An informal talk by professor Gilberto Freyre, Bahia, for invitees and staff of the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, on August 27th 1956.

Brazil is almost a continent and certainly more than half a continent. Its regional diversity is therefore an essential condition of its unity. Its unity is remarkable. In no other space of so great an extension one finds the same language - the Portuguese language - spoken by 60 millions with so little variation from one extreme to the other of that vast territory, North to South, East to West. There are also dishes and drinks, customs and amusements of a popular flavour, superstitions and beliefs, that are found with little variation in every province, together with a music - the now internationally famous Brazilian music - that is, and has been, for years, one of the conditions of Brazilian unity.

Only his unity is not, and has not been since Brazil has been Brazil static but dynamic: combined with a creative diversity. No one understands or knows Brazil who does not understand and knows its regions, not only from the point of view of their picturesque diversity but also from the point of view of what, in every one of these regions, in an expression of a historical experience, that had to be different in so vast a country like Brazil.

No modern student of social science neglects history to believe only in geography as a conditioning factor of national or regional character: not even those who take geopolitical science too seriously.

Brazil is geographically a continuous space, from North to South, with no mountain breaking its physical unity. Climate varies only from tropical or equatorial in the Amazon to a beginning of temperate in the Southern provinces. Most of Brazil is a tropical and sub-tropical space: another condition for its unity.

Its history has been one of different experiences for different regional groups. Specially of different experiences, or even adventures, in human contact: ethic and cultural contact. It is true that geography has had something to do with this difference of experiences of human contact, for one of the most important or decisive facts in the early development of Brazil was the quality of the soil of the North-eastern part of the country, from the point of view of agriculture: this soil and also the humid atmosphere of the region made possible the great development of sugar cane agriculture in Brazil and the Brazilian production of sugar in the 16th century. Brazil became a great producer of sugar, exactly when Europe became a sugar-minded, to the extent of using sugar as an every-day food and not only for medical or therapeutical purpose.

But geography by itself would not have made of the Brazilian North-east what it became in that century: the greatest center of sugar production and also the earliest expression of a new civilization in the tropics: predominantly European but with values taken form Ameridian and African cultures. The explanation for this assimilation of African values is that since the early 16th century African slaves were taken from Africa to work in the sugar cane plantations.

History played an important part in this process - the development of a new type of civilisation in the tropics - by making it possible for the Brazilian Northeast to receive from Portugal exactly the human element it needed for the right exploitation of its soil as a plantation colony, specialized in the production of sugar.

Early in the 16th century, Brazil was divided by the king of Portugal in feudal dominions, and each dominions was given to a feudal lord who was to be responsible for the development of this lands. The Brazilian North-east was given to a Portuguese nobleman of the small agrarian nobility of the North of Portugal who did not go to Brazil fascinated by the possibility of finding gold but attracted by the opportunity of developing a plantation colony.

Consequently, he took with him his wife and a large number of families, some of them related by blood to him or to his wife - persons and families he knew well. Most of them had a little fortune that they took to Brazil, for no one who did not have a little fortune of his own was able to become a sugar cane planter and the owner of a sugar mill.

So, while other Portuguese went to Brazil as pure adventurers and without their families, the Captain who was given Pernambuco as his feudal dominion took with him this own family and a number of families of the small agrarian nobility of the North of Portugal. This gave to Pernambuco, form its very beginning, a history somewhat different from that of other Portuguese settlements of Brazil; and the basis for the development of a stable economic structure - an agrarian one - of a stable social structure - an aristocratic, patriarchal one, where the colonizing unit was, not the individual or the state or the Crown or some industrial company, but the family. The family as a social, a religious, a political, an economic unit.

One interesting aspect of this organization, that from the Brazilian Northeast would spread to other regions of Portuguese America - just as other cultural values, first developed and combined in the Brazilian Northeast, spread to other regions of Brazil, to other areas of America, to other tropical areas, as forms - sociological forms - capable of taking different contents - was the important role that white or Portuguese women or ladies played in at, during the 16th century, as organizers of a new home structure whore European techniques of cooking of taking care of children, and of servants, of using plants to medical purposes, had to be adapted to new conditions. New physical and new social conditions.

