Manoel Luís Vieira: An Entrepreneur in Rio De Janeiro During Brazil’s Eighteenth Century Agricultural Renaissance

Abstract

A N ECONOMIC HISTORY of colonial Brazil, based on the archival as well as printed materials available, has yet to be written,' but when it appears it is safe to say that a significant chapter will concern the agricultural revival of the second half of the eighteenth century. This period saw the beginnings of the coffee, cacao, cotton, and rice industries, as well as widespread, though largely unsuccessful, attempts to promote indigo, cochineal, hemp, and other products. One of the earliest of these new cultures to become commercially successful was the rice industry which began in the 1750's and 1760's, and flourished particularly in Maranhdo, Pars, and Rio de Janeiro during the late decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries. Though the two northern captaincies eventually outstripped the early lead of Rio, the latter was Brazil's earliest commercial rice producer. During the 1760's Manoel Luis Vieira was the owner of Rio's only commercial rice mill, the first successful one in Brazil. Fragmentary as the data concerning Vieira's activities is, it throws some light on the beginnings of one of the new extractive industries, and on some of the problems faced by eighteenth-century entrepreneurs in Brazil.2 *The author is instructor of history at the University of Washington. 'iRoberto Cochrane Simonsen 's Bist6ria econ6mica do Brasil (2 vols., Sio Paulo, 1937), now in its third edition, is a valuable pioneer work based largely on printed materials. It should be regarded as suggestive, rather than definitive, as it sometimes is-particularly in Brazil. For an excellent interpretation of various aspects of the colonial economic history of Brazil see Caio Prado Junior, FormaCao do Brasil contempordneo: col6nia (4th ed., Sho Paulo, 1953) which is also based on published documentation. 2 This study is a byproduct of research in Brazil during 1957 which was made possible by a fellowship from the Henry and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation, Inc., New York, N. Y. I should like to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Jose Honorio Rodrigues, formerly Diretor da Divisio de Obras Raras e Publicaq5es of the Biblioteca Naciorial, Rio de Janeiro, for his many courtesies, and to Sr. Marcos Carneiro de Mendonqa who graciously accorded me unlimited access to his remarkable manuscript and rare book collection in his home in Cosme Velho, Rio de Janeiro. (This collection is hereafter cited as CMCM.)