What if the Tordesillas Line set Brazil as Spanish, and the Cabral expedition never landed there?

[raharris1973]

What if the Tordesillas Line was set a bit to the east of OTL, so just east of the tip of Brazil, missing the mainland, leaving it in Spain’s zone? Consequently, Cabral’s course, although going a bit southwest into the Atlantic on its way to India, using the Volta Do Mar technique, never goes *as far* west, and never, either accidentally (nor purposefully, as some believe) makes landfall in Brazil?



How do the 1500s and 1600s proceed with Brazil as a field for Spanish exploration and settlement, not Portuguese, and Portugal focused solely on Africa and the Indies?



I imagine the Spanish will get around to exploring and looking over Brazil’s coast at least, before too long. In the voyages that Vespucci says he undertook under the Spanish (though with uncertain veracity and probably Captain’ed by others) prior to 1500, he explored the north coast. Orellana was to explore down the Amazon in the first quarter or half of the 1500s, and a Cabot in Spanish pay was to explore the mouth of the La Plata River in the 1510s.



At the same time, Brazil, with its relatively simpler living, less bejeweled Tupi natives who lack impressive architecture or cities will not have the same draw for the Spaniards that the Maya, Aztec, Muisca, and Inca will have, nor even the Taino. The most notable resource on the land will be the Brazilwood tree, which produces a useful red dye.



I imagine the Spaniards will send parties to give some of the interior and coastal regions at least a superficial look by no later than 1550. The Spaniards are, after all, the same people who sent Coronado walking from Arizona through Utah through Kansas and Oklahoma in the 1540s, and DeSoto through the American Southeast as far as Tennessee and Arkansas, and Brazil is no less accessible.



The Spanish may be, relatively, slow to start colonies, but they will do it. In places they may collapse due to conflict with natives or natural disaster and have to be refounded later, like the early La Plata/Argentina colony, but I think that is all doable.



I do not know for sure how the different regions of Spanish Brazil would be divided up administratively, but I would imagine that religious orders like the Jesuits would have an outsize role in the colonization effort here, especially given the lack of superficial signs of wealth to attract as many private soldiers of fortune as certain other regions.



Might much of southern or southwest Brazil, especially the Guarani inhabited parts, end up as part of an enlarged “Super-Paraguay”? Would a Jesuit-mission administered order over natives model be extended more broadly over many Tupi and Tupinamba inhabited areas?



How would the history of sugar cultivation in Spanish Brazil compare and contrast with that of OTL’s Portuguese Brazil? The Castilians were no strangers to sugar cultivation and practiced it in the Canary Islands, and to a degree, in their Caribbean possessions. They were also no strangers to the employment of African slaves, though they owned scarcely any African trading posts or forts themselves.



However, OTL’s Spanish America did not seem to go as industrial scale and multi-generational scale with African single crop plantation slavery as the Portuguese and later northern European colonies. Slaves were often primarily employed in mines, and survivors were then employed in a variety of trades and crafts including ranch hands/cowboys and soldiering, often with paths for emancipation available to mixed race in particular. The Spaniards in the 1500s and 1600s did not seem to optimize their Greater Antilles toward plantation agriculture like sugar or coffee, rather deserting them and leaving them as sparse ranch and forestry reserves.



Would that await Brazil under Spanish rule? Or would the soil and growing conditions encourage massive Spanish Brazilian sugar boom basically matching the sugar boom that emerged from OTL’s Portuguese northeast Brazil in the late 1500s and early 1600s?



If Spanish Brazil does *not* develop the same scale of massive sugar growing complex, demand for African slaves and the number of victims of the middle passage may be a good deal lower. There might also be less inspiration for some of the intensive sugar monocrop island plantation techniques the Dutch, French, and English later applied in the Caribbean. However, I doubt the last would be entirely butterflied away, and the possibilities of agricultural capitalism, opportunities to trade in human lives and labor, and consumer desires for sugar and coffee and tobacco will probably come together in a manner somewhat similar to OTL at some point.



Would Spanish Brazil be beset by challenges and interlopers from France as much as Portuguese Brazil was? French Huguenots-and Catholics, alike trying to set “France Antarctique” and France Equinoxiale”? Would the Spanish be swifter at squashing these French efforts? Slower at it or ineffective? Or about as effective as the Portuguese?



Would the Dutch seek to poach a Spanish Brazil with the same enthusiasm they sought to poach Portuguese Brazil in OTL? On the one hand, the Dutch were at war with Spain for a long period, so there is motive. On the other hand, perhaps they would be more intimidated by Spanish garrisons, seeing them as a harder target. Or, if plantations are less developed, a less juicy target. Would Spain fare any worse at fending off Dutch attacks than the Portuguese did? The only factor I can think of working against the Spanish is that in the Americas they have so much else to defend.



When are the Spaniards going to discover the gold and diamonds of Brazil? That would create a gold rush and a movement of prospectors and settlers, and, I believe, put an end to Jesuit rule over known or suspected gold fields, if such rule has lasted this long.



Is the history of the Guyanas going to go any differently? Is there any reason it won’t be divided up among French, Dutch and British, but be held by Spanish instead? Or that the British, French, and Dutch holdings might be larger?



Meanwhile, how is Portugal being changed in the absence of Brazil from its imperial portfolio? It was always sending more people to Africa and the Indies than to Brazil in the 1500s and 1600s I believe, at least until a gold rush started. If it still ends up stuck with an Iberian Union and targeted by Dutch attacks, is it any better able to hold any possessions from the Dutch? Perhaps not, since the things it lost, it lost by the early 1600s. From the 1700s and 1800s on, do the homeland and Azores remain more populous and crowded without Brazil as an outlet, increasing the overall size of the economy, if not its per capita living standard? Indeed, Azores overcrowding could lead to migration back to Portugal’s major cities? And Portuguese emigration, rather than Brazil focused, could, especially by the 19th century, be more generically spread through the Spanish speaking New World, the Anglophone world and France and the Francophone world, in addition to those places in Portugal’s own empire in Africa and the tropics hospitable to European habitation after the widespread availability of quinine?

 

[raharris1973]

Maybe a butterfly effect of this is: No Spanish Philippines. Bear with me while I explain: If irritation in Portugal over getting shortchanged at Tordesillas would still be raw nearly a century later (well almost 90 years), to change the course of a Portuguese Succession, then it should be pretty raw around 1520 also. Especially around that year and next, as word gets back to Europe of the conquest of fabulously wealthy Mexico. Under those circumstances, would a Portuguese navigator like Fernan Magellan even think of hiring himself out to the Spanish, and even worse, selling these monopolizers of western continents on a scheme to compromise Portugal's Asian sphere, by sailing west? Given the dirty looks and hate the Spanish have seen from the Portuguese, would the Spanish court trust a Portuguese navigator, even a turncoat, with such a mission?
No Magellan for Spain, means no Magellan discovering the Philippines circa 1521, before getting killed there, while working for the Spanish Crown. Portugal is more likely to make multiple contacts on that archipelago north of the Spice Islands long before the Spanish manage a circumnavigation themselves that hits those islands.

 

[Ricardolindo]

How would the history of sugar cultivation in Spanish Brazil compare and contrast with that of OTL’s Portuguese Brazil? The Castilians were no strangers to sugar cultivation and practiced it in the Canary Islands, and to a degree, in their Caribbean possessions. They were also no strangers to the employment of African slaves, though they owned scarcely any African trading posts or forts themselves.



However, OTL’s Spanish America did not seem to go as industrial scale and multi-generational scale with African single crop plantation slavery as the Portuguese and later northern European colonies. Slaves were often primarily employed in mines, and survivors were then employed in a variety of trades and crafts including ranch hands/cowboys and soldiering, often with paths for emancipation available to mixed race in particular. The Spaniards in the 1500s and 1600s did not seem to optimize their Greater Antilles toward plantation agriculture like sugar or coffee, rather deserting them and leaving them as sparse ranch and forestry reserves.



Would that await Brazil under Spanish rule? Or would the soil and growing conditions encourage massive Spanish Brazilian sugar boom basically matching the sugar boom that emerged from OTL’s Portuguese northeast Brazil in the late 1500s and early 1600s?



If Spanish Brazil does *not* develop the same scale of massive sugar growing complex, demand for African slaves and the number of victims of the middle passage may be a good deal lower. There might also be less inspiration for some of the intensive sugar monocrop island plantation techniques the Dutch, French, and English later applied in the Caribbean. However, I doubt the last would be entirely butterflied away, and the possibilities of agricultural capitalism, opportunities to trade in human lives and labor, and consumer desires for sugar and coffee and tobacco will probably come together in a manner somewhat similar to OTL at some point.

At this time, Spain did not promote sugar production in their colonies as they wanted to protect sugar production in Andalusia. That's why the Spanish Caribbean had far fewer slaves than the British, French and Dutch Caribbean until the late 18th century.

 

[raharris1973]

At this time, Spain did not promote sugar production in their colonies as they wanted to protect sugar production in Andalusia. That's why the Spanish Caribbean had far fewer slaves than the British, French and Dutch Caribbean until the late 18th century.

Interesting. Was the Andalusian production dead from war damage, or international competition, or other forces by the late 18th century, or at latest end of Napoleonic Wars, so the Spanish then were willing to give it all a try in Cuba with slave labor and later the Philippines with coolie labor?

 

[Ricardolindo]

Interesting. Was the Andalusian production dead from war damage, or international competition, or other forces by the late 18th century, or at latest end of Napoleonic Wars, so the Spanish then were willing to give it all a try in Cuba with slave labor and later the Philippines with coolie labor?

AFAIK, it was the British occupation of Havana during the Seven Years' War that showed the Spaniards how profitable sugar slave plantations could be and led them to adopt the system.

 

[Ricardolindo]

AFAIK, it was the British occupation of Havana during the Seven Years' War that showed the Spaniards how profitable sugar slave plantations could be and led them to adopt the system.

During their brief occupation of Havana during the Seven Years' War, the British imported a lot of slaves.
BTW, the fact that this happened in Cuba but not in Puerto Rico is one reason why Cuba had far more slaves than Luerto Rico during the 19th century though there are others such as Cuba being far larger and more suitable for sugar plantations.

 

[raharris1973]

During their brief occupation of Havana during the Seven Years' War, the British imported a lot of slaves.
BTW, the fact that this happened in Cuba but not in Puerto Rico is one reason why Cuba had far more slaves than Luerto Rico during the 19th century though there are others such as Cuba being far larger and more suitable for sugar plantations.

I think in Cuba, later on, an influx of refugee planters from French Saint-Domingue (Haiti) also boosted the sugar plantation sector in Cuba. It did so for Louisiana as well.