2. Britain and Brazil (1808–1914)*

I

The foundations of British pre-eminence in Brazil in the 19th century – political, commercial and financial –were established in the period between the transfer of the Portuguese Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1807–8 during the Napoleonic Wars and the abdication of independent Brazil’s first emperor in 1831.

There was a long history of close relations, both political and economic, between Great Britain and Portugal. Under treaties signed in 1642, 1654 and 1703, Britain guaranteed to protect the Bragança dynasty and to maintain the territorial integrity of Portugal and its dominions throughout the world, especially Portuguese America (Brazil), against external aggression – a guarantee reaffirmed in 1793 at the outbreak of the war in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. During the 17th and 18th centuries British merchants in Lisbon and Oporto established a privileged position in the exports to Brazil as well as the imports from Brazil and the re-exports from Portugal to Europe and the rest of the world. When Napoleon, determined to close the only remaining loophole in the Continental System against British trade with Europe by invading Portugal, Great Britain, for reasons both economic and geo-political, assumed a decisive role in the decision of the Portuguese Prince Regent D. João in November 1807 to transfer the Portuguese court, the entire apparatus of the Portuguese state and large sections of the Portuguese governing class from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro under protection from the British navy. In a secret convention of 22 October 1807 Great Britain had renewed its existing guarantees to preserve the territorial integrity of Portugal and its empire and the continuity of the Bragança dynasty, now specifically to include the protection of the Portuguese court in Brazil and the liberation of Portugal from the French.

The Prince Regent D. João and the Portuguese government in Rio de Janeiro were dependent on the British army for the liberation of Portugal and the British navy for the defence of Brazil and the rest of Portugal’s overseas empire. In Portugal, Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future duke of Wellington, commanded a British expeditionary force; General William Carr Beresford was commander in chief of the Portuguese army; and the British ambassador (first John Charles Villiers, 1808–10, then Sir Charles Stuart, 1810–14) was the most influential figure in the Conselho dos Governadores [called the Regents in English publications of the period]. In Rio de Janeiro, the most powerful men in the Corte were Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, commander of the British squadron in Guanabara Bay (until July 1809), and the British minister, Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe, the sixth Viscount Strangford, 28 years old, who arrived from Lisbon in July. Strangford declared with his usual exaggeration: ‘I have entitled England to establish with the Brazils the relation of sovereign and subject and to require obedience to be paid as the price of protection’.¹

During a brief stopover in Salvador in January, D. João had proclaimed the opening of Brazilian ports to direct trade with all friendly nations, thus formally ending the 300-year-old Portuguese monopoly of colonial trade. In practice, at least until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this meant direct trade with Great Britain. The number of ships entering Rio de Janeiro in 1808 was more than four times greater than in 1807 and the majority of them British. Already in August 1808 between 150 and 200 merchants formed the beginning of a prosperous British community in Rio de Janeiro. Others were formed in Salvador, Recife. São Luís de Maranhão and Belém.

Nevertheless, Britain was not satisfied with the opening of Brazilian ports to direct trade. George Canning, Foreign Secretary March 1807–October 1809, wanted the same privileged position in Brazil that Britain had enjoyed in Portugal since the middle of the 17th century. After prolonged negotiations between Strangford and Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, conde de Linhares, the Portuguese Secretary of State for Foreign Relations and War and leader of the so-called ‘partido inglês’ in the Corte, two treaties were signed on 19 February 1810 – and immediately ratified by D. João. The first was a Treaty of Alliance and Friendship, and the second, a Treaty of Navigation and Commerce, under which British manufactured goods imported into Brazil would attract a preferential 15 per cent maximum tariff. Moreover, British merchants would not only have the right to reside and own property in Brazil and maintain their own churches, cemeteries and hospitals, but also to nominate special magistrates [juizes conservadores] who would be responsible for all cases involving British subjects (that is, a parallel system of British justice would be established in Brazil).

Canning had also instructed Strangford that any treaty with Portugal must include the first steps towards the eventual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. In 1807, after a 20-year struggle, Britain had abolished the slave trade, and immediately adopted a policy of promoting international abolition. Brazil was the world’s principal market for slaves. The immediate cessation of the slave trade would be against the interests of Brazilian fazendeiros [plantation owners], indeed would signify the ruin of Brazilian agriculture, as well as Portuguese and Brazilian merchants. However, the transfer of the Corte to Brazil and its dependence on Britain offered a rare opportunity to force concessions from Portugal on the slave trade. Under article 10 of a Treaty of Alliance and Friendship, the Portuguese government recognised the injustice of the slave trade, committed itself to limiting the trade to Portuguese territories on the coast of Africa and promised gradually to take effective steps towards its abolition. It was the first agreement between Portugal and Great Britain on the trade. British pressure for the fulfilment of the final commitment would henceforth be unrelenting.²

Resentment in Brazil against Britain grew after 1810. The commercial treaty was much more favourable to English than to Portuguese interests, in both Portugal and Brazil. And as a result of a misinterpretation of article 10 of the Treaty of Alliance, British navy ships captured some Portuguese ships engaged in the slave trade, principally from Bahia and Pernambuco, on the Costa da Mina, and sent them for adjudication to the British Admiralty court in Sierra Leone.³ Finally when, taking advantage of the revolutions for independence in Spanish America, the Corte, and especially Carlota Joaquina, D. João’s Spanish wife, considered the idea of recapturing Colônia do Sacramento (ceded to Spain in 1778), taking Montevideo, and expanding the territory of Portuguese America to the Río de la Plata; Strangford always made clear British opposition.

The evident decline of Britain’s political influence in the Corte accelerated after the death of Linhares in January 1812, and especially when two years later António de Araújo de Azevedo (from 1815 conde da Barca), returned to government as Secretary of State for the Navy and the Colonies, responsible for Portugal’s foreign relations. Araújo de Azevedo, a francophile, was a strong adversary of the ‘partido inglês’ and opponent of the treaties signed in 1810. He found the entire English connection, as Strangford reported to Lord Castlereagh, Canning’s successor as British Foreign Secretary, ‘oppressive and degrading to Portugal’.⁴ In any event Portugal no longer needed British protection. The war in Portugal had effectively ended in May 1811 with the defeat of the third French invasion. By October 1813 Wellesley had liberated Spain and entered France and after the battle of Leipzig the war in Europe turned decisively against Napoleon. The Emperor resigned in April 1814.

Although Britain had armed, financed and commanded the Portuguese army, Portugal regarded itself as having made a decisive contribution in the war against France. The Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815) offered an opportunity for Portugal to demonstrate to the world that it was no longer dependent on Britain. (The Treaty of Paris in May 1814 had been signed by Britain on behalf of Portugal without its express approval.) However, the Great Powers that had defeated Napoleon – Great Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia – treated Portugal as a second-class power at Vienna and the Portuguese representatives were unable entirely to resist Castlereagh’s demands.

Two Anglo-Portuguese conventions were signed in January 1815. The first annulled the 1810 Treaty of Alliance and Friendship, but confirmed the validity of the ancient treaties between Britain and Portugal that protected the Portuguese dominions against external threats. Britain also paid £300,000 in compensation for Portuguese slave ships illegally captured by ships of the British navy and annulled that part of the loan of £600,000 contracted by Portugal in 1809 that remained unpaid (75 per cent). However, Portuguese attempts to retain French Guiana (occupied with the support of the British navy in 1809), to transfer Colônia do Sacramento from Spain to Portugal, to secure the return of Olivença (captured by Spain in 1801) and, above all, to terminate the Anglo-Portuguese commercial treaty of 1810 all failed.

Moreover, in the second convention signed in January 1815 Portugal declared the slave trade north of the Equator illegal, which penalised in particular the interests of Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhão and Pará. The Portuguese trade in slaves continued to be permitted south of the Equator, but was restricted to territories in Africa over which the Portuguese crown claimed dominion and to trade destined for the transatlantic possessions of Portugal. (This was more than enough to furnish Brazil with the slaves it needed.) Portugal promised to introduce and implement legislation to punish Portuguese subjects engaged in the illegal trade, and reiterated its promise to gradually abolish the entire slave trade. No legislation was introduced, and the Portuguese continued to resist British pressure to fix a date for the total abolition of the trade. Britain did not have the powers to enforce the 1815 treaty until an additional convention was signed in 1817 under which Portugal conceded to the British navy the right to detain ships suspected of carrying slaves illegally, i.e. north of the Equator, and send them to be judged before Anglo-Portuguese courts of mixed commission especially created for the purpose in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Rio de Janeiro.⁵

There was an expectation – in both Britain and Portugal – that with the end of the war in Europe the Portuguese prince regent, his court and his government, after seven years in Rio de Janeiro, would return to Lisbon. From May 1814 Strangford had been encouraging D. João to return. ‘The hatred of the natives of Brazil to England is now more violent than I can describe. It pervades every class of person in this country’, Strangford had warned Castlereagh in February.⁶ Only in Lisbon could Britain restore its traditional influence in the Portuguese court. Twice D. João refused. Finally, preoccupied with the demands arriving from Lisbon, he indicated to Strangford his willingness to return. In September, Castlereagh sent Vice-Admiral Sir John Beresford (younger brother of General Beresford in Lisbon) to Rio de Janeiro with three Royal Navy ships to provide transport, if necessary, or at least protection for the royal family in its return voyage to Lisbon. The former Foreign Secretary George Canning was sent to Lisbon as ambassador in order to receive (and influence) D. João on his return. Beresford arrived in Rio on 28 December 1814 but in January the conde de Aguiar anounced that the prince regent had no immediate plans to leave Brazil. D. João’s decision to remain was seen as a fatal blow to British influence in the Portuguese court. Strangford was recalled to London (he left Brazil in April 1815), and was not replaced. The consul-general Henry Chamberlain was chargé d’affaires for the next five years until the arrival of Edward Thornton as minister in November 1819.

There were various reasons for the Portuguese government’s decision to remain in Brazil. One – reinforced by Portugal’s experience at the Congress of Vienna – was the desire to reduce the level of dependence on Great Britain. At Vienna Talleyrand, the French minister of foreign relations, had encouraged Portuguese diplomats to persuade D. João to remain in Brazil for this reason. The instructions of Richelieu, the French prime minister, to Colonel Maler, the French charge d’affaires leaving for Rio de Janeiro, are very revealing: the prince regent must choose between being the head of the leading power in America Meridional for some time to come or the head of one of the third class powers of Europe. In Vienna, Talleyrand apparently also suggested to the conde de Palmela, Portuguese ambassador to Britain, the advantages of raising Brazil to the status of a kingdom equal with Portugal. Under a monarchy Brazil could avoid the revolutions for independence and fragmentation afflicting Spanish America and at the same time become an obstacle to the spread of republicanism on the American continent.⁷

In any event, on 16 December 1815, in recognition of the new reality since 1808, the change in the relative importance of Portugal and Brazil, and the inevitable consequence of his decision to remain in Brazil after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, D. João declared Brazil and Portugal equal parts of a Reino Unido [United Kingdom]. Three months later, in March 1816, on the death of his mother, Queen Maria, the prince regent became D. Joao VI, the first (and, as it would transpire, the last) king of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.

