Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, maps, and tables
- Preface
- Abbreviations and special terms
- Weights and measures
- Dedication
- Part I Formations, 1500–1600
- Part II The Bahian engenhos and their world
- 4 The Recôncavo
- 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
- Part IV Reorientation and persistence, 1750–1835
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Glossary
- Sources and selected bibliography
- Sources of figures
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES IN PRINT
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures, maps, and tables
- Preface
- Abbreviations and special terms
- Weights and measures
- Dedication
- Part I Formations, 1500–1600
- Part II The Bahian engenhos and their world
- 4 The Recôncavo
- 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
- Part IV Reorientation and persistence, 1750–1835
- Appendixes
- Notes
- Glossary
- Sources and selected bibliography
- Sources of figures
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES IN PRINT
Summary
… it is certain that this captaincy is an agricultural colony and it is convenient that it is so since its products are so valuable.
Miguel Antônio de Melo (1797)About eleven o'clock we entered the Bay of All Saints, on the northern side of which is situated the town of Bahia or San Salvador. It would be difficult [to] imagine before seeing this view anything so magnificent. It requires, however, the reality of nature to make it so. If faithfully represented in a picture, a feeling of distrust would be raised in the mind.
Charles Darwin (1832)Maria Graham, an aristocratic Englishwoman later to become Lady Calcott, was an acute observer with a sprightly literary style. As she sailed into the Bay of All Saints in 1824, she was enthralled by the scene, and she and her shipboard companions amused themselves by speculating as to on which shore before them Robinson Crusoe had established his plantation, for Defoe's hero was supposed to have lived here too. No traveler who crossed the bar of Santo Antônio and sailed beneath the fort of that name that guarded it remained unimpressed by the beauty of the prospect that greeted their eyes. At latitude 13 degrees south, longitude 37–9 degrees west, the sea cuts a great arm into the tropical coastline, forming a magnificent bay or inland sea some fifty miles in length.
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- Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian SocietyBahia, 1550–1835, pp. 75 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986