When considering transpacific relations between Asia and Latin America, scholars have begun to pay closer attention to the centuries-long historical connections between China and Brazil. The global circulation of goods, people, natural resources, and ideas between Brazil and China began in the early sixteenth century when Portuguese explorers, in competition with other European empires to find the quickest oceanic routes to the silk and spice trade, connected a global trade network that linked port cities in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The nineteenth-century history of China-Brazil relations had a contingent relationship to earlier histories of the movement in human labor, goods, languages, cultures, and concepts. In Brazil, the gradual end of African slavery led many intellectuals, politicians, and agriculturalists to look to China for possibilities of setting up new trade networks and Chinese contract labor as a possible substitution for slave labor. These economic concerns were entangled with visions...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
