Exports, Slavery and Patriarchy have been the three constants of Brazilian history. The export orientation of the colonial economy shaped Brazil's society. Even the name "Brazil," like the nation itself, is suggestive of commerce and the pursuit of wealth. Brazil's name derives from the brazilwood trees from which Europeans sought in the 16th century to make valuable red dyes. the central fact of the nation's history was the exploitation of cheap labor, first as slaves, then as wage-earners.

Brazil's history can be separated into five economic times, each characterized by a dominant export product. The first time, from 1500 to 1550, involved the logging of brazilwood along the coast of the Northeast. Brazilwood was the source of a red dye valuable to the expanding textile industry of 16th-century northern Europe, particularly Normandy and Flanders. The trees and the ready labor of the natives, who were eager to obtain metal products in return for cutting and hauling logs to the coast, attracted Portuguese and French ships.

The 5th time began in the 1930s with import-substitution industrialization and extended into the 1990s. Industry's initial and heaviest concentration was in the triangle of São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro-Belo Horizonte. The time was perhaps best symbolized by the steel mills of Volta Redonda, built in 1944, and São Paulo's integrated industrial zone. Industrialization and its parallel urbanization attracted rural migrants from throughout the nation, but particularly from the drought-plagued Northeast. In the space of a generation after 1940, Brazil leaped from the age of the bull-cart to that of the internal combustion engine, changing the national map in the process.