On Ernst Pijning’s Controlling Contraband Assessment of 18th Century Brazil

One of the great strengths of Pijning’s book is his very skillful and comprehensive integration and interrogation of the historiography of late colonial Brazil and his highly original reflections on why Brazil took a different path to independence from the rest of South America. Independent Brazil after all remained a monarchy and was led by the eldest son of Portugal’s monarch and then his son for much of the 19th century. Brazil did not fragment like Spanish America.

Pijning explains why Brazil had become virtually independent in the decade before the Portuguese Court was forced to relocate to Brazil from Lisbon during the Napoleon invasion of the country in 1807. He delineates how Brazilian commerce and trade (and above all the contraband or “illegal” trade) allowed Brazil to escape from Lisbon’s mercantilist straight-jacket. Brazil was in effect by 1800 no longer in practice following the economic strictures issued in Portugal and the most important vested interests in Brazil had effectively escaped from the economic decrees issued from Lisbon.

The focus here is on Rio de Janeiro and the South Atlantic and Pijning often takes to task other historians who have gone before him, usually politely, but no less devastatingly. This will not make him very popular in some academic circles. But it is a great strength of his book that he has so effectively integrated these historiographic themes and questions into his work. He provides a scintillating review of the arguments among Portuguese and Brazilian worthies at the time over economic policy and free trade and a review of the remarkable debates in Brazil and in Portugal over corruption and thievery and ethical dilemmas.

What Pijning has done in convincing detail, based on a remarkably wide range of archival sources, is to show how contraband and illegal trade, and official and unofficial commerce, both locally, regionally within South America, and within the Portuguese empire in São Tomé, in West and Southern Africa, and in Asia, intersected. And how this rich and complex chiaroscuro worked in practice. It is a fascinating journey into the past of imperial history. And it explains in part why Portugal’s imperial endeavour was so flexible and lasted so long.

Above all he follows the lives and activities of individual traders, large and small, of governmental officials and military offices, of viceroys and magistrates, of bishops, priests and monks, of slave traders and market stall holders, and itinerant hawkers, all of them benefiting from and taking advantage of the loopholes in a system that was sometimes enforced by the authorities but was also often contravened. Examining a myriad of both official and unofficial cases, Pijning has followed a remarkable paper trail in multiple archives which he has exploited to great advantage.

This then is a study of the entrails of empire. We meet the Benedictines who though a hole in the wall of their convent in Rio de Janeiro conducted an illegal trade with the contrabandists of Rio’s Prajanha beach. In fact isolated beaches out of the sight of the authorities (or with their connivance) were a favorite location for the illicit exchange of goods and commodities and slaves along the coast of Brazil. Here foreign vessels were also involved though if they arrived in the port of Rio de Janeiro, they could (and were) seized by the Portuguese authorities.  Pijning provides fascinating details of several of these cases. We meet the individuals involved and their trials and tribulations. The mentality and social values and social status determined the degree to which individuals were allowed to engage in “illegal” activities.

The overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities in Brazil facilitated these manoeuvres. As did the conflicting competences of the various oversight official bodes in Portugal. The foreign nations in Portugal had their own sovereign jurisdictions often granted in return for the promise of military assistance to Portugal in time of need. England and the Dutch obtained these privileges as a consequence of peace treaties. The first in the aftermath of Portuguese independence from Spain in 1640 and the latter as a consequence of reconciliation after the Dutch conquests of Portuguese colonies in the West and East Indies. Ties with England were strengthened by the commercial treaty negotiated by Methuen in 1703 and the Dutch two years later signed a similar treaty. There was a symbiotic relationship between trading privileges and contraband trade. The Portuguese regarded these privileges as providing loopholes for illegal trade.

Some of this “illegal” commence in Brazil was sanctioned, especially with the Spanish American port of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata or though the Portuguese outpost of Colônia on the northern bank of the Rio de la Plata. Here was the source of the silver from Potosi in Upper Peru which the Portuguese and Brazilians desired for their trade with Africa and Asia. Tobacco and Cachaça (distilled spirit from sugar cane) from Bahia was exchanged on the off-shore Portuguese controlled island of São Tomé with Dutch, English, and French merchants to purchase slaves in West Africa. Some dozen of Bahia’s leading merchants were involved in this profitable enterprise.

The rewards of this “illegal” commerce were very high. Throughout the 18th Century gold and gold dust flowed into Rio de Janeiro from Minas Gerias in one of the world’s first great gold rushes. Gold dust in particular was often smuggled out of Rio de Janeiro on the Brazil fleets from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon and then from Lisbon to England via the Falmouth packet boat. Diamonds from the far interior of Minas Gerais were also a glittering export from Brazil, easily concealed in the baggage of many sailors.

Pijning’s archival research is astounding, and its originality and scope is astonishing, using Brazilian, French, Dutch, British, American, and Portuguese archives in six countries. Few historians have the enviable linguistic skills of Pijning, and he uses these skills to great advantage in this book. In this he is a worthy successor of Charles Boxer, the great British historian of the Portuguese and the Dutch empires. C.R. Boxer was also a mentor to the late Professor John Russell-Wood, who was Pijning’s academic adviser.

Professor John Russell-Wood was a punctilious British scholar who taught in the history department at John’s Hopkin’s University in Baltimore for much of his academic career, where he encouraged a remarkable group of young PhD students over the years, perhaps uniquely so among scholars of the Portuguese imperial endeavour, and Ernst Pijning’s was one of them. Pijning’s careful archival work and the originally of his research and conclusions very much reflects Russell-Wood’s influence, as it also reflects the influence of Professor George Winius of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands who was also an early Pijning mentor.

This is an astonishing work of history. It is accessible, detailed, engaging, and very well written. It provides a widow into the hidden realities and complexities of Atlantic history. It is a major contribution to our view of the 18th century world and its empires. Above all it is a revelation of the role of a fascinating cast of characters navigating their way through the complexities and challenges of everyday life in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Controlling Contraband: Mentality, Economy, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro