Brazilwood Gives the Colony Its Name
A red dyewood, cut by the shipload, hands Brazil the name it still carries
Quick facts
- Name origin
- pau-brasil, from brasa (ember), for the wood's red color
- Name first on maps
- Around 1511
- Chief early use
- Red dye for European textiles
- Rivals in the trade
- French vessels from 1504 onward
What happened
The first thing Portugal wanted from its new land was a tree. Brazilwood, prized in Europe for its wood and a red dye it produced, grew in abundance along the Atlantic coast. When the Portuguese saw the blood-red inside of these trees, they called them pau-brasil, pau being Portuguese for 'wood' and brasil a derivative of brasa, or ember. The name Brazil first appears on maps around 1511. Harvesting the wood required Indigenous labor, and the Tupi people, initially traded with for that labor, were increasingly coerced or enslaved as demand grew. From 1504 onward, French vessels from Brittany, Flanders, and Normandy competed in the dyewood trade despite Portugal's claimed monopoly.
Why it matters
Brazilwood set the pattern for everything that followed: a single high-value export, extracted from the land, worked by forced Indigenous labor, and defended against European rivals. When the coastal brazilwood stands were cut out, the same colonists replaced them with sugarcane, carrying the extractive logic forward into a far larger and deadlier system.
How we know
The etymology of the name and the tree's role as a chief early export are documented verbatim in Brown University's Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, and the French competition in the dyewood trade from 1504 is recorded in the Library of Congress country study.
Sources
- Brown University Library. Brazilwood (Brazil: Five Centuries of Change) · Reputable sourcelibrary.brown.edu · The domain "library.brown.edu" is on our Reputable source registry.
- Library of Congress, Country Studies (Federal Research Division). Brazil: The Colonial Era (Country Studies) · General sourcecountrystudies.us · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineHistory of Brazil24 events · A land of hundreds of nations before 1500, the destination of nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, and the only monarchy the New World's republics ever toleratedView all →