June 11, 2010

Uniforms of the Brazilian Army

Greetings from Brazil! More to follow on the fascinating city of São Paulo. For now, I present some images of eighteenth century Brazilian army uniforms, courtesy of the excellent Portuguese-language blog Arquivo Histórico, :


Note the 'auxilaries' in the bottom left of this last image -- apparently mestizo and African-descended soldiers, sporting uniforms with much brighter colors than their rather drab colleagues!

These officers look almost exactly like Revolutionary War era British redcoats to my untutored eye. Here's the full book on archive.org.

1 comment:

Felipe said...

This is very interesting - as to the green colored uniforms, they seem to be often associated with Batalhões de Caçadores (literally hunter battalion, Riflemen in England, Jäger in Germany and Austria).
There is a famous Bahian battalion during the independence conflicts called Periquitos (parakeets) because of their green collars. On Page 245 of this book, there is also a post-Paraguayan war (1871) caçador with green collar, but also what seems to be an actual pet parakeet! Check it out