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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    CARTE DE LA TERRE FERME DU PEROU, DU BRESIL ET DU PAYS DE S AMAZONES - Guillaume de L'Isle, 1703-1708
    A map of Brazil at the start of the gold rush

    The Brazilian gold rush was a gold rush which began in the Portuguese colony of Brazil in the 1690s and lasted well into the nineteenth century, making it arguably the longest gold rush in history. Over ten metric tons of gold were mined on average every year in Brazil during the eighteenth century. This activity massively enriched the Portuguese crown in the process. The more substantial impact was in the growth of the Portuguese colony. At the time of the first discoveries of gold in Minas Gerais in the mid-1690s Brazil’s colonial population was still very limited, with a quarter of a million or so Portuguese and African slaves living in a limited number of communities along the coast. By 1800 this had ballooned to somewhere between three and four million and by 1872 when the first national census was undertaken the population had expanded to nearly ten million inhabitants. Much of the country’s population expansion in these years can be attributed to the gold rush and so many Brazilians today can trace their genealogy in some senses to this quest for gold in the Brazilian mountains.[1]

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    The Brazilian gold rush chronology of events

    In April 1500 the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the coast of what is now Brazil after his ship was blown way off course on its way south to sail around Africa to India. It was soon determined that this new land lay within the Portuguese sphere of influence that had been decided upon as part of the Treaty of Tordesillas which effectively divided the world beyond Europe into Spanish and Portuguese zones back in 1494. The new land soon became known to the Portuguese as Terra do Brasil, the ‘land of Brazil’, in recognition of the plentiful supplies of brazil-wood which could be obtained there.[2]

    Rodolfo Amoedo - Ciclo do Ouro, Acervo do Museu Paulista da USP
    Ciclo do Ouro (1922), ‘The Cycle of Gold’, by Rodolfo Amoedo

    However, despite the abundance of brazil-wood and the size of the territory, Portuguese settlement of Brazil was limited through the sixteenth century. No gold or silver deposits were found here on a par with those the Spanish had located in Mexico and Bolivia and which had drawn extensive Spanish settlement to those regions. Instead the Portuguese only began to settle in anything near significant numbers in Brazil in the early seventeenth century as the sugar-cane boom began and plantations of sugar-cane were established along the coast, often worked by slaves from Africa.[3] Despite these shifts in the seventeenth century, the total population of Portuguese and European settlers and African slaves in the coastal communities of Brazil by the end of the seventeenth century was only about a quarter of a million, though some studies argue for a figure as high as 400,000.[4]

    This all changed with the discovery of extensive gold seams in the mountains of Minas Gerais in the mid-1690s. A gold rush followed, one which soon led to new discoveries, notably much further inland along the Cuiabá River in the 1720s. Throughout the eighteenth century enormous amounts of gold were pulled from the rivers and hills of Brazil by an ever-growing number of miners and prospectors. Some 800 metric tons of gold arrived back to Portugal alone during the eighteenth century, making Lisbon one of the most splendidly wealthy capitals in Europe before it was unceremoniously destroyed in the great tsunami and earthquake of 1755. Incredibly, the gold rush continued down to the late nineteenth century, two centuries after it had begun.[5] Today a fresh gold rush in the Amazon is creating wealth, but also violence and dislocation of the few remaining native tribes in the region.[6]

    Extent of migration during the Brazilian gold rush

    Stieler, Joseph Karl - Alexander von Humboldt - 1843
    Alexander von Humboldt

    The migration associated with the gold rush was extensive, though owing to a lack of precise demographic records going back to the late seventeenth century, the figures are a point of considerable contention. Most established studies, for instance, argue for a base population of 250,000 Portuguese and African slaves in Brazil by the 1690s. Others, though, suggest this is an underassessment and the figure could lie at 400,000 or even higher. What is clear is that the migration to Portugal once the gold rush began was greater than anything which Brazil had seen during the first two centuries of colonial rule. Over 2.5 million people entered Brazil from abroad in the eighteenth century and the figure may have been substantially higher.[7] Hundreds of thousands came from Portugal, with particularly intense periods of migration in the early eighteenth century as the gold rush began and then again in the late 1750s after the great earthquake and tsunami of 1755 destroyed most of the city of Lisbon back in the home country. The greater proportion of the migration, however, came from Africa. It is estimated that 1.7 million slaves were forcibly trafficked by the Portuguese to Brazil from western Africa during the eighteenth century.[8]

    The overall impact of this is also a matter of dispute. The German polymath, Alexander von Humboldt, undertook studies in the nineteenth century to try to determine the population of much of the Americas. His studies concluded that the population of Brazil was probably around 3.8 million at the end of the eighteenth century, though this was not a scientifically obtained figure, rather than the result of informed guesswork. Most studies place the figure broadly between three and four million, suggesting a huge population increase in the century following the inception of the gold rush. The level of gold being extracted in the nineteenth century decline considerably, but by then the population expansion of the eighteenth century had created population centers with a diverse range of industries and opportunities which drew further migrants. Thus, when the first modern census was carried out in Brazil in 1872 it recorded a population of just under ten million people.[9]

    Demographic impact of the Brazilian gold rush

    The role of the Brazilian gold rush in the creation of modern-day Brazil cannot be overstated. At the time of the first discovery of gold back in the 1690s the colonial population was negligible in size. It grew at least eightfold in the course of the eighteenth century and perhaps as much as twelvefold, with a further tripling in the course of the period between 1800 and 1872. All of this ensured that there was the basis for Brazil’s population to expand by natural increase in the twentieth century to become the largest nation demographically in South America, with well over 200 million inhabitants today. The gold rush also shaped the country’s demographic composition as a country of people of both European and African descent as the importation of slaves from Africa was so substantial in the eighteenth and indeed well into the nineteenth centuries.[10]

    See also

    Explore more about the Brazilian gold rush

    References

    1. ↑ Manoel Cardozo, ‘The Brazilian Gold Rush’, in The Americas, Vol. 3, No. 2 (October, 1946), pp. 137–160.
    2. ↑ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/cabral-discovers-brazil
    3. ↑ Matthew Edel, ‘The Brazilian Sugar Cycle of the Seventeenth Century and the Rise of West Indian Competition’, in Caribbean Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (April, 1969), pp. 24–44.
    4. ↑ https://www.scielo.br/j/soc/a/cJm7cNVCCgBmqNxgwbDkw4b/
    5. ↑ Manoel Cardozo, ‘The Brazilian Gold Rush’, in The Americas, Vol. 3, No. 2 (October, 1946), pp. 137–160.
    6. ↑ https://news.mongabay.com/2022/01/brazils-illegal-gold-rush-is-fueling-corruption-violent-crime-and-deforestation/
    7. ↑ https://www.scielo.br/j/soc/a/cJm7cNVCCgBmqNxgwbDkw4b/
    8. ↑ Steven J. Micheletti, et al., ‘Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas’, in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 107, No. 2 (August, 2020), pp. 265–277.
    9. ↑ Dauril Alden, ‘The Population of Brazil in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary Study’, in Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1963), pp. 173–205.
    10. ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/migration-brazil-making-multicultural-society


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