🗺️ Why Brazil has never broken apart

When Brazil declared its independence in 1822, it emerged as a territorial giant, with lands stretching from the Amazon down to the Río de la Plata. Spanish America, by contrast, splintered into a constellation of new republics. The roots of that divergence lie not only in geography and economics, but also in the institutional choices of the two Iberian empires that shaped the Americas for more than three centuries.

In the late 15th century, Portugal and Spain divided the non-European world between them through the Treaty of Tordesillas. It was this agreement that placed the future Brazilian coastline under Portuguese rule when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived in 1500. Over the next 300 years, the two colonial systems developed in ways that would define how independence unfolded across the region…

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