Conflicts and Conspiracies

Brazil and Portugal, 1750-1808

Kenneth Maxwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135930806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A study of Brazil during a critical formative period which illuminates the causes of her special historical development within Latin America. Professor Maxwell analyzes the shifting relationships between Portugal, England and Brazil during the second half of the 18th Century. Through his study, Professor Maxwell is concerned with the social, economic and political significance of the events he describes. An important part of this work is a study of the Minas Conspiracy of 1788-89.

Chapter 1

Dispositions

It might be said, that hitherto Portugal existed only for England. She was, as it were, entirely absorbed by her. It was for her that the vine flourished at Oporto, that the tree of the Hesperides burdened itself with its golden fruit, that the olive diffused its sweet and unctuous tides; it was for her that the sun of the Brazils hardened the diamond in the bowels of the earth, and it was for her that Portugal rendered her banks and her soil inhospitable to industry.

Europe and America, translated from the French of the Abbé de Pradt by J.D.Williams (2 vols., London, 1822) 1, 425.

When great new dispositions are necessary they should always be put forward by ancient names and in ancient clothing.

Manuel Teles da Silva to Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Vienna, 25 Sept. 1750 Anais da Academia Portuguesa da História, 2nd series, vol. VI (Lisbon, 1955) 313–15.

In late July 1750, amid multifarious relics, lulled by assorted chanting ecclesiastics, João V, a moribund Portuguese Roi Soleil at last expired. Within three days of the accession of José I, there began the predominance in affairs of state of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later to be the Marquis of Pombal. Hardworking, taciturn, inquisitive, Carvalho e Melo had been Portuguese minister in London, then special envoy at Vienna. The political testament of Dom Luís da Cunha, delegate to the Utrecht treaty negotiation and ambassador in Paris, recommended him for his ‘patient and speculative temperament’.¹ Others were not so complimentary. The British diplomat Benjamin Keene wrote: ‘It is a poor Coimbrian pate as ever I met with, to be as stubborn, as dull, is the true asinine quality. […] I shall only say that a little genius who has a mind to be a great one in a little country, is a very uneasy animal.’²

News of Carvalho e Melo’s ascendancy in the government reached

Vienna during September of 1750. Manuel Teles da Silva, an emigré Portuguese of aristocratic lineage who had risen high within the Austrian state, wrote at once to Lisbon. ‘We are not slaves of fashion and foreign practices’, he told the new minister, ‘we conserve unalterably the names and external practices and national establishments, but still less are we slaves of ancient habits and preoccupations. If there is puerility in fashions, there is folly in the obstinacy of old ways.’ Manuel Teles da Silva, created Duke Silva-Tarouca by Charles VI in 1732, was president of the council of the Netherlands and Italy, and a confidant of the Empress Maria Theresa. He recalled his ‘intimate conversations’ with Carvalho e Melo, and recommended that ‘when great new dispositions are necessary they should always be put forward by ancient names and in ancient clothing’.¹

‘Great new dispositions’ Carvalho e Melo clearly had in mind. He was fifty years of age at the accession, and was one of a generation of open minded officials and diplomats who had given much thought to imperial organization and the mercantilist techniques believed to lie behind the startling and growing power and wealth of France and Great Britain.² Carvalho e Melo had written in 1742 that ‘all the nations of Europe are today augmenting themselves by reciprocal imitation, each carefully watching over the actions of the others’.³ Such careful watching was his ‘most interesting duty in London’, he told Cardinal da Mota.⁴ The Duke Silva-Tarouca remarked in 1757: ‘For eight years Your Excellency observed with a vision more secure than that of corporal eyes the constitution of Great Britain, of her forces and accidental riches, and for another period of five years in Vienna of Austria Your Excellency with equal judgement and perspicacity observed the non-accidental riches and forces of these most fertile states.’⁵

Carvalho e Melo’s observation of the European situation had been shrewd and systematic, and the same shrewdness was evident in his private affairs. From a family of country gentry, notorious for doctored genealogies, he had suffered personal rebuffs as a young man at court.¹ In the face of bitter opposition, however, he had married Theresa de Noronha, a widowed niece of the Count of Arcos, an arrangement which related him to the high nobility.² His second marriage to the Countess Daun in Austria brought the personal blessing of the Empress who counted him among her ‘ancient friends’. In Vienna the Portuguese envoy’s ‘skill, uprightness, amiability, and especially his great patience’ had won the praise of all at court according to the French minister. Maria Theresa herself told Carvalho e Melo’s wife that she owed the ‘preservation of the monarchy’ to the Daun family.³ It was Maria Anna of Austria, the Queen Regent of Portugal, who first recalled Carvalho e Melo from Vienna to join the ministry in Lisbon.⁴

The diminished stature of the Iberian nations in the eighteenth century had forced both Spanish and Portuguese statesmen to face the formidable problem of modernization. It became increasingly evident that governmental efficiency and imperial consolidation were essential if either country was to retain its influence in a competitive and jealous world. Carvalho e Melo was in London during the critical years between 1738 and 1745, the era of the war of the Spanish Main and Vernon’s attack on Cartagena. It was a period crucial to the crystalization of imperial ideas and mythology in Britain, and inevitably brought to the forefront of Carvalho e Melo’s mind those long held preoccupations about the future of the Portuguese territories. The envoy’s concern was aggravated by the deep offense given to his own sensibilities by the casual way in which the British took the Anglo-Portuguese relationship for granted, and his suspicion that the ‘envy of our Brazil so strong in English hearts’, as he put it, would lead them to an attack on Portuguese America.⁵

