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
5 - Safra: the ways of sugar making
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
- 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
Agriculture … is easier and prettier to write about than to practice. Dependent on the rude and unbearable work of industry, the cultivation of sugarcane, despite its advantages, is very detrimental and full of a thousand inconveniences.
José da Silva Lisboa (1781)The techniques of sugar production in all of the American colonies were essentially the same, as the classic and roughly contemporaneous descriptions of Père Labat for the French Antilles, Richard Ligon for Barbados, and André João Antonil for Brazil make clear. But details differed in response to regional distinctions and local conditions. In Brazil, the techniques of sugar making and the structure of production defined the colony's social and economic structure for almost one hundred years to about 1650 and thereafter exercised considerable influence in sugar-producing regions such as Bahia and Pernambuco, despite the growth of other economic activities. The foundation on which the Brazilian colony rested was the relationship of masters to slaves, and this was inherent in the relations of production engendered by the plantation economy. To understand the nature of sugar production, then, is to perceive the needs and desires of the class that controlled the essential property, lands, and slaves and to grasp the conditions and constraints under which those who produced the sugar labored.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian SocietyBahia, 1550–1835, pp. 98 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986