Old Christian Merchants and the Foundation of the Brazil Company, 1649

Abstract

F EW STEREOTYPES of Luso-Brazilian history have endured more tenaciously than the concept of the merchant as Jew, crypto-Jew, or foreigner. The association of the mercantile profession with New Christians has been particularly strong for the seventeenth century, with the terms burguesia and cristdos-novos often being used interchangeably in works about that period.' The political, social, and religious factors which contributed to the concentration of New Christians in commerce are familiar and need not be elaborated here. The converse theoretical explanation is that Portuguese gentiles (or Old Christians) abandoned the field to the interlopers because of their inability or unwillingness to compete with the New Christians' supposed racial aptitude for trade and their clannish favoritism in business practice. As commerce became ever more linked in the popular mind with the despised crypto-Jew, fear of guilt by association increased the aversion of Old Christians to the mercantile arts, ultimately leaving Portuguese trade in the hands of the New Christians. To contemporaries the problem appeared so compelling that in 1629 D. Felipe IV called a council of ecclesiastics and jurists to consider measures for dealing with the New Christians, whose monopoly of trade allegedly caused prices to soar thus sucking all the money from the populace,