JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Hispanic American Historical Review. IN RECENT YEARS scholars have made impressive efforts to reconstruct the demographic characteristics of the population of preand post-Columbian Spanish America.2 But comparable progress has not been registered for Brazil where demographers, in contrast with historians, have displayed surprisingly little interest in the pre-independence centuries.3 Yet as long ago as 1938 Samuel H. Lowrie called attention to abundant census data housed in the archives of Sdo Paulo concerning that state's colonial and early national periods.4 But with few exceptions these records have remained unexploited, and the same is true of census reports for other parts of colonial Brazil. These records, which were apparently *The author is assistant professor of history at the University of Washington. 1 This study is a by-product of research undertaken during the past five years concerning the administrative history of eighteenth-century Brazil, and I am grateful to the following for financial assistance at various times during these years: The Henry and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation, Inc., New York, N. Y.; the an indication of recent progress in pre-and post-Columbian demography consult the appendices of Angel Rosenblat, La poblaci6n indigena y el mestizaje en America (2d ed., Buenos Aires, 1954), I, passim. 3 Cf. Gigorio Mortara, " Demographic Studies in Brazil, in The Study of Population. An Inventory and Appraisal, eds., Philip M. Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan (Chicago, 1959), pp. 235-248, especially the bibliography on pp. 246-248. The earliest Brazilian demographic study which included estimates of Brazil 's population from c. 1770 to 1870 was by the poetaster Joaquim Norberto de Souza Silva in "Investigaqoes sobre os recenseamentos da populagao geral do imperio e de cada provincia de per si tentados desde os tempos colonies at6 hoje,"

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Not long ago an authority on dyeing observed that “in the history of the dyeing industry indigo holds a unique place by reason of its irresistible rise to supremacy among dyestuffs and its equally rapid dethronement by the modern chemical colors. …” Among the sources of this once flourishing industry, one that has never been studied adequately is that of colonial Brazil. Commercial indigo production began there in the early 1760's, but after an impressive start the industry disappeared within less than two generations. Its beginnings occurred at a time when Portugal, like other imperial powers of that era, was seeking to diversify the agriculture of her colonies so as to make them more lucrative to the mother country. A study of the industry's brief tenure in Portugal's most important colony reveals some of the problems that confronted its planters, merchants, and royal officials as they attempted, with limited experience and inadequate supporting capital, to develop new sources of income during a period of keen international economic rivalry. The factors involved in the rise and decline of the Brazilian indigo industry can best be appreciated when it is examined as part of the global history of indigo production and trade between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries.