Brazilian mining and emigration boom

In the eighteenth century Brazilian production of the coveted metal exceeded the total volume of gold that Spain had taken from its colonies in two previous centuries. Adventurers and fortune hunters poured in. Brazil had 300,000 inhabitants in 1700; a century later, at the end of the gold years, the population had multiplied eleven times. No less than 300,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the eighteenth century, a larger contingent than Spain contributed to all its Latin American colonies. From the conquest of Brazil until abolition, it is estimated that some 10 million blacks were brought from Africa; there are no precise figures for the eighteenth century, but the gold cycle absorbed slave labor in prodigious quantities.
Salvador de Bahia was the Brazilian capital of the prosperous Northeastern sugar cycle, but the "golden age" in Minas Gerais moved the country's economic and political capital southward and Rio de Janeiro, the region's port, became the new capital in 1763. In the dynamic heart of the new mining economy, camps bloomed abruptly into cities, described by a contemporary colonial authority as "sanctuaries for criminals, vagabonds, and malefactors," in a vertigo of easy riches. The "Vila Rica de Ouro Preto" (The "Rich Town of Black Gold," so called because the mined gold turned black on exposure to the humid air, due to the presence of silver. -Trans.) had grown to city size by 1711; born of the miners' avalanche, it was the quintessence of the gold civilization. Simao Ferreira Machado, describing it twenty-three years later, said that the power of Ouro Preto businessmen surpassed by far that of Lisbon's most flourishing merchants: "Hither, as to a port, are directed and collected in the Royal Mint the grandiose amounts of gold from all the Mines. Here dwell the best educated men, both lay and ecclesiastic. Here is the seat of all the nobility and the strength of the military. It is, by virtue of its natural position, the head of the whole of America; and by the wealth of its riches, it is the precious pearl of Brazil." Another writer of the period, Francisco Tavares de Brito, in 1732 defined Ouro Preto as "the Potosi of gold."