Brazil's recorded history begins with the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500, although it had been discovered and settled by Indians many centuries before. The importation of millions of African slaves over the next four centuries completed the rich blend of European, Indian and African influences that formed modern Brazil and its people. Achieving independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazil's enormous wealth in land and natural resources underpinned a boom-and-bust cycle of economic development that continues to the present day. The eternal "Land of the Future" is still a prisoner of its past, as industrialization turned Brazil into the economic giant of South America, but sharpened social divisions. After a twenty-year interlude of military rule, the civilian "New Republic" has struggled, with some success, against deep-rooted economic crisis and has managed to consolidate democracy. Although social divisions remain, the current economic and political outlook is the best it has been for a generation
Early history
Very little is known about the thousands of years that Brazil was inhabited exclusively by
Indians
. The first chroniclers who arrived with the Portuguese - Pedro Vaz da Caminha in 1500 and Gaspar Carvajal in 1540 - saw large villages, but...
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Conquest
The Portuguese discovery of Brazil, when
Pedro Alvares Cabral
landed in southern Bahia on April 23, 1500, was an accident, an episode in Portugal's thrust to found a seaborne empire in the East Indies during the sixteenth century. Cabral was...
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War with the Dutch
The
Dutch
, with naval bases in the Caribbean and a powerful fleet, were the best placed to move against Brazil. A mixture of greed and pressing political motives lay behind the Dutch decision. From 1580 to 1640 Portugal was united with Spain,...
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The bandeirantes: Gold and god
The expulsion of the Dutch demonstrated the toughness of the early Brazilians, which was also well to the fore in the penetration and settling of
the interior
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Every few months, expeditions set...
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The Jesuits
Apart from the
bandeirantes,
the most important agents of the colonization of the interior were the
Jesuits
. The first Jesuit missionaries arrived in Brazil in 1549 and, thanks to the influence they held over successive Portuguese...
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Independence
Brazil, uniquely among South American countries, achieved a peaceful transition to independence. The odds seemed against it at one point. Brazilian resentment at their exclusion from government, and at the Portuguese monopoly of foreign trade, grew...
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Early empire: Revolt in the regions
Although independence had been easily achieved, the early decades of empire proved much more difficult. The first problem was Dom Pedro himself: headstrong and autocratic, he became increasingly estranged from his subjects, devoting more attention to...
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The War of the Triple Alliance
With the rebellions in the provinces, the
army
became increasingly important in Brazilian political life. Pedro insisted they stay out of domestic politics, but his policy of diverting the generals by allowing them to control foreign policy...
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The end of slavery
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century around ten million Africans were transported to Brazil as
slaves
- ten times as many as were shipped to the United States - yet the death rate in Brazil was so great that in 1860 Brazil's black...
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From empire to republic
The end of slavery was also the death knell of the monarchy. Since the 1870s the intelligentsia, deeply influenced by French liberalism, had turned against the emperor and agitated for a republic. By the 1880s they had been joined by the officer corps,...
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Coffee with milk - and sugar
The years from 1890 to 1930 were politically undistinguished, but saw Brazil rapidly transformed economically and socially by large-scale
immigration
from Europe and Japan; they were decades of swift growth and swelling cities, which saw a...
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The revolution of 1930
The revolution of 1930 that brought the populist
Getúlio Vargas
to power was a critical event. Vargas dominated Brazilian politics for the next quarter-century, and the Vargas years were a time of radical change, marking a decisive break with...
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Vargas and the Estado Novo
It was not just Vargas who took power in 1930, but a whole new generation of young, energetic administrators, who set about transforming the economy and the political system. Vargas played the nationalist card with great success, nationalizing the oil,...
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The death of Vargas
Eurico Dutra proved a colourless figure, and when Vargas ran for the presidency in 1950 he won a crushing victory, the old dictator "returning on the arm of the people", as he wrote later. But he had powerful enemies, in the armed forces and on...
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JK and Brasília
Juscelino Kubitschek
, "JK" to Brazilians, president from 1956 to 1961, proved just the man to fix Brazil's attention on the future rather than the past. He combined energy and imagination with integrity and great political skill, acquired...
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1964: The road to military rule
At the time, the
military coup of 1964
was considered a temporary hiccup in Brazil's postwar democracy, but it lasted 21 years and left a very bitter taste. The first period of military rule saw the famous economic miracle, when the economy...
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Military rule
The military moved swiftly to dismantle democracy. Congress was dissolved, those representatives not to military taste being removed. It then reconvened with only two parties, an official government and an official opposition ("The difference,"...
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Opening up the Amazon
The first step towards opening up the vast interior of the
Amazon
was taken by Kubitschek, who built a dirt highway linking Brasília to Belém. But things really got going in 1970, when Médici realized that the Amazon could be used as a huge...
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The abertura
Growing popular resentment of the military could not be contained indefinitely, especially when the economy turned sour. By the late 1970s debt, rising inflation and unemployment were turning the economy from a success story into a joke, and the military...
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The New Republic: Crisis and corruption
Tragically, the New Republic was orphaned at birth. The night before his inauguration, Tancredo was rushed to hospital for an emergency operation on a bleeding stomach tumour: it proved benign, but in hospital he picked up an infection and six weeks later...
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Brazil in the 1990s
Despite everything, Brazil still managed to begin the next decade on a hopeful note, with the inauguration in 1990 of
Fernando Collor de Melo
, the first properly elected president for thirty years, after a heated but peaceful campaign had...
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Cardoso: Stability and reform
Uniquely among modern Brazilian presidents, Cardoso, a donnish ex-academic from São Paulo, proved able and effective. Ironically, before he became a politician he was one of the world's most respected left-wing theorists of economic development. His...
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