2 The Establishment of African Slavery in Brazil in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Why did the Portuguese decide massively to import Africans into Brazil, when this was a minor part of their world empire and when the dominant overseas institutions it developed were trading factories and not colonies? In fact, the first thirty years of colonial contact in Brazil fit the African and Asian patterns more than the colonization of Madeira and the Azores.
The initial conquest and contact with Brazil was marginal to the great Portuguese international imperial expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Claiming the region through expeditions that found Brazil on the road to the East Indies, the Portuguese were little interested in its immediate development. With the riches of Asia available to them as the Portuguese opened up a water route to the islands of Indonesia and then to India, Japan, and China, there was little demand for the development of Brazil beyond an emporium for tropical products unavailable in Europe.1 The first commercial exports in fact were woods, from which were extracted dyes. These so-called Brazil wood trees were usually cut by local Indian groups and then shipped by the Portuguese to Europe on a seasonal basis, with no permanent Portuguese settlers residing in America.2 Castaways and other marginal Portuguese began living with local Tupi–Guarani-speaking Indian communities along the coast and became the crucial cultural brokers who kept the contact with the mother country alive.3 For some twenty years after its exploration and official integration into the Portuguese Empire, Brazil remained a backwater with seasonal trade with independent Indian groups being the only dominant form of contact, a pattern of colonization that reduced Indian-Portuguese conflict to a minimum.4
This situation changed rapidly, however, when Portugal was suddenly confronted by European rivals willing to contest this transitory control over its American territories. French and British merchants began to send their own ships into Brazilian waters to pick up the profitable dyewoods, and they soon used the coast as a base for attacking the Portuguese East Indies fleets that cruised the South Atlantic. The French and British even went so far as to set up more than temporary logging camps at both the Amazonian estuary in the Northeast and in Guanabara Bay in the south. The establishment of this latter settlement – the so-called French Antarctica colony – finally convinced the Portuguese that full-scale exploitation of Brazil was imperative for the safety of their entire overseas empire. Thus, despite their limited population resources, the Portuguese decided to commit themselves to full-scale colonization.5
Because the Portuguese already had extensive experience with African slaves in their Atlantic islands and had ready access to African labor markets, once the decision was made to exploit their American colony, then the turn toward African workers was only conditioned by the availability of capital for importation of African slaves. In turn, that capital became available from the proceeds of sugar exported to Europe. Thus, by 1600, Indian slaves were being replaced by African slaves everywhere in the coastal plantation regions, and the pattern of African slave labor plantations producing crops for the European market had been firmly established.6
African slavery had already developed in the Spanish colonies in Mexico, Peru, Central America, and the remainder of South America before the evolution of the Brazilian slave plantation model. Nevertheless, it would represent a distinct slave system differing in many ways from the system that would evolve in Portuguese America. In cases where the native population was large and integrated into complex social systems, African slavery filled specialized roles in colonial economic development, mostly working in domestic households and urban occupations.7 In zones where the native population was scattered and minimally organized or where severe demographic decline had occurred, African slavery enjoyed a more prominent role in the labor force. Although African slaves in Spanish America occasionally dominated certain individual economic sectors (such as gold or copper mining),8 they were mostly a minor element in the Indian- and mestizo-peasant-dominated labor force. This explains why
the African slave trade, which was significant to these Spanish mainland colonies until the mid-seventeenth century, declined rapidly afterward as the Amerindian and mestizo populations began to expand and fill the labor needs of the Spanish elite.9 Even though African arrivals to Brazil would slow in the mid-seventeenth century due to the Dutch invasions, the long-term trend was rising, and these African arrivals never fell to the level of Spanish American imports after 1611 (see Graph 2.1).
The northern Europeans who followed the Iberians to America within a few decades of the discovery had even fewer Indians to exploit than the Spanish and the Portuguese. They were unable to develop an extensive Indian slave labor force, let alone the complex free Indian labor arrangements developed by the Spaniards. Nor did they have access to precious metals to pay for imported slave labor. But, unlike the Iberians of the sixteenth century, they did have a cheaper and more willing pool of European laborers to exploit, especially in the crisis period of the seventeenth century. Even with this labor available, peasants and the urban poor could not afford the passage to America. Subsidizing that passage through selling of one's labor to American employers in indentured contracts became the major source of colonial workers in the first half-century of northern European settlement in America. The English and the French were the primary users of indentured labor, and they exploited a significant pool of workers faced by low wages and poor opportunities within the European economy. They were also not above transporting convicts to the colonies. In fact, a significant part of the labor migration to English America was transported convicts, whereas the rest were overwhelmingly indentured servants.10 But the end of the seventeenth-century crisis in Europe and especially the rapid growth of the English economy in the last quarter of the century created a thriving labor market in Europe and resulted in a consequent increase in the costs of indentured laborers.11
With their European indentured laborers becoming too costly and with no access to American Indian workers or Indian slaves, it was inevitable that the English and the French would turn to African slaves, especially after developing sugar or other plantation-produced crops that could profitably be exported to the European market on a mass scale and pay for this expensive labor force. In this evolution, the Brazilian slave plantation model became the norm in many parts of the English, French, and Dutch colonies of America. Even those regions such as New England that had no such plantations depended on trade with the Caribbean slave plantations for their own survival.
