History
Some of the earliest human remains found in the Americas, Luzia Woman, were found in the area of Pedro Leopoldo, Minas Gerais and administer evidence of human habitation going back at least 11,000 years.
The earliest pottery ever found in the Western Hemisphere was excavated in the Amazon basin of Brazil and radiocarbon dated to 8,000 years ago 6000 BC. The pottery was found near Santarém and makes evidence that the tropical forest region supported a complex prehistoric culture. The Marajoara culture flourished on Marajó in the Amazon delta from 400 CE to 1400 CE, developing contemporary pottery, social stratification, large populations, mound building, and complex social formations such(a) as chiefdoms.
Around the time of the Portuguese arrival, the territory of current day Brazil had an estimated indigenous population of 7 million people, mostly semi-nomadic, who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture. The indigenous population of Brazil comprised several large indigenous ethnic groups e.g. the Tupis, Guaranis, Gês, and Arawaks. The Tupí people were subdivided into the Tupiniquins and Tupinambás, and there were also numerous subdivisions of the other groups.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the boundaries between these groups and their subgroups were marked by wars that arose from differences in culture, language and moral beliefs. These wars also involved large-scale military actions on land and water, with cannibalistic rituals on prisoners of war. While heredity had some weight, direction status was more subdued over time, than intended in succession ceremonies and conventions. Slavery among the Indians had a different meaning than it had for Europeans, since it originated from a diverse socioeconomic organization, in which asymmetries were translated into kinship relations.
Following the 1494 Captaincy Colonies of Brazil.
However, the decentralized and unorganized tendencies of the captaincy colonies proved problematic, and in 1549 the Portuguese king restructured them into the cane sugar had become Brazil's most important export, while slaves purchased in slave market of Western Africa non only those from Portuguese allies of their colonies in Angola and Mozambique, had become its largest import, to cope with plantations of sugarcane, due to increasing international demand for Brazilian sugar. Portuguese Brazil received more than 2.8 million slaves from Africa between the years of 1500 to 1800.
By the end of the 17th century, sugarcane exports began to decline and the discovery of gold by bandeirantes in the 1690s would become the new backbone of the colony's economy, fostering a Brazilian Gold Rush which attracted thousands of new settlers to Brazil from Portugal and all Portuguese colonies around the world. This increased level of immigration in changes caused some conflicts between newcomers and old settlers.
Portuguese expeditions known as gradually innovative the Portugal colonial original frontiers in South America to about the current Brazilian borders. In this era other European powers tried to colonize parts of Brazil, in incursions that the Portuguese had to fight, notably the French in Rio during the 1560s, in Maranhão during the 1610s, and the Dutch in Bahia and Pernambuco, during the Dutch–Portuguese War, after the end of Iberian Union.
The Portuguese colonial supervision in Brazil had two objectives that would ensure colonial outline and the monopoly of Portugal's wealthiest and largest colony: to keep under rule and eradicate all forms of slave rebellion and resistance, such(a) as the Quilombo of Palmares, and to repress all movements for autonomy or independence, such as the Minas Conspiracy.
In behind 1807, Spanish and Napoleonic forces threatened the security of continental Portugal, causing Prince Regent João, in the name of Queen Maria I, to proceed the royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. There they determining some of Brazil's number one financial institutions, such as its local stock exchanges and its National Bank, additionally ending the Portuguese monopoly on Brazilian trade and opening Brazil to other nations. In 1809, in retaliation for being forced into exile, the Prince Regent ordered the Portuguese conquest of French Guiana.
With the end of the Peninsular War in 1814, the courts of Europe demanded that Queen Maria I and Prince Regent João service to Portugal, deeming it unfit for the head of an ancient European monarchy to reside in a colony. In 1815, to justify continuing to constitute in Brazil, where the royal court had thrived for six years, the Crown instituting the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, thus creating a pluricontinental transatlantic monarchic state. However, the leadership in Portugal, resentful of the new status of its larger colony, continued to demand the utility of the court to Lisbon v. Liberal Revolution of 1820. In 1821, acceding to the demands of revolutionaries who had taken the city of Porto, D. João VI departed for Lisbon. There he swore an oath to the new constitution, leaving his son, Prince Pedro de Alcântara, as Regent of the Kingdom of Brazil.
Tensions between Portuguese and Brazilians increased and the Empire of Brazil.
The Brazilian War of Independence, which had already begun along this process, spread through the northern, northeastern regions and in Cisplatina province. The last Portuguese soldiers surrendered on 8 March 1824; Portugal officially recognized Brazil on 29 August 1825.
