Paper short abstract:

The present paper analyzes how bioprospecting racially displaced peoples and used local embodied knowledge of tropical lands to enforce Brazilian imperial state-building and the making of new colonial relations within peripheral regions, like the Amazonian rainforest, in the 19th century.

Paper long abstract:

In the nineteenth century, Brazil emerged as a tropical sovereign monarchy that lasted for almost a century. Refusing to relinquish its colonial history and imperial governance, Brazilian authorities grounded their attempts to consolidate a nascent state on the premise of territorial unity. However, independence raised conflicting visions of labor, territory, and nationhood across the empire. For the northern provinces, like Grão-Pará in the Amazon basin, 1822 did not mark the birth of a nation. Rather, it signaled a troubled renegotiation between the old metropole, Lisbon, and the new one, Rio de Janeiro. Returning to colonial practices of border surveillance, agrarian production, and extractivist expeditions, the Brazilian empire reinforced the subordination of the Amazon through a racialized discourse on both its inhabitants and environment. By treating independence as an imperial transition and a colonial continuity to Afro-Indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest, I argue that Brazil transformed itself from a Portuguese colony to an independent empire with its own peripheral territories to be colonized. Now, colonization meaning the in insertion of a whole environment and its natural resources to be prospected, speculated, and commodified in a international capitalist market. Beyond the understanding of imperial continuity, the paper contextualizes how bioprospecting racially displaced peoples and used local embodied knowledge of tropical lands to enforced extractivist and agricultural productivity.