- Once the economy fostered by the Jesuits withered away, the population, now much diminished, reverted to the subsistence livelihoods that had always been a mainstay of the region.
- The pace of colonization in the Portuguese Amazon accelerated following the Jesuits’ expulsion. The Companhia de Comércio do Grão-Pará e Maranhão’s primary business model was to accelerate the African slave trade in the coastal provinces of Maranhão, but it also radically changed the economics and demographics of the Amazon floodplain.
- In the case of Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana, after the abolition of slavery, the countries imported labor from India (under the rule of the British Empire) and from the Dutch East Indies. Their shared history is more similar to that of the Caribbean than that of the Amazon.
Because of their privileged status as a transnational religious institution and their allegiance to the pope, the Jesuits enjoyed considerable autonomy from both the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. This status allowed them to avoid taxes and disregard the colonial elites, who envied their ability to monopolize labor and resources. Colonial dissatisfaction was exacerbated by palace intrigue in Lisbon and Madrid, as well as in Rome, which led to their expulsion from the Portuguese and Spanish empires in 1759 and 1767, respectively.
In Maynas, Chiquitos and Moxos, responsibility for administering the productive assets of the reducciones was assumed by civil authorities as representatives of the crown, while the missions’ spiritual operations were passed to diocesan clergy. Wholesale dysfunction motivated the Spanish to transfer the religious system to the Franciscans in 1780, but the separation of the economic means of production from religious control denied the friars the means of supporting the missions, and by 1804 the entire system had essentially collapsed.
In Maynas, the advance of the Portuguese was kept in check by the military post at Iquitos, but access to the region was now organized via the colonial towns on the upper Marañón (Jaen) and Huallaga (Moyobamba) rivers, which were linked to the coast by an Inca road that traversed a low point in the Andean Cordillera (Huancabamba Gap). Administrative control was now exercised from Lima (Virreinato del Perú) rather than Quito (Audiencia de Quito). This arrangement was formalized in 1801, when the region was organized as the Comandancia General de Maynas. The change in jurisdictional status was repudiated by the Republic of Ecuador in 1809, but Peru prevailed because the logistical connections via the Marañón and Huallaga rivers were geopolitically durable compared to the tenuous links with Quito, which had ceased to function after the Jesuit exodus.
Despite the jurisdictional changes, the economy fostered by the Jesuits withered away, and the population, now much diminished, reverted to the subsistence livelihoods that had always been (and remain) a mainstay of the region. Maynas essentially slumbered through the following century, until the rubber boom triggered the next stage of its historical evolution. Nonetheless, the acculturation of the region’s native inhabitants, mostly of the Omagua ethnic group, ensured their engagement with colonial traders and military garrisons. Their descendants are the Ribereños who now dominate the political economy of lowland Amazonian Peru.
In Chiquitos, the criollo elite in Santa Cruz de la Sierra quickly moved to appropriate the economic assets of the Jesuit missions. Some of the Indigenous residents decamped to the forest, but most came under the subjugation of the colonial, soon to be Republican, elites. The newcomers occupied the villages, while the Indigenous residents were relocated to ‘ranchos’ some distance from the main village. Typically, each rancho was associated with an agricultural estate, and its inhabitants acquired a serf-like status similar to that of the latifundio system that prevailed in the Andean highlands.
In Moxos, the process was slower because of its isolation and the Indigenous residents’ willingness to maintain the basic structure and economic production system. Alcides d’Orbigny, the French naturalist, visited the region in 1933 and observed that the mission structure remained essentially intact, with approximately 20,000 residents who conserved their native languages. Pioneers from Santa Cruz were migrating into the region and appropriating large tracts of land for cattle ranching, however, and by 1850 the number of individuals claiming European descent increased from 57 to more than 1,100. The cattle herd also grew, to more than 150,000 head.