The future residence of the Portuguese court was, however, still not defined. The American option presented considerable difficulties for D. João in Portugal where the economic crisis deepened and resentment at the continued absence of the Court in Brazil and the continued presence of Britain in Portugal grew. Beresford (now Lord Beresford) returned from a visit to Rio de Janeiro (September 1815–July 1816) with his powers greatly enhanced, a virtual dictator of Portugal. He guaranteed order in Portugal and resistance to any possible aggression from Spain, especially after the Portuguese invasion of the Banda Oriental of the Río de la Plata and occupation of Montevideo in January 1817. However, in August 1817 Beresford wrote to the conde de Barca: ‘If you wish the Crown to remain with the Braganças, D. João must return to Portugal ... at present there is no government here.’⁸ At the beginning of 1820 Beresford again travelled to Brazil, this time to insist on the return of D. João to Lisbon. But, like his brother in 1814, he failed in his mission. Beresford returned to Portugal and arrived in October 1820 to find himself in the middle of a revolution.

The Liberal revolution in Portugal in 1820, the return of D. João to Lisbon in 1821 (leaving behind his 24-year-old son D. Pedro as prince regent), the attempt by the Portuguese Cortes in 1821–2 to put the clock back to 1808 and ‘recolonise’ Brazil, Brazil’s declaration of independence in September 1822 and the acclamation of D. Pedro as emperor in October, created new opportunities for Britain to re-establish its political influence and consolidate its economic pre-eminence in Brazil.

The government of the independent empire of Brazil sought international recognition, not least in order to secure access to international capital markets for government loans. Recognition was also important, first, in order to forestall any attempt by Portugal to re-establish a Reino Unido, encouraged and possibly assisted by the reactionary Holy Alliance powers of Europe (Austria, Prussia and Russia), together with France, which had restored Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain; second, and ultimately more important, to maintain the unity of Brazil and to strengthen the new emperor’s authority in confronting loyalist, regionalist and separatist elements in the north-east and north of Brazil.

The movement for independence in Portuguese America had drawn its strength from the provinces of the centre–south – Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais – and especially from the capital, Rio de Janeiro. The provinces of the north-east and the north, which were closer to Portugal geographically, which were not economically integrated with the centre–south and which in many respects had closer historical ties with Lisbon than with Rio de Janeiro, and where there was still a considerable Portuguese military presence, sizeable Portuguese merchant communities and a good deal of pro-Portuguese sentiment, initially chose to remain loyal to Portugal. In July 1823, however, the military loyal to D. Pedro and the navy organised by the English mercenary, Lord Cochrane, fresh from his triumphs in Chile and Peru, crushed the opposition in Bahia, Maranhão and Pará.⁹

Apart from two kingdoms on the west coast of Africa, Benin and Lagos, the United States was the first to recognise the independent empire of Brazil. However, recognition by Great Britain was evidently more important. As Felisberto Caldeira Brant Pontes, the future marquês de Barbacena, D. Pedro’s representative in London, wrote in July 1823: ‘With the friendship of England we can snap our fingers at the rest of the world … It will not be necessary to go begging for recognition from any other power for all will wish our friendship’.¹⁰

Brazil was fortunate, therefore, in finding Britain, and in particular George Canning, who had become Foreign Secretary again a month after the suicide of Castlereagh in September 1822, for a variety of different reasons disposed to offer early recognition to Brazil. In the first place, the independence of Brazil was, in Canning’s view, a fait accompli. Portugal had neither the political will nor the financial and military resources to resist Brazilian independence. And Canning was already preparing to recognise several de facto independent Spanish American republics – Mexico, the Confederation of the Río de la Plata, Colombia and Chile. He was also anxious to preserve the monarchy in Brazil as an antidote to republicanism and what he regarded as the ‘evils of universal democracy’ on the American continent and as a vital link between the Old and New Worlds. ‘The conservation of the monarchy in one part at least of the great continent of America’, he wrote to Edward Thornton in Rio, ‘is an object of vital importance to the Old World’.¹¹ Of more immediate importance, the Anglo-Portuguese commercial treaty of 1810 was due to expire in 1825 after 15 years. Its acceptance and renewal by the independent empire of Brazil was regarded as imperative for the protection of Britain’s economic interests in the country. In the 1820s Brazil was, after the United States and Germany, the third largest market for British textiles and a whole range of manufactured consumer goods.

Finally, Brazil’s need for recognition also presented Britain with a unique opportunity to make significant progress on the slave trade question. In normal circumstances, given the importance of slavery to the Brazilian economy and the dependence of the slave system on the continued importation of slaves from Africa, it might have been thought impossible to persuade a newly independent Brazil to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. But Canning was quick to realise that Brazil’s anxiety for British recognition ‘put [her] at our mercy as to the continuation of the trade’. Brazil, he told the British abolitionist leader William Wilberforce, would have to be ‘purged of its impurity before we take it into our embraces’.¹² There would be no recognition without abolition.

Britain, however, also had economic and strategic interests in Portugal and treaty obligations to maintain the integrity of the Portuguese empire. It was preferable, therefore, that Portugal should first recognise the independence of Brazil – though this was not essential. In the negotiations between Portugal and Brazil held in London and mediated by Great Britain (and Austria) during July 1824 to February 1825, Canning made it clear that he was not prepared to wait indefinitely for Portuguese recognition of Brazilian independence. Any undue delay would endanger Brazil’s fragile political institutions as well as its precarious political and territorial unity.¹³ It would also threaten Britain’s political influence and commercial interests in Brazil and, above all, any chance of persuading Brazil to put an end to the slave trade. The conde de Subserra, one of Portugal’s representatives in the London negotiations, had no doubt that it was British policy to ‘cut all ties between Portugal and Brazil, converting the latter into a country completely dependent on Great Britain’ and Canning ‘appears already to have come to an agreement in this sense with the Brazilians’.¹⁴

Canning finally lost patience and decided that the time had come for Britain to act alone. He entrusted Sir Charles Stuart, British ambassador to Paris since 1815, with ‘a special mission of the greatest delicacy and importance’. He was to go to Lisbon, and make a final effort to convince the Portuguese to accept the independence of Brazil. However, whether or not he succeeded, he was to continue to Rio de Janeiro, where he would enter into negotiations directly with the Brazilians for a commercial treaty which would include the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade. The signing of such a treaty would evidently constitute British recognition of the independent Brazilian empire.

After tough negotiations in Lisbon Stuart finally persuaded D. João to accept the inevitability of Brazilian independence. He was granted permission to negotiate with the Brazilian government in the name of Portugal as well as Britain. On 29 August 1825 in Rio de Janeiro, after no less than 13 meetings with the Brazilian negotiating team, a treaty was signed by which D. João recognised his son D. Pedro as emperor of an independent Brazil. In return, Brazil agreed to pay Portugal compensation amounting to two million pounds sterling. The treaty was ratified by D. Pedro on 30 August and celebrations took place on 7 September, the third anniversary of Brazil’s declaration of independence from Portugal.

Now Brazil also had to pay a price to Britain for services rendered in securing international recognition of its independence – and for future British friendship and support. In October Brazil signed a treaty extending the 1810 commercial treaty and a treaty for the abolition of the slave trade. But Canning felt that Stuart, too eager to complete what he called ‘the most infernal mission I ever filled’ and anxious to leave Rio de Janeiro, ‘this detestable place’,¹⁵ had gone beyond his instructions and made too many concessions to the Brazilians. ‘This comes of a man thinking himself cleverer than the rest of mankind and believing himself to be protected by the King against the responsible Minister under whom he is acting’, Canning commented.¹⁶ He rejected the treaties and recalled Stuart. Although a year had been lost, the empire had become more secure and the situation therefore less favourable, Stuart’s successor, Robert Gordon (‘that ill-educated and stubborn Scot’ as D. Pedro called him) successfully negotiated two treaties with Brazil acceptable to Canning. Under the first, signed on 23 November 1826, the importation of slaves into Brazil would become entirely illegal three years after its ratification. The Royal Navy’s ‘right of search’ was extended to all Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves, north or south of the equator. Any ships detained would be sent for trial before the existing mixed commission courts in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Rio de Janeiro, which became Anglo-Brazilian courts. The treaty was ratified on 13 March 1827. The second treaty, signed in August 1827 and ratified three months later, maintained the maximum 15 per cent tariff on British goods imported into Brazil as well as the right to appoint special magistrates to deal with cases involving British subjects resident in Brazil and all the rights of British merchants under the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1810.¹⁷

Thus was concluded the process begun in 1810 by which Britain successfully transferred its privileged economic position in Portugal to Brazil, and at the same time secured the abolition (or at least the illegality) of the slave trade from Africa to Brazil. The foundations were laid for Britain’s economic and political domination in Brazil throughout the long 19th century. In the judgement of the US minister in Rio, Condy Raguet, in November 1825, ‘Brazil in continuation of Portugal has completely thrown herself into the arms of England and, to a certain extent, has transformed her colonial allegiance from one country to another’.¹⁸

There was anger and indignation in Brazil at the price paid to Great Britain for facilitating the recognition of its independence. Robert Gordon recognised that the Anglo-Brazilian treaties on trade and the abolition of the slave trade had been ‘ceded at our request in opposition to the views and wishes of the whole Empire’.¹⁹ The treaties were widely regarded as being an excessive (and possibly unnecessary) sacrifice of national interests (or at least the interests of the land-owning and slave-owning dominant class) and national sovereignty at the insistence of a powerful, imperial Britain, pursuing its own economic, political and ideological interests when the newly independent Brazilian empire was at its most vulnerable. Brazilian historians have in general agreed with contemporary opinion.²⁰

II

Under the Anglo-Brazilian treaty of 1826 the entire Brazilian slave trade became illegal in March 1830. The Brazilian government immediately came under intense British pressure to fulfil its treaty obligation to introduce legislation banning the importation of slaves into Brazil, and to enforce it. A law was finally passed on 7 November 1831. It was, as is often said, simply para inglês ver, that is to say, never intended to be enforced. Initially, some effort was made by customs officials, police [delegados] and judges to apprehend and free slaves illegally imported, but after a few years the task was largely abandoned. Brazilian demand for slaves continued to expand with the growth of the coffee sector and successive Brazilian governments proved unwilling and unable to enforce the 1831 law. Britain deployed its naval power to capture illegal Brazilian slave ships on the high seas and send them for adjudication before international tribunals set up for the purpose under the treaty of 1826: the Anglo-Brazilian mixed commissions in Freetown, Sierra Leone and Rio de Janeiro. However, Britain was hindered by limited powers and limited resources. Between 1831 and 1850 more than 750,000 slaves were imported into Brazil – all of them illegally.

