Pedreira Contraband.pdf

HAHR 81.3/4-10A Pedreira

11/27/01

5:25 PM

Page 739

Contraband, Crisis, and the Collapse of the Old Colonial System

Jorge M. Pedreira

A s much as I understand Ernst Pijning’s desire to engage in the controversy over the breakdown of the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system, and unreservedly welcome his comments, I fear that the discussion will now be confined to a subsidiary point that I tried to avoid in the essay that prompted Pijning’s response. Contrary to his assumption, “the extent of illegal trade in the decade prior to 1808” is not crucial to my argument; in fact, contraband is an ancillary topic in my analysis of the breakdown of the old colonial system. My argument is as follows. Between the 1770s and the early years of the nineteenth century, Portuguese trade with Brazil and Brazil-based foreign trade, which benefited from the adversity that beset other colonial empires, grew fivefold. Large imports of sugar, cotton, and tobacco from Brazil led to unprecedented reexports of tropical groceries to European ports such as Hamburg and Genoa and generated a large trade surplus; this also meant an increase in the export of foodstuffs and manufactured goods to Brazil. Despite some fluctuations and the risks of the international situation, the prosperity of this trading system lasted until 1807, when French troops occupied Portugal to enforce the Continental System; the royal family escaped to Rio de Janeiro, where the court was established, and the trade with Brazil was discontinued, forcing the government to open Brazilian ports to foreign ships. This brought about the collapse of the old colonial system that had united Portugal and Brazil. In this line of reasoning, documented by trade statistics and reports, and informed by the knowledge of the Portuguese and Brazilian economic structures and trading networks, contraband does not come into the picture. Then, how did it find its way into the last section of my essay? The reason is simple. This argument, which I first articulated in my book, informed by Valentim Alexandre’s work,1 on the Portuguese industrial structure and the role colonial 1. Valentim Alexandre, Os sentidos do império: Questão nacional e questão colonial na crise do antigo regime português (Porto: Ed. Afrontamento, 1993). Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 – 4 Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press

HAHR 81.3/4-10A Pedreira

740

11/27/01

5:25 PM

Page 740

HAHR / August and November / Pedreira

market,2 challenges the assumption made by two leading Brazilian historians, Fernando Novais and José Jobson de Andrade Arruda: Long before 1807 – 8, the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system underwent a severe crisis, which finally led to its demise.3 Their assumption was originally based on the presumed dissolving effects of the Industrial Revolution and the American Revolution on the Iberian colonial systems. Against the irrefutable evidence of a thriving colonial trade, the only historical fact provided by Novais in support of his contention was the possible rise of contraband. This, which in Novais’s work was cautiously presented as a mere conjecture or hypothesis, became the focal point of Arruda’s argument. He assumed that the alleged increase in illicit trade indicated that the colonial system was no longer working, and was the consequence ofthe autonomous vitality of the Brazilian economy, now in search of direct trade with Europe.4 However, he did not offer evidence to substantiate his assumption, except for a few reports of the chief comptroller of the general superintendence on contraband.5 Instead, he simply tried to infer the volume of contraband from the deficit of the Portuguese balance trade with Brazil, which, as Valentim Alexandre and I have shown, was grossly overestimated.6 In other words, such an argument is inconsistent with the very trade statistics that Jobson Arruda used. However, he has rephrased it in a recent work.7 2. Jorge M. Pedreira, Estrutura industrial e mercado colonial: Portugal e Brasil, 1780 –1830 (Lisbon: DIFEL, 1994). 3. Fernando Novais, Portugal e Brasil na crise do antigo sistema colonial, 1777 –1808, 4th ed. (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1986); and José Jobson de Andrade Arruda, O Brasil no comércio colonial (São Paulo: Ed. Ática, 1980) 4. The nationalistic nature of the argument is quite obvious. Its real purpose is to show that the Brazilian economy already offered a strong structural basis for independence, which was being prepared, in the political arena, by conspiracies such as the Inconfidência Mineira, which have become founding myths in Brazilian nationalism. Incidentally, it should be noted that the significance of those conspiracies has been questioned and that the development of a public sphere before 1808 was definitely problematic in a colony that until then still lacked a university, a printing house and of course the press. 5. Contraband is often an issue in official reports during the eighteenth century. In the last decades of the century, complaints about illegal trade were frequent in reports of both the colonial and the central administration. However, the impact of illegal trade cannot be calculated from the number of references in these documents. This is clearly a case of diminishing marginal returns from recently found reports voicing old complaints. 6. Alexandre, Os sentidos do império, 51, 62 – 65; and Pedreira, Estrutura industrial, 303. 7. José Jobson de Andrade Arruda, “O sentido da colônia: Revisitando a crise do antigo sistema colonial (1780 –1830),” in História de Portugal, ed. José Tengarrinha (Bauru, SP: EDUSC, 2000).