In contrast to Maynas, Chiquitos and Moxos, the pace of colonization in the Portuguese Amazon accelerated following the expulsion of the Jesuits, partly because the departure of the missionary orders coincided with the ascendency of the Marquês de Pombal as prime minister in the court of King Jose I. Pombal was responsible for a monumental transformation of the imperial government, but he was also a self-interested aristocrat who induced the king to grant a monopoly trading concession in 1755 to the Companhia de Comércio do Grão-Pará e Maranhão. The company, which was modeled on the charter companies of Britain and the Netherlands, privatized the administration of crown assets while confiscating the economic assets of the mission villages. Its primary business model was to accelerate the African slave trade in the coastal provinces of Maranhão, but it also radically changed the economics and demographics of the Amazon floodplain and adjacent landscapes. The Companhia appropriated the lucrative trade in the drogas do sertão, a move that brought it into direct conflict with the Jesuits.
The separation of economic and religious activities was accompanied by the establishment of a system referred to as the ‘Diretoria’, which, at the level of the mission village, meant replacing the Jesuit autocrat with a civil servant representing the Companhia. These individuals were compensated based on a percentage of the trade generated by the mission and their ability to supply Indigenous labour to colonists and government agents who were pouring into the region as part of a policy to establish the presence of the Portuguese state.
The Companhia consolidated its presence by establishing military posts between 1767 and 1777 at the junction of the Solimões and Javari rivers (Tabatinga), the upper Rio Negro (São Gabriel de Cachoeira) and the Rio Branco (São Joaquim). It also extended its presence up the Madeira and Guaporé rivers by establishing settlements at Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade, in what is now Mato Grosso, and at the Forte Príncipe da Beira, near Costa Marquez in current-day Rondônia. The extension of Portuguese sovereignty east of the Guaporé coincided with the expansion of bandeirante excursions from São Paulo into Mato Grosso in their ongoing thirst for gold, slaves and territories.
These forts and their associated mission settlements established an effective border between the Spanish and Portuguese that was formalized by the treaties of Madrid (1750) and Ildefonso (1777). Ironically, the company’s monopoly ended in 1777, when Pombal was banished from the court, and was dissolved by an edict of the queen in 1778. Nonetheless, the system perfected by the Companhia, which included state control of the mission villages, dominated the economy of the Portuguese and Brazilian Amazon for another half century.
The first years following the change in governance saw an upsurge in the activities of bandeirantes and the decline of the tribes of the lower Amazon. As these people were decimated by disease and forced relocation, the bandeirantes expanded their expeditions upstream into the Solimões and Rio Negro. Tens of thousands of individuals were captured and transported (descended) to the lower Amazon, where they were cast into a social milieu that robbed them of their ethnic identity.
Upriver, demographic transformation was propelled by soldiers, border functionaries and bandeirantes who took local women as their wives and concubines, creating a local elite that dominated the trade routes that were growing up around the drogas de sertão, the term used to describe the forest products that were the basis of the Amazonian economy in the period between the Jesuit expulsion and the onset of the rubber boom in the late nineteenth century.
Five tribes stand out for their role in resisting, avoiding or succumbing to the Portuguese: the Omagua, who were closely associated with the floodplain islands of the Solimões; their neighbors, the Tikuna, who lived in the upland forests north of the Solimões floodplain; and further downstream, the Mura, who occupied the lower Madeira and middle Amazon floodplain until they were displaced by the Murunduku, who dominated the Rio Tapajós, while the Manao controlled the middle stretch of the Rio Negro.
The Omagua were incorporated first into the mission settlements and then into the Ribeirinha culture, while the Tikuna avoided contact and assimilation by retreating into their forest sanctuaries. The Mura waged a guerilla war for more than a century, but surrendered to the Portuguese in 1789 as a strategy to escape attacks from the Murunduku; today they self-identify as Caboclos. The Manao, who had once controlled passage on the river, declined gradually and eventually disappeared in face of repeated attacks by bandeirantes. The Murunduku and Tikuna survived by using a combination of avoidance and guile; today they are among Brazil’s most resilient and largest Indigenous nations.