The history of the Portuguese settlements in that part of the Brazilian Northeast, where sugar cane found the best soil and atmospherical conditions for its development, is a history in which what some social anthropologists and sociologists call transculturation took place in a very intensive way. In a few years, food that in Europe was cooked with European products, was being done with manioc and maiz - the same European form but a new content - a tropical content - and we know from documents of the period that these experiments were done by the first Portuguese women to become mistresses of sugar cane plantations, as companions to their husbands, who wore the lords of the same plantations. The same thing is true of drinks, of fruit preserves, of fruit juices-one of them used to clean one's teeth. Ameridian values were adopted, though not in their ameridian purity, to European form. This hammock was one of these values and the pipe to smoke tobacco was another one: here not only contents but forms were new. And not only the hammocks but the tobacco of the Brazilian Northeast became famous in Brazil and Portugal for their excellence, though the use of tobacco was for years condemned by the high Portuguese church authorities as unworthy of good or respectable Christians. In spite of this, it is known that in colonial or patriarchal Brazil ever aristocratic ladies smoked their special cigars, having in this way been the pioneers of a custom that only recently has become an elegant one in Europe. In another point, the aristocratic ladies of the Brazilian Northeast were pioneers: the first woman governor - governor of a state or a province - was not an Anglo-Saxon woman of New England but a Portuguese one of the Brazilian Northeast, as early as the first half of the 16th century. Her Christian name was Brita and her family name Albuquerque.

The prosperous condition of the Brazilian Northeast in the 16th century; the fact that by the end of that century it was one of the richest communities in the New World with good plantation mansions (whose architecture, adapted to the tropics, may be said to have been the beginning of the modern Brazilian architecture, now famous for some of its solutions for complex architectural problem); the fact that houses were made of brick and stone and covered with tiles of a Chinese or Oriental style; the fact, also, that some of the aristocratic houses in Olinda, had big keys made of solid silver and that their inhabitants, gentlemen and ladies, dressed according to the last fashions of Spain and Portugal, the ladies wearing many jewels; the fact that sugar planters of the Brazilian Northeast became also famous for their banquets, and for the fine food and expensive wines that they imported from Europe - seem to explain why the Brazilian Northeast more than once attracted the attention of other Europeans, who were then in sharp economic and political competition with the Portuguese and the Spaniards. The Dutch also became interested in the Brazilian Northeast and in its production of sugar. And for a part of the 17th century they, and not the Portuguese, had the military and economic control of that Brazilian region. Specially of Pernambuco - the most important province of the region - whose capital they - the Dutch - changed from feudal Olinda, a picturesque town on hills and in excellent position to be a military and ecclesiastical town, with monasteries that could rival the medieval ones of Europe in vastness of proportions - to Recife, until the Dutch conquest, a much less important town than Olinda, though from a commercial point of view, favoured by notable advantages; flat, served by two riders, and by the sea. It was in the 17th century Recife that the Dutch founded in tropical America their nearest approach to a tropical Amsterdam, apparently developing there a taste for tall, narrow, two and three story buildings with a sharp inclination in their roofs; for bridges; for canals. This Dutch presence in Recife has made a number of observers - geographers, historians, sociologists - point out to that town - now a city - as an example of a town in tropical America, where some of the Iberian urban characteristics, common to Portuguese and Spanish America, were surpassed by traits received from Northern Europe and that may be described - some of us think so - if not as specifically Dutch, as North European; and suggestive of a progressive bourgeois, commercial type of architecture and urban culture. In the study of this aspect of the social history of the Brazilian Northeast - some of the most capable young Brazilian historians and sociologists are now engaged; and it certainly would be a good thing if the subject could be studied through an intelligent cooperation of Brazilians scholars with Dutch historians and sociologists, who have somewhat neglected - it seems to me - the study of a not entirely unimportant chapter in the history of Dutch expansion in the tropics: the contact of men of this vigorous North European nation with the Brazilian Northeast during the 17th century.

In Brazil, I repeat, that in the last 20 years the social history of the Northeast is being rewritten and re-interpreted by younger historians and sociologists with a new interest in the Dutch period and in survivals of Dutch influence upon Brazil. It has been claimed by some Brazilian writers even of an older generation that some of the psychological characteristics that make of the Brazilian Northeast a region different in its behaviour from all other regions of Brazil, are characteristics that were developed there not only by the Dutch but by contacts of this men of that region with Northern Europe: contacts that were made possible by the Dutch occupation. For it is well know that during the Dutch occupation, Recife, the capital of the Northeast, became a cosmopolitan town, in contrast with other towns of Brazil, that lived in an almost complete segregation from Northern and protestant Europe; and only in contact with Iberian and Catholic Europe. In Recife, during the Dutch occupation, Protestant churches and schools flourished and it was there that this type of Christianity began to appear, in a regular form, in Latin America, beside the Catholic type and for some time in a rare atmosphere of relative reciprocal tolerance. It was also in Recife, during the Dutch occupation, that the Jews had their first opportunity to express themselves as a religious system apart from the Christian one. Jewish literature in America began not in North America but in South America - in the Brazilian Northeast. In Recife, whose congregation was an extension of the then powerful Amsterdam congregation, famous for its scholars.

