Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835

by Stuart B. Schwartz

• ISBN13: 9780521313995
• ISBN10: 0521313996
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1986-01-31
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This study examines the history of the sugar economy and the peculiar development of plantation society over a three hundred year period in Bahia, a major sugar plantation zone and an important terminus of the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on little-used archival sources, plantations accounts, and notarial records, Professor Schwartz has examined through both quantitative and qualitative methods the various groups that made up plantation society. While he devotes much attention to masters and slaves, he views slavery ultimately as part of a larger structure of social and economic relations. The peculiarities of sugar-making and the nature of plantation labour are used throughout the book as keys to an understanding of.roles and relationships in plantation society. A comparative perspective is also employed, so that studies of slavery elsewhere in the Americas inform the analysis, while at many points direct comparisons of the Bahian case with other plantation societies are also made.

Table of Contents

List of figures, maps, and tables

Preface

Abbreviations and special terms

Weights and measures

Part I. Formations, 1500-1600: 1. The sugar plantation: from the Old World to the New

2. A wasted generation: commercial agriculture and Indian laborers

3. First slavery: from Indian to African

Part II. The Bahian Engenhos and their World: 4. The Recô

ncavo

5. Safra: the ways of sugar making

6. Workers in the cane, workers at the mill

7. The Bahian sugar trade to 1750

8. A noble business: profits and costs

Part III. Sugar Society: 9. A colonial slave society

10. The planters: masters of men and cane

11. The cane farmers

12. Wage workers in a slave economy

13. The Bahian slave population

14. The slave family and the limitations of slavery

Part IV. Reorientation and Persistence, 1750-1835: 15. Resurgence

16. The structure of Bahian slaveholding

17. Important occasions: the war to end Bahian slavery

Appendixes

Notes

Glossary

Sources and selected bibliography

Sources of figures

Index.