When you study the contents of Modern History, you soon come across the themes of great navigations and maritime expansions portuguese and Spanish. Well then, this characterizes what historians call The Age of Discovery. This era was followed by the colonization process, that is, the effective occupation of the new discovered lands.
Within the colonization process, especially the Portuguese colonization, there was the development of a system of relationship between the Metropolis (the Portuguese Empire) and the Colonies (Brazil and others) called CovenantColonial.
The Colonial Pact (also known as ExclusiveMetropolitan), as the name implies, was a commercial exclusivity agreement, that is, what the colonists produced in Brazil, such as the sugar (in Engenhos Nordestinos), could not be traded with other nations, but only with Portugal, which was its Metropolis. Thus, the Portuguese colonies were seen as an extension of the empire.
This pact sought to prevent colonial wealth from being usurped by competing nations, since the The political and economic environment at that time had an extremely competitive bias and, at times, very violent. It was about the systemmercantilist.
Mercantilism was the economic-commercial system that prevailed during modernity (from the middle of the 16th century to the last decades of the 18th century). There was not just one form of mercantile practice, but all of them were characterized by the search for raw materials in the newly discovered Americas, for the search for precious metals and for a balance of trade that would favor the entire enterprise, that is, obtaining profits on what was invested. This required various forms of protection over what was profitable.
The Colonial Pact was the way found by States, like the Portuguese, to guarantee the crown's profits and protect themselves against possible attacks by foreign nations.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes