The Development of Brazilian Historiography: Colonial Legacies and Institutional Foundations

As with all of the Americas, Brazil was conquered and colonized by globally expanding European powers beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A key distinction from Spanish America, however, was the absence of colonial universities. While Spanish America established institutions of higher learning from the mid-sixteenth century, Portuguese America saw no equivalent until the early nineteenth century. The first university faculties in Brazil were created only after the arrival of the Braganza royal family (1808-21), who fled Napoleon’s invading armies. Throughout the nineteenth century, higher education remained limited to isolated law, engineering, and medical faculties concentrated in coastal cities. Not until the creation of the Universidade de São Paulo in the 1930s did Brazil possess an institution equivalent to a modern, multidisciplinary university.

During the colonial period, historical writing was produced sparingly by priests and royal functionaries. The most notable early works were chronicles of conquest, colonization, and Christianization. Among these, the letters of Jesuits like Manoel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta in the sixteenth century, and later writings by André João Antonil, are prime examples. Only a handful of chroniclers produced what are considered the major historical accounts during three centuries of colonial rule. This limited output reflects the peripheral status of Portuguese America within the empire’s intellectual priorities, contrasting with the more developed historiographical traditions in Spanish American viceroyalties.

The arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808 transformed Brazilian high culture and institutional life. Prince Regent João (later King João VI) established the first faculties of law (in São Paulo and Recife), medicine (Rio de Janeiro and Salvador), and engineering (Rio de Janeiro). He also founded elite institutions such as the national library. Following independence in 1822, the Empire of Brazil, under Pedro I and Pedro II, used royal patronage to forge a national identity. This included creating national archives and supporting historical writing to build an ‘imagined community’ around new national myths and symbols, laying a foundational infrastructure for professional scholarship.

Throughout the nineteenth century, history remained the domain of gentleman scholars, much like in the United States and Spanish America. The two giants of this era were Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen, a diplomat, and João Capistrano de Abreu. The latter’s work, especially his “Capítulos de História Colonial” (1907), is widely regarded as the beginning of modern Brazilian historical writing due to its rigorous emphasis on documentary evidence and sophisticated analysis. These historians wrote for a tiny elite, as Brazil in 1872 had a population of ten million with a literacy rate of only about 10 percent.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the establishment of national and state archives and libraries, although collections focused predominantly on government documents. These foundations were laid during the Brazilian Empire (1822-89) and the First Republic (1889-1930). This period was economically dominated by coffee production, which drove expansion and, by the early twentieth century, spurred industrialization, particularly around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. These two cities would come to dominate Brazil's intellectual and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. Most major intellectual figures emerged from families enriched by the coffee economy or its commercial networks, solidifying a geographic and economic concentration of cultural power that shaped the development of Brazilian historiography.