Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society

Abstract

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.

Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development Among New World Economics

“…12. See, in particular, Dunn (1972) on the English colonies and Schwartz (1985) on Brazil. In early Brazil, slaves were also used in mining.…”

A Companion to Tudor Britain

“…Not only male slaves but also female slaves worked in the sugar mills and the fields always under male overseers. Females who provided domestic services in the big house were most prey to their owner's sexual overtures (Schwartz, 1985). Gilberto Freyre's influential description of slaveholders' patriarchal benevolence toward their slaves, which portrayed Portuguese settlers' sexual exploits of their female slaves as evidence of a unique lack of prejudice that distinguished Brazil from Spanish colonial America, has proven to be a fallacy (Freyre, 1933;Schwartz, 1985).…”

“…Females who provided domestic services in the big house were most prey to their owner's sexual overtures (Schwartz, 1985). Gilberto Freyre's influential description of slaveholders' patriarchal benevolence toward their slaves, which portrayed Portuguese settlers' sexual exploits of their female slaves as evidence of a unique lack of prejudice that distinguished Brazil from Spanish colonial America, has proven to be a fallacy (Freyre, 1933;Schwartz, 1985). In Brazil, as in Spanish America, the rapidly growing population of mulattos were mostly the offspring of sugar planters who impregnated their domestic female slaves, but they were only rarely legitimated through marriage.…”

Cultivos y crecimiento de la población esclava: el caso de Guyana en el siglo XIX

“…Los registros proveen información sobre el número de nacimientos y defunciones para distintos tipos de plantaciones durante los tres años transcurridos entre mayo de 1829 y mayo ^ Véase Klein y Engerman (1978). y en su apoyo, con evidencia histórica bioantropológica, Handlcr y Corruccini (1986); la aplicación al Brasil, en Schwartz (1985), pp. 363-64. ""…”