In 1651, following a prolonged march through the wilds of South America, a few surviving members of the once grand expedition led by the master backwoodsman Antonio Raposo Tavares reached Belém do Pará so stricken by illness, hunger, and wounds suffered in Indian attacks that, according to the Jesuit missionary and renowned orator Father Antonio Vieira, “those who remained looked more dead than alive.” Nonetheless, the same priest added, their journey “truly was one of the most notable that has been carried out in the world to this day”: for three years and two months the members of the company had completed a “great walkabout” through the interior of the continent, though after a certain point they scarcely knew where they were or where they were going. Lost in the immensity of America, they only learned that they had traveled down the great Amazon River when their precarious, improvised crafts reached the military outpost of Gurupá, on the falls of the Xingu River, and the fort’s astonished soldiers told them where they were.
However, what most shocked Vieira was the evident contrast between such extraordinary efforts and the prosaic objectives that had led these Portuguese colonists to travel so many leagues and suffer such privation. For the single motive that had impelled their undertaking was to uproot “either by force or by will [Indians] from their lands and take them to São Paulo and then have them there as their servants as they are accustomed to doing.”
To a certain extent, the expedition led by Raposo Tavares was emblematic of seventeenth-century expansionism in Portuguese America. Although many historians, following Jaime Cortesão, have emphasized the geopolitical dimension of the undertaking, Raposo Tavares’s expedition and so many other slaving parties that set out from São Paulo were not motivated by territorial expansion, nor did their efforts result in more expansive settlement. Quite the contrary: rather than contributing directly to the occupation of the interior by the colonizing power, these incursions – like the heavily armed canoe flotillas that plied the Amazon basin, and the forcible resettlements carried out by missionaries in both regions – contributed to the devastation of innumerable native peoples. To paraphrase Capistrano de Abreu, the activities of these “colonizers” were profoundly tragic in their effects, depopulating rather than settling vast stretches of the continent.
In their day, the Paulistas – settlers of the colonial nucleus of São Paulo and founders of its satellite towns – came to be known in the Americas and Europe as great backwoodsmen, peerless in their knowledge of the vast wilderness, in their perseverance, and in their courage. Much later, historians would christen them bandeirantes while building them up to epic proportions, emphasizing their role in the geographic expansion of Portuguese America. But while their expeditions came to occupy a prominent place in Brazilian historiography, the society that these ventures created remains little understood.
Indeed, tales of the legendary feats of brave explorers have obscured the gripping history of the thousands of Indians – the negros da terra, or “blacks of the land” – captured by the backwoodsmen of São Paulo. Thus, a sizeable body of scholarship has recounted the dramatic adventures of the bandeirantes, but in this literature a “cycle of Indian hunting” appears as a preliminary, relatively unimportant phase of their activities, in which the Paulistas furnished Indian slaves for the plantations of the sugar-producing northeast. At the same time, the immense bibliography on the colonial economy and society of Portuguese America has paid scant attention to indigenous labor. Although a few recent contributions have shed some light on this neglected subject, the major trends in the study of colonial Brazil remain bounded by a theoretical framework in which the organization of labor is subordinate to the logic of the expansion of mercantile capitalism. In this perspective, the Indian – when mentioned at all – is described as having played the ephemeral, secondary role of precursor to the millions of African slaves whose fundamental place in the history of colonial Brazil and the broader Atlantic world is unassailable.
Blacks of the Land returns to the seventeenth-century history of São Paulo, while seeking to re-evaluate the historical context of the bandeirante phenomenon. Its starting point is the simple claim that the frequent incursions into the interior, rather than provisioning a supposed market for Indian slaves on the coast, sustained the growth of an indigenous labor force on the plateau, thus enabling the production and transport of an agricultural surplus; in this way, the São Paulo region was linked to other parts of the Portuguese colony and even to the commercial circuits of the South Atlantic. But the dimensions and significance of Indian slavery in the region went far beyond this commercial nexus. In fact, virtually every aspect of the formation of São Paulo during its first two centuries was tied in some fundamental way to the expropriation, exploitation, and destruction of indigenous populations.
