Directed migrations supported the Luso-Brazilian government’s efforts to navigate the geopolitical challenges of the post-Napoleonic world. In order to correct the perceived dearth of population in the new seat of an exiled Portuguese Court, government officials went to great lengths to jumpstart migratory flows to Brazil. Peopling served many purposes, allowing the prince regent to cement royal authority through subsidies and concessions while responding to pressures to curtail slavery. Yet, as various groups made their way to Brazil, they lay bare the challenges in long-distance migrant conveyance as well as the diplomatic liabilities involved in directed migrations. The Luso-Brazilian government thus began to defer migration drives to private, mostly German, individuals gearing for profits. This chapter traces the emergence of a strategic exchange between the Joanine government in Rio and foreign petitioners who began to shape peopling as a profitable business sphere, which allowed the Luso-Brazilian administration to quell pressures stemming from Vienna and London, but opened the way for numerous unforeseen consequences.

A “spirit of association” took hold of Brazilian businessmen and lawmakers in the Regency period of the 1830s. This spirit manifested itself in the Rio Doce Company drive, which directly inspired Brazilians to launch the first homegrown colonization companies in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. This chapter traces the trajectory of these pioneering domestic enterprises and examines their operations and their meanings in the context of continuous logistical and political challenges both at home and abroad. Ultimately, these companies set a precedent in institutionalizing reception and conveyance mechanisms, lobbying successfully for pro-colonization policies, and collaborating with the Brazilian diplomatic corps to build a powerful international network of migrant recruitment overseas. Despite these companies’ broad appeal among quarreling elites, both faltered amid the financial crisis of 1837,. The colono trade they spurred in periodic overlap with the illegal slave trade, however, opened the door for continued undocumented migrations from the Azores.

The lessons learned from private colonization experiments in the 1830s drove Brazilian lawmakers back to the drawing board to devise policies that could both promote private colonization schemes and keep them under the government’s purview. A reinstated executive seized the reins of colonization as the royal household enthusiastically founded model colonies spearheaded by the young emperor and his sister. A small group of palatial figures, or áulicos, close to the emperor made this possible from key appointments including in the reactivated Council of State, which oversaw ad hoc colonization petitions. In parliament, the slow but steady evolution of land law bills further contributed to the Brazilian government’s resolve to exercise regulatory muscle. This process came to a head with the debacle of the Delrue contract – a colono-provisioning deal with a French firm that went sour when the Brazilian government discovered numerous irregularities in the payments claimed by Delrue. Ironically, the Delrue scandal empowered Vergueiro & Co., a São Paulo-based firm that would become a leading colono distributor within a decade, demonstrating that the colonization irradiated from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, and not the other way around.

Chapter 6 investigates how the duopoly, by radically curtailing numbers, inadvertently transformed actors from vagrants in need of a patron’s protection to celebrities lionized by courtiers and commoners alike. Managerial choices coalesced with the historical accident of a monarch so intimately associated with the theatre that he took two actresses as mistresses. Playhouse architecture also exerted an unexpected phenomenological effect on their status. The intimacy characteristic of the Restoration playhouse transmogrified performed intersubjectivity into the crackling exchange of eroticized energy. Unprecedented social freedom, economic mobility, and even contemporary portraiture attest to their new stature after 1660. That new prominence, however, invited attacks in print and person – against women especially – from men anxious about their own precarious hold on respectability. The choices, contingencies, and memories that made Restoration theatre such an unforgiving business nonetheless catapulted the acting profession toward the celebrity culture that would flourish in the following century.

Brazil accompanied global mid-century changes with its own great transformation in 1850: three landmark laws on the slave trade, land, and commerce that in theory aligned state-building with market forces. Yet, if premised on colonization as a substitute for slavery, the country’s transformation was in fact a circuitous one, as abolitionists’, planters’ and the government’s own efforts pointed in different directions. As the illegal slave trade endured after 1850, Brazilian abolitionists organized a new association to promote model colonies built from the ground up, but their efforts paled in comparison to the private colonization undertaken by wealthy Paraíba Valley planters. Historians assume that this coffee-growing elite held sway over the Brazilian state, but their colonization approaches suggest otherwise. The imperial government was more interested in promoting myriad new colonization endeavors across the Empire, including in the northeastern provinces, and using colonization for its own geopolitical needs. Conflicting uses of colonization laid bare not only the failure of government-directed initiatives to appease divergent regional interests, but also the ways in which colonization complicated rather than facilitated a purported transition toward free labor and an alignment of state and market interests.

With the end of the Paraguayan War, planters again panicked over impending labor scarcity. In response, prominent businessmen at the Court began to organize a new company to jumpstart a “coolie trade” to Brazil. Without a diplomatic entry-point into China, however, their efforts remained scattershot until they pressured the Brazilian government to pursue a commercial treaty with the Qing Empire. Meanwhile, Brazil’s top tycoon, the barão de Mauá, attempted to set up a model sugar central with Indian coolies from Mauritius in an effort to overcome a colossal bankruptcy. As British colonial subjects, these workers received special attention when they complained of poor treatment, which demonstrated the power of diplomatic representation to curtail planters’ disregard for contractual conditions and for workers in general. Both “experiments” were put to the test in the court of public opinion, where Sinophobia masked competing business interests. Whereas the Agricultural Congress of 1878 examined the potential of coolie labor to effect a labor “transition” with lukewarm enthusiasm at best, newspapers engaged in a battle of words with strong racist and eugenic undertones that, at base, had more to do with competition for readership and government contracts than the issue of Chinese colonization itself.

As Chapter 5 details, the theatrical promise of courtliness, prestige, and technological innovation attracted talented men and women who sought careers as dramatists. The duopoly, however, severely limited their opportunities, as did the ever growing backlog of old plays. After 1682, only one company remained to which they could sell their product, and overburdened payrolls consumed budgets that could otherwise be spent on new play development. Dramatists thus found themselves in the contradictory position of, on the one hand, affecting the gentility necessary for belonging to this exclusive cultural enterprise, and, on the other, chasing after diminishing opportunities like any common hack. And, finally, the theatre’s embrace of luxury and innovation made scarce another limited resource over which dramatists now competed: sumptuous scenic effects to adorn their scripts. By the end of the century, so deeply felt was disaffection with working conditions that few literary-minded writers took up drama as a profession, thereby establishing a pattern that would continue well into the eighteenth century.