This chapter tells the story of two of the most notorious and ambitious company efforts in nineteenth-century Brazil, which, taken together dispel the notion that the end of the “conciliation period” had produced any lasting government neutrality in relation to private enterprise. The Mucury Company, founded by liberal stalwart Teófilo Ottoni, faced unlikely competition from the new Associação Central de Colonização, a state-favored company established in Rio. While Ottoni incorporated agents and techniques from previous colonization efforts, devised his own indigenous appeasement policies, and successfully orchestrated migrations to his flagship colony of Filadelfia, the ACC focused solely on migrant recruitment, transport, and reception, and received ample government subsidies to guarantee shareholder dividends. The ACC quickly overtook Ottoni’s colono recruitment efforts thanks to the support of prime minister Olinda, who was attempting to counter international criticisms of Brazilian colonization and define pertinent regulatory frameworks while harboring distrust toward Ottoni’s political aims. While both companies eventually folded, they did so for different reasons. In turn, the regulations devised by Olinda in his engagement with them became landmark precedents for the era of mass migrations.

The nineteenth century saw a transformation in the concept of colonization as political economists recast the term to refer to directed migration and settlement processes. Brazilian statesmen, intellectuals, and businessmen in the newly independent Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) embraced this new brand of colonization as an advantageous policy expedient because it aligned with old regime peopling practices, promised to resolve the question of slavery, and, significantly, held the prospect of individual profits, particularly if carried out by colonization companies. Brazilian engagement with colonization fit within a wider series of colonization processes unfolding within European empires or their overseas dominions as well as throughout the new republics in the Americas. Comparing and connecting the Brazilian case to concurrent peopling efforts across the globe unsettles understandings of colonization as part of a global settler revolution of which Brazil figured as a peripheral case. The key role played by companies as the harbingers of a new colonization paradigm underscores profit as a guiding principle in Brazilian colonization schemes in the nineteenth century.

Amid epidemics, droughts, and a bourgeoning abolitionist wave in the late 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian Empire internalized migration protocols long in the making. Crucial to the development of new migration policies was the Sociedade Central de Imigração (SCI), a new association midway between a corporation and a literary club. The SCI and its abolitionist members, which included conservative noblemen and republican professionals, synthesized the lessons learned by three generations of political elites, and avidly lobbied for reform policies pertinent to land surveying and distribution, naturalization, and immigration promotion. Dismissed by scholars as a bourgeois and largely failed experiment in immigration advocacy, the SCI in fact furnished the policy tools for the Brazilian government to counter German and Italian interdictions on migrations to Brazil, which, as the chapter demonstrates, had more to do with commercial and geostrategic concerns than with immigration issues themselves. Ultimately, the SCI laid the building blocks for the new Republican government to welcome exponentially growing cohorts of migrants despite the persistence of international prohibitions in Italy.

Chapter 1 chronicles how the distractibility of a king, the agency of objects, the desires that cloud judgment, and the memories that haunt the present shape events perhaps even more than ideology. Prior to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Duke of Newcastle proposed returning to a Caroline-style theatrical marketplace, but he was outmaneuvered by courtier-playwrights long accustomed to deploying networks of access. Contingency also determined outcomes. The particular circumstances of Charles II’s upbringing certainly benefited William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, the two successful patentees. Unlike his royal predecessors, the new monarch regarded the commercial theatre as a gift to be bestowed upon persistent clients who would enjoy monopolistic control going forward. No one foresaw, of course, the economic repercussions of that gift, namely, how the transformation of the theatre from a purely commercial to a hybrid enterprise would require substantial support beyond the box office. Additionally, the duopoly so sought by Killigrew and Davenant exerted its own unexpected agencies. As the following chapters explore, its resulting economic and cultural logic galvanized a host of decisions about repertories and performance practices that would prove both innovative and ruinous.

