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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 unre-
servedly welcome his comments, I fear that the discussion will now be con-
fined to a subsidiary point that I tried to avoid in the essay that prompted Pijn-
ing’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 five-
fold. Large imports of sugar, cotton, and tobacco from Brazil led to unprece-
dented 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 fluctua-
tions 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 govern-
ment 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 struc-
tures 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
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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 pre-
sumed dissolving effects of the Industrial Revolution and the American Revo-
lution 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).
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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 conclu-
sion 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 ques-
tions concerning contraband need to be reframed: How did it affect the colo-
nial 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.
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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 gov-
ernment (especially in the region of the River Plate), and other forms associ-
ated to slave trade (which had long been controlled by Brazilian-based mer-
chants) did not displace the Portuguese colonial system. Such illicit ventures
tended to be supplementary rather than competitive vis-à-vis the official colo-
nial 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 peri-
ods. There is no evidence of declining profits or surplus prices in the Por-
tuguese 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 Por-
tuguese 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 administra-
tion, 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 adminis-
trators as intermediaries, but it certainly did not undermine the colonial trad-
ing 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.
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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 intru-
sion “on long-established relations both across the Atlantic Ocean and inside
Brazil,” then why would they have formerly welcomed the intrusion of smug-
glers 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 connec-
tions 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 cri-
sis 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 pro-
tracted crisis (from the late 1770s), whereas Pijning contends for the heighten-
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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-estab-
lished 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 organi-
zation 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.