The history of Brazil

Brazil, the largest country in South America, was home for more than eleven thousand years to hundreds of Indigenous peoples, from the mound-building societies of the Amazon to the Tupi farmers of the Atlantic coast. Portugal claimed it in 1500 and built a colony on sugar, gold and the labour of enslaved Africans, bringing more captives across the Atlantic than any other territory in the Americas. Brazil became independent in 1822 as an empire under a branch of the Portuguese royal family, abolished slavery only in 1888 and became a republic the following year. The twentieth century brought the long rule of Getúlio Vargas, rapid industrialisation, a new capital at Brasília and a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and since then Brazil has been a mass democracy marked by deep inequality and sharp political division.

Humans reached eastern South America at the end of the last Ice Age. In the limestone caves of Lagoa Santa in Minas Gerais, archaeologists found the skeleton of a young woman, nicknamed Luzia, who lived roughly 11,500 years ago, one of the oldest human remains in the Americas. At Serra da Capivara in Piauí, rock shelters such as Pedra Furada hold thousands of paintings of hunting, dancing and ceremonies; some researchers argue that people were there far earlier than elsewhere on the continent, a claim many archaeologists still doubt. Along the southern coast, fishing peoples built huge shell mounds called sambaquis over thousands of years.

The Amazon was long imagined as a wilderness too poor to support large societies, but archaeology has overturned that view. Pottery dug up at Taperinha near Santarém is around 7,000 years old, among the oldest in the Western Hemisphere. Over millennia Amazonian peoples domesticated manioc and other crops, managed forests rich in useful trees, and created terra preta, dark soils enriched with charcoal and waste that remain fertile today. On Marajó island at the mouth of the river, the Marajoara culture flourished from about 400 to 1400 CE, raising large earth mounds for houses and burials and making elaborately painted funerary urns; its population may have reached around 100,000. Further upstream the Tapajó people around Santarém produced intricate ceramics, and in the upper Xingu basin, between about the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, ancestors of the present Xinguano peoples built networks of villages linked by roads, bridges and defensive ditches.

On the eve of the European arrival, the land that is now Brazil held perhaps a thousand or more distinct peoples. Estimates of their total number vary widely, most commonly between two and five million. The coast was dominated by Tupi-speaking peoples, such as the Tupinambá, Tupiniquim and Potiguara, who had migrated from the interior and pushed out earlier inhabitants. They lived in large villages of communal longhouses, grew manioc in cleared forest plots, fished and hunted, and waged frequent wars in which captives were ritually killed and eaten. The interior was home to speakers of Jê, Arawak, Carib and many other languages, from farming chiefdoms on the Amazon floodplain to mobile hunters of the dry plateaus. None of these societies built states like the Inca Empire in the Andes, but they had their own complex systems of trade, alliance, religion and political leadership.

The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 divided the lands of the Age of Discovery between Spain and Portugal along a line in the Atlantic, and the eastern bulge of South America fell on the Portuguese side. Spanish navigators sighted the coast early in 1500, but it was a Portuguese fleet bound for India, commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral and following the route opened by Vasco da Gama, that landed in what is now southern Bahia on 22 April 1500 and claimed the land for the crown.

For three decades Portugal showed little interest, since the spice trade of Asia was far more profitable. The main business was brazilwood, a tree whose red dye was valued in European textile workshops and which gave the colony its name. Indigenous people felled and carried the logs in exchange for metal tools and trinkets. French traders competed for the same wood and alliances, and the threat of a French foothold pushed Lisbon to settle the coast.

In the 1530s King John III divided the coast into hereditary captaincies, strips of land granted to Portuguese nobles who were to settle and defend them at their own cost. Most failed, but Pernambuco and São Vicente prospered. In 1549 the crown sent a governor-general, Tomé de Sousa, who founded Salvador on the Bay of All Saints as the capital. With him came the first Jesuits, led by Manuel da Nóbrega. In 1554 Jesuits founded a mission on the plateau above the coast that grew into São Paulo, and in 1565 Estácio de Sá founded Rio de Janeiro during a campaign to drive out the French colony of France Antarctique, which was finally expelled in 1567.

The Tupi peoples resisted. Between 1554 and 1567 the Tamoio Confederation, an alliance of coastal chiefs led at first by Cunhambebe, fought the Portuguese settlements around Rio and São Paulo, while other groups allied with the Portuguese against their own enemies. Colonists raided villages for slaves, and the Jesuits gathered converts into mission villages that offered some protection but broke up Indigenous ways of life. Epidemics did the greatest damage: smallpox and measles swept the coast in the 1560s, killing tens of thousands, and the diseases ran inland along trade routes ahead of the Europeans themselves.

