Colonial Brazil provides a continuous history of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil from the beginnings of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Doña Marina (La Malinche) ...Pocahontas ...Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as "go-betweens" as Europeans explored and colonized the New World. In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf's convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.

Capistrano de Abreu has created an integrated history of Brazil in a landmark work of scholarship that is also a literary masterpiece. Abreu offers a startlingly modern analysis of the past, based on the role of the economy, settlement, and the occupation of the interior. This Brazilian classic opens Brazil's rich past to the general reader.

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil was originally published by the University of California Press in 1992. Alida Metcalf has written a new preface for this first paperback edition.

When Brazil's 'golden age' began, the Portuguese were securely established on the coast and immediate hinterland. European rivals - Spanish, French, Dutch - had been repelled, and expansion into the vast interior had begun. By the end of the 'golden age', bandleirantes, missionaries, miners, planters and ranchers had penetrated deep into the continent. In 1750, by the Treaty of Madrid, Spain recognized Brazil's new frontiers. The colony had come to occupy an area slightly greater than that of the ten Spanish colonies in South America put together. Despite conflicts, the fusion of Portuguese, Amerindian and African into a Brazilian entity had begun; and the explosive expansion of Brazil had laid the foundation for the independence that followed in 1822. Professor Boxer deals not only with the turbulent events of the 'golden age' but analyses the economic and administrative changes of the period. He examines the relationships of officials with colonists, of settlers with Indians, of colony with mother country. Professor Boxer's classic study of a critical period in the growth of Brazil (the world's fifth largest country) has long been out of print. It is here reissued with numerous illustrations.