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 offers a narrative and an analysis of the process of independence in Brazil between 1807 and 1831 from a general perspective, but with a still little-known focus: the influences this process received from Spanish America, which, during the same period, was also becoming independent. The narrative follows the flow of the most relevant political and social events in both realms, revealing how Spanish America as a whole and its many regions in particular were “read” in Brazil, and how the country created its political options, among other factors, from its continental neighborhood, then becoming independent from Portugal and starting its formation as a sovereign state and nation. Far from the traditional – and still current – idea of Brazil as an exception in the American context of the nineteenth century, the ways in which Brazil and Spanish America shared a scenario and historical unity are shown, which cannot be properly understood separately. In addition to that, the drawing of this common plot will be developed with a general description of the inverse movement, lesser known in the historiography, i.e., of how Brazilian independency impacted parts of Spanish America.

This chapter explores how postcolonial reformers attempted to reconcile Brazil’s dependence on slavery and the slave trade within a nation-building project that emphasized it as an empire of law, order, and liberal citizenship. It discusses Brazil’s transition from a colony to a postcolonial nation, and analyzes the antislavery ideas that informed the building of the penitentiary in Rio as a crucible for modernizing the empire. By 1831, these postcolonial reformers converged around a philanthropic organization called the Sociedade Defensora da Liberdade e Independencia Nacional, whose objective was to modernize Brazil’s institution from colony to nation. The organization targeted abolition of the slave trade to Brazil and reform of its criminal justice system as two of its main objectives to anchor the empire on the path to progress, order, and economic prosperity. Analyzing the postcolonial debates on the abolition of the slave trade, legal reforms, and citizenship demonstrates that they were fundamental to the adoption of the penitentiary. Social reformers and antislavery advocates viewed the prohibition of the traffic as significant in resolving debates about race, nation, and citizenship in postindependence Brazil.