Chapter 2 analyzes how both patent companies used the duopoly to intensify consumer demand through the complementary strategies of engineered scarcity and manufactured prestige. In addition to limiting the number of theatres operating in London, the patentees designated two-thirds of the auditorium for those wealthy enough to spend discretionary income on vastly increased ticket prices. In their pursuit of prestige, the companies also imported various French repertory practices, such as later curtain times and long runs, that did not map well onto the traditional six-day-a-week English performance calendar. Additionally, the early Restoration practice of mounting a pre-1660 repertory, owing to the lack of new playwrights, became an ingrained habit. The resulting repetition within the dramatic repertory failed to realize the box office magic sought by management: premieres of new plays were few and revivals of old plays many, to the consternation of spectators and playwrights alike. To flourish, the Restoration companies needed to offer a varied dramatic repertory that was both affordable and accessible to a large swath of Londoners.

Colonization and colonization companies persisted well after the era of mass migrations in initiatives such as the “March to the West” and the military dictatorship’s efforts to colonize the Amazon in the 1970s. Covering the republican, Vargas, and dictatorship eras in the way of a birds-eye view, this chapter surveys the recurrent restaging of the nineteenth-century paradigm of colonization in hinterland colonization efforts in the twentieth century, particularly those in “central” Brazil and in the southern Amazon. Ultimately, nineteenth-century colonization dynamics overseen and underwritten by the Brazilian government and led by private entities provided artificial advantages to incoming migrants in relation to other demographic groups, which raises important questions about the historical memorialization of migrant pasts.

Deborah C. Payne’s groundbreaking study traces the historical origins of a dilemma still bedeviling theatre companies: how to reconcile audience demand for novelty with profitability. As a solution, English acting companies in 1660 adopted an unprecedented theatrical duopoly. Implicit in its economic logic were scarcity, prestige, and innovation: attributes that, it was hoped, would generate wealth and exclusivity. Changes to playhouse architecture, stagecraft, dramatic repertory, and company practices were undertaken to create this new, upmarket theatre of “great expences.” So powerful was the promise of the duopoly and so enthralling the wholesale transformation of the theatrical marketplace that management – despite dwindling box office receipts – resisted change for thirty-five years. Drawing upon network and behavioral economic theory, Professor Payne shows why the acting companies clung to an economic model inimical to their self-interest. Original archival research further bolsters this radically new perspective on an exciting and crucial period in English theatre.

In the 1860s, numerous armed conflicts around the world generated successive waves of expatriates and produced fresh opportunities for colonization entrepreneurs. This chapter traces the entanglements of Brazilian colonization with war-ravaged global scenarios that potentially furnished new streams of foreign colonos to be managed by a diverse assortment of middlemen. The chapter focuses on the efforts of a new political generation in Brazil to attract Confederate veterans from the US South. The Sociedade Internacional de Imigração opened offices in New York, where its agent, Quintino Bocaiúva, worked closely with Cuban intermediaries and helped establish the first steamship line between the US and Brazil. The Sociedade’s remittance of emigrants from New York and New Orleans to Brazil obligated central and provincial government officials to offer a wealth of benefits to newcomers including accommodations, land, and surveying services, in line with the liberal immigration policies that Bocaiúva would espouse decades later.

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.

Chapter 3 explores how the letters patent authorizing the duopoly laid the groundwork for a theatre of lavishness and innovation, thereby affiliating the restored stage to the costly improvements sweeping London after the Great Fire of 1666. Theatrical amelioration bolstered national pride – England was finally catching up with continental stagecraft – and made available luxurious viewing conditions previously reserved for court audiences. To realize these ends, management chose newly developed, upmarket neighborhoods to site their equally expensive baroque playhouses. Despite these improvements, the companies risked disappointing the very consumer expectations aroused by the culture of improvement. They simply could not afford new scenes, machines, and special effects for every play. Moreover, their playhouses were ruinously costly to operate – they required enormous manpower compared to early modern stages – and personnel expenses skyrocketed further whenever the companies ventured upon a dramatic opera or spectacle-heavy production. Not until the 1690s were strategies finally devised to escape the culture of improvement.