When in 1844 the Brazilian government decided not only to revoke the commercial treaty with Britain but also the treaty for the abolition of the slave trade, the reaction of the British government was decisive – and possibly illegal. The controversial Slave Trade Brazil Act of 1845, the famous bill Aberdeen (named after Lord Aberdeen, the British Foreign Secretary), declared the Brazilian slave trade piracy under a controversial interpretation of the 1826 treaty, which was fiercely contested by Brazil. The British navy could capture Brazilian ships illegally engaged in the slave trade and send them for adjudication and, if condemned, the liberation of their slaves to British vice-Admiralty courts established in St Helena in the mid Atlantic, Sierra Leone on the west African coast and the Cape of Good Hope, which had been captured from the Dutch in 1795 during the Napoleonic Wars and incorporated into the British empire as the Cape Colony in 1815.

Nevertheless, despite the Aberdeen Act, the illegal slave trade continued to flourish. Indeed, in 1848 it reached its highest level when 60,000 slaves were imported into Brazil. For the first time there were signs that British pressure might soon be eased or even withdrawn. The British minister in Rio, Lord Howden, saw little chance of any progress on the slave trade question with any Brazilian government, Conservative or Liberal, and the issue was having a damaging effect on Anglo-Brazilian relations in general. ‘All parties are alike in their hatred of us’, he told Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary.²¹ At the same time, there were growing doubts in Britain itself about the efficacy of the antislave trade measures being adopted. Domestic opposition to Britain’s self-appointed role as the world’s anti-slave trade policeman was becoming more vocal, both in parliament and in the press.

Lord Palmerston, famous for views such as ‘half-civilized governments … require a dressing down every 8 or 10 years to keep them in order … and they must not only see the stick but actually feel it upon their shoulders’ [September 1850],²² desperately needed to bring the war on the Brazilian slave trade to a successful conclusion, if necessary by the use of greater force. In 1850 he strengthened the naval squadron in the South Atlantic and ordered it, under the Aberdeen Act, in blatant violation of Brazilian sovereignty, to seize suspected slave ships in Brazilian territorial waters and Brazilian ports. It was not long before shots were exchanged between British warships and Brazilian coastal fortresses, notably at Paranaguá in July.

The Brazilian Foreign Minister, Paulino Soares de Sousa, the future Visconde de Uruguai, argued that it was no longer possible for Brazil to resist ‘the ideas of the age in which we live’. The alternative to acquiescence in Britain’s demand that it should finally take the necessary steps to bring the illegal slave trade to an end was at best an endless series of violent conflicts with the British navy which would severely disrupt Brazil’s coastal trade, at worst total economic blockade and even war with Britain (at a time when Brazil was preparing to go to war with Rosas over Uruguay). The Brazilian empire was faced, it seemed, with a major threat to its sovereignty, its hard won unity and stability and its economic prosperity.

As it happened, probably for the first time since independence, British pressure was brought to bear on a government which, as a result of political change, administrative centralisation and economic growth in the 1840s, had the legitimacy and the resources to ignore the interests of the slave owners and take action against the slave trade. This was made somewhat easier by the fact that there was a temporary glut on the slave market. A new anti-slave trade law was enacted on 4 September 1850 and effectively enforced by provincial presidents, chiefs of police and local magistrates. Thus, the trade in slaves from Africa to Brazil, which had been pursued entirely legally for three hundred years and illegally, despite all Britain’s efforts, for the previous 20 years, came to a sudden, dramatic and permanent end. Only 3,278 slaves were imported into Brazil in 1851, fewer than 1,000 in 1852. The last known attempt to land slaves in Brazil occurred in 1855.²³

After 1850–1 the Aberdeen Act remained in force as an insurance against the revival of the slave trade, ‘to be used’, as Palmerston declared in 1858, ‘in case the Brazilians should revert to their bad courses. So long as you have the act in reserve, so long will the government of Brazil pursue the policy which you compelled them to adopt’.²⁴ (It was not repealed until 1869.) Throughout the 1850s and early 1860s British diplomats regularly complained – and with more than a hint that it might be necessary for Britain to take further action – about the condition of the so-called emancipados, the 4–5,000 slaves liberated by the Anglo-Portuguese and Anglo-Brazilian courts of mixed commission in Rio de Janeiro between 1819 and 1845 who were still alive.²⁵ ‘It was always with a threat on its lips that the English government spoke to Brazil’, Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo, the Brazilian minister to London, complained to Lord Clarendon, the British Foreign Secretary, in 1854.²⁶ British diplomats also regularly enquired about the fate of the Africanos livres, those 3–4,000 illegally imported slaves who had been liberated by the Brazilian authorities under the law of 1831 and more especially under the law of 1850. While nominally under the protection of the Brazilian government these freed slaves – both emancipados and Africanos livres (frequently lumped together as Africanos livres) were employed in public works or hired out to private individuals (legally for a maximum of 14 years – a term frequently and unilaterally extended) to prepare them for repatriation to Africa or a future of ‘free labour’ in Brazil. It was a well-known fact that most ended up in conditions close to slavery.²⁷ There is little doubt that British pressure, culminating in a speech on the subject of liberated Africans in Brazil by Lord Palmerston, now prime minister, in the House of Lords on 12 July 1864, in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Christie affair’ (see below), speeded up the concession of letters of emancipation to some 5,000 remaining Africanos livres by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice under a decree of 24 September.²⁸

More than this, it was the British government’s view that under the treaty of 1826 and the subsequent Brazilian legislation of 1831 all slaves in Brazil who had been imported after 1830 – and their children and grandchildren – were legally free.²⁹ In 1850, as the need for stronger British action against the Brazilian slave trade was debated in the House of Commons, the future Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone had declared that Britain had ‘a perfect right to go to Brazil and call upon her to emancipate every slave imported since 1830 and, upon refusal, to make war with them (sic) even to extermination’ (although he went on to express the hope that this right would not be exercised).³⁰ Within two years of the effective end of the trade Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo was pressed on the issue of the hundreds of thousands of slaves – more than three quarters of a million – imported into Brazil since 1830. He replied that to give way on this would be equivalent to emancipating the vast majority of slaves of working age and by seriously disrupting the slave system could not fail to ‘produce general revolution and annihilate the Brazilian Empire’. He therefore stated categorically that ‘ in slavery they must remain [na escravidão hão de ficar]’.³¹ However, politicians in London and diplomats in Rio kept the issue alive throughout the 1850s and 1860s until the issue was resolved in favour of the owners of illegally import slaves and their descendants, temporarily at least, by the creation of a national register of all existing slaves in 1872 (see Essay 4).

The British government was not directly involved in the final abolition of slavery in Brazil, but British public opinion, if not decisive, was certainly influential. Joaquim Nabuco, who had taken up the cause of abolition in parliament in 1879 and with the other Brazilian abolitionists had founded the Sociedade Brasileira contra Escravidao in September 1880, believed from the beginning that to be successful the struggle for abolition in Brazil would require worldwide support. He used three visits to London (February – May 1881, December 1881 – April 1884, April – August 1887) to raise international awareness of the continued existence of slavery in Brazil and mobilise international opinion in favour of its abolition, furnishing information in particular to his friend Charles Allen, the secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Allen in turn made sure that Brazilian slavery was given maximum coverage in the British press, especially in the London Times (for Nabuco ‘a voz da civilização’ [the voice of civilisation]) which had considerable influence in Brazil. The Brazilian slave-owners and their representatives in parliament, however, successfully resisted abolitionist pressure, both domestic and international, until May 1888 (see Essay 4.)

III

The Anglo-Brazilian commercial treaty of 1827 was always unpopular in Brazil. The 15 per cent maximum tariff on imported British goods – extended under most-favoured-nation agreements to other European countries and the United States – severely restricted the income of the Brazilian government, primarily derived from customs’ revenue. Britain offered no reciprocity: Brazil’s principal agricultural exports faced stiff competition in the British market from British colonial imports which benefited from preferential duties. The balance of trade was, therefore, overwhelmingly in Britain’s favour and the extraterritorial rights British subjects had in Brazil were thought incompatible with Brazil’s sovereignty as an independent nation.

When the British diplomat Henry Ellis arrived in Rio de Janeiro in November 1842 to negotiate the renewal of the treaty, which was due to expire after 15 years, he found both the press and public opinion ‘absurdly violent and impertinent’ in their opposition to ‘enslaving Brazil with treaties’.³² Britain invoked the two-year extension permitted under the treaty to allow further time for negotiation. But in 1844 Brazil revoked the commercial treaty with Britain, recovering its fiscal autonomy (duties on imports were immediately raised to between 25 and 30 per cent, and by the 1880s had reached almost 50 per cent) as well as its national sovereignty (the special British courts, the symbol of Britain’s extra-territorial rights in Brazil, were finally abolished). Ultimately the British government accepted Brazil’s decision to terminate the 1827 treaty with a certain equanimity because it was no longer necessary (if it had ever been necessary) for continued British predominance in Brazil’s international trade.

The proportion of total British exports worldwide absorbed by Brazil had declined from 15 per cent in the 1820s to less than ten per cent by the early 1840s, but in the middle decades of the 19th century Great Britain supplied around 50 per cent of Brazilian imports (48.4 per cent in 1842–3, 53.3 per cent in 1852–3, 51.5 per cent in 1872–3).³³ British ‘commercial houses’ in Brazil imported and distributed British goods, 75 per cent of which were textiles (cottons, woollens, linens, etc.) but which also included a wide range of other manufactured consumer goods from ironware, cutlery, porcelain and glass to furniture, pianos and clothing, some foodstuffs, medicines and raw materials, especially coal. Later in the century capital goods, including industrial and agricultural machinery and above all equipment for the railways, were more important. However, the British share of the Brazilian market declined in the late empire and early republic; it was only 31.4 per cent in 1900, and 25–30 per cent in the period immediately before the First World War.

Three agricultural products, all based on slave labour, accounted for between 70 and 80 per cent of Brazil’s exports during the empire. All three experienced substantial growth as a result of growing world demand, but their relative importance in Brazil’s international trade changed over time. In the middle decades of the century sugar accounted for 20–30 per cent of exports, but by the 1880s, facing strong Caribbean, especially Cuban, competition in world markets, and the growth of beet production in Europe, it had declined to less than ten per cent. Cotton accounted for between five and 10 per cent of Brazil’s exports in the mid 19th century, but as much as 20 per cent during the American Civil War when US production suffered a collapse, only to fall to less than five per cent at the end of the empire as a result of the renewal of exports from the United States and the emergence of a new competitor, Egypt. Coffee rose steadily from 20–30 per cent of Brazilian exports in the 1820s and 1830s, to 50 per cent in the 1850s, and between 60 and 70 per cent in the final two decades of the empire when it had become by far the most important factor responsible for Brazil’s increasing integration in the international economy. Brazil was by this time supplying 60–70 per cent of the world’s coffee. Brazil also exported tobacco, cacao, hides and various woods. At the end of the empire rubber, tapped by seringueiros [rubber tappers] in the Amazonian rainforest, was also beginning to be a significant Brazilian export. In response to growing world demand, exports of rubber increased from fewer than 1,500 tons in 1850 to 7,000 tons in 1880 and 17,000 tons in 1887 when it accounted for almost 15 per cent of Brazil’s exports. In the boom years immediately before the First World War and the crash that was to follow the war – a crash that originated in the legendary ‘botanical theft’ of 70,000 rubber seeds from the Amazon rainforest by the British adventurer Henry Wickham in 1876, their unauthorised exportation to Liverpool and thence to Kew Gardens, and the subsequent transfer of 2,000 seeds to plantations in South Asia – rubber made up 40 per cent of Brazilian exports.

