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.

This chapter synthesizes the history of the monarchy in Brazil from the Portuguese court’s 1807 exile to Rio de Janeiro to the end of the Regency in 1840. It addresses the European threats to the Portuguese monarchy, its successes in Brazil, and its adaptation to the Atlantic revolutionary era. It focuses on the actions of two monarchs, João VI and Pedro, João’s heir in both the old Portuguese kingdom and the new Brazilian one, which Pedro made independent and transformed into the Empire of Brazil, in 1822. It goes on to discuss Pedro I’s struggle (1822-1831) for domination against the Brazilian elite, and the results, through the Regency (1831-1840) following Pedro I’s abdication. Of particular significance in all of this are international and social issues bound up with the continued expansion of African slavery and its Atlantic trade. In both the diplomacy between João VI and his crucial English allies, the abolition of that trade loomed large. It was central, too, in the struggles between Pedro I and his parliamentary opposition. Indeed, slavery’s maintenance as foundational to the economy, the society, and those who dominated both, as well as the state, is made clear in analyzing the monarchy’s politics during 1822-1840. Slavery affected the monarchy’s survival, transformation, and the nature of party formation and ideology in the constitutional monarchy that emerged by 1840.

The various Atlantic and European entanglements of the age of Latin American independence make it difficult to establish solely “Iberian” perspectives of the events culminating in the independences. Nevertheless, this essay proposes four distinct periods, mostly based on developments in Iberian politics, including the Peninsular War and its aftermath, when elites in Spain and Portugal advanced distinct views and solutions to the crises unfolding in the Americas. Certainly, the situation was not the same in Spain and Portugal. Still, the many cross-pollinations in Spanish and Portuguese politics in the first quarter of the nineteenth century permit the use of shared chronological benchmarks. Indeed, the years of the French occupation of the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, and the distinct challenges that the events in this six-year period created, loomed large in subsequent debates about imperial preservation, sovereignty, rights, and relations within the Iberian Empires. Large-scale, multisited, unrest in Spanish America since 1810, prompted the proposal of political and military solutions to guarantee the integrity of the empire and of what some viewed as a trans-Atlantic “Spanish nation.” In Portugal, the debates revolved around the lasting consequences of the royal family’s relocation to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, and anxieties about the status of Portugal itself within the reconfigured empire.