Contraband, Crisis, and the Collapse of the Old Colonial System

As much as I understand Ernst Pijning's desire to engage in the controversy over the breakdown of the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system, and unreservedly welcome his comments, I fear that the discussion will now be confined to a subsidiary point that I tried to avoid in the essay that prompted Pijning's response. Contrary to his assumption, "the extent of illegal trade in the decade prior to 1808" is not crucial to my argument; in fact, contraband is an ancillary topic in my analysis of the breakdown of the old colonial system.

My argument is as follows. Between the 1770s and the early years of the nineteenth century, Portuguese trade with Brazil and Brazil-based foreign trade, which benefited from the adversity that beset other colonial empires, grew five-fold. Large imports of sugar, cotton, and tobacco from Brazil led to unprecedented reexports of tropical groceries to European ports such as Hamburg and Genoa and generated a large trade surplus; this also meant an increase in the export of foodstuffs and manufactured goods to Brazil. Despite some fluctuations and the risks of the international situation, the prosperity of this trading system lasted until 1807, when French troops occupied Portugal to enforce the Continental System; the royal family escaped to Rio de Janeiro, where the court was established, and the trade with Brazil was discontinued, forcing the government to open Brazilian ports to foreign ships. This brought about the collapse of the old colonial system that had united Portugal and Brazil.

In this line of reasoning, documented by trade statistics and reports, and informed by the knowledge of the Portuguese and Brazilian economic structures and trading networks, contraband does not come into the picture. Then, how did it find its way into the last section of my essay? The reason is simple. This argument, which I first articulated in my book, informed by Valentim Alexandre's work, ¹ on the Portuguese industrial structure and the role colonial market, ² challenges the assumption made by two leading Brazilian historians, Fernando Novais and José Jobson de Andrade Arruda: Long before 1807-8, the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system underwent a severe crisis, which finally led to its demise. ³ Their assumption was originally based on the presumed dissolving effects of the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution on the Iberian colonial systems. Against the irrefutable evidence of a thriving colonial trade, the only historical fact provided by Novais in support of his contention was the possible rise of contraband. This, which in Novais's work was cautiously presented as a mere conjecture or hypothesis, became the focal point of Arruda's argument. He assumed that the alleged increase in illicit trade indicated that the colonial system was no longer working, and was the consequence ofthe autonomous vitality of the Brazilian economy, now in search of direct trade with Europe. ⁴ However, he did not offer evidence to substantiate his assumption, except for a few reports of the chief comptroller of the general superintendence on contraband. ⁵ Instead, he simply tried to infer the volume of contraband from the deficit of the Portuguese balance trade with Brazil, which, as Valentim Alexandre and I have shown, was grossly overestimated. ⁶ In other words, such an argument is inconsistent with the very trade statistics that Jobson Arruda used. However, he has rephrased it in a recent work. ⁷

When I first read Ernst Pijning's study on contraband in Rio de Janeiro, ⁸ I immediately knew that it would be explored by those trying to restore to life the argument for the existence of a crisis in the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system prior to 1807-8. This is precisely why I undertook a detailed analysis of contraband, incorporating Pijning's recent contribution, even if my conclusion was left unchanged. The significance of the expansion of Portuguese colonial-based trade remains unchallenged, and...