This chapter tells the story of two of the most notorious and ambitious company efforts in nineteenth-century Brazil, which, taken together dispel the notion that the end of the “conciliation period” had produced any lasting government neutrality in relation to private enterprise. The Mucury Company, founded by liberal stalwart Teófilo Ottoni, faced unlikely competition from the new Associação Central de Colonização, a state-favored company established in Rio. While Ottoni incorporated agents and techniques from previous colonization efforts, devised his own indigenous appeasement policies, and successfully orchestrated migrations to his flagship colony of Filadelfia, the ACC focused solely on migrant recruitment, transport, and reception, and received ample government subsidies to guarantee shareholder dividends. The ACC quickly overtook Ottoni’s colono recruitment efforts thanks to the support of prime minister Olinda, who was attempting to counter international criticisms of Brazilian colonization and define pertinent regulatory frameworks while harboring distrust toward Ottoni’s political aims. While both companies eventually folded, they did so for different reasons. In turn, the regulations devised by Olinda in his engagement with them became landmark precedents for the era of mass migrations.

The nineteenth century saw a transformation in the concept of colonization as political economists recast the term to refer to directed migration and settlement processes. Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen in the newly independent Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) embraced this new brand of colonization as an advantageous policy expedient because it aligned with old regime peopling practices, promised to resolve the question of slavery, and, significantly, held the prospect of individual profits, particularly if carried out by colonization companies. Brazilian engagement with colonization fit within a wider series of colonization processes unfolding within European empires or their overseas dominions as well as throughout the new republics in the Americas. Comparing and connecting the Brazilian case to concurrent peopling efforts across the globe unsettles understandings of colonization as part of a global settler revolution of which Brazil figured as a peripheral case. The key role played by companies as the harbingers of a new colonization paradigm underscores profit as a guiding principle in Brazilian colonization schemes in the nineteenth century.

Amid epidemics, droughts, and a bourgeoning abolitionist wave in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian Empire internalized migration protocols long in the making. Crucial to the development of new migration policies was the Sociedade Central de Imigração (SCI), a new association midway between a corporation and a literary club. The SCI and its abolitionist members, which included conservative noblemen and republican professionals, synthesized the lessons learned by three generations of political elites, and avidly lobbied for reform policies pertinent to land surveying and distribution, naturalization, and immigration promotion. Dismissed by scholars as a bourgeois and largely failed experiment in immigration advocacy, the SCI in fact furnished the policy tools for the Brazilian government to counter German and Italian interdictions on migrations to Brazil, which, as the chapter demonstrates, had more to do with commercial and geostrategic concerns than with immigration issues themselves. Ultimately, the SCI laid the building blocks for the new Republican government to welcome exponentially growing cohorts of migrants despite the persistence of international prohibitions in Italy.

Colonization and colonization companies persisted well after the era of mass migrations in initiatives such as the “March to the West” and the military dictatorship’s efforts to colonize the Amazon in the 1970s. Covering the republican, Vargas, and dictatorship eras in the way of a birds-eye view, this chapter surveys the recurrent restaging of the nineteenth-century paradigm of colonization in hinterland colonization efforts in the twentieth century, particularly those in “central” Brazil and in the southern Amazon. Ultimately, nineteenth-century colonization dynamics overseen and underwritten by the Brazilian government and led by private entities provided artificial advantages to incoming migrants in relation to other demographic groups, which raises important questions about the historical memorialization of migrant pasts.

In the 1860s, numerous armed conflicts around the world generated successive waves of expatriates and produced fresh opportunities for colonization entrepreneurs. This chapter traces the entanglements of Brazilian colonization with war-ravaged global scenarios that potentially furnished new streams of foreign colonos to be managed by a diverse assortment of middlemen. The chapter focuses on the efforts of a new political generation in Brazil to attract Confederate veterans from the US South. The Sociedade Internacional de Imigração opened offices in New York, where its agent, Quintino Bocaiúva, worked closely with Cuban intermediaries and helped establish the first steamship line between the US and Brazil. The Sociedade’s remittance of emigrants from New York and New Orleans to Brazil obligated central and provincial government officials to offer a wealth of benefits to newcomers including accommodations, land, and surveying services, in line with the liberal immigration policies that Bocaiúva would espouse decades later.

Little appeared to change with Brazilian independence regarding the establishment of colonies. The new imperial government continued to sponsor the settlements established during the Joanine years and kept signing on agricultural workers in Europe for similar endeavors. While colonies grew in economic and demographic terms, many of them did so at the expense of enslaved Africans and their descendants in direct contravention of their founding principles. Additionally, migrants contracted in Europe as field hands were in fact mercenary soldiers for Pedro I’s forces. This chapter explores how colonization informed a foundational rift in Brazilian politics. As constitutional order struggled to establish itself, colonization pitted an entrenched executive with imperial ambitions and an emergent legislature trying to assert itself.