254 Lectures on Brazilian Affairs
golden phase of its history with 8o per cent of the world’s
production.
The last period, “the fifth period,” as Roberto Simonsen
puts it, started in 1897 with accelerated but uncoordinated
culture in paulista districts, causing the over-production
from which we are still suffering, with all its economic, social,
and political consequences.
During that period of sixty years, among the incidents
of interest in our commercial policy was intervention in the
River Plate markets, an economic consequence of a political
episode. As the imperial government had decided to inter-
fere in Buenos Aires and Montevideo against the dictator
Rosas and Oribe, his Uruguayan lieutenant, the Baron de
Maua, an important Brazilian capitalist, was entrusted
with the financial part of the contract with Uruguayan
liberals. Accordingly he became interested in the economic
equipment and development of Montevideo and the Uru-
guayan trade between 1850 and 1868. This was considered
a short episode of Brazilian economic imperialism in the
River Plate Republic.
Curiously enough, liberal ideas had led Brazil to interfere
in the South and claim the liberty of access to her interior
province of Matto Grosso by way of the River Plate and
the Paraguay. Conservative ideas, however, led that same
imperial government to postpone any discussion of the free
access of Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia by the Amazon River.
Commander Mathew Maury, the well-known hydrographer
and explorer, who died in Lexington, Virginia, in 1873, had
written twenty years before his Letters on the Amazon in
which he disclosed to the world the situation of commerce
and navigation in that part of the Brazilian Empire. Under
the pressure of world opinion and of American diplomacy,
the imperial government opened the Amazon to international