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Peopling for Profit provides a comprehensive history of migration to nineteenth-century imperial Brazil focusing on the orchestrated efforts of migrant recruitment, transport to, and settlement in post-independence Brazil. The book explores Brazil’s connections to global colonization drives and migratory movements, unveiling how the Brazilian Empire’s engagement with privately run colonization models from overseas crucially informed the domestic sphere. It further reveals that the rise of a for-profit colonization model indelibly shaped Brazilian peopling processes and governance by creating a feedback loop between migration management and government formation.
José Juan Pérez Meléndez is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at UC Davis. His research centers on political, business and migratory dynamics that have shaped governmental mechanisms of population control and transport in Brazil and the broad Atlantic. Before UC Davis, he completed a postdoctoral stay as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. His current research is on the comparative political and social development of various Latin American polities that opted for conservative pathways in the post-independent period.