Brazil

From the thousand nations of the forest and coast to a Portuguese colony built on sugar, gold, and the largest slave economy of the Americas, and on to an empire, a republic, and a modern democracy.

Brazil's history begins with the diverse Indigenous peoples, perhaps two to four million strong, who inhabited the land for millennia before European contact. Claimed for Portugal after Pedro Alvares Cabral's landfall in 1500, it became a vast colony whose wealth rested first on sugar and later on gold, sustained by the transatlantic slave trade that brought more enslaved Africans to Brazil than to any other country. Independence came in 1822 with the Cry of Ipiranga, creating a singular monarchy, the Empire of Brazil, which abolished slavery only in 1888, the last nation in the Americas to do so, and gave way to a republic the following year. The twentieth century moved through the Old Republic, the Vargas era and its Estado Novo dictatorship, a long democratic interlude, and the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. The Citizen Constitution of 1988 restored democracy to what is today the largest nation in Latin America.