5:42 - I mean, D. João was very religious and an absolutist, but he was known for being very politically savvy and pragmatist. But still, some historians argue they had enough strength to try and resist the French(which sent a huge army but were affected by all sorts of bad luck on their way, including pests), but the fear of Napoleon's reputation was enough to D. João pack everything and bounce lol.
And I think the video fails to portray how big this flotilla was. About 10.000-15.000 people came on board, including the entire Portuguese Army, Navy and treasure. It was really some last moment kind of stuff.
8:53 - The colonization of Brazil was done very differently than the US and we learn that in school, it's very traditional. Our historians classify the US as a settlement colony from England while Brazil as an extraction colony from Portugal. There's whole books explaining this point, if you're that interested, the works of Sergio Buarque de Hollanda. But basically, Brazil was meant only to be a place to harvest riches and transfer them to Portugal, so it was important for Portugal to have restrictions on its development.
13:30 - Bro, just try to imagine how different history could've been if the British just decided to make what would've become the United States part of the Empire. No civil war, no republic, no Canada. We can assume everything we know today would be different in the Americas.
15:20 - If I had to pick one single reason why the house of Bragança is still so liked in Brazil, it is the fact they managed to repress those revolts to maintain the national unity we are so proud of today. This diversity of customs and cultures in Brazil is something that everyone in our country treasures. It's so common to see a middle aged guy leave their region for the first time to meet another part of the country and it's almost like going to another country, since the food, accent, customs and even architecture can change drastically. For example, Where I live in the Northeast region, colonial architecture is a huge influence(even domestically), since our region was one of the earlier colonies and almost everybody is of Portuguese descent. But in other regions that's not really a thing. I could go on about this forever, I'm sure you get the gist.
16:35 - Pedro's "playboy reputation" was not only his thing with women. He used to get in trouble all the time, one of his favorite things to do was go out with the servants dressed as a commoner to drink in normal taverns, get into fights, challenge people for sword duels or hand to hand fighting, stupid shit like that. That was what his father hated the most, even more of him being known as a ladies man. He was like "Prince Harry '' of his day lol. He was a very decent warrior too, not very bright. His wife on the other hand that's a terrific administrator and to this day holds a better reputation than him. There's monuments, avenues, museums and institutions all over the country with her name on it(Leopoldina).
22:50 - Actually some people in Brazil find our independence "boring" because it involves so many political events and it can make for some difficult and traumatizing history exams people had in the past lol. For us Brazilians, the gigantic military conflict that was the US war for independence is also something that fascinates people. We also had a war for independence, but it wasn't at all the same. Portugal is not England and they couldn't never be close to that heat lol. Our war for independence was a series of maritimal battles where Portugal got their ass kicked in almost all of them. It was kind of humiliating at the time that they couldn't even make it to the shore.
36:15 - In Brazil there was always a difference between the "christianized" natives who abandoned their tribal lifestyle and became integrated. Not that is okay, but once a native was Christian, he became a subject of the King of Portugal and with the same legal rights as the rest of the subjects. In Uni I've read dozens of letters of native subjects to the King of Portugal on every issue you can imagine. Not saying natives were not being persecuted and brutalized, but it was not something on a ethnic level, we can say that 100%, it was always involving territory and religion(I'm not saying it's ok or moral, just how it was perceived at the time).
37:01 - Even for historians it's difficult to say that for certain. People already wrote entire books just to try and answer this question and it's never a consensus in the history community in Brazil.
39:31 - I think D. Pedro II takes the throne after a whole series of revolts being brutally crushed by the central government. I think that added to the fact of even harsher reprisals by a more unified government was one of the most influential factors that made rebels to chill. People still have their lives and want to see the kids grow up, war sucks. But that's a personal take on the matter, honestly.
41:12 - It was not exactly like that, but I can understand why he would phrase it like that, in such a production, you only have a few minutes to explain everything. This was a very long and complex process that involved multiple factors. Hear me out here.
The Portuguese ideal for a dream life back then was being a noble, owning land and having multiple servants to work on your state and serve you, the old European nobility thing. That was possible to recreate in Brazil even if you weren't a noble, but had some money. You could buy a farm, build a fancy house, buy slaves(the servants) and live a noble life back in the day. Slavers were the utmost definition of new money at the time and that was what they wanted the most.
So since slavers were always kind of trying to evade British and Brazilian law, when they retired, they usually would've just sold all their interests, bought a lot of houses in the city, rented them and spent the rest of his life chilling in his farm surrounded by servants(slaves). But when they've banned importation altogether, there was a rush of people selling all their interests in int and doing this at the same time.
Some historians said that while that helped boost Brazil's economy in the beginning, that was a short-sighted vision of a monarchist society that had a mindset stuck in the middle ages, while the US slavers used their money to create banks and therefore incalculable fortunes that were used to the economic development of the United States. It’s fkd up, but that’s how history goes sometimes.
Also, I don't think the Government really knew what was going on at the time(you can imagine how difficult it was to enforce taxes back then), but must've realized after the ban on the importation of slaves.
52:09 - The republicans did him dirty. After he left Brazil, he wrote dozens of letters practically begging to be allowed to come back and contribute to the further development of Brazil as a private citizen, but they never allowed him to come back, fearing a monarchist ressurgency. He died obsessed with the idea of coming back to Brazil, he had jars of earth from Brazil in his room all the time and his last words were: "Please, God, grant me these last wishes - peace and prosperity for Brazil." Can't say the guy didn't love the country.
Let me just make something clear, I'm not a monarchist. But Pedro II is a guy that most teachers/professors/researchers usually admire a lot for being a scholar and most of what you'll find about it seems to corroborate this.
1:02:21 - I mean, his wife tried to kill him his whole life, maybe he had reasons to be paranoid about food and clothes lol.
1:03:25 - Yup, that's what we learn in Uni nowadays. There's a lot of people telling stories of how stupid and gross John VI was, but the truth is the guy managed to meet all his political objectives in one way or another. Was he indecisive or was he buying time and taking advantage of his distance to Europe's problems? That's the most current debate on this matter, I liked that the guy was on par with this.
1:04:07 - Probably because it was impossible. Every sector of the Brazilian economy depended on slavery at that point. Also, the biggest fortunes in the country were in the hands of the big farmers and slavers. The section of the society that pushed for abolition the most, was the urban populace and elites. Deciding to abolish slavery through law would trigger a civil war where the slaver side would be 5x or even 10x stronger than the abolitionist side. Now think about it. Can you just imagine what the US would be if the confederates had won the civil war? And in the end, he probably was right about the possible civil war, it was what happened in the United States. And even more dramatically, the US' economy wasn't as dependent on slave labor as Brazil was back then. I'm in no way, shape or form trying to say slavery is something moral or permissible under circumstance, I'm just explaining how one could be an abolitionist Emperor without having the actual power to enforce this by law.
Damn, that was long, but I tried to answer the stuff you asked. Ty for the great reaction, like always.
PS: I forgot to mention, but during January 8th, those animals destroyed furniture from the XVIII century that D. João VI brought from Portugal when he evacuated Portugal. Fking animals.
PS2: Maybe you'd be interested to know more about "Caramaru", he was a portuguese cast away that lived among the natives for a long time and learned their customs, took a native wife and then got rescued back by the Portuguese. He'd become a noble and his native wife was the first native to be part of the Portuguese royal family(there were others too, but few). To me, that makes a point that the ethnic factor was less relevant than some might think when it comes to the repression and brutalization the natives were subject to by the portuguese administration, Also, I'm not claiming these people were not racist, this is the XVI century and that was the rule for most europeans then.
