Portuguese colonization

Portuguese colonization
Main articles: Colonial Brazil, War of the Emboabas, and Inconfidência Mineira

Representation of the landing of Pedro Álvares Cabral in Porto Seguro, 1500. Painting of 1922.
The land now called Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese Empire on 22 April 1500, with the arrival of the Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral.[56] The Portuguese encountered indigenous peoples divided into several tribes, most of whom spoke languages of the Tupi–Guarani family, and fought among themselves.[57] Though the first settlement was founded in 1532, colonization effectively began in 1534, when King John III of Portugal divided the territory into the fifteen private and autonomous Captaincy Colonies of Brazil.[58][59]

However, the decentralized and unorganized tendencies of the captaincy colonies proved problematic, and in 1549 the Portuguese king restructured them into the Governorate General of Brazil in the city of Salvador, which became the capital of a single and centralized Portuguese colony in South America.[59][60] In the first two centuries of colonization, Indigenous and European groups lived in constant war, establishing opportunistic alliances in order to gain advantages against each other.[61][62][63][64] By the mid-16th century, cane sugar had become Brazil’s most important export,[57][65] and slaves purchased in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the slave market of Western Africa[66] (not only those from Portuguese allies of their colonies in Angola and Mozambique), had become its largest import,[67][68] to cope with plantations of sugarcane, due to increasing international demand for Brazilian sugar.[69][70] Portuguese Brazil received more than 2.8 million slaves from Africa between the years of 1500 to 1800.[71]