Sugar transformed the colony. Plantations with mills, called engenhos, spread across the fertile lowlands of Pernambuco and Bahia, and by the end of the sixteenth century Colonial Brazil was the world's leading producer of sugar. Planters first relied on enslaved Indigenous workers, but as disease and flight reduced their numbers they turned to Africa.

Brazil became the largest destination of the Atlantic slave trade. Of the roughly 12 million Africans forced across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, about five million were landed in Brazil by most estimates, roughly four in ten of the total and more than ten times the number taken to North America. Most came from West Central Africa, through ports such as Luanda in what is now Angola, and from the Bight of Benin, in present-day Benin and Nigeria. Brazilian merchants ran much of the trade themselves, exchanging tobacco and rum for captives.

Conditions on sugar plantations and later in the gold mines were brutal, and mortality was so high that planters relied on constant new imports rather than natural growth. Enslaved people resisted in every way open to them, from slowing work and running away to open revolt. Runaways formed settlements called quilombos in the backlands. The largest, Palmares, in the hills inland from Pernambuco, held many thousands of people for most of the seventeenth century and repelled repeated expeditions. Its last leader, Zumbi, refused a peace that would have left other Africans enslaved; Palmares fell in 1694 to a force led by the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho, and Zumbi was captured and killed on 20 November 1695. African religions, music, food and languages deeply shaped Brazilian culture and today a majority of Brazilians identify as Black or of mixed ancestry.

Between 1580 and 1640 the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united under Philip II of Spain and his successors, which made Brazil a target for Spain's enemies. The Dutch West India Company, an arm of the Dutch Republic, briefly took Salvador in 1624 and in 1630 captured Olinda and Recife, the heart of the sugar economy. Under Count John Maurice of Nassau, governor from 1637 to 1644, Dutch Brazil welcomed Jewish and Protestant settlers. After Portugal regained its independence in 1640, planters in Pernambuco rose against the Dutch in 1645, defeated them at the battles of Guararapes in 1648 and 1649, and forced their surrender in 1654.

Meanwhile, armed expeditions from São Paulo known as bandeiras pushed deep into the interior in search of Indigenous captives and precious metals. The bandeirantes, many of them of mixed Portuguese and Indigenous descent and speaking a Tupi-based language, attacked Jesuit missions among the Guarani in the Spanish borderlands and enslaved thousands. They also extended Portuguese claims far west of the Tordesillas line. In the 1690s bandeirantes found gold in what became Minas Gerais, setting off the first great gold rush in the Americas. Tens of thousands of settlers and enslaved Africans poured into towns such as Vila Rica, now Ouro Preto, whose baroque churches still stand, and diamonds were found in the 1720s. Brazilian gold financed royal building in Lisbon and flowed on to Britain to pay for imports. The colony's centre of gravity shifted south, and in 1763 the capital was moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, the port for the mines.

The Treaty of Madrid of 1750 recognised Portugal's expansion and drew borders roughly resembling those of today. It led to the Guarani War of 1754 to 1756, in which Spanish and Portuguese troops crushed the resistance of Guarani mission towns ordered to move. The reforming minister the Marquis of Pombal expelled the Jesuits from the Portuguese empire in 1759. As gold output declined, colonial resentment grew. In 1789 a conspiracy in Minas Gerais, the Inconfidência Mineira, planned a republic; it was betrayed, and its one executed member, the officer known as Tiradentes, became a national hero.

In 1807 the armies of Napoleon invaded Portugal, and the royal family, escorted by British warships, sailed for Brazil with thousands of courtiers. The prince regent, later King John VI, reached Rio de Janeiro in March 1808, making it the only colonial city ever to become the seat of a European empire. He opened Brazil's ports to foreign trade and in 1815 raised Brazil to the status of a kingdom equal to Portugal within the Portuguese Empire.

After the Napoleonic Wars, a liberal revolution in Portugal demanded the king's return, and John VI sailed for Lisbon in 1821, leaving his son Pedro as regent. When the Portuguese parliament tried to restore Brazil's colonial subordination, Pedro defied it, and on 7 September 1822, near São Paulo, he declared independence. Crowned Emperor Pedro I that December, he fought a short war against Portuguese garrisons, the last of which left Bahia in July 1823. Portugal recognised independence in 1825. Unlike the Spanish colonies in the Spanish American wars of independence, Brazil kept its unity, its monarchy and its slave system.

The Empire of Brazil was governed under the constitution of 1824, which gave the emperor a "moderating power" over the other branches of government. Pedro I lost a war with Argentina over the Cisplatine province, which became independent as Uruguay in 1828, and his authoritarian style made him unpopular. He abdicated in 1831 in favour of his five-year-old son and returned to Portugal. The regency that followed faced a wave of provincial revolts: the Cabanagem in Pará, in which tens of thousands died; the decade-long Ragamuffin War of the southern ranchers; the Sabinada in Bahia and the Balaiada in Maranhão. In Salvador in 1835, enslaved and freed African Muslims rose in the Malê Revolt, the most serious urban slave uprising in the Americas.

