Colonial Brazil in the context of "São Paulo"

During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and early 19th century. The Norse settled areas of the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short-term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by Europeans, after Christopher Columbus’s voyages, is more well-known. During this time, the European colonial empires of Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden began to explore and claim the Americas, its natural resources, and human capital, leading to the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and genocide of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the establishment of several settler colonial states.

The rapid rate at which some European nations grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 15th century because it had been preoccupied with internal wars and it was slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the Black Death. The Ottoman Empire's domination of trade routes to Asia prompted Western European monarchs to search for alternatives, resulting in the voyages of Christopher Columbus and his accidental arrival at the New World. With the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide the Earth in two, with Portugal having dominion over non-Christian lands in the world's eastern half, and Spain over those in the western half. Spanish claims essentially included all of the Americas; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas granted the eastern tip of South America to Portugal, where it established Brazil in the early 1500s, and the East Indies to Spain, where It established the Philippines. The city of Santo Domingo, in the current-day Dominican Republic, founded in 1496 by Columbus, is credited as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Americas.

São Paulo (/ˌsaʊ ˈpaʊloʊ/, Portuguese: [sɐ̃w ˈpawlu] ) is one of the 26 states of the Federative Republic of Brazil and is named after Saint Paul of Tarsus. It is located in the Southeast Region and is bordered by the states of Minas Gerais to the north and northeast, Paraná to the south, Rio de Janeiro to the east and Mato Grosso do Sul to the west, in addition to the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast. It is divided into 645 municipalities. The total area is 248,219.481 square kilometres (95,838.077 square miles) km, which is equivalent to 2.9% of Brazil's surface, being slightly larger than the United Kingdom. Its capital is the municipality of São Paulo.

With more than 44 million inhabitants in 2022, São Paulo is the most populous Brazilian state (around 22% of the Brazilian population), the world's 28th-most-populous sub-national entity and the most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, and the fourth-most-populous political entity of South America, surpassed only by the rest of the Brazilian federation, Colombia, and Argentina. The local population is one of the most diverse in the country and descended mostly from Italians, who began immigrating to the country in the late 19th century; the Portuguese, who colonized Brazil and installed the first European settlements in the region; Indigenous peoples, many distinct ethnic groups; Africans, who were brought from Africa as enslaved people in the colonial era and migrants from other regions of the country. In addition, Arabs, Armenians, Chinese, Germans, Greeks, Japanese, Spanish and American Southerners also are present in the ethnic composition of the local population.

The Empire of Brazil (Portuguese: Império do Brasil) was a 19th-century state that broadly comprised the territories which form modern Brazil and Uruguay until the latter achieved independence in 1828. The empire's government was a representative parliamentary constitutional monarchy under the rule of Emperors Pedro I and his son Pedro II. A colony of the Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil became the seat of the Portuguese Empire in 1808, when the Portuguese Prince regent, later King Dom John VI, fled from Napoleon's invasion of Portugal and established himself and his government in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. John VI later returned to Portugal, leaving his eldest son and heir-apparent, Pedro, to rule the Kingdom of Brazil as regent. On 7 September 1822, Pedro declared the independence of Brazil and, after waging a successful war against his father's kingdom, was acclaimed on 12 October as Pedro I, the first Emperor of Brazil. The new country was huge, sparsely populated, and ethnically diverse.

Unlike most of the neighboring Hispanic American republics, Brazil had political stability, vibrant economic growth, constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, and respect for civil rights of its subjects, albeit with legal restrictions on women and slaves, the latter regarded as property and not citizens. The Empire's bicameral parliament was elected under comparatively democratic methods for the era, as were the provincial and local legislatures. This led to a long ideological conflict between Pedro I and a sizable parliamentary faction over the role of the monarch in the government. He also had to face other obstacles. The unsuccessful Cisplatine War against the neighboring United Provinces of the Río de la Plata in 1828 led to the secession of the province of Cisplatina (later to become Uruguay). In 1826, despite his role in Brazilian independence, he became the king of Portugal; he abdicated the Portuguese throne in favor of Maria, his eldest daughter. Two years later, she was usurped by Pedro I's younger brother Miguel. Unable to deal with both Brazilian and Portuguese affairs, Pedro I abdicated his Brazilian throne on 7 April 1831 and immediately departed for Europe to restore his daughter to the Portuguese throne.

French and Spanish forces invaded Portugal from 19–30 November 1807 during the Napoleonic Wars, sparking the Peninsular War. The Franco-Spanish invasion force was led by General Jean-Andoche Junot, while the Portuguese were under the nominal command of Prince Regent John, the future King John VI of Portugal. French and Spanish troops swiftly occupied the country in the face of little resistance due to the poor state of the Portuguese military.

Prior to the invasion, Napoleon had issued an ultimatum to the Portuguese government, which reluctantly acceded to most of his demands. Nevertheless, Napoleon ordered Junot to invade Portugal together with three Spanish Army divisions. Paralyzed by fear and indecision, the Portuguese authorities offered no resistance. Junot's troops occupied Lisbon on 30 November 1807, only to find that John and many of the leading families had escaped to Brazil aboard an Anglo-Portuguese fleet. The French quickly occupied the entire country and appropriated or disbanded the Portuguese Army. The following year saw the Portuguese revolt against their French occupiers, leading to the Battle of Évora in July 1808.

Bandeirantes (Portuguese: [bɐ̃dejˈɾɐ̃tʃis]; lit. 'flag-carriers'; singular: bandeirante) were frontiersmen and explorers in colonial Brazil who, from the early 16th century, participated in inland expeditions to find precious metals and enslave indigenous peoples. They played a major role in expanding Brazil's borders to its approximate modern-day limits, beyond the boundaries demarcated by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

Most bandeirantes hailed from São Paulo, then a small village in the Captaincy of São Vicente from 1534 to 1709 and later the Captaincy of São Paulo from 1720 to 1821. Some bandeirantes were descended from Portuguese colonists who settled in São Paulo, but most were of mameluco descent with both Portuguese and indigenous ancestry. This was due to miscegenation being the norm in colonial Brazilian society, as well as polygamy.

Rio de Janeiro (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈʁi.u d(ʒi) ʒɐˈne(j)ɾu] ) is one of the 27 federative units of Brazil. It has the second largest economy of Brazil, with the largest being that of the state of São Paulo. The state, which has 8.2% of the Brazilian population, is responsible for 9.2% of the Brazilian GDP.

The state of Rio de Janeiro is located within the Brazilian geopolitical region classified as the Southeast (assigned by IBGE). Rio de Janeiro shares borders with all the other states in the same Southeast macroregion: Minas Gerais (N and NW), Espírito Santo (NE) and São Paulo (SW). It is bounded on the east and south by the South Atlantic Ocean. Rio de Janeiro has an area of 43,653 km (16,855 sq mi). Its capital is the city of Rio de Janeiro, which was the capital of the Portuguese Colony of Brazil from 1763 to 1815, of the following United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves from 1815 to 1822, and of later independent Brazil as a kingdom and republic from 1822 to 1960.