After Brazil: Portuguese Debates on Empire, c. 1820-1850

If to the disgraceful condition of our African possessions we add the dismal state of the Portuguese treasury and the anarchy that has reigned in this country ... it is remarkable that we have managed to hold on to what we possess today and we must acknowledge the zeal, labor and patriotism of those who struggled for what still survives.

-Marquis of Lavradio, Estado das Colónias Portuguesas de África em 1851 (n.d.).

The decades between the transfer of the royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 and the Regeneração of the 1850s were marked by imperial contraction, as the amount of territory controlled by the Portuguese crown shrank precipitously. Contemporaries observed, often ruefully, that Brazil was effectively independent and the "old colonial system abolished" from 1808.² This was the year in which the invasion by Napoleon's armies forced the Portuguese court to evacuate Lisbon and re-establish itself in Rio de Janeiro. While the Court's move inaugurated a period of cultural and economic efflorescence in Brazil, christened as the "Tropical Versailles" period by historians,³ metropolitan Portugal was deprived suddenly of a major source of revenue, ravaged by the Peninsular War, and governed from the New World.

This dismal state of affairs represented an ignominious fall from the prosperity of the preceding decades. A combination of high prices on the world market for colonial commodities during the French Revolutionary wars, including new exports such as cotton and rice, and still strong, if significantly diminished, mineral yields in Brazil served to boost the Portuguese economy in the period before 1807.⁴ Portugal functioned as an entrepôt, a re-exporter of colonial commodities to northern Europe and a point of transit for European goods bound for Brazil. As a result, Portugal finally achieved a favorable balance of trade with Britain, something sought since the ascendancy of the Marquis of Pombal and his acolytes. The transfer of the court was accompanied by new commercial legislation that ended colonial monopoly, opening up Brazil's ports to ships from all nations. Portugal was eclipsed and its plight was exacerbated further by an 1810 trade treaty with Britain whose generous terms rankled Portuguese merchants long-reliant on uncompetitive tariff structures.⁵

Economic fragility was compounded by national dishonor, as Portugal found itself administered by a regency, itself laboring meekly under the tutelage of British military officials.⁶ The ill effects of the Court's failure to return to the Iberian peninsula after the Congress of Vienna were magnified by the Crown's decision to raise Brazil to the status of a kingdom in December 1815, transforming the empire into a United Kingdom (Reino Unido). Strenuous efforts in the early 1820s to reverse course and create a type of Lisbon-centered imperial federation, enshrined in a new constitution, capable of preserving the union between Brazil and Portugal (while recalibrating the relationship in Portugal's favor) failed. When such overtures were rejected, military force was employed, unsuccessfully, to restore the status quo ex ante. This failure did not prevent some Crown advisors from entertaining fantasies of reconquest of the northern Brazilian provinces of Pará, Maranhão, and Ceará, whose geographical proximity, large Portuguese-born population, and antipathy toward rule by Rio de Janeiro made such a prospect plausible.⁷ The independence of Brazil, officially recognized by Portugal in 1825, brought to a definitive, and anti-climactic, conclusion Portugal's dominion in the New World.⁸

Shorn of its major colony, Portugal was left with a mostly derelict Estado da Índia, centered at Goa, coastal settlements in modern Angola, Guinea and Mozambique, and the Eastern Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. A revamped colonial policy for these possessions, several of which were little more than depots for convicts (degredados) and staging grounds for the slave trade, and a full-fledged sense of their importance to Portugal's national destiny, would emerge in coherent form during the overhaul of administration, both domestic and ultramarine, in the 1850s, the period known as the Regeneração.

Historians often stress the imperial hiatus between...