As well as Brazilian imports, British commercial houses handled the bulk of Brazil’s exports. For example, Edward Johnston & Co., founded in 1842 (later Brazilian Warrant, c.1910), and Phipp Brothers & Co were prominent houses exporting coffee, the empire’s major export.³⁴ Three of the five houses responsible for 80 per cent of Brazil’s rubber exports at the end of the empire were also British. And British shipping companies were primarily responsible for carrying Brazil’s exports to foreign markets. Britain itself, however, only imported around 25–35 per cent of Brazil’s exports during the empire (27.9 per cent in 1842–3, 35.5 per cent in 1852–3, 36.9 per cent in 1872–3), and less than 15 per cent by the beginning of the 20th century.³⁵ The British simply did not drink enough coffee. Brazilian coffee was exported in British ships mainly to markets in the United States but also to Europe, particularly France, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia.

The City of London provided all the loans to the Brazilian government and most of the foreign capital invested in Brazil. Loans were made to Brazil of £1.7 million in August 1824 and £2 million in January 1825, and several more of between half a million and one million during the following three decades. In 1855 N. M. Rothschild and Sons became the exclusive agents of the Brazilian government (until 1908), responsible for all the loans raised in London. Two loans totalling £3.8 million in 1863 and one of £7 million in September 1865 ‘to meet the extraordinary expenses of the Empire’ were raised on the eve of the Paraguayan War. Further loans of between £3.5 million and £6.5 million were provided in 1871, 1875, 1883, 1886 and 1888. At the end of the empire 98 per cent of the Brazilian public debt (£33.6 million) had originated in loans raised in London.³⁶ After the establishment of the Republic the Rothschilds brokered a funding loan to the federal government of £10 million in 1898, described by Marcelo de Paiva Abreu as ‘a watershed in the financial and monetary history of Brazil: it involved a renegotiation of the foreign debt … and conditionalities which entailed a domestic adjustment programme that was designed to balance the budget and stabilize the exchange rate’.³⁷ Various substantial loans were made to state and municipal governments in the first decade of the 20th century and the Brazilian federal government secured a further funding loan of £15 million in London in 1914.

British direct investment in Brazil was modest before the 1860s when the first British commercial banks were established in Rio de Janeiro and the first joint stock enterprises began investing in early railway development and public utilities. Until then, since the mobility of domestic capital was not yet highly institutionalised, British commercial houses provided valuable financial services not only to the British communities in Brazil but also to local Brazilian clients in commerce and agriculture, and invested, modestly, in land, mining and food processing. Between 1865 and 1885, however, direct British investment in Brazil more than tripled from £7.3 million to £24.4 million, and reached £40.6 million in 1895. Until 1895 virtually all foreign investment in Brazil was British. Direct investment by Britain more than tripled again between 1895 and 1913 when it stood at £134.2 million. But by 1905 British investment was only 75 per cent of total foreign investment, and in 1913 it had dropped to 65 per cent.³⁸

Almost 80 per cent of British capital was directed towards the development of Brazil’s railway network and urban public utilities in Brazil’s major cities. The first British railway (though not the first railway in Brazil) was the Recife & São Francisco Railway (1858), followed by the Bahia & São Francisco Railway, the Minas & Rio Railway and, above all, the San Paolo Railway Company. A Inglesa as it was known, which began operations in 1867, was one of the great engineering feats of the Victorian era: only 139 kilometres long but rising 3,000 feet from Santos on the coast via the city of São Paulo, where the Estação da Luz, the third station built on the same site, became (and still is) one of the landmark buildings in the city, to Jundiaí on the edge of the expanding coffee frontier. In the 1880s British investors acquired, British engineers constructed or developed (with imported British track and rolling stock) and British managers and workers operated the Brazil Great Southern Railway, the Great Western of Brazil Railway Co., a network of 1,700 kilometres in Pernambuco and three other states in the north-east, and the Leopldina Railway Co. (Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo), the largest of Brazil’s networks. The British owned three railways in 1865, 11 in 1880, 14 in 1885 and 25 in 1889.³⁹

The British also invested in urban tramways, water and sewage, gas, later electric energy and telephones in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, Belém and other cities; in the modernisation of the ports of Rio de Janeiro and Santos; in telegraph lines from Pará in the north to Rio Grande do Sul in the south (Western and BrazilianTelegraph Co.) and transatlantic telegraph lines from Brazil to Europe and the United States (Brazil Submarine Telegraph Co.); in coffee plantations, coffee warehouses and a commodity exchange; in gold mining (the St John d’el Rey Mining Company, Morro Velho)⁴⁰; in textile factories (J. & P. Coats), shoe factories (Clark Shoe Co.), breweries, flour mills (the Rio de Janeiro Flour Mills and Granaries) and sugar centrales in Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and Pernambuco; in shipping lines providing regular service along the Brazilian coast and across the Atlantic (the Royal Mail Steam Packet, Lamport and Holt, the Anglo-Brazilian Steam Navigation Co., Booth Steamship Co.); in insurance companies (Marine Insurance, the Royal Insurance of Liverpool, the Liverpool and London Globe, Guardian Assurance); and not least in commercial banks (the London & Brazilian Bank, the first, was founded in 1862; the English Bank of Rio de Janeiro; the London and River Plate Bank). By the end of the empire the London & Brazilian was the biggest foreign bank with branches throughout Brazil from Manaus and Belém to Curitiba and Porto Alegre.⁴¹ In 1913 more than half the insurance companies operating in Brazil were British, and British banks held a third of total bank assets, domestic and foreign, in Brazil.

IV

Was Brazil part of Britain’s ‘informal empire’ in Latin America? The idea that in any discussion of the British empire and British imperialism in the 19th century it is important to make a distinction between formal empire – in which a particular territory and population came under the political-administrative and even the legal-constitutional control of the imperial state – and other forms of political subordination resulting from the expansion of the global capitalist economy dominated by Great Britain – has a long history. Lenin in 1916, for example, described Persia, Egypt and China as ‘semi-colonial countries’. The expression ‘informal empire’ was apparently invented by C.R. Fay in his Imperial Economy and its Place in the Foundations of Economic Doctrine, 1600–1932 (Oxford, 1934) and repeated in his chapter ‘The movement towards free trade, 1820–53’ in the Cambridge History of British Empire, volume II: The Growth of the New Empire 1783–1870 (1940). It was used, principally in relation to Africa, in a pioneering and extremely influential article by J. Gallagher and R.E. Robinson, ‘The imperialism of free trade’ in the journal Economic History Review (1953) and in their book Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (1961). It was used for the first time in relation to Latin America in the 19th century in an article by H.S. (Harry) Ferns, ‘Britain’s informal empire in Argentina, 1806–1914’ in the journal Past and Present (1953) and in his book Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (1960).⁴² As it refers to Latin America, the concept has had a long and interesting life, but it was always the target of criticism from those who believed it to be analytically imprecise and vulnerable to specialised empirical research.⁴³

After the British invasion of the Río de la Plata in 1806–7, an attempt to liberate as much as to conquer Spanish America, at least in its inception totally unauthorised, which lasted only a year and a half and ended with the expulsion of the British forces, Great Britain never showed itself willing to assume the political and military burdens of empire in South or Central America. Britain had only two ‘Crown colonies’ in South America in the 19th century – British Guiana (partly contested by Venezuela and Brazil) and the Falklands Islands/ Islas Malvinas (contested by Argentina) – and one in Central America: British Honduras/Belize. South America was the only area of the world to remain largely free of empire in the 19th century, the British empire or the empire of any other European power. However, the argument is that the independent Spanish American republics in South America, especially Argentina, and the independent empire of Brazil were part of Britain’s informal empire.

For more than a century – from the Napoleonic wars and, more especially, from the dramatic events of 1807–8 in the Iberian Peninsula which eventually led to the breakup of the American empires of Spain and Portugal, to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 (and to a lesser degree until the 1929 Depression and even the Second World War) – Britain was the dominant external actor in the economic and, to a lesser extent, political affairs of Latin America, especially South America. This is not difficult to explain. Firstly, Britain had been ‘present at the creation’; the foundations of Britain’s political, commercial and financial preeminence were firmly laid at the time of the formation of the independent Latin American states during the second and third decades of the 19th century. Secondly, from 1815 until 1860 or 1870 Britain exercised an unchallenged global hegemony and, until 1914, a somewhat less secure global supremacy. The Royal Navy ruled the waves. Thirdly, and most importantly, Britain, the ‘first industrial nation’, the ‘workshop of the world’, supplied most of the manufactured and capital goods imported into Latin America, and the City of London, the world’s major source of capital, supplied most of the loans granted to the new Latin American governments and most of the capital invested in Latin American infrastructure (above all, railways and public utilities), agriculture and mining. Moreover, Britain had more than half the world’s merchant shipping and British ships carried the bulk of the produce exported from Latin America to markets throughout the world. Finally, Britain itself was a major market for Latin American food and raw materials.

To justify the use of the concept ‘informal empire’, however, British predominance in trade and finance, it could be argued, is necessary but not sufficient. What is also required is the exercise of political influence, combined perhaps with the threat of coercion, in order to persuade a formally independent state to adopt policies in the interest of the imperial power – thus restricting its own national sovereignty.

There are many examples in 19th-century Latin America of political armtwisting behind the scenes by British diplomats inclined to act in a high-handed ‘imperialistic’ manner (not least because they were effectively three to six months away from the Foreign Office). On a few occasions, notably the Anglo-French blockade of the Río de la Plata in the mid 1840s and the Anglo-German-Italian blockade of Venezuela in 1902–3 – Britain (with other powers) resorted to demonstrations of naval force (gunboat diplomacy) for the protection of the lives, liberties and properties of British subjects, for the promotion of trade or the collection of debts. On the whole, however, considering the extent of Britain’s economic superiority –and Britain’s overwhelming naval supremacy – British governments more often than not exercised a considerable degree of restraint and were generally extremely reluctant to engage in direct interference, much less intervention, in the internal affairs of the Latin American sovereign states.