After 1650, the previously marginal and neglected areas of the Caribbean quickly developed as slave plantation colonies and were destined to become great slave centers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For all of these new emerging European colonies, the mature Portuguese model of commercial agricultural plantations and African slave labor would be the model used to sustain growth. The only difference was in the initial pre-African labor force employed. Whereas the Portuguese quickly came to rely on Indian slave labor to initiate their plantation systems, the European colonies of the West Indies had few Indians to enslave and were forced to rely on indentured European workers. They, like the Portuguese in Brazil in their first century, also lacked precious metals, so they too looked for American or imported plants that could find a European market. Once that market was established, they too would turn away from these alternative forms of labor and begin to base their export industries on African slave labor. The experience of the Portuguese American colonial development became the standard for all of these later colonies, even to the point of the direct transference of Brazilian slaves and Brazilian sugar technology to the Caribbean in the mid-seventeenth century.
With Portugal's decision to colonize Brazil came the need to find an export product more reliable and profitable than dyewood. In this context, its pre-American experiences in the Azores, Madeira, and São Tomé showed that sugar was the ideal crop to guarantee the existence of a profitable colony. This decision was greatly aided by the fact that the Portuguese still dominated the Atlantic slave trade at this time and could easily and more cheaply deliver slaves to America than any other European maritime power. The Crown was forced to offer extraordinary privileges to wealthy Portuguese entrepreneurs in an effort to generate the capital needed to open up this American frontier. The resulting captaincies looked more like feudal states than colonies and relatively few of them were economically successful. The new leaders of the colony were mostly men who had generated their initial wealth in the East Indies trade and could provide the crucial capital and credit needed to import the machines and the technicians who would get the sugar plantation regime going on a profitable basis. Although most of these feudal-style proprietary captains failed to establish viable settlements, a few succeeded admirably, and the key element was the production of cane sugar for the European market. Thus, by the 1550s was born the first plantation system in the New World, a system that very rapidly dominated the sugar markets of Europe and effectively ended the importance of the eastern Atlantic island producers.12
Brazil was not the first American region to produce sugar, as Columbus had already brought sugar to Santo Domingo as early as 1493.13 But the initially large sugar estates in that island eventually declined into small farms producing for just local and regional markets. The headlong rush of Spanish colonists to the mainland eliminated the incentives to develop these islands into full-scale production zones despite the quality of their soils. Even in Brazil, enterprising colonists had begun to plant sugar as early as the 1510s.14 It was not until the formal establishment of the Proprietary Captaincies into which Brazil was divided that systematic production began. The Portuguese fleet of 1532 carried along sugar experts from the Madeira plantations, and the new governors who took over their regions all brought plantings from Madeira or São Tomé. After many trials and problems with Indian raiding, two areas stood out initially as the most profitable centers of colonization and sugar production. These were the two northeast provinces of Pernambuco and Bahia. By the 1580s, Pernambuco already had more than sixty engenhos producing sugar for the European market,15 and by the last decades of the century, it was intimately connected to the Antwerp market. Given the initially marginal interest of the Portuguese in this zone, it was Dutch shipping that played a vital role in linking Brazil to the northern European sugar markets, the site of Europe's fastest-growing economies.16 By the 1580s, Bahia had emerged as the second-largest producer with some forty mills, and the two areas produced about three-quarters of all the sugar on the continent.17 By 1600, Brazil was producing an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 metric tons of sugar per annum from approximately two hundred sugar mills and had become Europe's single most important source for this rapidly expanding product.18
The sugar mills of Brazil's Northeast soon evolved into far larger operations than their Atlantic islands predecessor. By the end of the sixteenth century, Brazilian mills were producing six times the output per annum of the Atlantic islands engenhos.19 Much of this increase was due to the greater size of American sugar plantings, which involved not only the lands of the mill-owners but those of the smaller dependent planters tied to the mills (known as lavradores da cana). This allowed many owners to construct expensive, large, water-driven mills with capacities far greater than their own field production. At the end of the century, Brazilians also worked out a new type of milling process that effectively increased the percentage of juice extracted from the canes. This was the introduction of the three-roller vertical mill to Brazil in 1617, which greatly increased output at a reduced cost.20 With excellent soils, the most advanced milling technology, and close contact with the booming Dutch commercial network, Brazil dominated sugar production in the Western world by 1600. What had been a colony settled in a marginal way and with little interest from the Crown now began to take on more and more of a central role in Portugal's vast empire, with sugar being the crucial link connecting Portugal, Africa, and Brazil.21
Given the insatiable demand of the mills for unskilled agricultural labor, the Brazilians would experiment with many forms of labor organization that later colonists would attempt, excluding only indentured European workers. They imported African slaves from the very beginning, but they also sought to enslave the local American Indian populations and turn them into a stable agricultural labor force. The Tupi speakers who occupied the northeast coastal region were settled in large villages of several hundred persons and engaged in agricultural production. They were thus not the seminomadic and primarily hunting groups encountered further in the interior, although they were largely subsistence agricultural producers and nothing like the Andean or Mexican peasants with their complex markets and long-distance trade. Their constant warfare and putative ritual cannibalistic practices gave the Portuguese an excuse to conquer and enslave them, and initially, their agricultural experience promised the potential of making them into an effective labor force.
