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Introduction
This
article examines the relationship between a British
newspaper in Rio de Janeiro and the political elites of the
Brazilian Second Empire (1840-1889). The publication of the
newspaper in question commenced in February 1865 and continued
until 1884, when its owner, for health reasons, ceased his
journalistic endeavours and passed away shortly thereafter.
The newspaper was called the Anglo-Brazilian Times. Its editor
and owner was William Scully (1820?-1884), an Irish immigrant.
This
analysis does not cover the entire period of the publication
of the newspaper, a total of twenty years, but rather
concentrates on the initial phase, 1865-1870. Nevertheless,
the article will also cover, albeit superficially, the five
years of publication until 1875, when England decided to call
a halt to the emigration of colonists to Brazil. In respect of
those final years, this article does not concentrate on
Scully's discourse but rather is based on secondary sources.
This restriction is in part imposed by the lack of
availability of copies of the Anglo-Brazilian Times for the
years from 1871 to 1877. For the purposes of this research,
the collection of editions for the years 1865 to 1870 was
used. The collection is stored at the National Library in Rio
de Janeiro and is available on microfilm. The library does not
hold copies for the period from 1871 to 1877. The series with
the editions from 1878 to 1884 is also accessible to the
public and microfilmed. They have not however been included in
the analysis as they do not relate to the proposed theme of
discussion.
The
period of study covers the overall causes of the swift
extinction of a project of European immigration in which the
Anglo-Brazilian Times was involved. This was the settlement of
Irish people in Santa Catarina, in Colônia Príncipe Dom Pedro
along the river Itajaí-Mirim, between 1867 and 1869. The
article also pays particular attention to the political
crisis that resulted in the dissolution of
the Third of August Cabinet on 16 July 1868, and of the liberal-progressive
majority led by Zacarias de Góes e Vasconcelos (1815-1877),
which retained political hegemony in Brazil for some time
during the 1860s. Both incidents are inter-related.
The removal of Zacarias created the political conditions
whereby the initial settlement of the immigrants in Colônia
Príncipe Dom Pedro was rendered impracticable.
Preparations for the founding of the Anglo-Brazilian Times
date from the final stage of the controversies generated by
the actions of the British government, represented by its
Minister Plenipotentiary, William Dougall Christie
(1816-1874), and the Brazilian government, with respect to the
slavery question, in the wake of the end to the trans-Atlantic
slave trade between Africa and Brazil. Even with the
extinction of the trade itself in 1850 (Eusébio de Queirós
Law), Great Britain persisted in its own goal of forcing
Brazil to adopt measures conducive to the abolition of
slavery. In that way, Britain adopted an intransigent,
bellicose posture, which would provoke the breakdown of
bilateral relations between the two countries in 1863, despite
the fact that this extreme situation had been caused by
problems of minor significance. [1]
This
argument attempts to demonstrate that Great Britain, at a
time when Anglo-Brazilian relations had been severed,
contemplated free European immigration as an alternative that
might substitute the diplomatic and military pressures which,
until 1863, were aimed at forcing Brazil into adopting a
policy clearly favourable to the abolition of slavery. The
intimidating operations carried out during the first stage,
concluded with William Christie, had been frustrated, and so
the British government officially adopted a policy of
non-interference in relation to the problem of slavery in
Brazil. Nonetheless, Westminster would have proceeded to
disseminate propaganda aimed at the liberalisation of Brazilian immigration policy. According to this propaganda,
the growing numbers of free immigrants in the country,
arriving free of the customary restrictions, would render
slavery obsolete or unnecessary. The instrument for this form
of persuasion was precisely the Anglo-Brazilian Times, whose
establishment in the year 1865 appears to have been no
coincidence. The activities of William Scully were in line
with this hypothesis and would have been subsidised, to a
certain extent, by the British government.
The
strategy thus outlined, however, was short-lived. Yet it seems
to have been the underlying cause of the political crisis of
January-July of 1868, which not only signalled the initiation of
the decline of the power of the monarch, Dom Pedro II
(1825-1891), but would also result in a decisive blow dealt to
British propaganda promoting mass immigration. From the
deposition of Prime Minister Zacarias Góes e Vasconcelos and
the consequent dissolution of the Third of August Cabinet, on
16 July 1868, the colonising initiative in which Scully was
most directly involved - the settlement of Irish people along
the river Itajaí-Mirim in Santa Catarina, found itself
deprived of political, material and financial support, and
ceased to exist within approximately one year.
This
would have been triggered by the identification of connections
between that colonisation experience and British propaganda
with regard to the promotion of free immigration. In this
specific case, the colonists might have been perceived as a
real threat to Brazilian sovereignty in solving the slavery
problem. That colonisation project, which not only included
Irish people of British origin, but also North Americans,
French, Italians and others, ended in failure after a further
blow to its possibilities of success, represented by the
catastrophic rainy season of 1869. [2] Following the dispersal
of this first wave of immigrants, Colônia Príncipe Dom
Pedro would be settled by Polish immigrants, and also Germans
and Italians, in a different domestic political context, under
Conservative leadership.
Subsequent initiatives aimed at promoting British immigration
were restricted to the provinces of Paraná and São Paulo.
Colonies located in Assunguy (present-day Cerro Azul, in the
vicinity of Curitiba) and in Cananéia, São Paulo, during the
first half of the 1870s, also ended in failure, even
though a few settlers managed to succeed (Marshall 2005:
137-187). In 1875, Great Britain, along with France, decided
to prohibit emigration for colonisation experiments in Brazil,
as other European countries had already done, such as Prussia
in 1859. [3]
(*)
This
article is based on my M.A. dissertation (Latin American
Studies, University College London, 1992); another more
extensive version, under the title of ‘Imagery and arguments
pertaining to the issue of free immigration in the Anglo-Irish
press in Rio de Janeiro,’ was published by the Associação
Brasileira de Estudos Irlandeses (ABEI Journal, Ed. Humanitas,
São Paulo, no. 5, pp. 111-127. June 2003.) This work is
available on: http://http.gogobrazil.com/angloirishpress.html,
thanks to the kindness of Peter O’Neill, to whom I would like
to express my sincere appreciation. The copyright pertains to
ABEI, edited by Dr. Munira Mutran and Dr. Laura Izarra, of the
University of São Paulo (USP), and to the author. Any mistakes
of interpretation or of any other nature are my sole
responsibility.
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