Carvalho e Melo set out to investigate the causes, techniques and mechanisms of British commercial and naval superiority, and during his sojourn in London succeeded in obtaining a most detailed appreciation of the British position. His remarkable library in London reflected his interests. With the books of Thomas Mun, William Petty, Charles Davenant, Charles King, Joshua Gee, Joshua Child, select reports on colonies, trade, mines, woolen manufactories, specialized tracts on sugar, tobacco, fisheries, parliamentary acts of tonnage and poundage, shipping and navigation, fraud in customs houses, the book of rates, ordinances of the British marine, and above all, with a heavy concentration of works on the English trading companies, his collection was a veritable treasure house of mercantilist classics.¹

Out of his extensive reading and his personal observation Carvalho e Melo came to see the control Britain exercised over his country not only as the root cause of the social and economic malaise of the Portuguese nation, but also as one of the prime causes of the rapid advances of the British economy. He believed the Cromwellian treaty of 1654 had fixed on the newly independent Portugal a system of control which had made her more a slave of English interest than ever she had been of Spain. The English had achieved possession without dominion. It was a relationship which enabled them to absorb the vast riches which had come after the discovery of gold and diamonds in Brazil, and Carvalho e Melo held that the colossal capital the mines produced almost wholly passed to Britain.

This great influx of Brazilian gold to Britain had provided in Carvalho e Melo’s opinion the mean for the creation of her formidable marine and vigorous arts and manufactories. The increase of bullion and circulating medium in Britain had stimulated agriculture, raised land values, and brought about the rejuvenation of manufacturing industry. And Portugal was concerned also with the results of these changes, for the Portuguese market was a guaranteed and lucrative outlet for British manufactured goods. Portugal in fact had allowed her riches to be used against herself, and the wealth of the mines were hence chimerical to her. ‘The negroes that work the mines of Brazil must be clothed by England’, Carvalho e Melo observed, ‘thus the value of their produce becomes relative to the price of cloth.’ It did not interest Britain whether the political situation in Portugal was good, indeed the opposite was the case. The effects of the system of control without responsibility had been the weakening and discrediting of the Portuguese government machine and the moral and intellectual viability of Portuguese society.¹

There was a great deal of truth in the new minister’s diagnosis, and by placing the problems squarely into the broad imperial framework the connections and interrelationships between the issues at stake became evident. The prosperity of metropolitan Portugal in the mid-eighteenth century depended directly on the fluctuations of the colonial economy. The gold, sugar, and tobacco of Brazil formed the basis of the South Atlantic commercial complex. Sugar and tobacco provided profitable re-exports to Spain; gold a means to balance the unfavorable trade with the north and pay for the import of wood and grain.² ‘The two cities of Lisbon and Oporto may be justly considered as the two eyes of Portugal’, commented the traveller Arthur Costigan, ‘for here centre the whole riches of the country and all their trade with foreign nations, and their own possessions in the Brazils; upon which last especially depends their whole existence as a people, and the immediate support of the throne.’³ During the decade 1740–50, in the port of Lisbon alone, the annual movement of shipping surpassed 800 vessels, of which about 300 were Portuguese, and a third of these directly engaged in trade to Brazil.⁴

Specialization among the Brazilian regions was reflected by a specialization of products carried by the fleets. The Rio fleet brought gold and substantial shipments of hides and silver. From Pernambuco came wood and sugar. The fleets of the north, of Grão Pará and Maranhão carried cacao. The riches of Bahia were legendary. A fleet of thirty to forty ships left each year for Lisbon with cargoes of gold, silver, diamonds, jasper, cacao, balsam, cotton, tobacco and sugar.¹ So acute was the reliance on Brazil that D.Luís da Cunha foresaw the transfer of the court to Rio de Janeiro. The King would take the title ‘Emperor of the West’ and appoint a viceroy to rule in Lisbon. In the recommendation composed in 1736 for the use of Carvalho e Melo’s uncle, Marco Antônio de Azevedo Coutinho, on his appointment as foreign secretary, D.Luís da Cunha had envisioned a Portuguese Empire in America extending from the Plata and Paraguay to north of the river Amazon. ‘It is safer and more convenient to be where one has everything in abundance’, he wrote, ‘than where one had to wait for what one wants.’²

A major mechanism linking the colonial system to a developing world economy was Anglo-Portuguese commerce. By the Methuen treaty of 1703, English woolen goods entered Lisbon and Oporto free of duty, and in return, Portuguese wines received advantages on the English market. During the first half of the eighteenth century the trade was greatly in Britain’s favor and the profits for individuals high.³ Woolen cloth made up two-thirds of the total British export, and from 1756–60 Port wine composed in value 72 per cent of the total wine consumption in England.⁴ Since the early 1730s the great influx of gold and diamonds from Brazil had exaggerated the imbalance of Anglo-Portuguese exchange.⁵ Deficits could be made up and the purchase of foreign goods facilitated by the outflow of bullion which as Henry Feilding observed, ‘Portugal distributes so liberally over Europe’.¹

Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century only Holland and Germany surpassed Portugal as consumers of British exports, and it was to be only during...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Jeremy I.Adelman
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Illustrations and Orthography
• 1. Dispositions
• 2. Change
• 3. Divergence
• 4. Confrontation
• 5. Conspiracy
• 6. Skulduggery
• 7. Crisis
• 8. Compromise
• Bibliography
• Index