Brazil

The history of Brazilian population in the colonial period was shaped by the arrival of Portuguese settlers, the reduction and retreat of indigenous tribes, and the importation of African slaves. In 1500 the entire Atlantic coast was occupied by scattered tribes, mostly of the Tupi-Guarani language group, totaling about 2.5 million. Portuguese military campaigns in the 1560s and 1570s sometimes resulted in the annihilation of whole tribes; the survivors were commonly enslaved. By 1585, African slaves had substantially replaced Indian slaves on the sugar plantations of the northeast. However, in the interior and in the Amazon region, enslaved Indians continued to predominate as the labor force through the seventeenth century. In Maranhão the emerging cacao trade after 1720 finally prompted the greater use of African slaves.

Slavery was the dominant form of labor in colonial and nineteenth-century Brazil. Estimates for Brazilian slave imports from 1551 to 1870 vary from 2.5 million to 4.3 million. More than 80 percent of all African slaves entered Brazil after 1700, the vast majority through Rio de Janeiro to the mines of Minas Gerais in the period 1700–1780 or to the sugar and coffee plantations in the period 1780–1850. Proportions of slaves in the populations of various Brazilian municipalities in the eighteenth century varied from 39 to 52 percent, while in the sugar zones often as much as 70 percent of the population was slave. The slave population had an abnormally low fertility rate and a high death rate; the rate of natural increase was almost always negative. Slavery was also important in urban skilled and unskilled occupations in the early nineteenth century; slaves sometimes provided more than half the urban labor force, a situation that was facilitated by the location of most production in artisan households.

The European population grew from about 20,000 in 1570 to approximately 100,000 in 1700, and to about 2 million in 1798. Brazil had a population of between 3 and 4 million at the end of the eighteenth century and began the nineteenth century with a moderate growth rate, succeeded in the twentieth century by one of the highest growth rates in the world. For the period from 1850 to 1900, Giorgio Mortara estimated a gradual increase in rate of growth from 1.6 percent per annum from 1850 to 1870, to 2.4 percent from 1890 to 1900. The crude death rate declined to about 28 to 29 per thousand and immigration accounted for almost one-third of population growth between 1891 and 1900. This was the peak period of the impact on population of European immigration, with the growth from immigration declining to about 8 percent for each of the next four decades.

The ethnic and racial composition of the Brazilian population changed significantly during the nineteenth century. The free population of color, which was only 20 percent of the total colored population in 1800, had ballooned to 74 percent by 1872. It was the fastest-growing population group in the nineteenth century, constituting 58 percent of the total population of Brazil in 1872. However, the free colored population was a much more important proportion of the population in the Northeast than in the Southeast, and the white population continued to predominate in the urban areas. In the twentieth century the parda, or racially mixed, population continued to expand relative to both the white and the black populations, increasing from 21 percent of the population in 1940 to 39 percent in 2006. In the same period the preta, or black, population declined from 15 to 6 percent of the population.

The Brazilian slave population declined from 1,715,000 in 1864 to 1,240,806 in 1883, with the remaining slaves concentrated in the coffee-producing south. The expansion of commercialized export activities in the late nineteenth century resulted in a substantial transfer of slaves from urban areas back into rural cash-crop activities. Although industrial occupations characterized only a small part of the slave population, 11 percent of manual and mechanical industrial workers in Brazil in 1872 were slaves, as were more than 25 percent of the total industrial labor force in the province of Rio de Janeiro.

Recent research on the slave family in Brazil suggests that—in spite of a strongly unbalanced sex ratio—between 50 and 80 percent of the rural Paulista slave population had the experience of living within a family context, that is, either with a marital partner or with one or two parents. On large Paulista plantations, couple-headed households were the norm. Many households in smallholdings were composed of a slave mother and her children. The frequency of the slave family was also much higher on older plantations, whose slaves tended to be native-born (creoles). Little is known about the frequency with which such unions were broken up by sale or inheritance or about their duration, but other studies reveal that levels of slave marriage and family life were very low, particularly on small plantations and in urban areas.

