Directed migrations supported the Luso-Brazilian government’s efforts to navigate the geopolitical challenges of the post-Napoleonic world. In order to correct the perceived dearth of population in the new seat of an exiled Portuguese Court, government officials went to great lengths to jumpstart migratory flows to Brazil. Peopling served many purposes, allowing the prince regent to cement royal authority through subsidies and concessions while responding to pressures to curtail slavery. Yet, as various groups made their way to Brazil, they lay bare the challenges in long-distance migrant conveyance as well as the diplomatic liabilities involved in directed migrations. The Luso-Brazilian government thus began to defer migration drives to private, mostly German, individuals gearing for profits. This chapter traces the emergence of a strategic exchange between the Joanine government in Rio and foreign petitioners who began to shape peopling as a profitable business sphere, which allowed the Luso-Brazilian administration to quell pressures stemming from Vienna and London, but opened the way for numerous unforeseen consequences.

A “spirit of association” took hold of Brazilian businessmen and lawmakers in the Regency period of the 1830s. This spirit manifested itself in the Rio Doce Company drive, which directly inspired Brazilians to launch the first homegrown colonization companies in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. This chapter traces the trajectory of these pioneering domestic enterprises and examines their operations and their meanings in the context of continuous logistical and political challenges both at home and abroad. Ultimately, these companies set a precedent in institutionalizing reception and conveyance mechanisms, lobbying successfully for pro-colonization policies, and collaborating with the Brazilian diplomatic corps to build a powerful international network of migrant recruitment overseas. Despite these companies’ broad appeal among quarreling elites, both faltered amid the financial crisis of 1837,. The colono trade they spurred in periodic overlap with the illegal slave trade, however, opened the door for continued undocumented migrations from the Azores.

The lessons learned from private colonization experiments in the 1830s drove Brazilian lawmakers back to the drawing board to devise policies that could both promote private colonization schemes and keep them under the government’s purview. A reinstated executive seized the reins of colonization as the royal household enthusiastically founded model colonies spearheaded by the young emperor and his sister. A small group of palatial figures, or áulicos, close to the emperor made this possible from key appointments including in the reactivated Council of State, which oversaw ad hoc colonization petitions. In parliament, the slow but steady evolution of land law bills further contributed to the Brazilian government’s resolve to exercise regulatory muscle. This process came to a head with the debacle of the Delrue contract – a colono-provisioning deal with a French firm that went sour when the Brazilian government discovered numerous irregularities in the payments claimed by Delrue. Ironically, the Delrue scandal empowered Vergueiro & Co., a São Paulo-based firm that would become a leading colono distributor within a decade, demonstrating that the colonization irradiated from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, and not the other way around.

Brazil accompanied global mid-century changes with its own great transformation in 1850: three landmark laws on the slave trade, land, and commerce that in theory aligned state-building with market forces. Yet, if premised on colonization as a substitute for slavery, the country’s transformation was in fact a circuitous one, as abolitionists’, planters’ and the government’s own efforts pointed in different directions. As the illegal slave trade endured after 1850, Brazilian abolitionists organized a new association to promote model colonies built from the ground up, but their efforts paled in comparison to the private colonization undertaken by wealthy Paraíba Valley planters. Historians assume that this coffee-growing elite held sway over the Brazilian state, but their colonization approaches suggest otherwise. The imperial government was more interested in promoting myriad new colonization endeavors across the Empire, including in the northeastern provinces, and using colonization for its own geopolitical needs. Conflicting uses of colonization laid bare not only the failure of government-directed initiatives to appease divergent regional interests, but also the ways in which colonization complicated rather than facilitated a purported transition toward free labor and an alignment of state and market interests.

With the end of the Paraguayan War, planters again panicked over impending labor scarcity. In response, prominent businessmen at the Court began to organize a new company to jumpstart a “coolie trade” to Brazil. Without a diplomatic entry-point into China, however, their efforts remained scattershot until they pressured the Brazilian government to pursue a commercial treaty with the Qing Empire. Meanwhile, Brazil’s top tycoon, the barão de Mauá, attempted to set up a model sugar central with Indian coolies from Mauritius in an effort to overcome a colossal bankruptcy. As British colonial subjects, these workers received special attention when they complained of poor treatment, which demonstrated the power of diplomatic representation to curtail planters’ disregard for contractual conditions and for workers in general. Both “experiments” were put to the test in the court of public opinion, where Sinophobia masked competing business interests. Whereas the Agricultural Congress of 1878 examined the potential of coolie labor to effect a labor “transition” with lukewarm enthusiasm at best, newspapers engaged in a battle of words with strong racist and eugenic undertones that, at base, had more to do with competition for readership and government contracts than the issue of Chinese colonization itself.

This chapter tells the story of two of the most notorious and ambitious company efforts in nineteenth-century Brazil, which, taken together dispel the notion that the end of the “conciliation period” had produced any lasting government neutrality in relation to private enterprise. The Mucury Company, founded by liberal stalwart Teófilo Ottoni, faced unlikely competition from the new Associação Central de Colonização, a state-favored company established in Rio. While Ottoni incorporated agents and techniques from previous colonization efforts, devised his own indigenous appeasement policies, and successfully orchestrated migrations to his flagship colony of Filadelfia, the ACC focused solely on migrant recruitment, transport, and reception, and received ample government subsidies to guarantee shareholder dividends. The ACC quickly overtook Ottoni’s colono recruitment efforts thanks to the support of prime minister Olinda, who was attempting to counter international criticisms of Brazilian colonization and define pertinent regulatory frameworks while harboring distrust toward Ottoni’s political aims. While both companies eventually folded, they did so for different reasons. In turn, the regulations devised by Olinda in his engagement with them became landmark precedents for the era of mass migrations.

The nineteenth century saw a transformation in the concept of colonization as political economists recast the term to refer to directed migration and settlement processes. Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen in the newly independent Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) embraced this new brand of colonization as an advantageous policy expedient because it aligned with old regime peopling practices, promised to resolve the question of slavery, and, significantly, held the prospect of individual profits, particularly if carried out by colonization companies. Brazilian engagement with colonization fit within a wider series of colonization processes unfolding within European empires or their overseas dominions as well as throughout the new republics in the Americas. Comparing and connecting the Brazilian case to concurrent peopling efforts across the globe unsettles understandings of colonization as part of a global settler revolution of which Brazil figured as a peripheral case. The key role played by companies as the harbingers of a new colonization paradigm underscores profit as a guiding principle in Brazilian colonization schemes in the nineteenth century.

Amid epidemics, droughts, and a bourgeoning abolitionist wave in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian Empire internalized migration protocols long in the making. Crucial to the development of new migration policies was the Sociedade Central de Imigração (SCI), a new association midway between a corporation and a literary club. The SCI and its abolitionist members, which included conservative noblemen and republican professionals, synthesized the lessons learned by three generations of political elites, and avidly lobbied for reform policies pertinent to land surveying and distribution, naturalization, and immigration promotion. Dismissed by scholars as a bourgeois and largely failed experiment in immigration advocacy, the SCI in fact furnished the policy tools for the Brazilian government to counter German and Italian interdictions on migrations to Brazil, which, as the chapter demonstrates, had more to do with commercial and geostrategic concerns than with immigration issues themselves. Ultimately, the SCI laid the building blocks for the new Republican government to welcome exponentially growing cohorts of migrants despite the persistence of international prohibitions in Italy.