
The donatory system of government fi rst estab-
lished in Brazil by the Portuguese crown soon
proved unsatisfactory. A glaring contradiction ex-
isted between the vast powers granted to the dona-
tories and the authority of the monarch; moreover,
few donatories were able to cope with the tasks of
defense and colonization for which they had been
made responsible. The result was a governmental
reform. In 1549, Tomé de Sousa was sent out as
governor general to head a central colonial admin-
istration for Brazil. Bahia, situated about midway
between the fl ourishing settlements of Pernam-
buco and São Vicente, became his capital. Gradu-
ally, the hereditary rights and privileges of the
donatories were revoked, as they were replaced
by governors appointed by the king. As the colony