The chances of an eighteenth-century merchant's business correspondence surviving to the present are remote, but it is even less likely that an editor could persuade publishers today to issue a five-volume collection of such material. Apart from its sheer massiveness —5,600 documents and nearly 4,000 pages of text—there are several reasons that make the appearance of Negócios colonials an event of unusual significance. First, it represents a major addition to the scant literature available concerning the activities of Portuguese merchants during the first imperial centuries; second, it is by far the most extensive and diversified published collection of mercantile papers pertaining to the colonial era of the New World; and thirdly, since the papers relate to the activities of a prominent Lisbon merchant during most of Brazil's Golden Age (1695-1760), they make it possible for the first time to comprehend many of the strategies and difficulties that arose in the conduct of trade between Portugal and her most important colony during that aureate era.

Not long ago an authority on dyeing observed that “in the history of the dyeing industry indigo holds a unique place by reason of its irresistible rise to supremacy among dyestuffs and its equally rapid dethronement by the modern chemical colors. …” Among the sources of this once flourishing industry, one that has never been studied adequately is that of colonial Brazil. Commercial indigo production began there in the early 1760's, but after an impressive start the industry disappeared within less than two generations. Its beginnings occurred at a time when Portugal, like other imperial powers of that era, was seeking to diversify the agriculture of her colonies so as to make them more lucrative to the mother country. A study of the industry's brief tenure in Portugal's most important colony reveals some of the problems that confronted its planters, merchants, and royal officials as they attempted, with limited experience and inadequate supporting capital, to develop new sources of income during a period of keen international economic rivalry. The factors involved in the rise and decline of the Brazilian indigo industry can best be appreciated when it is examined as part of the global history of indigo production and trade between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

On April 28, 1774, the Boston News-Letter published at the bottom of its first page the following “extract” of a letter it had recently received from Fayal, the Azores:

By a Vessel that arrived here last Month from Rio de Janeiro in the Brazils, we have accounts of a small Whaling Brig belonging to some Part of North-America, putting in there for Refreshments, but that Part of the crew were prevailed on either by fair or foul Means to enter on board a Portuguese Scow, to go on a Cruise of three Months a Whaling…. That the Brig still remained there in October last, with only the Captain and three People on board…. That the Portuguese provided themselves with Harpoons and other Necessaries, agreeable to the English Model, and were gone in Search of Spermaceti Whales, a Trade they have hitherto been entirely ignorant of, and are very desirous of acquiring some Knowledge in. All the oil they used to make in the Brazils was from the Bone Whales, and those they caught in such Abundance in open boats along the Shore that they migh[t] undersell any other Europeans if they were expert in their Business, but they never venture out of Sight of Shore.

During the imperial crisis of the 1770's the Pennsylvania conservative, Joseph Galloway, offered a plan to close the everwidening breach that was dividing England and her colonies. Galloway's Plan of Union, a revision of the Albany Plan proposed by Franklin twenty years before, called for the establishment of a subordinate colonial parliament “for regulating the administration of the general affairs of America.” Though rejected by the Continental Congress, the plan continued to draw support from some statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, curiously enough, was the Marquis of Pombal, Portugal's prime minister, a man who by no stretch of the imagination could be regarded as a friend of popular government.

Exmo. Sr.

1. A carta de V. S.a que trouxe o n.° 44, e a data de 7 do corrente chegou aqui no dia de hoje depois de haverem partido os despachos que dirigi a V. S.a na data de 18 e 25 do mesmo mez que corre.

2. Em continuação e supplemento d'elles, não posso deixar de significar a V. S.a que o seu referido despacho fez subir ao maior ponto a justa perplexidade, que me tinham causado os inesperados termos com que mylord Rocheford se havia explicado com V. S.a nas conferencias que fizeram os objectos da minha instrução de 20 de outubro proximo precedente: vendo que o referido lord insistia ainda em mostrar que se não tinha feito algum cargo, de que a situação em que actualmente se acha este côrte, mettida entre as concussões das de Madrid e Paris, não émais critica a respeito de Portugal do que o é a respeito da Inglaterra, pelas obvias razões que no meu officio de 25 do corrente foram recopiladas.