The relationship between the abolition of slavery and the immigration program in Brazil is complicated. Thomas Holloway demonstrates that the decline in available slaves relative to labor needs by 1887 necessitated a transition to a new labor system in São Paulo. Planters viewed abolition as necessary if free immigrant labor was to be attracted.

In the period between 1880 and 1930, more than 4 million immigrants entered Brazil, with almost 60 percent settling in the state of São Paulo. The foreign-born proportion of the Brazilian population increased from about 4 percent in 1872 to a peak of 7 percent in 1900. From 1908 to 1941 almost 200,000 Japanese immigrated to Brazil; another 50,000 Japanese immigrated after World War II. Most Japanese entered as farm laborers and settled in São Paulo. In addition, German, Polish, and Italian immigrant entrepreneurs played a significant role as small farmers or pioneers in industrial activity in Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo.

In the early twentieth century, population growth tapered off, primarily because of the decline in immigration to 7 to 8 percent per year of population growth from 1900 to 1930. Mortality declined slightly, probably due to the abolition of slavery and increased public health measures, especially the eradication of yellow fever. From 1918 to 1966, infant mortality—whose primary cause was inadequate diet—declined dramatically. Mortality declined about 50 percent from 1920 to 1960, but the continued strong birth rate resulted in the most rapid population increase in Brazilian history (3 percent per year) for the decade 1950 to 1960. In the 1960s Brazil experienced the first marked decline in its crude birth rate, from 43 to 44 per thousand in the period 1940–1960 to near 40 per thousand in the period 1960–1970. By 1990, the birth rate had declined dramatically to 27 per thousand and fell further by 2006 to 16.56 per thousand. Although this rate of growth continues to be high by international standards, there has been a substantial fertility change. It has occurred in spite of only modest economic growth.

Internal migration is one of the dominant population characteristics of twentieth-century Brazil. From a rate of 3 percent per year in the period 1890–1900, the net rate of internal migration increased to 5.5 percent for the period 1950–1960. Rural-urban migration was not significantly related to macroeconomic processes until about 1920. For the period 1890–1930 international migration was more important demographically than internal migration and essentially preempted internal migration as a source of labor in the south and the east. After 1930 internal migration became more significant. This pattern is particularly apparent in São Paulo, the most important region for both internal and foreign migration in the twentieth century. While migration in the period 1890–1950 was focused on moves between rural labor markets and the opening of new land on the frontiers, the migration patterns since 1960 have been predominantly rural-urban and urban-urban migration. Urban population, which composed only 16 percent of total population in 1940, increased to 40 percent of total population by 1970, to 67 percent by 1980, and to 80 percent by 2005.

After 1890 the demographic center of Brazil shifted southward (particularly with the massive arrival of European and Japanese immigrants); by 1950, the state of São Paulo was the largest state in the republic, with 18 percent of the total population. Since the 1940s, the frontier regions in Brazil have grown most rapidly, with the old agricultural regions in relative decline. Urbanization became pronounced in the south in the latter part of the nineteenth century, stimulating the growth of internal markets. Since the 1960s, cities in all regions have expanded dramatically, exceeding 4 percent population growth per annum. During this period Brazil shifted from an essentially rural nation (75 percent rural in 1940) to an urban one (80 percent urban in 2005). In 2005 Brazil had a total estimated population of 183.88 million.

Thomas Merrick and Douglas Graham explain the intense migration to rural destinations in the period after 1930 by the growing push factors of increased capital-intensive sugar production in the northeast as well as the increased labor demand in São Paulo. They suggest four patterns of rural frontier settlement: (1) the Paulista plantation immigrant pattern of 1885–1930, based on a rural oligarchy and leading to economic mobility and sustained economic growth; (2) the Paraná small-to-medium farmer pattern of the 1940s and 1950s; (3) settlement in central Goiás and Mato Grosso, focused on cattle in the 1950s and 1960s, including many low-income migrants from the northeast; and (4) Amazon colonization projects in the 1970s, which gave way to corporate estates as colonization by small farmers failed.