In the historiography on Britain’s informal empire in Latin America Argentina not only received, as we have seen, but continues to receive, the most attention. The four principal chapters – by Alan Knight, David Rock, Colin M. Lewis and Charles Jones – in the most recent study of British informal empire in Latin America, Matthew Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital (Oxford, 2008), are all on Argentina. But what of Brazil? The 19th century was for Brazil ‘o século inglês’ [the English century]. British domination of Brazil’s trade was largely unchallenged in the period from independence to c.1870/80 (see above). Britain remained Brazil’s main trading partner until the First World War, supplying manufactured and capital goods and carrying the bulk of Brazilian exports to markets throughout the world. But Britain’s share of the Brazilian market, never more than 55 per cent, declined steadily after 1870/80, as we have seen. This was in large part a consequence of Britain’s overall relative decline. As other European nations, especially Germany, and the United States industrialised Britain’s share of manufacturing output and world trade inevitably fell. British industry also failed to remain competitive; it was no longer at the forefront of technological change. Britain simply could not compete with Germany, whose share of the Brazilian market reached almost 20 per cent in 1913, or the United States in producing and selling the goods for which Brazilian demand was rising most rapidly: modern electrical goods, chemicals, proprietary drugs and automobiles. In 1901 German and US exports to Brazil combined were two-thirds the value of British exports; by 1912 British exports were three-quarters the value of the combined German and US exports.⁴⁴ At the same time, the growth of manufacturing industry in Brazil had reached a point where many of the goods (especially textiles) which had dominated Britain’s export trade for more than a century were increasingly produced domestically.

Britain, did, however, remain by far the most important source of loans to government, federal, state and municipal, and direct investment in Brazil up to the First World War, although there was by this time some very modest French and German as well as US direct investment. One consequence of this, for example in the case of the funding loan of 1898, as we have seen, was the insistence by Britain on behalf of British creditors that Brazilian governments pursue orthodox monetary and fiscal policies, that is to say, balancing the budget and maintaining a stable currency. Latin American historians, sociologists and economists of the ‘dependency school’ in the 1970s and 1980s argued that Brazil’s ‘dependence’ on British finance, and in particular the ‘conditionalities’ attached to British loans, reinforced the structural obstacles to the independent economic development of Brazil, principally the accumulation of capital for industrialisation. In so far as this is true, and the argument remains highly controversial, it was only one of several factors which explain the underdevelopment of Brazil in the 19th century (compared, for example, with the United States). And it should be remembered that after the difficult relationship with Britain during the period of independence the political and economic elites of the empire and early republic Brazil (‘collaborating elites’ if you will) welcomed British economic ‘penetration’ and pursued with considerable enthusiasm the model of capitalist modernisation through external borrowing, direct foreign investment, growth based on agricultural and mineral exports, and integration into world markets.

As for political influence, coercion or the threat of coercion to oblige the Brazilian government to adopt domestic and external policies against its own interests, the commercial treaty and the treaty for the abolition of the slave trade imposed on Brazil in return for recognition of its independence and certainly the 20-year-long campaign for the abolition of the illegal Brazilian slave trade could be seen in this light. Intense British diplomatic pressure on Brazilian governments to oblige Brazil to fulfil its treaty obligations, the use of force by the Royal Navy on the high seas for the suppression of the trade, and finally the deployment of British warships against slave ships in Brazilian territorial waters in 1850, which finally forced the Brazilian government to take the necessary steps to end the trade, constitute a prime example of Britain acting as an imperial power in its relations with the independent empire of Brazil, albeit for a predominantly humanitarian cause.⁴⁵

In December 1862 William D. Christie, a particularly arrogant and overbearing British minister, who had already irritated the Brazilian government by consistently championing the cause of the emancipados, Africanos livres and slaves illegally imported since 1831, authorised a naval blockade of Rio de Janeiro as a reprisal for the failure to pay compensation for the plundering of a British vessel The Prince of Wales after it sank off the coast of Rio Grande do Sul in June 1861 and the alleged mistreatment of three British naval officers of HMS Forte accused of misconduct on the streets of Rio in June 1862. It lasted only six days and only five Brazilian merchant vessels were seized. But the Brazilian government regarded it as unacceptable ‘aggression’, and in May 1863 broke off diplomatic relations with Britain. Christie, criticised by the British community in Rio, by commercial interests in Manchester and London and by the opposition in parliament, was withdrawn. After arbitration (in Brazil’s favour) by Leopold II, king of Belgium and mediation by the king of Portugal, diplomatic relations were restored in September 1865 when Edward Thornton, the British minister in Buenos Aires, conveyed the apologies of Queen Victoria to D. Pedro II at Uruguaiana, where the Emperor was visiting Brazilian troops at the start of the Paraguayan War (1864–70). Thus, the ‘Christie affair’ ended in a diplomatic victory for Brazil.⁴⁶

It is a myth that Britain manipulated Brazil (and Argentina) into waging war against Paraguay and played a decisive role in the Paraguayan War (1864– 70) (see Essay 3). The British government was not directly involved in the final abolition of slavery in Brazil, as we have seen (above). Nor was Britain involved in the fall of the empire and the proclamation of a republic in 1889. An attempt was made to extract a new commercial treaty which would diminish the tariffs on British goods imported into Brazil in exchange for British recognition of the new republican government, but it failed.⁴⁷ The British minister in Rio and the commander of the British naval forces stationed in Guanabara Bay were strictly neutral during the Brazilian naval revolt against President Floriano Peixoto (September 1893 to March 1894), despite some British commercial losses, though Floriano spread rumours that the British secretly supported the rebels in order to restore the monarchy in Brazil.⁴⁸

In January 1895 the British occupied and hoisted the Union Jack over Trindade, a desolate and uninhabited island (not much more than a rock) in the middle of the Atlantic 500 miles east of Rio de Janeiro with the aim of establishing a cable station there. In Brazil there were violent anti-British protests in July and August 1895, however, similar to the anti-British protests in 1863 (the ‘Christie affair’). In August 1896 Britain accepted defeat and withdrew. In the long standing dispute between Britain and Brazil over the huge (30,000 sq. km), largely uninhabited territory to the north of the Amazon basin between Brazil and British Guiana the British, however, scored a notable victory. Portuguese and later Brazilian claims to the territory had been challenged by Britain following Sir Robert Schomburgk’s explorations on behalf of the Royal Geographic Society in the 1840s. In November 1901, after failing to reach agreement for decades, the two sides finally agreed to international arbitration by the king of Italy. Joaquim Nabuco, Brazilian minister in London at the time, spent the following year preparing the Brazilian case in the form of a memorandum Frontières du Brésil et de la Guyane Anglaise. Le droit du Brésil in five volumes. After the British had also presented their case in a written memorandum, Nabuco and his six assistants during the summer of 1903 prepared the Brazilian response: La Pretention Anglaise; Notes sur la partie historique du Première Mémorie Anglais; and La Preuve Cartographique. A third memorandum, in four parts, concluding with an Exposé final, was prepared in the winter of 1903–4. In the end Brazil submitted a total of 2,000 written pages, plus maps and documents, in no less than 18 volumes. On 14 June 1904, Nabuco, confident of victory, was summoned to the Quirinal, together with the British ambassador to Rome, to receive King Victor Emanuel III’s decision, which was to award three-fifths of the territory in dispute to Britain.⁴⁹

Finally, there is the question of cultural imperialism. The volume Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, cited above, attempts (not always convincingly) to incorporate the ‘cultural turn’ in contemporary historical research into the debate about informal empire. In his introduction Matthew Brown argues that, beyond trade, capital and political control, for informal empire to exist ‘there must be a demonstrable role for culture, either in supporting [political and diplomatic] relationships, or as an independent variable (as in a local consciousness of asymmetrical power relations) …The tentacles of informal empire must be found on the ground and in the … minds of the citizens and nations whose sovereignty is being compromised. Informal empire must be lived, and known’.⁵⁰ In Brazil, as we will see, the ‘cultural encounters’ between the British and the Brazilians, the ‘day-to-day relationships formed between colonized, colonizers and their many mediators’, were quite limited, except perhaps in the case of Protestantism and football, and the social and cultural influence Britain had in Brazil was readily accepted and absorbed. Moreover, external social, cultural – and intellectual – influences on the Brazilian elite during both the empire and the early republic were as much, if not more, French as British.

V

In his book Os ingleses no Brasil (1948) Gilberto Freyre brilliantly examines the influence of the small communities of British subjects established in the ports of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife since the opening of Brazil to foreign trade in 1808, and of imported British manufactured consumer goods, on the private, everyday social lives of the Brazilian urban upper and middle classes in the first half of the 19th century.⁵¹

The second half of the 19th century and the period before the First World War witnessed mass immigration to Brazil. First the Portuguese, thus strengthening the existing Portuguese presence in the social and cultural life of the independent Brazilian empire, then Italians, Spanish, East Europeans and finally (from 1908) Japanese arrived in Brazil in great numbers. Over two million immigrants, two thirds of them Italian, entered Brazil between 1889 and 1914. There was no mass British immigration to Brazil. The British working class preferred to go to Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Several hundred English and Irish agricultural labourers were attracted to colonisation schemes in southern Brazil between 1867 and 1873 – but they all failed.⁵² On the other hand, as a result of the deepening of economic relations between Brazil and Great Britain the British communities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife, joined now by smaller communities in São Paulo and Santos as well as other Brazilian port cities, grew. At the end of the empire there were already 1,500 British residents in Rio de Janeiro, several hundred in Salvador, Recife, Santos/São Paulo, and smaller numbers in Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, São Luis de Maranhão, Belém and Manaus. The character of the British communities changed; they no longer consisted primarily of diplomats, merchants, judges, lawyers and a few artisans (tailors, carpenters, etc.). They now also included civil engineers, technicians and skilled workers on the railways and the mines, managers and administrative staff of railways, urban public utilities, banks, telegraph, shipping and insurance companies as well as teachers and missionaries – many with their families.⁵³

The British in Brazil had their own country clubs, schools, hospitals, churches, cemeteries and newspapers. As elsewhere in the empire – and informal empire – the British communities in Brazil tried to be as exclusive and self-contained as possible, but inevitably interacted with, and therefore had an impact on, local Brazilian society (lifestyles, fashion, food, language, values, etc.). Anglican churches and non-conformist missionaries, like the Scottish Congregationalists, and from the mid 1850s the London-based evangelical organisations and publishers, the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded in 1804) and the Religious Tract Society (founded in 1799), certainly played a key role in the growth of Protestantism and ideas of religious liberty and pluralism in a predominantly Catholic country.⁵⁴ The British introduced Brazilians to many outdoor sports: tennis, cycling, rowing and sailing, golf (the nine-hole golf course in São Paulo was called the Morro dos Ingleses), rugby, horse racing, athletics (the São Paulo Athletics Club founded in 1880), cricket (the English Paysandú Cricket Club, the Rio Cricket Club in Niterói) and, above all, football – this perhaps the most lasting influence on Brazilian society and culture.⁵⁵

