American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches

8 Indians in Portuguese America

8 Indians in Portuguese America Whereas English colonists expropriated Indian land overseas and Spaniards expropriated Indian labor, Portuguese colonists at first seized neither. Rather, their pattern, which was subsequently imitated successfully by Dutch and other European merchants, left the means of production in the hands of aboriginal inhabitants. This primarily mercantile model proved inordinately successful well into the nineteenth century in Africa and Asia, where local inhabitants had long been accustomed to producing goods for overseas markets. When they arrived on American shores in 1500, the Portuguese simply wanted to bargain with the natives for the price of their goods and leave all the details of production in native hands. But this commercial mode had limited success in the New World. Lacking the infrastructure to cope with the new demands and devastated by the diseases that European traders brought with them, Native American societies found themselves subject to unprecedented and often intolerable pressures. Nor was this commercial pattern any more satisfactory to Europeans. All three groups of Europeans who initially embarked upon this model it in the Americas eventually abandoned it. Dutch leadership simply refused more than minimal funding of the unprofitable North American colony in the 1630s. And although the French held on to their Canadian colony for ≈ 135 ≈ strategic reasons (geopolitical competition with England), the settlement was unprofitable from the start. Only the Portuguese, in abandoning the trade model, successfully transformed their commercial empire into a large colonial one in which Europeans owned and managed the means of production.1 In the New World, only two kinds of colonial policies were successful in the long run: the land-based empires of the English and the labor-based empires of the Spanish and eventually the Portuguese. When forced to establish a permanent presence, largely to protect and fortify their trading posts against other marauding Europeans in the 1530s, Portuguese officials reluctantly ordered the settlement of the eastern rim of the South American continent. This terrain was profoundly underpopulated , as was that encountered by the English in North America. Whereas mainland North America was inhabited by a mixture of nomadic and sedentary cultivators, eastern South America was inhabited entirely by nomadic cultivators and hunter-gatherers. But despite encountering both a terrain and a people that ideally fit the English rationales for conquest (better even than North America)—a terrain that had in fact inspired Thomas More’s Utopia—Portuguese settlers never invoked any of the English colonists’ terms or attitudes. Rather than expelling aboriginal peoples from their land, Lusitanian settlers sought their labor. Portuguese reactions to the New World were far closer to those of Spaniards, with whom they shared an often common history , a closely related language, and numerous similar cultural concepts. As I have noted in preceding chapters, Portuguese and Spanish subjects believed that they shared ownership of all valuable mineral resources and that their officials managed such resources for them. Also as I have noted, Spanish and Portuguese colonists viewed the distinction between themselves and native peoples in terms of their identity as “Christians” and the natives’ identity as pagans and idolaters. Both believed they had a right to punish Indians for their immoral conduct, cannibalism in particular , through harsh regimes of labor. When encountering “cannibals,” Lusitanians—like their Spanish neighbors—sought to capture such natives and make them slaves. However, enslaving all natives was neither possible nor desirable. Under royal guidance, Portuguese colonists in the New World developed the Jesuit mission system, a distinct form of assimilating indigenous peoples to European norms of labor and conduct. But the missions’ singular success in Brazil led to the system’s downfall and the eventual expulsion of the Jesuits. Portugal’s path to separate economic development began in the late I n d i a n s i n P o r t u g u e s e A m e r i c a ≈ 136 ≈ Middle Ages, following the end of Muslim rule. Its emergence as a commercial power during the fifteenth century provides the background for its transformation into a colonial empire in Brazil. A Commercial Power Over the course of the fifteenth century, as their navigators traveled steadily further down the West African coast, Portuguese monarchs found trade with the newly accessible regions increasingly profitable. Traders bought or traded for goods and in many regions deposited these goods at fortified local warehouses called feitorias (factories), where they...