In 1840 the fourteen-year-old Pedro II was declared of age. His reign of nearly half a century brought political stability under a parliamentary system, with Liberals and Conservatives alternating in office. Coffee, grown at first in the Paraíba valley and then on the western plateau of São Paulo, became the leading export, and by the mid-nineteenth century Brazil produced about half of the world's coffee, almost entirely with enslaved labour. Brazil intervened repeatedly in the politics of the River Plate, and from 1864 to 1870 it fought, alongside Argentina and Uruguay, the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay. It was the deadliest war between states in Latin American history; Paraguay lost a very large share of its population, and Brazilian troops occupied it until 1876.

Britain pressed Brazil to end the slave trade, and a law of 1831 declared it illegal, but it was openly ignored and hundreds of thousands more Africans were landed in the following two decades. Only after British warships began seizing slave ships in Brazilian waters did the Eusébio de Queirós Law of 1850 effectively end the trade. Slavery itself continued. The Rio Branco Law of 1871 freed children born to enslaved mothers, though they owed labour to their mothers' owners until adulthood, and a law of 1885 freed slaves over sixty. A broad abolitionist movement grew in the 1880s, led by figures such as Joaquim Nabuco, the journalist José do Patrocínio and the engineer André Rebouças, while enslaved people fled plantations in large numbers. Ceará and Amazonas freed their slaves in 1884.

On 13 May 1888 Princess Isabel, acting as regent for her father, signed the Golden Law, which abolished slavery immediately and without compensation. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to end it. The freed population received no land, education or other support, and many former slaves remained in poverty on the margins of the new economy, while planters looked to subsidised European immigration for labour. The racial inequalities rooted in more than three centuries of slavery remain one of the central facts of Brazilian life.

Abolition cost the monarchy the support of many planters, while army officers, influenced by positivist ideas, resented civilian politicians. On 15 November 1889 Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca led a military coup that overthrew Pedro II, who went into exile in Europe, and proclaimed a republic. The constitution of 1891 created a federal republic, the United States of Brazil, with a strong presidency and powerful states. Literacy requirements excluded most of the population from voting. After the first military presidents, power settled into the "coffee with milk" politics in which the dominant states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais traded the presidency, and local bosses known as coronéis delivered rural votes.

The republic used force against those it saw as backward or subversive. At Canudos in the backlands of Bahia, a religious community gathered around the preacher Antônio Conselheiro was destroyed by the army in 1897 after several failed expeditions, with many thousands killed. In 1910 sailors, most of them Black, mutinied in Rio in the Revolt of the Lash against flogging in the navy.

The economy boomed on coffee and, in the Amazon, on wild rubber, which turned Manaus into a wealthy city before Asian plantations destroyed the trade after 1910. Rubber tappers and planters forced many Indigenous peoples into debt labour or off their lands, and violence against them spread. In 1910 the army officer Cândido Rondon, himself partly of Bororo descent, founded the Indian Protection Service on the principle that the state should contact Indigenous peoples peacefully; in 1914 he guided the former US president Theodore Roosevelt down an unmapped Amazonian river. Brazil acquired Acre from Bolivia by the Treaty of Petrópolis in 1903. Millions of immigrants arrived from Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany, and from 1908 from Japan, making São Paulo the industrial heart of the country. Brazil was the only South American country to join World War I, declaring war on Germany in 1917. In the 1920s young army officers, the tenentes, rebelled repeatedly against the oligarchic system.

The Great Depression shattered coffee prices and the political bargain built on them. When the Paulista candidate won a disputed election in 1930, Getúlio Vargas, the defeated governor of Rio Grande do Sul, led an armed revolution and took power in November. He defeated a São Paulo uprising in 1932, granted women the vote that year, and was elected president under a new constitution in 1934. After crushing a communist revolt in 1935, Vargas used the threat of communism to seize full power in November 1937, closing Congress and proclaiming the Estado Novo, or New State, an authoritarian regime that borrowed from Salazar's Portugal and from the corporatism of Benito Mussolini. Political opponents were jailed and tortured, the press censored, and a fascist-inspired Integralist putsch in 1938 was put down.

