English, Irish, and Irish-American Pioneer Settlers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Anyone who has wondered why Brazil, for all its beauty and resources, ranked well behind Argentina, Canada, and the United States as a target of European emigrants in the late nineteenth century will find a substantial answer in Oliver Marshall’s monograph. Author or editor of several previous works on English-speaking migration to Latin America, including Brazil in British and Irish Archives, he not surprisingly exploits the archives (including Rio’s) very well. But he has also enriched the book with interviews of descendants of the 1850s – 1870s migrants he writes about, as well as personal papers, letters, diaries, and documents in their possession.Marshall’s migrants came from the U.K. and New York (his Irish-Americans came only from there). From 1864 to 1873, British arrivals at Rio de Janeiro outnumbered all but Portuguese, Italians, and French. Their encounter with Brazil was more difficult because of their noncognate language and frequent disparity of religion. Migrants from the former Confederate States of America to Brazil in the late 1860s have been studied previously, but this book supplies a thorough, source-based monograph on the British and Irish.The misadventures of these migrants were startling, constant, and immense. Many perished; many (the lucky ones) returned home or moved on. Misinformation, hopelessly disconnected administrators and procedures, inadequate investment and infrastructure, and sheer ignorance produced great hardship. Brazil got a bad name as an immigrant destination. Many of these problems continued, causing the Italian government, for example, to stop issuing exit visas for Brazil in 1902. In the broad context of mass transatlantic migration, the experience of English and Irish migrants to Brazil was among the least enviable.Marshall zeroes in on two groups. The first is ethnically Irish, some from New York’s slums, but larger numbers from Mayo and Galway who were living in the “Black Country” of the English Midlands, particularly in a place called Wednesbury, west of Birmingham. Thus he writes here not about first-time post-Famine Irish peasant migrants but people who had already moved at least once. In February 1868, hundreds left by train for Liverpool, were stuck in Birkenhead for three weeks (and should have quit right there), then sailed for two months to Rio, took a coastal steamer to Santa Catarina, and finally went overland 80 miles to Colônia Príncipe Dom Pedro — a stony, mountainous, flood-ridden settlement run by a phony but dictatorial American “doctor.” Flash floods tore apart the colony in 1868 and 1869. Many died; some survivors traipsed back to Rio, while others went to Santos, where men found work on the Jundaí-Campinas railway and women took jobs as domestics.The second group, all English from Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and nearby, left Liverpool in May 1872. Most made their way to Colônia Cananéia in São Paulo province or Colônia Assunguy in Paraná. More came in 1873. The results were nearly as bad as the earlier attempt.Marshall tells both stories with a wealth of detail on land grants, fraud, farming procedures, marketing problems, local administration, social life, and religious practice. It is clear that these migrants to Brazil had a worse time, and few came anywhere near succeeding as settlers, compared to migrants to the United States, Canada, or Argentina in the same period. Marshall does not dwell on the murkiness of Brazilian land titles or the nature of any “agricultural ladder” they might have climbed, nor does he say much about the transatlantic voyages; the first group evidently went by sail, the second by steam, some on an early Lusitania. The shift from sail to steam was well underway on the North Atlantic run but not yet to South America. But these are minor omissions.The author notes that many Europeans succeeded in southern Brazil. His subjects did not root themselves in the land as did, for example, Germans in Rio Grande do Sul, where (he notes correctly) their dialects were still spoken four generations later. He has located and talked with assimilated descendants of his subjects; their recollections and experiences are fascinating.Appendixes include a table of about four hundred migrants by name, occupation, marital status, family composition, arrival and departure dates, colony, and subsequent destination. This supplements the rich verbal detail in the text

Economic history · Emigration · Government (linguistics) · Ignorance · Immigration · Irish · Political science · Portuguese · Possession (linguistics) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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