As much as I understand Ernst Pijning’s desire to engage in the controversy over the breakdown of the Portuguese-Brazilian colonial system, and unreservedly welcome his comments, I fear that the discussion will now be confined to a subsidiary point that I tried to avoid in the essay that prompted Pijning’s response. Contrary to his assumption, “the extent of illegal trade in the decade prior to 1808” is not crucial to my argument; in fact, contraband is an ancillary topic in my analysis of the breakdown of the old colonial system.
My argument is as follows. Between the 1770s and the early years of the nineteenth century, Portuguese trade with Brazil and Brazil-based foreign trade, which benefited from the adversity that beset other colonial empires, grew fivefold. Large imports of sugar, cotton, and tobacco from Brazil led to unprecedented reexports of tropical groceries to European ports such as Hamburg and Genoa...
