Costs and Profits of a Colony: Introduction to the Fiscal System of the Brazilian State, 1606–1807

Abstract

From the standpoint of the State, one of the key elements, if not the most important one in the relations between a mother country and its colonies, is the fiscal system. In the case of the Spanish and Portuguese metropolises, the payment of the costs of the conquest could be covered with profits deriving from precious metals remittances or with monopoly commerce with their colonies. For metropolises with many conquered territories, imperial financial arithmetic was of a special kind: what mattered at the end of the day was not only the individual yield of each colony, but the income and expenses balance as a whole. What might be lost in one colony, would be retrieved in another. Under this perspective, this study falls within the field of what we can call the historiography of the exchequer of the Portuguese empire.