The Portuguese tried converting the Indians and paying them wages, but the primary means of extracting their labor was to turn them into chattel slaves. From 1540 to 1570, Indian slaves were the primary producers of sugar in Brazil and accounted for more than four-fifths of the labor force in the Northeast and almost all of the labor component in the southern sugar mills developing in the Rio de Janeiro region. Owners obtained these slaves through purchase from other Indian tribes or direct raiding on their own. They also encouraged free Indians to work for wages, which quickly tied them to the estates, so that thereafter little distinction could be made between enslaved and debt-peon Indian laborers.22
Although Portuguese efforts in this area showed that an enslaved and indebted Indian labor force could be created from the Tupi-Guarani Indians of the coast despite an open frontier and constant warfare with Indian groups, the institution of Indian slavery, which now claimed tens of thousands of Indians, was doomed to failure. The most important factor undermining its importance was the endemic diseases the Europeans brought with them, which became epidemic when they affected the Indians. In the 1560s, at the height of Indian slavery, a major smallpox epidemic broke out among these previously unexposed populations of Indians. It was estimated that thirty thousand Indians under Portuguese control, either on plantations or in Christian mission villages, died of the disease. This susceptibility to disease along with their shorter life expectancy resulted in lower prices for Indian slaves than for African slaves. When combined with increasing Crown hostility toward Indian enslavement, especially after the unification of the Portuguese Crown with that of Spain after 1580, Indian slavery was made less secure and more difficult to maintain.
This decline in the utility of Indian slave labor combined with the increasing wealth of the Brazilian planters led to the beginnings of mass importations of African slave labor after 1570. Whereas the Northeast had few Africans before 1570, by the mid-1580s, Pernambuco alone reported two thousand African slaves, now comprising one-third of the captaincy's sugar labor force. With each succeeding decade, the percentage of Africans in the slave population increased. By 1600, probably just under half of all slaves were now Africans, with some fifty thousand Africans having arrived in the colony up to that time. In the next two decades, the Indian slaves progressively disappeared from the sugar fields, and by the 1620s, most sugar estate workers were black.23
In the 1570–1620 transition period shift to African labor, Africans first moved into the most skilled slave positions in the engenhos, working more in the sugar-making processes than in field cultivation. Because many West Africans came from advanced agricultural and iron-working cultures, they were far more skilled in many of these activities than were the native American Indians. They also came from the same disease environment as the Europeans, and most of the epidemic diseases for the Indians were endemic ones for the Africans. Thus, in terms of skills, health, and involvement in more routinized agricultural labor, the Africans were perceived as far superior to their Indian fellow slaves, and the three-to-one price differential paid by planters reflected this perception. As capital was built up from sugar sales, there was a progressive move toward Africans on the part of all Brazilian sugar planters.
That the sugar economy was expanding rapidly can be seen from the numbers. By 1600, Brazil had close to two hundred engenhos producing a total of between 8,000 and 9,000 metric tons of sugar per annum, and by the mid 1620s, Brazilian output rose to 14,000 tons per annum. All of this occurred during a period when European sugar prices were constantly rising. Moreover, the introduction of the three-roller vertical mills in the second decade of the seventeenth century both reduced considerably the costs of mill construction and increased the juice extracted from the cane. While there appears to have been a price drop in the 1620s, prices firmed up in the next two decades as Brazilian sugar dominated European markets. Thus, slave importations began to rise dramatically, and by the 1630s and 1640s, Africans were arriving in Brazil in much greater numbers than to Spanish America, a trend that would maintain itself into the nineteenth century.
