King Manuel the Fortunate did not make any special efforts to colonize Brazil. Juan III, faced with possible competition from the French and Dutch, ordered the systematic Portuguese colonization of the country. For this he put together an expedition that, under the command of Martín Alonso de Sousa, left Lisbon in 1530 with four ships and about four hundred men . In 1531, the first city in Brazil, São Vicente (today Santos), was founded, where cattle, seeds, fruit trees and cereals were introduced. The country was divided into twelve captaincies, with three hundred kilometers of coastline, each of which was under the responsibility of a donee , armed by the king with powers to appoint judges and officials, collect taxes and subject the Indians to work on the lands administered by him. Only two captaincies were consolidated from this experience:Pernambuco, to the north, and San Vicente, where the city of the same name was founded, very close to present-day Santos, the base of the future Portuguese penetration into the interior of the country.
However, the wealth of brazilwood was soon replaced by another that would transform the traditional and feudal structure of the new Portuguese colony. In 1532, in the areas surrounding the foundations of Santos and Pernambuco, the Portuguese introduced sugar cane , from the island of Madeira, whose cultivation spread in a short time and completely replaced brazilwood as the first source of wealth in the country. This was one of the first crops of true capitalist economy. It was made mostly for European consumption and was based on cheap labor thanks to the introduction of slaves from Africa that would transform the economy of the colony and Brazilian society, thus generating a new economy of a capitalist nature, based on in the slave job.
Slavery in the Portuguese colony
The Portuguese, the first slavers, moved millions of blacks from the Gulf of Guinea in order to serve a growing world sugar market , making the colonization base for the city of Salvador (Bay of Todos los Santos), capital until 1763.
The contingents of slaves would transform the ethnic composition of the future Brazil . The new wealth would also bring the seeds of future disputes with other European powers, confronted on the continent for apparently religious reasons that, in reality, hid questions of political hegemony.
Sao Paulo Foundation
The evangelizing mission corresponded to the order of the Jesuits who, near Pernambuco, built the Colegio de San Pablo, which over time would give rise to the prosperous city of Sao Paulo.
The Portuguese governor Mendes Sá, to celebrate the expulsion of the French Calvinists from Guanabara Bay, founded on March 1, 1565, at the foot of Paõ de Açucar in said bay, the city of Saõ Sebastiaõ do Rio de Janeiro , the southern capital, leaving Bahia as the seat of the northern capital.
In Portugal, King Sebastian died without issue and, with the opposition of the Portuguese aristocracy and people, Felipe II became monarch of Portugal (heir through his mother's branch of the Lusitanian royal family). He keeps the country and its colonies under the rule of the Habsburgs until in 1640 Spain loses Portugal forever. This stage turned out to be disastrous for the nascent country, since Spain brought many enemies to Brazil, including the French and Dutch, who harassed the colony for much of the 17th century.
The Gold Rush
Groups of men were organized to exploit the territory and explored the interior and the riverbeds in search of gold. It was about the bandeirantes (groups of gangs), who toured Mato Grosso and Minas Gerais, where gold had been found in abundance. The Brazilian economy had gone from depending on brazilwood, in the first half of the 16th century, to sugar cane (in decline with the disappearance of the last member of the Habsburgs in Spain), which gave way to the gold rush , until the middle of the 18th century, approximately.
Racial Structure
The racial composition of early Brazil was very complex because from the beginning the Portuguese married or married Indian women.
To miscegenation we must add the black slave contingent, who arrived to remedy the lack of labor in the commercial farms of the colony. This is how a triracial country emerged in the 18th century where Indians, blacks and mestizos predominated over Europeans of Lusitanian origin that were concentrated on the Atlantic coast, around the Bay, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais and São Paulo.
Portuguese Administration
For the administration of the new lands, there was a Casa de las Indias in the Lusitanian metropolis. , replaced in 1532 by the Mesa da Consciencia e Ordems, Manuelinas , dating from 1521.
However, the union of the Crowns of Spain and Portugal over the head of Felipe II caused the importation of the Spanish administrative structure to the Brazilian colony . At the beginning of the 17th century, a financial organization, the Conselho da Fazenda and the Conselho da India , replace the Manueline Ordinances by the Philippines, less strict in terms of regional autonomy.
During the eighteenth century, the country was divided into a series of general captaincies that obeyed the supreme authority of the viceroy, whose headquarters were in Rio de Janeiro.
Judicial activity was territorially divided into two large courts, that of Rio de Janeiro to the south and that of Bahia to the north, although in large cases it was possible to appeal to the Superior Court of Lisbon.
Portuguese Commerce
From a commercial point of view, the exploitation of the territory began in the 17th century through two large companies, the Companhia Comercial do Brasil and the Companhia Maranhao , both of a monopolistic nature, abolished at the dawn of the Century of Enlightenment (XVIII).
The Portuguese Church
The Church was favored by the creation in 1676 of the Archbishopric of Brazil , whose first headquarters were established in Bahia. The priests played an important role in disseminating culture, especially the Jesuits, who converted the natives and, at the same time, taught them the Lusitanian language and integrated them into European culture.