Bandeirismo in Colonial Brazil: An Introduction and Overview

The suffix -ism (-ismo in Portuguese) has several purposes. The Oxford EnglishDictionary informs us that this suffix may form "a simple noun of action," express "the action or conduct of a class of persons," or form "the name of a system of theory or practice," for example political or social. Each usage would be applicable to bandeirismo (whose etymology is bandeira+ismo). This word appears to have come into the Portuguese language as spoken in Brazil in the late twentieth century. It does not appear in the Dicionário da língua portuguesacontemporânea published in 2001 by the Portuguese Academia de Ciências. The Brazilian Dicionário Houaiss also published in 2001offers the following definitions for bandeirismo: "conjunto de acontecimentos relacionados com as bandeiras (expedições)" and "maneira de agir das bandeiras e dos bandeirantes."¹

The four essays in this dedicated issue of The Americas cast considerable light, and will probably generate some heat, in sharpening the definition of the term bandeira whose looseness is such as to make it almost generic and in expanding the lexicon of bandeirismo to detail other terms of greater precision and more appropriate to a specific time or place. They also focus specifically on persons known as bandeirantes, and the actions and circumstances of individuals comprising a bandeira. Each essay situates bandeirismo in a specific region and in the context of changing and prevailing political, social and economic circumstances. A Portuguese perspective is counter-balanced by discussion and analysis of the composition and demography of Indian peoples in each region under discussion. The essays show that bandeirismo manifested itself in different forms in response to local conditions and that it could change and evolve into forms which would have been anathema to the first bandeirantes; that there was a surprising uniformity of purpose regardless of time and place; that it was a colony-wide phenomenon; and that it persisted in its various manifestations from the sixteenth century through to independence

These papers were originally presented at a CLAH-sponsored session of the AHA annual meeting in Washington D.C. in January of 2004. They have subsequently been revised for publication but, other than informal exchange of papers between authors, they remain discrete papers. My purpose in this introduction is to highlight features common to and distinct from each other contained in the essays, place these in the framework of issues such as settlement and colonization, governance, agency, and continuity and change and provide some comments on sources and the contribution of these essays to the historiography. The substance of these comments is based largely on the essays without acknowledgment to individual authors.

Regions

Each of the regions under discussion—Bahia, Amazonia, Minas Gerais, and Goiás is topographically and hydrographically distinctive and each played a significant role in the formation of colonial Brazil (1500-1822).The sixteenth century witnessed the establishment of crown government in Salvador in the northeast and the growing sugar cane industry created a demand for labor in the captaincies of Bahia and Pernambuco. The newly created colony awoke the interest of other European nations. The north of Brazil took on a multinational dimension with a French, Spanish, Irish, and English presence in the sixteenth century and a Dutch shortly thereafter. This gave rise to competition for the allegiance, labor, and souls and bodies of Indians. This area witnessed a transition from an economy largely based on the harvesting of drogas do sertão to export agriculture. There was alluvial gold in Amazonia, but it was the lure of gold and diamonds which spurred movement away from the littoral to the interior of Brazil in the eighteenth century. Gold rushes in seriatum brought the Portuguese into conflict with Indians seeking to protect the lands on which they were dependent for hunting and planting crops and resisting enslavement. This move to the west was marked by the creation of the captaincies...