There is some evidence of a kind of football being played by students at Jesuit Colleges and British merchant seamen and sailors in Brazil in the 1870s and 1880s, but it is generally agreed that modern football in Brazil dates from the arrival in Santos of a 19-year old English student Charles Miller in October 1894. Miller, who had been born in Brazil, the son of a Scottish father and a Brazilian mother, had been at school in Southampton and arrived with two leather footballs, an air pump, football kit and boots, and a copy of the FA Rules of the Game (first published in 1863). He quickly persuaded the São Paulo Athletics Club to adopt football. The first football match in Brazil was between the São Paulo Railway Team against the Gas Team (from the municipal gas supply company) in April 1895. An Anglo-Swiss-Brazilian Oscar Cox brought football to Rio from Europe in 1897. Clubs were formed in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Recife (Naútico in 1901, Sport in 1905) and throughout Brazil. From an elite sport it soon became a popular sport with the creation of factory clubs: for example, Votorantim Athletics Club in the British owned Fábrica de Tecidos Votorantim in Sorocaba in the interior of São Paulo; Bangú in the British-managed textile firm Companhia Progresso Industrial do Brasil in the Zona Norte of Rio de Janeiro. The famous British amateur club Corinthians visited Brazil in 1910, 1913 and 1914 (but forced to turn back because of the outbreak of the First World War); the professional club Exeter City played three games in Rio in 1914. In 1922 Lima Barreto wrote: ‘Everyone in this good city of Rio, provided they are not leaden footed … plays the so-called British sport’.⁵⁶

On the elite of the late empire and the early Republic, however, the predominant social and cultural outside influence was French. Since the arrival of the French Artistic Mission in 1816 art and architecture in Brazil had been heavily French-influenced. French fashion was the most sought after. French operas by Mayerbeer, Ambroise Thomas, Offenbach and Gounod were performed in the many opera houses of Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities, although Italian opera – Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi – dominated. French literature was the most widely read. French thinkers, for example, the philosopher and historian Ernest Renan, Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, who is best remembered for his theories on race, and, above all, the philosopher Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, who died in 1857, were also prominent in Brazilian intellectual life

It is now recognised that English, Scottish and Irish novelists – Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, and so on – made a significant contribution to the formation of the Brazilian novel, though their work was often read in French translation.⁵⁷ A number of British men of letters were widely read by Brazilian intellectuals: Jeremy Bentham, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, author of the classic On Liberty (1859), the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, whom Rui Barbosa much admired, Walter Bagehot whose The English Constitution (1867) had a profound influence on the political thinking of Joaquim Nabuco and, above all perhaps, the sociologist and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer.⁵⁸

Among Brazilian public intellectuals Joaquim Nabuco was exceptional in the extent to which he was influenced by English ideas. He recognised that the ‘dominant cosmopolitan passion’ of most members of the Brazilian political, social, cultural and intellectual elite was Paris. He himself described a meeting with Renan in Paris as ‘my greatest literary influence in life, the most perfect intoxicant of the spirit … my intellectual coup de foudre’.⁵⁹ But he preferred London, the imperial metropolis, to Paris. His life-long admiration for England and all things English is given full expression in the chapters on Bagehot, London, 32 Grosvenor Gardens (the residence of the Brazilian minister in London, the barão de Penedo, during the late Empire), the English influence and the English spirit in his literary, intellectual and political autobiography Minha formação (Rio de Janeiro: Garnier, 1900).⁶⁰

Jeffrey Needell concludes his study of the belle époque in Rio de Janeiro thus: ‘By 1900, a member of the Carioca elite was part of a profoundly Europhile culture that informed every aspect of his or her life … all [the] delicate and crucial aspects of culture and society were increasingly informed by the Franco-English aristocratic paradigms accepted by this tropical elite as Civilization.’ [Author’s italics.]⁶¹

VI

The First World War brought to an end the international order of the ‘long 19th century’ which had been dominated by Great Britain. Between the First and Second World Wars the United States overtook Britain as the world’s leading industrial and creditor nation. The United States steadily increased its trade and investments with its neighbours in Latin America. Britain strengthened its commercial and financial ties with the empire, and especially the Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), at the expense of Latin America, with the exception of Argentina (until the post-war period). In Brazil, the United States, which had been for a long time the main market for Brazil’s principal export, coffee, now replaced Britain as Brazil’s main source of manufactured and capital goods. Britain’s share of the Brazilian market fell to 20 per cent during the 1920s and 10 per cent during the 1930s. Britain imported only three to five per cent of Brazilian exports during the 1920s and nine to 12 per cent during the 1930s. British direct investment declined during the 1920s, but in 1930 Britain remained the principal foreign investor in Brazil and still held the bulk of Brazil’s external debt. During the 1930s and the Second World War (and the immediate post-war period) British investments in Brazil fell dramatically. At the same time the United States replaced Britain as the main source of capital: portfolio and direct. The Second World War also strengthened political, military and cultural relations between the United States and Brazil. The hegemonic transition in Brazil, from Great Britain to the United States, was complete.

Appendix

British writers and artists in 19th century Brazil

The transfer of the Portuguese Court to Rio de Janeiro and the opening of Brazil’s ports to world, especially British, trade in 1808, and the close political and economic relations between Britain and Brazil in the century up to the First World War brought many British travellers to Brazil, some of whom took up residence. Among the dozens of books on Brazil published by British visitors and residents the most notable are the following:⁶²

• John Mawe, Travels in the Interior of Brazil, Particularly in the Gold and Diamond Districts of that Country (London, 1812; 2nd expanded edn., 1821). Mawe, a mineralogist from Derbyshire, was the first foreigner allowed to visit the gold and diamond mines of Minas Gerais.

• John Luccock, Notes on Rio de Janeiro and the Southern Parts of Brazil Taken During a Residence of Ten Years in that Country from 1808 to 1818 (London, 1820), described by the great 19th century Brazilian historian Varnhagen as ‘the most faithful portrayal of the material, moral and intellectual state of the capital of Brazil’ in the years immediately after the arrival of the Portuguese Court. Luccock was a cloth merchant from Leeds importing textiles and other manufactured goods from West Yorkshire.

• Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil, in the Years from 1809 to 1815 (London, 1816; 2nd edn., 2 vols., 1817). Koster was a British merchant who had grown up in Portugal and established himself in Pernambuco in 1809 as a sugar planter.

• Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence there During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London, 1824), one of the best – and most quoted – accounts of Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro, at the time of independence. Graham, later Lady Calcott, was the wife of a British naval officer who visited Brazil in 1821–2 on her way to Chile and in 1823 on her way back to England. She returned in 1824 at the invitation of the Emperor D. Pedro to serve as tutor and governess to his daughter Princess Maria da Glória.

• Rev. Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (2 vols., London, 1830). Walsh, an Irish Anglican clergyman, was chaplain to the British mission in Rio de Janeiro.

• John Armitage, The History of Brazil, from the Period of the Arrival of the Braganza family in 1808 to the Abdication of Dom Pedro the First in 1831 (2 vols., London, 1836). Armitage spent eight years in Rio de Janeiro as a merchant from 1828 to 1835. Planned as a sequel to Robert Southey’s three volume History of Brazil,⁶³ this was the first history of the period 1808–31, based on state documents and other primary sources as well first-hand knowledge of the country. Translated into Portuguese in 1837 it remained a fundamental text for all later historians of the period.

• George Gardner, Travels in the Interior of Brazil Principally through the Northern Provinces and the Gold Mining Districts During the Years 1836–41 (1846). Gardner, who was later Superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens of Ceylon, went to Brazil to collect botanical specimens and penetrated parts of south-east, central and north-east Brazil rarely visited by foreigners.

• Alfred Russel Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (London, 1853) and Henry Walter Bates, A Naturalist on the River Amazons (2 vols., 1863). Wallace and Bates, aged 25 and 23 respectively, travelled to Pará in 1848 intending to collect for private dealers and for Kew Gardens, which had been reorganised in 1841 and formally recognised as the national botanic garden under the direction of Sir William Hooker (and later his son Sir Joseph Hooker). They remained together for two years, parting company in 1850. Wallace spent two more years on the Rio Negro and the Orinoco before returning to England, Bates another nine years on the Solimões and Upper Amazon. The books as well as the journals and letters of these two great British naturalists made an enormous contribution to scientific knowledge of the Amazon in the mid 19th century.⁶⁴ As an appendix to his volume Wallace included notes on the natural history, geography and geology of the Amazon valley and its aboriginal tribes, with vocabularies of Amazonian languages, which represent a mere fragment of the physical history of the Amazon he had planned to write. He became co-founder with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin believed Bates second only to Humboldt in his knowledge of tropical forests and regarded his book ‘the best book of natural history travels ever published in England’.⁶⁵

• Richard Spruce, Palmae Amazonicae (London, 1869), The Hepaticae of the Amazon and the Andes of Peru and Ecuador (1885) and Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes (2 vols., 1908) edited by Alfred Russel Wallace. Spruce (age 32, though with an established reputation for his work in Yorkshire and the Pyrenees) went to the Amazon in 1849, a year after Wallace and Bates. He stayed in northern Brazil, Peru and Ecuador for 15 years until 1864. Wallace and Bates were primarily entomologists, Spruce a botanist (though all three, it should be said, were also explorers, geographers, geologists, anthropologists, linguists, and much else besides).⁶⁶

• William Scully, Brazil; its Provinces and Chief Cities, the Manners and Customs of the People, Agriculture, Commerce and Other Statistics (London, 1866). Scully was the Irish-born proprietor and editor of the Anglo-Brazilian Times, published in Rio de Janeiro from 1865 to 1884.

• Sir Richard Burton, Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil, with a Full Account of the Gold and Diamond Mines, also Canoeing Down 1500 miles of the Great River São Francisco from Sabará to the Sea (2 vols., 1869). The great ‘orientalist’ and explorer was British consul in Santos 1865–68. Apart from travel, Burton’s other great passion was translation, with Portuguese, which he learned in Goa, his favourite language after Arabic. While in Brazil, besides translating Camoes’ Lusiads, Burton translated several Brazilian works, including José Basílio da Gama’s epic 18th-century poem O Uraguai (1769) and two contemporary novels, José de Alencar’s Iracema (1865) and João Manuel Pereira da Silva’s Manuel de Moraes (1866).⁶⁷

• Charles Barrington Brown and William Lidstone, Fifteen Thousand Miles on the Amazon and its Tributaries (London, 1878). Brown, a geologist, and Lidstone, a civil engineer, were employees of the Amazon Steam Navigation Company 1873–5.

• James W. Wells, Exploring and Travelling Three Thousand Miles Through Brazil from Rio de Janeiro to Maranhão (2 vols., London, 1886). Wells was a civil engineer who made this journey in 1873– 5. His travels overlapped in many places with those taken earlier by George Gardner and Richard Burton.

