Brazil gained independence in 1822 as a monarchy ruled by Emperor Pedro I, the son and heir of Portuguese emperor João IV (Pedro I eventually abdicated the Brazilian throne and returned to Portugal as its emperor). In other words, when Pedro I rode up Ipiranga Hill, raised his sword, and proclaimed “Independence or death!” the newly independent country was ruled by the same people who had governed it that morning. Nonetheless, this act marked the culmination of a process that began in 1808, when Napoleon’s armies crossed the Pyrenees from France to invade the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon toppled the Spanish crown, but the Portuguese royal family, many of the government’s bureaucrats, and most of the aristocracy fled aboard British warships to Portugal’s colony, Brazil. This would be the first and only time a European empire would be ruled from one of its colonies.

Before the seat of Portuguese power relocated to Brazil, colonial policies had restricted many activities in Brazil in order to keep the colony dependent and subordinate to Portugal. It was only with the arrival of the imperial court that Brazil gained its first printing press, library, and military and naval academies, as well as schools for engineering, medicine, law, and the arts. The first comprehensive university in Brazil was not founded until 1922, nearly four centuries after the first universities were established in Mexico and Peru, and three centuries later than in the United States. (The first university was established during the commemoration of the centenary of independence, in order to be able to award an honorary degree to a visiting European dignitary.)

With the flight of the emperor to Brazil in 1808 and the declaration of independence by his son in 1822, Brazil achieved something that had eluded Spanish-American nations: it retained the unifying symbol of the monarchy and continued to build upon the infrastructure of colonial administration, even if that infrastructure had been more rudimentary than in the Spanish colonies. A liberal constitution adopted in 1824 lasted until a republican military coup in 1889. It established a two-chamber parliamentary system and a role for the emperor as a guide and intermediary in political affairs. Pedro I was not adept in this role and abdicated in 1831, leaving behind a regency governing in the name of his five-year-old son, Pedro II. In 1840, at the age of fourteen, Pedro II declared himself an adult and assumed the throne. His rule, which lasted forty-nine years, provided the country with unusual political stability that helped keep Brazil from dividing into separate nations, as occurred in Spanish America, and avoided the internal strife that characterized the United States during that period.

The nature of Brazil’s independence nonetheless constrained its growth in the nineteenth century. Portugal had been economically and militarily dependent on Britain, and Britain transferred this dependency onto Brazil. The British treaty recognizing Brazilian independence compelled the Brazilian state to assume the debts owed by Portugal: the British government presumed that without revenue from Brazil, the Portuguese crown could not honor the debts. Britain negotiated with Brazil a “Friendship Treaty” that allowed British industrial goods to enter the country with very low tariffs and granted British citizens in Brazil the right to be tried by British rather than Brazilian judges. The flood of cheap British imports inhibited Brazilian industrialization. British economic and political influence, as well as the special privileges enjoyed by British citizens in Brazil, were examples of neocolonialism, the influence that European powers and the United States exerted over politically and economically weaker countries after they gained their independence.