Port-Driven State Formation in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter highlights the most prominent outcome of state-formation in Brazil, which its founders fittingly called an empire. It considers Brazil as the fifth-largest country in the world and the largest contiguous territory in the Americas. It also mentions the great efforts of Rio de Janeiro to extinguish separation attempts from Pernambuco and Bahia in the Northeast and Rio Grande do Sul in the South during the intense wave of secessionism in the 1830s. The chapter discusses the extraordinary wealth created by the coffee boom and the carefully designed emergency plan by a triumvirate of political entrepreneurs that consolidated Brazil's territory. It explores the period in which Uruguay was a province of Brazil, which produced an archival gem that gives a clear sense of the magnitude of the success by Rio de Janeiro.