Caboclos, quilomobolas and Maroons
People living along the Amazon and Solimões rivers bear the imprint of their Indigenous forebears, as well as changes induced by missionaries, bandeirantes, colonists and traders. Erosion of their Indigenous heritage was gradual. Over time, they became known as Caboclos, a racialized term for a demographic group of mixed Indigenous and European heritage. Historians estimate that, by the first half of the nineteenth century, Caboclos represented the largest demographic group in the Provincia de Grão Pará (~40,000), surpassing ethnic Indigenous people residing in former mission settlements (~33,000) and an increasing number of enslaved Africans (~30,000). All remained under the nominal control of individuals of European descent (~15,000).
Despite the autocratic nature of the regional government, numerous enslaved Indigenous and African people escaped their captors; they were, after all, skilled practitioners of the subsistence economy and could reconstitute their livelihoods after escaping from their overlords. The region was also beset with violence and unrest, which reached a peak in 1835, when a peasant rebellion, known as the Cabanagem, overturned the status quo. This uniquely Amazonian revolt was led by a coalition of Caboclo peasants, displaced Indigenous refugees and urban poor who rose up in violent protest against slave traders, plantation owners and merchants. Surprisingly, the rebels overthrew the regime in Belem and controlled the government for more than a year. Their success was partly due to the participation of urban elites enticed by the idea of an independent state free from the domination – and neglect – of Southern Brazil.
It was a violent affair from its inception, because of internecine conflicts among its protagonists, suppression by federal troops and an extended guerilla war that lasted four years after the rebels were ejected from Belem. The population in Pará, estimated at around 120,000 before the revolt, was reduced by an estimated thirty to forty per cent, a remarkable number that reveals the brutality of the armed forces that intervened to reassert federal control. The reported deaths may be inflated by another demographic phenomenon, however.
The Cabanagem was also an ideal opportunity for the enslaved to escape their masters. Displaced Indigenous people could escape and return to their villages upriver or, more likely, disappear into the Caboclo culture. That was not an option for Black people, who were subject to harsh treatment in a country in constant fear of a slave uprising. They responded by fleeing to remote landscapes to establish agrarian communities known as quilombos.
A similar foundational narrative describes a cultural demographic in Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. These three geographic jurisdictions share a history of colonial domination by non-Iberian countries and an economy based on sugar cane plantations. Like many European colonies of the nineteenth century, they were dependent upon the slave trade from West Africa. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large numbers of these slaves escaped captivity and established free communities in the forest interior of Suriname and French Guiana. In the early years, the escapees were forced to defend themselves from colonial governments seeking their capture. They eventually settled into coexistence with colonial administrators, established self-governing communities and pursued livelihoods based on forest resources and subsistence agriculture. These communities have created an ethnic identity referred to as Maroons, which consist of six main tribes with different cultural and linguistic traditions.
After the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the colonial governments transported contract labor from British-ruled India and the Dutch East Indies. This shared history sets them apart from Latin America and a cultural tradition more closely linked to the Caribbean than the Amazon. These groups are more numerous than their fellow citizens of African descent and have considerable economic and political power. The Maroons have faced adversity and discrimination throughout their existence. For example, in the 1970s the newly independent government in Suriname sought to evict them from their traditional lands during the construction of the Brokopondo Reservoir.
Coincidentally, their territories overlay the Guiana greenstone belt and the Maroons have become major actors in wildcat gold mining operations, starting in the late 1890s during the region’s first gold rush and continuing into recent decades. Some participate as a source of labor, but the more enterprising have obtained mining concessions, which they sublet to Brazilian wildcat miners known as garimpeiros. Like wildcat gold mining landscapes across the Pan Amazon, most activity occurs within the ‘informal’ economy, where royalties and taxes are seldom paid and environmental regulations are routinely ignored. Most use mercury to concentrate the gold, and in the process poison themselves and their traditional lands.
Banner image: The Real Forte Príncipe da Beira (Costa Marques, Rondônia, Brazil) was founded in 1775 to defend Portuguese claims to Amazonian territories from Spanish incursions after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Moxos missions in the present-day Bolivian lowlands. Image location: www.ipatrimonio.org/costa-marques-forte-principe-da-beira. CC BY-SA 4.0 Courtesy of iPatrimônio.
“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.
Chapter 6. Culture and demographic defines the present