The occupation of the Southeast region had its beginning associated with the period of the Great Navigations, in the middle of the 16th century, with the settlement of Luso-Brazilians in the coastal region of Brazil from Oiapoque, in the north, to Paranaguá Bay, in Santa Catarina, South. The purpose of colonization was to obtain sovereignty over the territory and protect it from French invaders.
Directly sent by the king of Portugal, D. João III, the Portuguese nobleman Martim Afonso de Sousa carried out a great colonizing expedition. Martim Afonso was the discoverer and founder of the Captaincy of São Vicente, where he came together with his fleet, founding, in January 1532, the first settlement in Brazil. This coastal strip was characterized by violent conflicts between indigenous peoples and Portuguese and French colonizers.
However, colonization was consolidated with the arrival of the Jesuit missions. The first Governor General, Tomé de Souza, brought the first Jesuits (led by Father Manoel da Nóbrega) with the aim of finding and catechizing indigenous groups present in the “New World”. Among other members of the Jesuit mission, Father José de Anchieta stood out, who climbed the Serra do Mar, reached the Plateau of Piratininga (present-day city of São Paulo), and founded, on January 25, 1554, a school that soon became Vila de São Paulo de Piratininga.
During this period, the grantees, responsible for the hereditary captaincies, divided them into large tracts of land known as sesmarias, which consisted of permitting the use of land for colonists. A part of the settlers who lived in the villages of the captaincy of São Vicente began a journey towards the interior of the captaincies with the predominant objective of hunting Indians and looking for gold. Bandeiratism was born in the city of São Paulo, approximately between 1580 and 1730, reaching the region of Minas Gerais in the second half of the 17th century. Until that moment, the states that make up the Southeast region occupied a modest place in the economy as a whole. Brazilian, based on the exploration of pau-brasil, on the planting of sugar cane and on the agriculture of subsistence.
Gold and diamond were discovered in the region of Minas Gerais around the year 1687, began to attract a large number of people from the villages located near the coast to its exploration. A significant number of slaves brought from the African continent also arrived in the region during this period. The "gold routes" emerged, the name given to the locations where the gold was transported to the areas from where the shipments to Portugal departed, which brought a new economic and social dynamic to the Southeast.
The captaincy of Rio de Janeiro was renewed as it established relations between the region of Minas Gerais and the kingdom, becoming the main urban center of the Colony. The establishment of the royal family in Rio de Janeiro in 1808 contributed to significant improvements in the regional economy and to the beginning of the production of manufactured goods in the country. In 1882, Brazil became politically independent from Portugal, reverberating throughout Brazil and especially in Rio de Janeiro, which became the new capital of the Empire.
In areas more distant from mineral extraction, the production of sugarcane was the predominant economic activity in much of the Southeast region, with emphasis on the current state of São Paulo, during most of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century, when the coffee culture took prominence, becoming the economic activity main.
Julio César Lázaro da Silva
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
Master in Human Geography from Universidade Estadual Paulista - UNESP
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/brasil/historia-economica-regiao-sudeste.htm