Colonial Portuguese Amazon Region, from the 17th to 18th Centuries

The colonial Portuguese Amazon region constituted a separate province of Portuguese America, and it lasted as such from the beginning of the 17th century until the beginning of the 19th century, when Brazil became an independent nation. Although its precise limits were uncertain, this territory had the Amazon River and its tributaries as the backbone of the Portuguese dominion of the region. It bordered Dutch, French, English, and Spanish territories. From a territorial and administrative point of view, it had several configurations. It was officially created in 1621, as the state of Maranhão, or the state of Maranhão and Pará. This configuration lasted until 1751, when the Crown renamed it the state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão. From the mid-1770s until the beginning of the 19th century, the Crown created two separate provinces from it: the state of Grão-Pará and Rio Negro (west) and the state of Maranhão and Piauí (east). It was constituted by several captaincies: the most important being Pará, Maranhão, Piauí (created at the beginning of the 18th century), and Rio Negro (created in the mid-18th century). Most of its territory corresponds to the modern-day Brazilian Amazon region, except from its eastern part (especially part of the captaincy of Maranhão and the captaincy of Piauí). The Amazonian part of this Portuguese province was heavily dependent on Indian compulsory labor, although African slaves entered the region in increasing numbers, mainly during the second half of the 18th century, when the Crown established a monopoly trade company to foster agricultural exploitation in the region. The Amazonian colonial economy was based on a combination of agriculture, cattle raising, and extraction of forest products, known as drogas do sertão, which one could translate as “Amazonian spices.” The importance of the latter, and of Indian compulsory labor and slavery, gave rise to a society and economy dependent on territorial expansion to survive. Thus, except for agriculture and cattle raising, developed mainly in the areas close to the main cities, the hinterland, known as sertão, remained crucial for the economic development of the region. Scholarship on the colonial Portuguese Amazon region has increased in recent years, mainly owing to the development of graduate studies in Amazon region universities. Thus, much of the renewal of the field is still in the form of dissertations and theses, which can be found online in the universities’ repositories.