• J.P. Wileman, Brazilian Exchange: the Study of an Inconvertible Currency (Buenos Aires, 1896). Wileman was a British civil engineer who lived in Rio Grande do Sul for many years and died in Rio in 1914. His book was the first systematic analysis of Brazil’s financial history, covering the period from 1860 to 1894, and a major influence on the governments of the new Brazilian republic. He also founded in 1898 the weekly Brazilian Review (edited after 1914 by his son H.F. Wileman under the title Wileman’s Brazilian Review until 1941), an important source of economic, financial and business news, aimed at subscribers abroad.

• H. M. Tomlinson, The Sea and the Jungle (Being the Narrative of the Voyage of the Tramp Steamer Capella, 1909 and 1910 (London, 1912), an account of a journey from England to Pará, along the Amazon and Madeira rivers, and back again. The book is considered a classic of travel literature.

British artists, professional and amateur, some spending lengthy periods in Brazil but many of them like naval officers or official artists on Royal Navy ships spending only days or weeks, made significant contributions to the iconography of Brazil in the 19th century. Their work is scattered in collections, public and private, throughout the world. The following either had their work published in albums at the time or were the subject of later studies:

• Richard Bate, a merchant (optics and nautical instruments) and gifted amateur artist, who spent 20 years in Rio de Janeiro between 1808 and 1848.⁶⁸

• William Swainson, botanist and ornithologist, who spent a year and a half in Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in 1816–18. Swainson is considered the best illustrator of the flora and fauna, especially the birds of Brazil, since the Dutch artists resident in Pernambuco in the middle of the 17th century.⁶⁹

• Henry Chamberlain, a royal artillery lieutenant and amateur artist, the son of the British consul general/chargé d’affaires visited Rio de Jameiro, aged 22, in 1819–20. His watercolours formed the basis of a famous album of 36 lithographs.⁷⁰

• Augustus Earle, a professional artist trained at the Royal Academy, who spent two months in 1820 and then more than three years in Rio de Janeiro (December 1820–February 1824).⁷¹

• Charles Landseer, official artist, also trained at the Royal Academy, and William John Burchell, botanist and amateur artist, who came to Rio with the Stuart mission to negotiate the recognition of the independence of Brazil from Portugal in 1825.⁷²

• William Smyth, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and amateur artist, who found himself in Rio de Janeiro on several occasions during the 1830s.⁷³

• Sir William Gore Ouseley, a diplomat and accomplished artist, who went to Rio de Janeiro as secretary to the British legation and became chargé d’affaires in 1838 (until his transfer to Buenos Aires as minister in 1844). His paintings are mainly of Rio and Bahia.⁷⁴

• Oswald Brierly, a professional artist on various ships of the Royal Navy – Wanderer, Rattlesnake, Meander, Galatea – which visited Rio de Janeiro at different times between 1842 and 1867.⁷⁵

• George Lothian Hall, a professional artist who spent the years 1848–54 in Rio de Janeiro (possibly as a merchant) and exhibited in London on several occasions at, for example, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Academy during the following two decades.⁷⁶

• Benjamin Robert Mulock, the one British photographer of importance, who worked as an engineer in Salvador and the interior of Bahia between November 1859 and April 1862 during the construction of the Bahia–Sao Francisco railway.⁷⁷

• Marianne North, a ‘botanical globetrotter’ and prolific artist who visited Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais in 1872–3. She left a large number of paintings and drawings of both plants and topography to Kew Gardens.⁷⁸

* This is a new essay that draws on material in ‘A presença britânica no Império nos trópicos’, Acervo. Revista do Arquivo Nacional, 22 (2009), pp. 53–66; ‘O Brasil no século XIX: parte do ‘império informal’ britânico?’, in J. Murilo de Carvalho and A. Pereira Campos (eds.), Perspectivas da cidadania no Brasil Império (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 2011), pp. 15–35; and ‘A presença britânica no Brasil, 1808–1831’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, forthcoming.

1 Cited in A.K. Manchester, British Pre-eminence in Brazil: Its Rise and Decline. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), p. 67.

2 See L. Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

3 J.P. Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 35.

4 Strangford to Castlereagh, 20 Feb. 1814, cited in P. Wilken, Empire Adrift: the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 142.

5 At Vienna on 8 February 1815, in a significant declaration in the history of international law and human rights, the slave trade was denounced by a committee of all eight signatories to the Treaty of Paris, including Portugal, as ‘repugnant to the principles of humanity and universal morality’. On the question of the abolition of the slave trade at Vienna, see Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 195–212.

6 Strangford to Castlereagh, 20 February 1814, quoted in Wilken, Empire Adrift, p. 142.

7 M. de Oliveira Lima, D. João VI no Brasil [1908] (4th edn., Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2006), pp. 385, 439–40; V. Alexandre, Os Sentidos do Império. Questão Nacional e Questão Global na Crise do Antigo Regime Português (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1993), p. 336; J.M. Pedreira and F. Dores Costa, D. João VI. Um Príncipe entre dois Continentes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008), p. 302.

8 G. Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions: the Luso-Brazilian World, c.1770–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 103.

9 See Thomas Cochrane, 10th earl of Dundonald, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chile, Peru and Brazil, from Spanish and Portuguese Domination (2 vols., London, 1858–9). Also B. Vale, Independence or Death! British sailors and Brazilian Independence 1822–25 (London, 1996) and The Audacious Admiral Cochrane: the True Life of a Naval Legend (London, 2004).

10 Manchester, British Pre-eminence, p. 193, n. 25.

11 Canning to Thornton 23 Dec. 1823, quoted in Paquette, Imperial Portugal, p. 212.

12 Cited in Bethell, Abolition, p. 31.

13 In March 1824 an armed revolt in Pernambuco led to the establishment of an independent republic, the Confederation of the Equator. It was supported by Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba and Ceará, and attracted sympathy throughout the north-east. Like an earlier attempt to establish a republic in Pernambuco (in 1817), it was, however, short-lived: it was put down by imperial troops after six months.

14 11 Oct. 1824, parecer to the Council of State, cited in Paquette, Imperial Portugal, p. 212, n. 203.

15 Stuart to J. Planta, Under-Secretary of State, 19 Aug., 5 Sept. 1825, Canning papers, archive 109, Leeds District Archive. ‘Whatever misfortune occurs to you through life’, Stuart advised a friend, ‘never go to the Brazils’. Quoted in Paquette, Imperial Portugal, p. 227.

16 H. Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning 1822–27: England, the Neo-Holy Alliance and the New World (London, 1925), pp. 508–9.

17 Canning, who became prime minister in May 1827, did not witness this. After only 119 days in office, he died on 8 August 1827.

18 Quoted in J. Smith, Brazil and the United States: Convergence and Divergence (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), p. 198, n. 10. Manoel Rodrigues Gameira Pessoa, the Brazilian agent in Paris who became Brazil’s first minister in London, had warned D. Pedro against ‘putting Brazil under the influence [of Britain], as it would be difficult to extricate itself later, as the example of Portugal demonstrates … Brazil should be the friend of Britain, but not its pupil’. Quoted in Paquette, Imperial Portugal, p. 26.

19 Cited in Bethell, Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade, p. 62.

20 See, for example, J.H. Rodrigues, Aspirações nacionais. Interpretação histórico- política (São Paulo, 1965) (‘[The Anglo-Brazilian commercial treaty of 1827] transformed us into an English protectorate’, p. 84); Rubens Ricupero, ‘O Brasil no mundo’, in Alberto da Costa e Silva (ed.), Crise Colonial e Independência 1808–1830, vol. 1 História do Brasil Nação 1808–2010 ed. Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre/Rio de Janeiro: Editora Objetiva, 2011).

21 Quoted in D. McLean, War, Diplomacy and Informal Empire: Britain and the Republics of La Plata, 1836–1853 (London: British Academic Press, 1995), p. 178.

22 Cited in R. Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London, 1983), p. 119.

23 For a fuller account of British efforts to end the Brazilian slave trade, see Bethell, Abolition. On the revisionist literature since 1970, J.D. Needell, ‘The abolition of the Brazilian slave trade in 1850: historiography, slave agency and statesmanship’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 33 (2001). See also Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian, Africanos livres. A abolição do tráfico de escravos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017), ch. 6 & 7.

24 Quoted in Bethell, Abolition, p. 379.

25 On the emancipados, see R. Conrad, ‘Neither slave nor free; the emancipados of Brazil, 1818–1868’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 53 (1973), pp. 50–70.

26 Quoted in Manchester, British Pre-Eminence, p. 288.

27 Mamigonian, Africanos livres, passim.

28 Mamigonian, Africanos livres, pp. 374–6.

29 This had been a preoccupation of the Brazilian authorities and slave-owners since it became clear in the mid 1830s that the 1831 law could not be enforced and the (illegal) trade was out of control. Twice – in June 1837 and September 1848 – the Brazilian parliament (in secret session) had considered the possibility of revoking the 1831 law – retroactively, thus offering impunity to those who held slave imported since 1831. In the end, successive Brazilian governments had preferred simply to continue ignoring the existence of the 1831 law. On Brazilian attitudes and policy towards the slaves illegally imported into Brazil after 1831, see S. Chalhoub, A força da escravidão. Ilegal idade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012), ch. 4, 5 & 7 and B. Gallotti Mamigonian, ‘O Direito de Ser Africano Livre. Os escravos e as interpretações da lei de 1831’, in S. Hunold Lara and J.M. Nunes Mendonça (eds.), Direitos e Justiças no Brasil. Ensaios de História Social (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2006).

30 Quoted in Bethell, Abolition, p. 381

31 Quoted in Bethell, Abolition, p. 382.

32 Quoted in Bethell, Abolition, p. 232.

33 M. de Paiva Abreu and L.A. Correa do Lago, ‘A economia brasileira no Império, 1822– 1889’, in M. de Paiva Abreu (ed.), A Ordem do Progresso. Dois séculos de política econômica no Brasil (2nd edn., Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2014), p. 17 Table 1.1. France had the second largest share of the Brazilian market, 12–15% (cotton, linen, woollen and silk textiles, wine, a variety of luxury goods, including shoes, hats and perfume, and some chemical and pharmaceutical products), then Portugal (olive oil and wine) 8%, Germany 5– 7% and the United States 6%.

34 On Johnstons, see R. Greenhill, ‘E. Johnston: 150 anos em café’, in M. Martins and E. Johnston Exportadores Ltd, 150 Anos de Café (2nd rev. edn., 1992).

35 Abreu and Correa do Lago, in Abreu (ed.), p. 17, Table 1.1; M. de Paiva Abreu, ‘British business in Brazil: maturity and demise (1850–1950)’, Revista Brasileira de Economia, 54 (2000), pp. 389–90.