Vargas centralised the state, promoted industry and built a labour system that gave urban workers a minimum wage, pensions and the consolidated labour code of 1943, in exchange for state control of unions. After hesitating between Nazi Germany and the United States, he joined the Allies in World War II in 1942, gaining American finance for the steelworks at Volta Redonda. In 1944 Brazil sent an expeditionary force of about 25,000 soldiers to fight in Italy, the only Latin American country to send ground troops to Europe. The contradiction between fighting dictatorships abroad and running one at home helped bring the generals to depose Vargas in October 1945.

A new constitution in 1946 restored elections. Vargas returned to power by winning the presidential election of 1950 and founded the state oil company Petrobras in 1953, but amid a growing crisis and military pressure to resign he shot himself in the presidential palace on 24 August 1954. President Juscelino Kubitschek, elected in 1955, promised "fifty years of progress in five" and built Brasília, a modernist capital designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in the empty central plateau, inaugurated on 21 April 1960.

Rapid growth brought inflation, debt and migration from the poor north-east to the cities of the south-east. Jânio Quadros, elected in 1960, resigned after seven months, and his vice-president, João Goulart, a Vargas protégé, took office over the objections of military leaders. Goulart's proposals for land reform and his ties to the labour movement alarmed landowners, business, much of the middle class and the government of the United States in the context of the Cold War and the recent Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro.

On 31 March and 1 April 1964 the armed forces overthrew Goulart, with backing from conservative politicians, business leaders and parts of the Catholic Church. The United States recognised the new government at once and had prepared a naval task force, Operation Brother Sam, to support the coup if needed. A succession of generals ruled for twenty-one years. The regime kept a Congress with two permitted parties and held managed elections, but it governed through institutional acts that stripped opponents of their political rights. The fifth such act, in December 1968, closed Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political crimes and opened the harshest phase of repression under General Emílio Médici. The security forces arrested, tortured and murdered opponents, including students and members of armed left-wing groups, and censored the press and the arts.

The National Truth Commission, which reported in 2014, confirmed 434 people killed or disappeared by the state and found that thousands more had been tortured. It also estimated that at least 8,350 Indigenous people died as a result of state actions and omissions during the period, as roads, dams, ranching and mining were driven into the Amazon with little regard for the peoples living there. Between 1968 and 1973 the economy grew at around ten per cent a year in the so-called economic miracle, but the gains went mostly to the better-off, and after the oil shocks foreign debt soared.

From 1974 President Ernesto Geisel began a slow political opening, continued by João Figueiredo, who passed an amnesty law in 1979 that freed political prisoners and allowed exiles to return, but also protected the agents of the regime from prosecution. Strikes led by the metalworkers' leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo challenged the government, and in 1984 millions demonstrated for direct presidential elections. The campaign failed in Congress, but in January 1985 an electoral college chose the opposition politician Tancredo Neves as president. He fell ill and died before taking office, and his vice-president, José Sarney, became the first civilian president since 1964.

The constitution of 1988 restored full civil liberties, gave the vote to illiterate citizens, created a universal public health system and, for the first time, recognised Indigenous peoples' original rights to the lands they traditionally occupy. Fernando Collor de Mello, the first president elected by popular vote since 1960, was impeached for corruption and resigned in 1992. Hyperinflation was finally tamed by the Real Plan of 1994, whose architect, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then served two terms as president, privatising state companies.

Lula, the former metalworker, was elected in 2002 at his fourth attempt, the first president from the working class. During his two terms, helped by a commodity boom, cash-transfer programmes such as Bolsa Família and rises in the minimum wage lifted millions out of poverty. His successor and ally Dilma Rousseff became the first woman president in 2011. Her second term was overwhelmed by a deep recession, mass protests and the Car Wash investigation into bribery around Petrobras, which implicated politicians across the spectrum. Congress removed her in 2016 for breaking budget rules, an impeachment her supporters denounced as a parliamentary coup and her opponents defended as constitutional. Lula himself was convicted of corruption and imprisoned in 2018, a conviction later annulled by the Supreme Federal Court on procedural grounds.

In 2018 voters elected Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who praised the military regime. His presidency saw a sharp rise in Amazon deforestation and one of the world's highest death tolls in the COVID-19 pandemic, which he played down. Lula defeated him narrowly in October 2022. On 8 January 2023, a week after Lula's inauguration, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed and vandalised the Congress, the Supreme Federal Court and the presidential palace in Brasília, calling for the military to intervene. In September 2025 the Supreme Federal Court convicted Bolsonaro of plotting a coup to stay in power and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison; he was taken into custody in November 2025.

In the general election of 4 October 2026, Bolsonaro's eldest son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, led the first round with about 47 per cent of the presidential vote to Lula's 45 per cent, and the two met in a run-off on 25 October. The 2022 census counted about 1.7 million Indigenous people belonging to around 390 peoples, including some of the last groups in the world living without contact with outsiders, and the security of their lands remains among the most contested questions in Brazilian politics.