The Politics of Immigration to Eighteenth-Century Brazil: Azorean Migrants to Santa Catarina

Abstract

Our knowledge of colonial Brazilian demography is appallingly low. European migration to Brazil remains a particularly neglected topic. It is no small irony that the migration of African slaves to Portuguese America is better documented than free white immigration. Surprisingly, reliable information is perhaps scarcest for the eighteenth-century gold-rush period when immigration to Brazil preoccupied Crown and treasure seekers alike. The manner of social and physical conditions which pushed individuals and families from their homes, the numerical ebb and flow of settlement patterns, even the simple mechanics of transport to the colony, remain caught inside a nebulous swirl of mythology, conjecture, and impressionistic conclusions. After two and a half centuries historians have scarcely gone beyond Antonil's oft quoted comment that ‘lured by the insatiable thirst for gold, a large quantity of Portuguese and foreigners arrive each year on the fleet heading to the mines […] the mixture is of every condition of people: men and women, young and old, poor and rich, nobles and plebeians, laymen and clerics, and friars from various orders, many of whom possess neither house nor convent in Brazil’.