Local Government in Portuguese America: A Study in Cultural Divergence

The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had brought Europeans, primarily English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, into contact with the lands, peoples and civilizations of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In Asia the effects of the European discoveries had been less far-reaching than had been the case in Africa and the Americas where barter had soon given way to slavery, peaceful proselitization to forced conversion, trade and commerce to extortion and monopolies, and coexistence to armed domination by the European intruders. Whereas in New France, Brazil, and the British colonies agricultural and commerical considerations had predominated, in counterdistinction to Spanish America where the initial emphasis had been militaristic, nevertheless the results of European settlement had been remarkably similar throughout the Americas.