Peopling for Profit in Imperial Brazil
Directed Migrations and the Business of Nineteenth-Century Colonization

Nineteenth-century Brazilians shaped a market in migrants by avidly pursuing colonization through private companies bridging business and politics.

José Juan Pérez Meléndez (Author)

9781009281843, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 June 2024

428 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.8 cm, 0.77 kg

'Peopling for Profit is an important contribution to studies of the nineteenth century, in Brazil and globally. Pérez Meléndez's nuanced analysis of colonization within the context of commerce helps to expand scholarly understandings of the peopling of Brazil, the transition from empire to republic, and the connection of both to the building of wealth.' Jeffrey Lesser, American Historical Review

Peopling for Profit provides a comprehensive history of migration to nineteenth-century imperial Brazil. Rather than focus on Brazilian slavery or the mass immigration of the end of the century, José Juan Pérez Meléndez examines the orchestrated efforts of migrant recruitment, transport to, and settlement in post-independence Brazil. The book explores Brazil's connections to global colonization drives and migratory movements, unveiling how the Brazilian Empire's engagement with privately run colonization models from overseas crucially informed the domestic sphere. It further reveals that the rise of a for-profit colonization model indelibly shaped Brazilian peopling processes and governance by creating a feedback loop between migration management and government formation. Pérez Meléndez sheds new light on how directed migrations and the business of colonization shaped Brazilian demography as well as enduring social, racial, and class inequalities. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Introduction
What is Colonization?
Part I. Colonization's Statecraft: 1. Peopling as strategy: appeasement and preemption in the Joanine court
2. Marching to the homestead: colonization in the crosshairs of the long post-independence
Part II. Colonization Companies and the Colono Trade: 3. Shareholder oligarchies: the first homegrown companies
4. Palatial diplomacy: colonization at the hand of the emperor's cabal
5. Brazil's great transformation
Part III. Disentangling Companies and State: 6. Cabinets and companies: testing the limits of the state
7. The dregs of war: emigrant sweeps at a time of global turmoil
8. Coolies and scandals: skullduggery, bankruptcy, and the coolie question after the free womb law
Part IV. Peopling the Country of the Future: 10. At the doorstep of mass migrations
Conclusion: the afterlives of a nineteenth-century paradigm
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]