Portugal establishes royal government in Brazil

Category
Government
Place
Brazil
Date
1548
Reference
[Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, 4th Ed.., p. 31-4]
Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The king of Portugal was too preoccupied with his Asian empire to think much about Brazil until the 1530s, when the appearance of French ships along the Brazilian coast made him fear for his claims there. To secure them, he finally sent Portuguese settlers to Brazil. Suddenly, the Portuguese did want something that the Tupi possessed—their land. Now everything would change. . . . By the mid-1540s, indigenous rebellions threatened to erupt up and down the coast. On the splendid Bay of All Saints, the Tupinambá, a subgroup of the Tupi, had demolished one of the most promising settlements. So, in 1548, the Portuguese king stepped up the colonization of Brazil by appointing a royal governor and building a capital city, Salvador (also called Bahia), on that site. . . . By 1600, Africans were rapidly replacing indigenous people as the enslaved workforce of Brazilian sugar plantations. The surviving Tupinambá either fled into the interior or intermarried and gradually disappeared as a distinct group. This pattern was to be repeated throughout Brazil as sugar cultivation spread."

This event is linked to the following periods

PeriodMiner
Begin
End
Category
Encounter
1492
1600
Latin American