With a POD that can go as far back as 1500 have Brazil as powerful as the US now is in 2012. Brazil is allowed to conquer territory if it can and needs to.
AHC: Brazil as powerful as the US
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You mean avoid the slaver coup that replaced Dom Pedro II? It's certainly a start, but Brazil also has some disadvantages that'll hobble them either way.
Cheers,
Ganesha
You don't need to go that far back. Have the Napoleonic wars go somewhat worse for Portugal. Thus there is an even greater exile on to Brazil than in OTL. In the aftermath once again Brazil goes its own way but this time it also retains Portugal's African colonies; thus Brazil will have the incentive to be a trade/colonial Empire, and have the population and resources to also grow develop internally. With good leadership this can go a long way. If you can have it so Brazil also happens to swallow Uruguay and a chunk of Argentina early on even better. The south Atlantic would be Brazil's turf and anyone wanting to mess with it will have an issue.
At the same time you need to weeken the US a bit but not much.
At the same time you need to weeken the US a bit but not much.
I think it will have to conquer a large part of S. America as it is quite a bit smaller than the US and needs to be as powerful.
Size doesn't necessarily equal power.
A Brazil that with a larger population, that controls two large colonies in Africa should serve as a good rival to the US. Souther Brazil has very good land for farming and is easily traversable and well communicated through rivers. It is not as large as the Mississippi drainage, but good enough. If it conquered the Entre Rios and a chunk of northwestern Uruguay early in their history it should be able to incorporate them with little problem into the Empire, and would subsequently gain a fair amount of usable land and access to Rio de La Plata.
Frankly, I disagree. Brazil is only 400,000 square miles smaller than the US. That's not too much smaller.
True, but is it equally useful? I'm not sure Brazil has the wealth of industrial minerals the US has (it does have iron, but I'm not sure re coal, etc.) and the internal communications by river and so on are rather worse. I'm not sure that there's as much temperate-climate farmland as in the US, either: tropical farming requires some rather different aproaches.
Bruce
Bruce
d32123
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A large portion of Brazil is not inhabitable or arable.
I think Brazil's biggest disadvantage is geography.
Do you guys think that control of the Rio de la Plata and possibly even it's corresponding basin would help Brazil?
I'm curious; what are those disadvantages? Besides the fact that a lot of Brazil is tropical jungle, I mean.
I don't know very much about Brazilian history.
Well, I certainly don't know much either, but I can think of at least a few:
1. Fewer coal deposits. Brazil only has about 4.5 billion short tons of recoverable coal, compared to 237.3 billion short tons for the United States. There are other, more specific advantages (bitumnious vs. subituminous), but that gives you an idea.
2. Less stable neighbors. Brazil has many more neighbors who have a much higher propensity to squabble with each other, vastly complicating Brazilian expansion. The United States only needed to deal with Canada and Mexico, both of which were relatively stable (even if Mexico wobbled sometime). Brazil borders Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru.
3. Worse position for expansion. Not only were Brazil's borders pretty much set by the time Brazil became independent, but it had no easy access to the Pacific. The US, on the other hand, was able to develop several great ports in the Pacific by the 1860s, and subsequently was able to trade and interact easily with nations on both sides, spurring further growth.
4. Larger slave-owning population and slave population. Slavery was, in the long term, something which held back the Brazilian economy and slowed down industrialization. In the US, only 4 million out of 31 million people were slaves in 1860 - about 13%. In Brazil, nearly 2 million people out of 9 million were slaves in 1872 - about 22%. That's a huge difference in the number of people who are kept uneducated, untrained, and oppressed, which is always a drag on a modern economy.
5. Brazil just had less people, as you can see above.
Those are the main reasons Brazil never became a power like the US, ranked in no particular order. There's more - less navigable rivers, less agricultural land, etc. But that gives an idea.
Cheers,
Ganesha
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All true which is one reason I think it needs to conquer some of its neighbors. I think it needs to be larger than the US (Because of its geographical handicaps) and it needs a smaller number of quarelling neighbors than OTL. This is also the reason I allowed POD as far back as 1500.
It's interesting and makes a lot of sense.
If instead of being a Portuguese colony, Brazil was under Spain could it have helped her? As a Portuguese speaking nation Brazil became a loner on the mainly Spanish speaking continent. It also limited her chances to expand in the early centuries. If Spanish was her language, Brazil would have been the undisputed leader of the Latin America. This would have helped not only political but also cultural domination by Brazil. Even if this wouldn't make her as powerful as the U.S.A, the gap would significantly be reduced.
Impossible. Brazil can never have access to as much revenue as America, large tracts are inhospitable, and Brazil only has access to one ocean.
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