12 - Wage workers in a slave economy

Summary

He who makes sugar, with reason they call master because his work demands intelligence, attention, and experience, not just any kind, but local experience.

André João Antonil (1711)

Sugar making is given over to ignorance, and generally to stupid blacks who sing but have no measure, no rule, and no proportion.

Sampaio e Mello (1834)

In the world of engenhos, mobility from field hand to proprietor, from slave to freedman, from those who labored to those who owned, or simply from black to white, was most apparent in the categories of wage earners that were always present in the sugar-making process. Although chattel labor characterized the sugar economy in Brazil from its inception until the end of the nineteenth century and slaves were always the predominant laborers, the nature of sugar production and its specific demands created a need for a body of wage earners at the core of the process. Field hands were almost always slaves, usually black, and predominantly Africans; senhores de engenho were invariably free and white; but in the intermediate positions of management, technical skill, and artisian craft were found freemen, freedmen, and slaves; whites, browns, and blacks. Here in the heart of the sugar economy was a sector of workers that by its very existence validated the system of slavery on which the industry was based by providing examples of mobility and advantage to those enslaved.