HAHR 81.3/4-10A Pedreira

11/27/01

5:25 PM

Page 741

Contraband, Crisis, and the Collapse of the Old Colonial System

741

When I first read Ernst Pijning’s study on contraband in Rio de Janeiro,8 I immediately knew that it would be explored by those trying to restore to life the argument for the existence of a crisis in the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system prior to 1807 – 8. This is precisely why I undertook a detailed analysis of contraband, incorporating Pijning’s recent contribution, even if my conclusion was left unchanged. The significance of the expansion of Portuguese colonial-based trade remains unchallenged, and it is simply not consistent with the assumption that the colonial system was operating under a crisis. As far as contraband goes, my dissent with Ernst Pijning is not so much a matter of interpretation, as he suggests, but a matter of focus. Pijning’s main concern is with the ability of the local authorities in Rio de Janeiro to use their regulating role to become partners or intermediaries in the illegal trade. Mine is with the effect of contraband on the political economy of the old colonial system as a whole. From the perspective of that system, the question is not that contraband was there, and not even that it was rising. I do not intend to dispute the rise of contraband from the 1790s, although I think that it should be measured against the growth of legal trade (which reduces its importance) and that some indicators for that increase have been misused.9 The real questions concerning contraband need to be reframed: How did it affect the colonial trading system, not the power of local authorities? Did it really make it any less effective? As I emphasized in my paper, and as Pijning fully acknowledges, there are many varieties of contraband or illegal trade, each with its own economic and institutional effects. However, while he is concerned with the fact that some were more illegal than others, and with the varying impact on the local authorities’ ability to control contraband, I am interested in studying the impact of contraband on the entire colonial trading system. It is important to note that there were several forms of contraband that did not threaten the colonial system, but still put the capacity of the local authorities to the test: 8. Ernst Pijning, “Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins Univ., 1997). 9. According to Pijning, the more the administration resorted to repressive actions, the more it proved incapable of controlling contraband. However, Pijning interprets two indicators of the repressive conduct of the administration (ship arrests and prosecutions for illegal trade) in exactly opposite ways, and this contradiction is left unresolved in his response. He fails to explain why the number of ship arrests, but not of prosecutions for illegal trade, should be taken as a measure of the authorities’ inability to keep contraband under control. In fact, the two indicators do not always tell the same story, which is much more complex than Pijning seemingly presumes.

HAHR 81.3/4-10A Pedreira

742

11/27/01

5:25 PM

Page 742

HAHR / August and November / Pedreira

for instance, the evasion of customs duties or the introduction of banned goods in Brazil by Portuguese merchants. In addition, illicit trade along the coastal areas of Spanish America, which had long been promoted by the government (especially in the region of the River Plate), and other forms associated to slave trade (which had long been controlled by Brazilian-based merchants) did not displace the Portuguese colonial system. Such illicit ventures tended to be supplementary rather than competitive vis-à-vis the official colonial trade. The examples of three smuggling ships in Pijning’s response clearly point to those types of contraband that did not have an adverse impact on the exclusive rights of Portuguese merchants and shipowners over the intercourse between Brazil and Europe. In sum, there is no evidence to suggest that, before 1807, those rights were under serious threat from the direct trade between other European countries and Brazil, or that the Portuguese legal monopoly over the foreign trade of Brazil was weaker in economic terms than it had been in earlier periods. There is no evidence of declining profits or surplus prices in the Portuguese trade between Europe and Brazil, which would confirm the crisis of that monopoly. There is no indication of greater irregularity in the trading movement (fluctuations are quite insignificant, especially in comparison to the trade between Spain and Spanish America),10 or evidence to show that Portuguese merchants failed to provide their Brazilian counterparts with goods for local consumption (as Pijning himself admits). Moreover, the suggestion of a crisis of the old colonial system is incompatible with the statistics of colonial trade. Because Pijning chose to work with other types of sources, he cannot simply circumvent these statistics and the evidence they offer, and confine himself to the interpretation of the role of the administration in Rio de Janeiro and the modes in which it exercised its authority. However innovative this may be, it is not an alternative to the analysis of the overall effects of contraband. According to Pijning, as long as contraband was controlled by the administration, regardless of the corruption or the volume of illegal trade, it could not have had an adverse impact. From the perspective of the political economy, this does not make much sense. In the case of Portugal and Brazil, the rise of contraband may or may not have undermined the authority of royal administrators as intermediaries, but it certainly did not undermine the colonial trading system. Therefore, the only way to reconcile the allegation of a crisis in 10. See, for example, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, “La perdida del imperio y sus consecuencias económicas,” in La independencia americana: Consecuencias económicas, ed. Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Samuel Amaral (Madrid: Alianza Univ., 1993), 295 – 98.

