Search Results: Brazil in the th century

With a wealth of natural resources, Brazil was by far the most important colony in the Portuguese empire and was, at one time or another, the world’s leading producer of sugar, diamonds, and tobacco. Colonised from the 1530s, most settlements...

The Portuguese Empire was established from the 15th century and eventually stretched from the Americas to Japan. Very often a string of coastal trading centres with defensive fortifications, there were larger territorial colonies like Brazil...

Portuguese Angola in southwest Africa was the first European colony on that continent. While settlement from 1571 proved problematic in the interior, the Portuguese did obtain a large number of slaves which they shipped to their Atlantic...

An 1816 painting of Rio de Janeiro. Rio was made sole capital of Portuguese Brazil in 1763. Painted by Nicolas-Antoine Taunay. (Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio)

A c. 1640 painting showing a Dutch ship in the harbour of Recife, Portuguese Brazil. Painted by Abraham Willaerts. (Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Amsterdam)

European explorers began to probe the Western Hemisphere in the early 1500s, and they found to their utter amazement not only a huge landmass but also a world filled with several diverse and populous indigenous cultures. Among their most...

The first plantations in the Americas of sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, and cotton were maintained and harvested by African slaves controlled by European masters. When African slavery was largely abolished in the mid-1800s, the center of plantation...

A painting of a slave market in Portuguese Brazil by Jean-Baptiste Debret from an original 19th-century engraving by Johann Moritz Rugendas.

A c. 1770 illustration by Carlos Julião showing enslaved market women in Rio de Janeiro, Portuguese Brazil.

Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. For this reason, European colonial settlers in Africa and the Americas used slaves on their plantations, almost all...