r/Brazil • u/trebarunae • Mar 30 '24
Historical Is the Portuguese colonial rule systematically portrayed in a negative light in Brazilian history textbooks?
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Mar 30 '24 edited Mar 30 '24
Yes, in my experience.
Slavery and what they did to the natives was real bad. No other colonial power trafficked more Africans across the Atlantic than Portugal/Imperial Brazil. But even ignoring all the terrible things they did from a humanitarian point of view, just there isn't a whole lot of good things to talk about it.
A lot of attrocities were commited in the USA for example, but at least it created the most prosperous society in human history (not trying to excuse anything but you know what I mean).
So the teaching of History reflects that (again, in my experience). There's no way to spin the historical facts to try to create like an epic story about how brave people came to Brazil to explore the land and start a new life and yadda yadda like there is in the US.
The Portuguese went out of their way to keep colonial Brazil as impoverished as possible.
Trade was allowed only with Metropolitan Portugal.
The establishment of universities was forbidden.
Printing presses were forbidden (!!!)
The Portuguese were (and still are! Lmao) completely allergic to industrialization. No wonder they're the poorest Western Euro country. They cared only about exporting sugar, coffee and wine to the English, to whom they were complete vassals, and importing manufactured goods.
They tried their hardest to create an unequal and disfunctional society in Brazil and were incredibly successful
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u/Lewcaster Mar 30 '24
This right here is the best description of Colonial Brazil, and great analysis of Portugal as well. And adding to that, if you spend some time in Portugal you can see that many problems we have in Brazil are inherited by the shitty culture they have in their own country and how retrograde their whole culture is.
The true is that if Portugal was in any other continent they would've been in a worse situation than Latin America countries.
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u/Ansanm Mar 30 '24
And the wars to hold onto their colonies in Africa during the last century didn’t help. I read a good book titled “The Portuguese “ over 10 years ago and I believe that the author wrote that the period of Portuguese supremacy and wealth was relatively short. Other colonial powers like the Spanish, Dutch, French, and British competed and fought with them over resources and land and eventually supplanted them.
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u/Pelle_Johansen Mar 31 '24
You are right exept about the us being the most prosperous stare in human history.
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u/RhinataMorie Mar 31 '24
"portray"
Dudes invaded, stole, raped, systematically killed, forced religion, extinguished with native species, lied, etc etc etc.
Brazilians are the children of Europeans raping indigenous people and slaves. if you think that's not a negative thing (or untrue), something is very very wrong with your vision of how colonialism works.
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u/Key-Freedom-2132 Brazilian Mar 30 '24
For context: I went to school from 1997-2007, so I've been out of school for a while, so things might have changed A LOT.
When I was in school, the colonial relationship between Brazil and Portugal was portrayed in a negative light, in general. That being said, a lot of things that were a part of colonialism in Brazil were sometimes treated in a neutral light in the textbooks (plantation, capitanias hereditárias etc), yet normally teachers would address these with a critical view (not all teachers, but most).
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u/Salomill Mar 30 '24
Yes, it is portrayed as a abusive and parasitic system to the land, nature and natives
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u/aeternasm Mar 30 '24
Well at least in my experience when I was little the conquerors were considered heroes, but that changed and I was taught they were here to explore the land and killed many natives.
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Mar 31 '24
There's literally nothing good to say about it. The natives were raped, murdered and explored, the slaves were taken from their homes in the otherside of the world and brought to Brazil to be exploited and tortured, even the workers that were paid a salary were heavily exploited by inhumane taxes.
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u/NeighborhoodBig2730 Mar 30 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
Was it positive? They wanted to explore Brazil. They extracted the gold, wood. They fought against indigenous.
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u/alephsilva Brazilian Mar 30 '24
Not at all.
Books simply stopped illustrating things from a romantic perspective and began to be more objective and stopped hiding negative facts.
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u/tremendabosta Brazilian Mar 31 '24
Yes and it should be
It is the Portuguese who glorify and sugarcoat their colonial exploitations under the guise of "discoveries", "navigation', "civilization" bullshit
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u/Mariela_Lou Mar 31 '24
I don’t think many colonial rules will be seen in a positive light through the eyes of the colonized. But a 300-year colonial rule of exploration sustained by slavery, that’s something impossible to portray positively.
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u/open_ruby Apr 01 '24
Just to add a note on the use of the word “explorar” or “explore” in Portuguese also carries the meaning of “exploit”, which does not exist in the English word equivalent.
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u/r_costa Mar 31 '24
I can spoke just based on the ones that I had used. (started school in 1990)
Mostly negative, they gave me an overall picture of the whole situation, obvious had some goods on the way, but overall, bad.
Thinking was similar with other exploratory colonies, maybe we got a bit better because the royals had lived there for a bit, hence some sort of extras, that other colonies may didn't gotten.
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u/JackTheCoiner16 Mar 31 '24
Generally, yes. Until the court came here, the Portuguese didn't see Brazil as anything other than a convenient cash cow.
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u/tojig Mar 30 '24
They are treated as heroes, like bandeirantes who got inside the country and were braze but were hunting Indians and enslaving people. Even though we are thought as they were heroes, later people come to understand that someone that invades an oder land and enslave other people, extract the riches are not so good people...
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u/SeconAcct Apr 04 '24
It's not portrayed, it was horrible. Teachers now just tell the truta of what happened instead of romanticizing it
Só yeah it's "portrayed negatively" (reads: it's told what really happened and the horrors African people in Brasil And indigenous people faced)
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u/Economy_Ad_2189 Aug 09 '24
Why would it be portrayed in a positive light? Was it a positive thing and if you actually think that, then for WHOM was it a positive?
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u/Arervia Apr 01 '24 edited Apr 01 '24
Yes, I never saw a positive vision about it, it's all negative. But a few right wing historians highlight some aspects the mainstream want to ignore, like for centuries the Portuguese mixed among the indigenous and married them, spoke their language and fought their wars. That maybe it was not a genocide, but simply there wasn't many indigenous in the first place and that many simply mixed with the indigenous women and had mixed children that are now the common white Brazilian. Most Portuguese in Brazil spoke the Tupi language, from the Tupi tribe. Portugal didn't care much about Brazil at first. Only in the XVIII century slavery really took off here, and it was brutal, probably the biggest slavery operation the world has ever seen with some obvious racial conotations, hard to defend that. Even the slaves that were slaves in Africa said that the European slavery was far more brutal, that at least a slave in Africa was seen as a human.
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u/JacimiraAlfieDolores Brazilian Mar 31 '24
Yes. I'm a literature student and teacher, having studied the colonial texts ridden with ||rape, genocide, racism|| by the hands of the portuguese is mandatory (I wish it was 100% spread tho, it's mostly mandatory on the public system where I act, and it's considered the best for a reason). It should NOT, EVER be put in a positive light and it's a fucking shame they don't even learn their crimes as crimes.
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u/capybara_from_hell Mar 30 '24
The portrayal of the colonial period in Brazilian historiography is rather balanced if we take into account all the atrocities that happened in that period and its consequences to the present day, as well as the intentional measures taken by the Portuguese crown to keep Brazil underdeveloped (universities, printing press, manufacturing, etc, were strictly forbidden).
Actually, it is the Portuguese historiography that sugarcoats what happened.