HAHR 81.3/4-10A Pedreira

11/27/01

5:25 PM

Page 743

Contraband, Crisis, and the Collapse of the Old Colonial System

743

the colonial system with the formidable growth of the colonial-based trade would be to claim that the political constraints embodied in such a system were largely irrelevant for that growth and Portugal’s share in Brazil’s overseas trade. But this would, of course, mean an even more formidable appraisal of the economic vigor of the ties between Portugal and Brazil, which seems inconsistent with the ensuing development of the commercial relationship between the two territories. Nevertheless, the resilience of those economic ties, the long established commercial network uniting Brazil and Portugal, surely restricted the chances for the extension of contraband. I must confess that I am puzzled by Ernst Pijning’s stand on the strength of this network and on the obstacles faced by British merchants who tried to penetrate the Brazilian market. He agrees with my contention that the endurance of such network explains both the partial recovery of the Brazilian trade by the Portuguese after 1810 and the difficulties British merchants faced to establish their own trading system. Nevertheless he is “not convinced” that the same can be said of the period before 1808. Thus he implies that it had been easier for the British to find clandestine trading connections before the opening of the ports than legal associations afterwards, something he fails to substantiate. If Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian merchants and authorities allied after 1808 to resist the intrusion “on long-established relations both across the Atlantic Ocean and inside Brazil,” then why would they have formerly welcomed the intrusion of smugglers on those same relations, which had been in place for so long. This is an obvious inconsistency in Pijning’s discussion of the matter, and the only way to redress it would be for him to either concede that before 1808 contraband trade was controlled by local Luso-Brazilian traders and authorities or to show that it did not intrude on those persistent relations. But this would undermine his central argument. In any case, Pijning’s acknowledgment of the alliance of Luso-Brazilian merchants and authorities to resist the British intrusion on trading connections across the Atlantic and inside Brazil clearly demonstrates that his work does not, in the least, lend support to the Novais-Arruda definition of the crisis of the old colonial system. This definition is based on the suggestion that Portugal had become redundant for Brazil and that Brazilian merchants were yearning for direct trade with Europe, and is not at all consistent with the notion that there was a strong mercantile network uniting Portugal and Brazil. Furthermore, Pijning also dissents from Novais and Arruda on a fundamental topic: chronology. The two Brazilian historians propose the notion of a protracted crisis (from the late 1770s), whereas Pijning contends for the heighten-

HAHR 81.3/4-10A Pedreira

744

11/27/01

5:25 PM

Page 744

HAHR / August and November / Pedreira

ing of contraband in the last few years before 1808, a decade at most (and in this form it could hardly be the result of structural factors). Therefore, the idea that the breakdown of the Portuguese-Brazilian empire resulted from a long crisis remains unsubstantiated. This is not to say, however, that the individual dynamic of the Brazilian economy should not be taken into account and thoroughly investigated. But to do this, historians must look elsewhere, and not to the Euro-Brazilian connection. The well-established Brazilian-African relationship or the purely American context offer more pertinent frameworks. Each in his own way, Luís Felipe Alencastro, João Luís Ribeiro Fragoso, Manolo Florentino, and Jeremy Adelman11 have shown the direction for future research on this topic. The paramount significance of the slave trade (which developed outside the parameters of control of the metropole and connected Brazil to Africa and the Spanish American colonies), the expansion of the domestic market for foodstuffs and labor and the organization of internal trade, and the integration into a vast trading system, which encompassed most of the Atlantic shores of South America, all form factors of the autonomous dynamic of the Brazilian economy. However, they all share one trait: they did not directly clash with the colonial system. This is probably why they tended to be overlooked for so long. In my view, the discussion should now concentrate on these matters. I do not wish to disregard the important contribution of Ernst Pijning’s work. It certainly improved our knowledge on the workings of contraband and on the role and involvement of the colonial administration. However, as far as the political economy of the old colonial system is concerned, as a system of trade, contraband is still a subsidiary topic.

11. Luís Felipe Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000); João Luís Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura: Acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro, 1790 –1830 (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992); Manolo Florentino, Em costas negras: Uma história do tráfico atlântico de escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVIII e XIX) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1995). At a conference at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais in Lisbon ( June 2001), Jeremy Adelman shared the provisional results of a research project he is conducting on the collapse of Iberian empires in America. These results, presented in his paper entitled “The Slave Trade and the Crisis of the Portuguese and Spanish Empires,” definitely emphasize the importance of a South Atlantic trading system.