The town named by the Portuguese Recife, - and that was for some time, with the name of Mauricetown, the seat of a governor general sent to the Northeast by the Dutch, who was a statesman of the highest type, Count Mauricio de Nassau, - was also the first town of America to have an urbanization plan, the work of a Dutch expert, Peter Post; some claim that it had the first botanical garden in the continent; and it is a well known fact that Nassau took with him to the Northeast scientists, scholars and artists with the mission of studying the nature and the indigenous population of the region; of describing it; of painting it; of collecting tropical material to be sent to Europe: material of a scientific and artistic interest. It was also in the Brazilian Northeast during the Dutch occupation, that the first political assembly of a democratic character was held in tropical America: A Dutch initiative.

No wonder, that after having had this experience, the Brazilian Northeast should develop, as a region, a spirit of its own, that even at the present time is one of the most dynamic forces in the cultural, political and technical, development of Brazil. Recife remains an intelectual center in Brazil, famous for its pioneering spirit.

Its political importance has decreased, because the economic basis of this importance - sugar - has fallen to a second rate position in the national economic structure. But during the Empire - for Brazil was for nearly a century, after its independence, the only monarchy in America, being then noted for the stability of its government and the high quality of its statesmen - the Brazilian Northeast, whose aristocracy was then probably the most capable of political leadership, contributed greatly to the development of Brazil into a nation that though a monarchy, was liberal, progressive and not afraid of social reform.

Abolition of slavery was accomplished in Brazil not through a civil war, as in the U.S., but through a process of social reform during the Empire days.

At present, if it is true that other regions of Brazil have taken the political leadership from the Northeast, it is true also that most of the cultural leaders of the Brazilian nation are men of the Northeast: editors, publishers, university professors, journalists, writers, artists scientists. Some of them act as "eminences grises" to politicians. These cultural leaders are noted not only for their pioneering spirit but for their tact in insight. And it seems to me that there is no exaggeration in considering the constance of this pioneering spirit among the men of the Northeast, as partly a result of the fact that the Northeast was a region that, during the Dutch occupation, had, as no other region of colonial Brazil, a broader vision of the world and enjoyed a greater variety of human and cultural contacts. If this interpretation is accepted, then the Brazilian Northeast is a Brazilian region that owes some of its generally recognized dynamic spirit to the Dutch occupation. As a Brazilian of the Northeast I am glad to be able to say this in the Tropical Institute of Amsterdam, without doing any violence to my science: the science of sociology.

I am also particularly glad to be in this Institute, because for years I have been suggesting the convenience of a special science, placed between ecology and social science, whose purpose would be the systematically comparative study of human societies and human cultures in tropical areas. I have even sketched an outline for a study of the Hispanic, particularly Portuguese, societies and cultures in the Asiatic, African and American tropics as a study of the adaptation of European values to tropical conditions; and for this idea I have met with the approval of scholars not only Hispanic, like Professor Zavala, but non-Hispanic, like Professor Paul Shaw, of the U.S. Such a special science would aim at the characterization of what there is of specifically Hispanic or Portuguese in the approach of the Iberian peoples to tropical nature, tropical populations and tropical cultures, so as to develop as they have developed and are developing, especially Hispanic - tropical civilization - as the Brazilian one and the one at Goa; also as the characterization of what seems to be a great process in which biological mixegenation and biological predisposition for living in warm climates have been complementary to a sociological interpenetration of cultures. To do this it will be necessary to compose this process with the methods of colonization of the tropics that have been followed by other European people. One of them, the Dutch people.

For such a comparative study you can easily see that the Dutch contact with the Brazilian Northeast during the 17th century remains a particularly valuable object or analysis, for these two methods were put in sharp contrast, though it is true that a number of private individuals - Dutchmen - decided, at that period, to follow the Hispanic or Portuguese method; and sociologically became members of a culture and a society, established in the tropics not as a purely sub-European culture or society, but as a combination of European values and techniques with tropical values and techniques. It is from combinations as the Brazilian one, that a new type of civilization is developing in different tropical areas - in Asia, in Africa, in America - a civilization for which I have suggested the name of Hispanic-tropical civilization; and for the study of whose specific characteristics some of us, in Brazil, are doing our best to organize an institute that, like yours, would be a tropical institute; and whose seat would be the city of Recife. This would be one more point of contact between Amsterdam and the American town, now a city of 700 thousand, that was for some time the capital of Dutch Brazil.

Fonte: FREYRE, Gilberto. North-East Brazil. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1956. 6p.