Brazilian Gold Rush

The Brazilian Gold Rush began in the 1690s, when prospectors found alluvial gold in the mountainous interior of what became Minas Gerais. It was one of the first great gold rushes in modern history. It pulled colonists, enslaved Africans, and fortune seekers far from the Atlantic coast, reshaped the Portuguese empire's economy, and shifted Brazil's center of gravity from the northeastern sugar plantations toward the south. The exact date of the first strike is uncertain, and the 1690s is best treated as an approximate starting point.

Portugal had long hoped for mineral wealth in Brazil, as Spain had found in Mexico and the Andes. For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, the colony's wealth came from sugar, grown on coastal plantations with enslaved African labor. By the late 1600s sugar prices were under pressure from Caribbean competition, and the Crown and colonists alike had reason to look inland. Expeditions of paulistas, frontiersmen from the São Paulo region, had been probing the interior for decades, often to capture Indigenous people for labor, and they were well placed to find the first deposits.

Once news spread, migration surged. Settlers came from the coast and from Portugal itself, so many that the Crown worried about depopulating the homeland and tried to restrict emigration. Mining camps grew quickly into towns such as Ouro Preto, then called Vila Rica, Mariana, and Sabará. Early conflict was inevitable: in the so-called War of the Emboabas, in the early 1700s, paulista discoverers fought newcomers over control of the mines. The Crown soon asserted authority, taxing output heavily, most famously through the "royal fifth," and later establishing foundry houses to control the gold. Diamonds were found in the region in the 1720s and were placed under even tighter royal monopoly.

The human cost was large. Enslaved Africans did much of the labor, and the gold economy greatly expanded the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil. Historians estimate that many hundreds of thousands of Africans were brought to the mining zone over the eighteenth century, though figures vary. Indigenous peoples were also displaced or coerced as settlement pushed outward.

The consequences were lasting. Gold flowed to Portugal and, in large part, onward to Britain to pay for imported goods, which historians often argue did less to develop Portugal than it did to strengthen its trading partners. In Brazil, the boom fostered urban life, a distinctive baroque art and architecture, and a more integrated internal market, including cattle and food supply routes to the mines. In 1763 the colonial capital moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, the port serving the mining region. By the later eighteenth century output declined, and resentment of heavy taxation fed conspiracies such as the Inconfidência Mineira of 1789.