In this new critical interpretation of the social history of São Paulo between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, native peoples play a central role. By focusing on the origins, development, and decline of Indian slavery, the chapters that follow seek to demonstrate that the principal structures of colonial society in the region emerged from a specific historical process in which several distinct indigenous societies came to be subordinated to an elaborate structure designed to control and exploit Indian labor.
Though it focuses most specifically on the structure and dynamic of Indian slavery, this book seeks to engage with three central problems in the history of Brazil: the role of the Indian in colonial economic and social history; the potent myth of the bandeirante; and the importance of non-export economies in the making of the country. Far from settling these issues, the material presented here seeks instead to contribute new elements to a broader and more critical discussion of the internal dynamic that developed in the interstices of an economy and a society oriented above all to the Atlantic world.
This book was born of a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Chicago in 1985. Although much of the original material of the dissertation remains, it was expanded and enriched over the last six years by additional research and by revisions undertaken in response to criticism. I am greatly indebted to John Coatsworth, Bentley Duncan, Friedrich Katz, and Stuart Schwartz, the members of the doctoral committee, for their precise comments and suggestions, many of which were incorporated into this book.
I am grateful to the following institutions, which funded research in Portuguese, Italian, and Brazilian archives: the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Chicago, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright/Hays Commission, and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). I also benefited from the institutional support of the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP), which generously hosted me as a visiting researcher in 1991–1992, enabling the completion of the final draft of this book in a rich interdisciplinary environment, a rare privilege for someone accustomed to the intellectual austerity of the academy.
Parts of this book previously appeared in several scholarly publications: Slavery & Abolition, Estudos Econômicos, História (Universidade Estadual Paulista), Revista de Antropologia, Ler História, Ciências Sociais Hoje, and Revista de História. I am grateful to the anonymous referees of these journals for their important critiques.
Innumerable people offered helpful collaboration at various stages of this trajectory. During my stays in Portugal, I enjoyed the valuable assistance and intellectual company of Albino Marques, L. M. Andrade, Patrick Menget, Bill Donovan, and Ivan Alves, the last two of whom also hosted me in Rio de Janeiro. Among my American colleagues, I am grateful to Martin Gonzalez, Cliff Welch, Joel Wolfe, Herb Klein, Alida Metcalf, Mary Karasch, Muriel Nazzari, and Kathy Higgins, who read and commented on parts of the work. My parents, Manuel and Madelyn Monteiro, as well as my brother Willy, offered several kinds of support on many occasions.
In São Paulo, the interdisciplinary Núcleo de História Indígena e do Indigenismo provided a fertile environment for discussion of this book. I am particularly grateful to Marta Rosa Amoroso, Beatriz Perrone-Moisés, Nádia Farage, Robin Wright, the late Miguel Menéndez, Paulo Santilli, Dominique Gallois, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha. Among my colleagues at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), I must recognize the commentaries and support of Luiz Koshiba, Sonia Irene do Carmo, Ana Maria Martinez Corrêa, Manoel Lelo Bellotto, Teresa Maria Malatian, Kátia Abud, Ida Lewkowicz, Jacy Barletta, and Angélica Resende. For their readings of earlier versions of this work, I am especially grateful to Francisco “Pancho” Moscoso, Carlos Eugênio Marcondes de Moura, Jacob Gorender, André Amaral de Toral, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, each of whom offered valuable suggestions. I also counted on the encouragement of Horácio Gutiérrez, José Roberto do Amaral Lapa, Bob Slenes, Lúcia Helena Rangel, Sílvia Helena Simões Borelli, Mara Luz, Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Luiz and Dida Toledo Machado, and especially Maria Cristina Cortez Wissenbach.
Finally, my greatest debt is to Maria Helena P. T. Machado, for her companionship and indispensable intellectual support, to say nothing of the assistance she provided in the translation of this book. Our sons, Álvaro and Thomas, also contributed, since without them the work would have been completed earlier, but the experience would have been poorer.