Recent urbanization has taken the form of increasing growth of the larger cities (over 250,000 population), especially the metropolitan areas of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Salvador, Pôrto Alegre, Belém, Curitiba, and Fortaleza, primarily as a result of migration from the Northeast. The growth rates in small and medium cities have generally been slowing and the southeastern urban areas continue to dominate. Migration has involved people from all socioeconomic levels, but since about 1970 migrants have increasingly come from lower-income groups. Nevertheless, although migration is often associated with urban poverty, migrants as a whole (based on income, occupational, and labor-force participation data) compare favorably to non-migrants, and they constituted 60 to 70 percent of the urban labor force in the center-south and about 45 percent in northeastern cities in 1975. Even more telling, in terms of an evaluation of migration as a strategy for social mobility, is the fact that the greatest poverty is found among very recent migrants. Female migrants are also less favored than male migrants, with a large proportion of women in domestic service and the informal employment sector as compared to men.

The Brazilian population in the twenty-first century continues to display many of its historical characteristics. Racial and cultural diversity, along with a somewhat insidious racism, was visible in the structure of occupations and in residential patterns. Personalistic modes of economic and political organization, along with an "urban peasantry" attitude toward multiple, often subsistence-based occupations, lent a rural flavor to urban life. The informal sector of the economy supported about 40 percent of the population, and income distribution was among the most polarized in the world. While mortality has diminished substantially, levels of child abandonment in urban areas were astounding, and malnutrition was still a major cause of death. Fertility levels, particularly among educated working women, have begun to decline, but "motherhood" was still reported to be "the essence of woman," and child labor continued to be significant to lower-class household income, a factor that encourages fertility. Public education was vastly underfunded on the primary level; most upper-class and middle-class children went to private schools. The secondary level of education was private and university education was free, essentially providing a subsidy for the elite. The system did not encourage lower-class families to restrict births and educate children for a better life. Future population trends are clearly dependent on changes in fertility, but the social and economic structure was hardly propitious for fertility decline in the near future.

See alsoBrazil: The Colonial Era, 1500–1808; Brazil: 1808–1889; Brazil: Since 1889; Slavery: Brazil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For historical studies of colonial and nineteenth-century Brazilian population see John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (1978), and Herbert Klein, "The Trade in African Slaves to Rio de Janeiro, 1795–1811: Estimates of Mortality and Patterns of Voyages," in Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 533-550. Work on the slave population in the nineteenth century is best represented by Robert Slenes, "The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery: 1850–1888" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1976). The best and most comprehensive study on Brazilian population since the late nineteenth century is Thomas W. Merrick and Douglas H. Graham, Population and Economic Development in Brazil, 1800 to the Present (1979). Other works are Giorgio Mortara, Contribuição para o estudo de demografia no Brasil (1970), and Thomas Holloway, "Creating the Reserve Army: The Immigration Program of São Paulo, 1886–1930," in International Migration Review 12, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 187-209.

Additional Bibliography

Bergad, Laird W. Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Centro de Documentação e Disseminação de Informações. Brasil, 500 anos de povoamento. Rio de Janiero: Author, 2000.

Marcilio, Maria Luiza. Crescimento demográfico e evolução agrária paulista, 1700–1836. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, Edusp, 2000.

Oliveira, Maria Coleta. Demografia da exclusão social: Temas e abordagens. Campinas, São Paulo: Editora da UNICAMP, 2001.

Pagliaro, Heloísa, Marta Maria Azevedo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos. Demografia dos povos indígenas no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz; and Campinas, Brazil: Associação Brasileira de Estudos Populacionais, 2005.

                                Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof