The República Federativa of Brazil

The República Federativa of Brazil is the largest and more populous country of América Latina and the fifth largest in area and population of the world. Its total area is of 8.514.876,599 km², it is located in the central and northeast part of South America. Its borders to the healthy North with Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and with the department foreign French of French Guiana; he/she has, East and Southeast
in the Oceano Atlântico. To the South, he/she makes border with Uruguay; to Southwest, with Argentina and Paraguay; to West, with Bolivia and Peru, and to Northwest, with Colombia. The only South American countries that don't make border with Brazil are Chile and Ecuador. Well besides the continental territory, Brazil also possesses some small groups of islands in the Oceano Atlântico: Penedos of São Pedro and São Paulo, Fernando of Noronha, and Trinidad and Martim Vaz. There is also a complex of small islands and you color called Atoll of the you Rub. The origin of the name of Brazil gave place to nothing less than eleven different hypotheses, until that the Brazilian philologist Adelino José of Silva Azevedo summarized them in an alone one in a book published in 1967, in which it proved that is a word of Celtic origin, although its more remote origins can be traced until the fenícios. This people maintained an intense trade of a red coloring that was extracted of a mineral whose main suppliers were the Celtic ones, people minerador that it explored lied of Ibéria to Ireland. The Greeks happened to the fenícios in the trade of this product, the one that called ´kinnabar´, and that passed to Latin as ´cinnabar´, to the Portuguese like ´cinábrio´ and to Spanish like ´cinabrio´. As one of the characteristics of the Celtic languages is the investment of particles, ´kinnabar´ they called ´barkino´, that would give place ´barcino´, adjective that is applied certain animals of for the red and that, with variants, it started to designate the red color in several languages of Celtic influence.
In the Medium Age, the artisans began to use an extracted red colorante of the wood that called her ´verzino´ in Toscana, in Veneza ´berziy´, in Gênova ´brazi´, name that soon was used to also designate the wood from where it was extracted, that was well-known in Spain as ´palo brasil´ou ´palo of Fernambuco´, and in Portugal as ´pau-brasil´.
At that time of the discoveries, the Portuguese kept the secret carefully of whatever they found or they conquered, in order to explore it advantageously, but it didn't delay in spreading in Europe that had discovered a certain ´ilha Brasil´ in the middle of the Atlantic, from where they extract ´pau-brasil´.
The gentílico ´brasileiro´ appeared in the century XVI and he/she referred initially to the that traded that wood and, later, to the Portuguese that arrived to that exotic place in search of fortune.
The colonization was not never in the purposes of the mercantile company that it impelled the sailings, specifically set up for the change, she always operated in the presupposition of the existence of local production, in the areas with that blanket the change. The problem of the colonization presents, like this, great difficulties, once the structure economic Portuguese was not prepared to face it. The exploration of America should appear, in the picture of the time, as a company extraordinarily difficult, in first place he/she had to attract people to populate the American continent. The obstacles, in that sense, were so important, that in the century XVI, that seems to have contemplated him in the controvertido problem of the degredados: to turn the Brazil destiny of these it seems to have been one in the ways of winning the natural resistances to the transplantação for an earth that didn't offer such little perspectives. There was also as obstacle, painful work conditions in the colony beside the weak enriquecimento possibilities, but it could be won by a high retribution of the work, in the case of if they move wage workers. Officially, the discoverer was Pedro Álvares Cabral, having sighted earth on April 21 and arrived in current Porto Seguro (Bahia) on April 22, 1500.
The effective occupation gave him starting from 1532, with the foundation of villa of São Vicente, by Martim Afonso of Sousa, donatário of two captaincies, but the one of São Vicente had just prospered, and even so, less than the captaincy of New Lusitânia (Pernambuco). All the other captaincies didn't prosper.
Unsatisfied, Dom João III decided to create a central government to correct the problems without abolishing the captaincies. He/she was correspondent Tomé of Sousa as first governor-general, that on March 29, 1549 it founded the city of Salvador as capital of Brazil.
Along the century XVI, went being rehearsed to slavery, initially the one of the natives, and starting from the last decades the one of the African, because there was already many black slaves in Portugal. They date of that century the first attempts of exploration of the interior there were still disputes with Frenches, that tried to implant in America for the piracy and for the commércio of the Brazilwood, getting to create a luso-French war. All this culminated with the expulsion of Frenches brought by Villegaignon, that had built to the small fort of Coligny in Rio de Janeiro), settling down in definitive the Portuguese hegemony.
The century XVII sees a great development of the agriculture, that uses the labor slave of African Blacks, with tobacco cultures and especially of the sugar-cane in Bahia, Pernambuco, and more tardiamente in Rio de Janeiro. The expeditions calls of Entrances and Flags of the from São Paulo discovered the gold, precious stones in Minas Gerais and herbs in the interior. The colonies native of northeastern Brazil were busy for the Dutchmen in 1624, and between 1630 and 1654, mainly under the command of Maurício of Nassau, being at the end expelled in the battle of Guararapes. In that time the Quilombo of Palmares was founded, by Zumbi, warring leader, and that congregated thousands of fled blacks of the mills of cane of the Brazilian northeast and some Indians and poor or undesirable whites. This sub-world was destroyed finally, not without a heroic and violent resistance, for the Portuguese members of the Bandeiras commanded by Domingos Old Jorge, tends its leader been died and decapitated (according to the no-official tradition, Zumbi would have gotten to flee).
In the century XVIII, although the production of the sugar has not lost its importance, the attentions of the Crown concentrated on the area of Minas Gerais where one had discovered gold. This, however, it is drained before the end of the century.