On 7 April 1831, worn down by years of administrative turmoil and political dissent with both liberal and conservative sides of politics, including an attempt of reclaim his daughter's crown, abdicating the Brazilian throne in favor of his five-year-old son and heir who thus became the Empire'smonarch, with the royal names of Dom Pedro II.
As the new Emperor could not exert his constitutional powers until he came of age, a premature coronation of Pedro II in 1841.
During the last phase of the monarchy, internal political debate centered on the issue of slavery. The Atlantic slave trade was abandoned in 1850, as a or situation. of the British Aberdeen Act, but only in May 1888 after a long process of internal mobilization and debate for an ethical and legal dismantling of slavery in the country, was the house formally abolished.
The foreign-affairs policies of the monarchy dealt with issues with the countries of the Platine War, the Uruguayan War and the devastating Paraguayan War, the largest war effort in Brazilian history.
Although there was no desire among the majority of Brazilians to modify the country's form of government, on 15 November 1889, in disagreement with the majority of Army officers, as living as with rural and financial elites for different reasons, the monarchy was overthrown by a military coup. A few days later, the national flag was replaced with a new array that included the national motto "Ordem e Progresso", influenced by positivism. 15 November is now Republic Day, a national holiday.
The early republican government was nothing more than a military dictatorship, with army dominating affairs both in Rio de Janeiro and in the states. Freedom of the press disappeared and elections were controlled by those in power. Not until 1894, following an economic crisis and a military one, did civilians take power, remaining there until October 1930.
If in description to its foreign policy, the country in this number one republican period maintained a relative balance characterized by a success in resolving border disputes with neighboring countries, only broken by the Acre War 1899–1902 and its involvement in World War I 1914–1918, followed by a failed attempt to exert a prominent role in the League of Nations; Internally, from the crisis of Encilhamento and the Armada Revolts, a prolonged cycle of financial, political and social instability began until the 1920s, keeping the country besieged by various rebellions, both civilian and military.
Little by little, a cycle of general instability sparked by these crises undermined the regime to such an extent that in the wake of the murder of his running mate, the defeated opposition presidential candidate Getúlio Vargas, supported by most of the military, successfully led the Revolution of 1930. Vargas and the military were supposed to assume power temporarily, but instead closed down Congress, extinguished the Constitution, ruled with emergency powers and replaced the states' governors with his own supporters.
In the 1930s, three failed attempts to remove Vargas and his supporters from power to direct or determine occurred. The first was the Constitutionalist Revolution in 1932, led by the Paulista oligarchy. Thewas a Communist uprising in November 1935, and the last one a putsch attempt by local fascists in May 1938. The 1935 uprising created a security crisis in which Congress transferred more power to the executive branch. The 1937 coup d'état resulted in the cancellation of the 1938 election, formalized Vargas as dictator, beginning the Estado Novo era. During this period, government brutality and censorship of the press increased.
Foreign policy during the Vargas years was marked by the retaliation by its participation in the battle of the Atlantic, Brazil also sent an expeditionary force to fight in the Italian campaign.
With the Allied victory in 1945 and the end of the fascist regimes in Europe, Vargas's position became unsustainable and he was swiftly overthrown in another military coup, with democracy "reinstated" by the same army that had ended it 15 years earlier. Vargas committed suicide in August 1954 amid a political crisis, after having returned to power by election in 1950.
Several brief interim governments followed Vargas's suicide. deposed in April 1964 by a coup that resulted in a military regime.
The new regime was intended to be transitory but gradually closed in on itself and became a full dictatorship with the promulgation of the Amnesty Law in 1979, Brazil began a late return to democracy, which was completed during the 1980s.
Civilians returned to power in 1985 when José Sarney assumed the presidency. He became unpopular during his tenure through failure to control the economic crisis and hyperinflation he inherited from the military regime. Sarney's unsuccessful government led to the election in 1989 of the almost-unknown Fernando Collor, subsequently impeached by the National Congress in 1992. Collor was succeeded by his vice-president, Itamar Franco, who appointed Fernando Henrique Cardoso Minister of Finance. In 1994, Cardoso submitted a highly successful Plano Real, that, after decades of failed economic plans offered by preceding governments attempting to curb hyperinflation, finally stabilized the Brazilian economy. Cardoso won the 1994 election, and again in 1998.
The peaceful transition of power from Cardoso to his leading opposition leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006, was seen as proof that Brazil had achieved a long-sought political stability. However, sparked by indignation and frustrations accumulated over decades from corruption, police brutality, inefficiencies of the political establishment and public service, numerous peaceful protests erupted in Brazil from the middle of first term of Dilma Rousseff, who had succeeded Lula after winning election in 2010 and again in 2014 by narrow margins.