The capital had been relocated because Napoleon threatened the safety of Lisbon, Portugal’s permanent capital city.
Around the same time, and perhaps partly for similar reasons, the first groups of German-speaking settlers brought cultural development to Brazil, as Thomas Sowell writes:
Substantial German immigration to Brazil, as to South America in general, began early in the nineteenth century and included over the years not only immigrants from what is now Germany, but also sizable numbers of Germans from Russia, Switzerland, and Austria.
The reader might be puzzled at the phrase ‘Germans from Russia,’ but from the mid-1700s forward, large numbers of Germans had emigrated to parts of Russia, hoping to make a new home there. Russia’s low literacy rates and weak economic infrastructure, however, caused many of these Germans to move on to other countries.
In 1818, a group of Germans settled in Ilheus. In 1819, another group settled in Sao Jorge. When Brazil became politically independent from Portugal in 1822, the new nation’s government worked to entice Germans to live in Brazil.
Most settled in the southern part of Brazil, concentrated in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where the first enduring German agricultural colony was established in 1824, though earlier unsuccessful attempts to establish German colonies in Brazil go back to the late eighteenth century.
Among the first Germans to make their home in Brazil, farming was a dominant activity. Later waves of Germans settled in cities instead of in the countryside, and became entrepreneurs, merchants, technical innovators, craftsmen, and industrialists.
Settlements of Germans, in groups numbering in the hundreds or the thousands, continued to be made in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.
By the end of the twentieth century, almost a million Brazilians used German as their primary language at home; almost three million speak German. There are villages which operate primarily as German-speaking communities.
Over the decades, the flow of Germans into Brazil enabled the development of technology and commerce. The Germans were, and are, leaders in medicine, the arts, and the economy of Brazil.