36 Abreu and Correa do Lago, in Abreu (ed.), A Ordem do Progresso. Dois séculos de política econômica no Brasil , p. 26.

37 Abreu, ‘British business in Brazil’, p. 393.

38 Abreu and Lago, in Abreu (ed.), A Ordem do Progresso, p. 17, Table 1.1; Abreu, ‘British business in Brazil’, p. 385, Table 1, p. 386.

39 There is a substantial literature on railways in Brazil. See R. Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernisation in Brazil 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), ch. 2; C.M. Lewis, ‘Public policy and private initiative railway building in São Paulo, 1860–89’, University of London Institute of Latin American Studies Research Paper 26 (1991); William R. Summerhill, Order against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil, 1854–1913 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 2003); W. Edmundson, The Great Western of Brazil Railway (Chippenham: Mainline & Maritime, 2016).

40 See M.C. Eakin, British Enterprise in Brazil: the St John d’El Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989).

41 See D. Joslin, A Century of Banking in Latin America (London, 1963); G. Jones, British Multinational Banking, 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1993).

42 See also a later article by H.S. Ferns: ‘Argentina: part of an informal empire?’, in A. Hennessy and J. King (eds.), The Land that England Lost. Argentina and Britain: A Special Relationship (London, 1992). Also, A.S. Thompson, ‘Informal empire? An exploration in the history of Anglo-Argentine relations, 1810–1914’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 24 (1992); A.G. Hopkins, ‘Informal empire in Argentina: an alternative view’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994).

43 The British historian D.C.M (Christopher) Platt, in various articles and books on Latin America, and especially Argentina, published in the 1960s and 1970s, was particularly determined to undermine and discredit the concept of informal empire. For an overview of the historiography, see R.M. Miller, ‘Informal empire in Latin America’, in R. Louis (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. V: Historiography (Oxford, 2001).

44 Abreu, ‘British business in Brazil’, p. 396.

45 Joaquim Nabuco, future leader of the movement for the abolition of slavery in Brazil, wrote in a student text A escravidão (1870): ‘the enforcement of the bill Aberdeen [1845] was an outrage, an insult to our dignity as an independent people’. Britain’s refusal to repeal it (until April 1869) had obliged Brazil to live for 25 years under the tutelage of England’. However, he continued, ‘the shame is ours’ because we left to England alone ‘the role of defender of humanity’. The text, donated by Nabuco’s widow to the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro in 1924, was published for the first time in the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 204 (1949); (2nd ed., Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1988).

46 See R. Graham, ‘Os fundamentos da ruptura de relações diplomáticas entre o Brasil e a Grã-Bretanha em 1863: a Questão Christie’, Revista de História, 24 (1962), pp. 117–38, 379–402. Also Mamigonian, Africanos livres ch. 9 ‘A Questão Christie e a questão dos africanos livres’. W.D. Christie, Notes on Brazilian Questions (London, 1865) deals with the so-called ‘Christie affair’ and many other ‘Brazilian questions’ of the time, including slavery, abolition and commercial relations with Britain.

47 See J. Smith, ‘Limits of diplomatic influence: Brazil versus Britain and the United States, 1886–1894’, History, 92 (2007), pp. 472–95.

48 See J. Smith, ‘Britain and the Brazilian naval revolt of 1893–4’, Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1970), pp. 175–98.

49 See L. Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no Mundo. Abolicionista, jornalista e diplomata (Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2016), ch. 1, ‘Joaquim Nabuco na Europa e nos Estados Unidos’.

50 M. Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 21.

51 G. Freyre, Os ingleses no Brasil (Aspectos da influência britânica sobre a vida, a paisagem e a cultura do Brasil) (1948; English translation The English in Brazil Oxford: Boulevard Books, 2011). See also, on one British community in this period, L.H. Guenther, British Merchants in Nineteenth-century Brazil: Business, Culture and Identity in Bahia, 1808–1850 (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2004).

52 See O. Marshall, English, Irish and Irish-American Pioneer Settlers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2005).

53 Apart from Freyre and Guenther cited above (n. 56), there are relatively few studies of the British communities in Brazil. However, see Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernisation in Brazil, op. cit., ch. 4 ‘The Urban Style’ and José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello, Ingleses em Pernambuco. História do Cemetério Britânico do Recife e da participação de ingleses e outros estrangeiros na vida e na cultura de Pernambuco, no período de 1813 a 1909 (Recife, 1972).

54 See D.G. Vieira, O Protestantismo, a Maçonaria e a Questão Religiosa no Brasil (Brasília, 1980) and Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernisation, ch. 11, ‘Individual Salvation’. Pedro Feitoza is completing a PhD dissertation at Cambridge University on British Protestant missions in Brazil.

55 See A. Hamilton, An Entirely Different Game: The British Influence on Brazilian Football (Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1998); D. Goldblatt, Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil (London: Penguin, 2014), ch. 1; D.J. Davis, ‘British football with a Brazilian beat: the early history of a national pastime (1894–1933)’, in O. Marshall (ed.), English-Speaking Communities in Latin America (London: Macmillan, 2000); F.M. Rodrigues Ferreira Antunes, ‘The early days of football in Brazil: British influence and factory clubs in São Paulo’, in P. Fontes and B. Buarque de Hollanda (eds), The Country of Football: Politics, Popular Culture & the Beautiful Game in Brazil (London: Hurst, 2014); and especially J. Lacy, God is Brazilian. Charles Miller: The Man Who Brought Football to Brazil (Stroud: Tempus, 2005).

56 Quoted in Goldblatt, Futebol Nation, p. 17.

57 Sandra Guardini Vasconcellos is almost single handedly revising the established view among Brazilian literary historians and critics that French novels and novelists almost exclusively influenced the development of the Brazilian novel in the 19th century. See, for example, ‘Migratory literary forms: British novels in nineteenth-century Brazil’, in A.C. Suriani da Silva and S. Guardini Vasconcellos (eds), Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768–1930: A Transatlantic Perspective (London: Legenda, 2014).

58 On Spencer’s influence on Brazilian intellectuals, see Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, ch. 9, ‘Progress and Spencer’. When in 1897 the members of the newly created Academia Brasileira de Letras met to elect 20 sócio correspondentes (foreign members) from leading writers and intellectuals around the world they elected Herbert Spencer along with three French sócios: Elisée Réclus, Emil Zola and Paul Groussac.

59 Joaquim Nabuco, My Formative Years (Oxford: Signal Books in association with Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, Rio de Janeiro, 2012), p. 7. Edited and with an introduction by Leslie Bethell, this is the first English translation of Minha formação (1900).

60 This was Nabuco’s own description of Minha formação in the entry he submitted to Who’s Who in 1906. It is reproduced (in Portuguese translation) as an appendix to the most recent edition, with an introduction by Alfredo Bosi (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012).

61 See J.D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Époque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn of the Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

62 For a complete list, see L. Bethell, Brazil by British and Irish Authors (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, 2003).

63 The poet Robert Southey, who never visited Brazil, wrote the first history of Brazil from the beginning of the 16th to the beginning of the 19th century. The first volume was published in 1810; the second volume in 1817; the third volume in 1820, almost half a century before Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen’s classic História geral do Brasil antes da sua separação e independência de Portugal (2 vols., 1854–7). Southey’s History was to some extent eclipsed by Varnhagen’s História, although it was much admired by later historians of Brazil, João Capistano de Abreu and Manoel de Oliveira Lima.

64 Besides the numerous biographies of Wallace, there are several studies of Wallace and Bates in the Amazon. The most recent and the best (which also includes Richard Spruce – see below) is John Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015).

65 Darwin was himself twice in Brazil during the second voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (Dec. 1831– Oct. 1836) – in Bahia in February 1832 and Rio de Janeiro April–June 1832, sending home by naval vessel consignments of carefully labelled specimens, and again, briefly, in Bahia and Recife on the return journey in August 1836. See Charles Darwin, Journals and Remarks 1832–6 (London, 1839), the third volume of Robert Fitzroy’s four volume Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships ‘Adventure’ and ‘Beagle’ between the years 1826 and 1836 (1839). It was published separately as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (1840).

66 See M.R.D. Seaward and S.M.D. Fitzgerald (eds.), Richard Spruce (1817–1893). Botanist and Explorer (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, 1996) and Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise.

67 Biographers have been fascinated by Richard Burton. On Burton in Brazil, see F. McLynn, From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas, 1860–69 (London, 1991); Alfredo Cordiviola, Richard Burton: A traveller in Brazil, 1865–68 (Lewiston, NY, 2001).

68 See G. Ferrez, Aquarelas de Richard Bate. O Rio de Janeiro, 1808–48 (Rio de Janeiro, 1965).

69 W. Swainson, Zoological Illustrations (first series London, 1820–33, second series London, 1829–33), The Ornithological Drawings of William Swainson. Series I: The Birds of Brazil (1834–6), and A Selection of the Birds of Brazil and Mexico: the Drawings (London, 1841). See L. Bethell, ‘William Swainson: naturalista britânica no Brasil, 1817–18’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, forthcoming.

70 H. Chamberlain, Views and Costumes of the City and Neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from Drawings Taken by Lieutenant Chamberlain During the Years 1819 and 1820, with Descriptive Explanations (London, 1822).

71 See D. James, ‘Um pintor ingles no Brasil do Primeiro Reinado’, Revista do SPHAN, 12 (1955) and J. Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle, Travel Artist: Paintings and Drawings in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia (London: Scholar Press, 1980).

72 See L. Bethell (ed.), Charles Landseer. Desenhos e aquarelas de Portugal e do Brasil 1825–1826 (2010); G. Ferrez, O Brasil do Primeiro Reinado visto pelo William John Burchell 1825/1829 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação João Moreira Salles & Fundação Pro-Memória, 1981); L. Bethell, ‘Dois artistas ingleses no Brasil: Charles Landseer (1825–6) e William John Burchell (1825–1830)’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 173, (2012), pp. 77–96.

73 See P. Geyer (ed.), Aquarelas de William Smyth, 1832–1834 (Rio de Janeiro, 1987).

74 See W.G. Ouseley, Views of South America, from Original Drawings Made in Brazil, the River Plate, the Parana, etc. (London, 1852).

75 See P. da Cunha e Menezes, Oswald Brierly. Diárias de viagens ao Rio de Janeiro 1842–1867 (Rio de Janeiro: Andrea Jakobsson Estúdio, 2006).

76 See Views of Rio de Janeiro from Sketches by George L. Hall n.d. a rare album published in London by Maclure, MacDonald & MacGregor, lithographers to the Queen, c.185

77 See ‘Um fotógrafo inglês na Bahia: Benjamin Robert Mulock (1829–63). Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (http://brasilianafotografica.bn.br/?p=8946).

78 See L. Ponsonby, Marianne North at Kew Gardens (London, 1990) and Julio Bandeira, A viagem ao Brasil de Marianne North 1872–3 (Rio de Janeiro: Sextante, 2012).