The middle decades of the seventeenth century would prove to be the peak years of Brazil's dominance of the European sugar market. No other sugar-producing area rivaled Brazil at this point, and Brazilian sugar eliminated the eastern Atlantic islands as major producers. It was this very sugar production monopoly that excited the envy of other European powers and led to the rise of alternative production centers. Crucial to this new American plantation movement would be the Dutch, who from the beginnings of the American sugar trade in the sixteenth century had been firm partners of the Brazilian planters, providing them with the crucial transport and marketing of their sugars in European markets.
But the rise of other non-Iberian modern states in sixteenth-century Europe created a group of rivals who wished to reproduce the Portuguese success in the Asian trade and challenge their monopoly of American sugar production. This movement would lead to systematic attacks on the Portuguese Empire. At the same time, changes in metropolitan governments would have a profound impact on Brazil. In 1580, the last of the kings of the royal Portuguese House of Avis died with no heirs to assume the throne, and Portugal and its empire were taken over by the Spanish Hapsburgs. Thus began the period of “captivity” in Portuguese history, or the unification of Portugal with Spain under Philip II, which would last until the Portuguese rebellion of 1640.
Initially this unification brought strength to Portugal and its empire, as Castile was the most powerful and richest state in Europe during the second half of the sixteenth century. But that power eventually was the undoing of the Portuguese colonial world, as it exposed Portugal to the enemies of the Spanish Crown. It would also involve Portugal in a war with Spain's Dutch rebels, who had been Portugal's long-term trading partners. Given the close relationship between Portugal and the Dutch in the sugar trade, every effort was made to maintain the intimate trading relations, even though the northern Dutch provinces were in active revolt from the late 1560s and especially after the mid-1570s. But eventually the long Dutch wars of independence had their impact on this traditional trading relationship. Not only did Spain eventually seize Dutch ships involved in this trade, but also the Dutch themselves decided to end all direct trade with Brazil after 1621. This was the year that the Dutch founded the Dutch West Indies Company to exploit both African and American resources and use force to conquer these regions.
Although northern European pirates systematically attacked the Portuguese trade with Asia and Africa, it was the Dutch who emerged in the late sixteenth century as the most aggressive, competent, and powerful of Iberia's rivals. A part of the Spanish Empire since the ascension to the Spanish throne of the Hapsburg Charles V, the seven northern and largely Protestant provinces of the Low Countries had gone into a final phase of their wars of independence against Spain in the 1590s. For the Spaniards, these Dutch wars of independence proved to be a long and disastrous affair and probably one of their costliest imperial conflicts. By 1609, the Dutch had secured de facto independence and were able to use their advanced commercial system and their dominance in European overseas trade to carry the war deep into the Iberian Empire. Whereas the Spanish American possessions were too powerful to conquer despite several assaults, the Asian, African, and eventually American empire of Portugal was less well defended.
Because the Dutch had become deeply involved in the Brazilian sugar industry, Portuguese America was initially protected from Dutch imperial pretensions. As long as the Spaniards did not attempt to interfere with this international trading, all was well. But the war with the Dutch proved to be a long and bloody affair, and the Spanish finally attacked Dutch shipping to Brazil in the first decade of the seventeenth century. This ended the neutrality of Brazil and of Portuguese Africa in the great imperial conflict, and in the last round of fighting after the end of the so-called twelve-year truce in 1621, the Dutch assaulted both Portugal's African settlements and the Brazilian plantations.
As early as 1602, the Dutch had established their East Indies Company to seize control of Portugal's Asian spice trade. That competition was not peaceful and involved constant attacks by the Dutch on Portuguese shipping and its Pacific commercial networks. With the foundation of the West Indies Company in 1621, the Dutch decided to compete directly in Africa and America with the Portuguese. In a systematic campaign to capture both Brazilian and African possessions, the Dutch West Indies Company sent the first of many war fleets into the South Atlantic in 1624. They temporarily captured the town of Salvador and with it Brazil's second-largest sugar-producing province of Bahia. But a year later, a combined Spanish-Portuguese armada succeeded in recapturing the province. In 1627, a second Dutch West Indies Company fleet attempted to take Recife, Brazil's premier sugar port and center of the province of Pernambuco, the colony's richest sugar plantation region. Although repulsed by the Portuguese, the Dutch fleet succeeded in capturing the annual Spanish silver armada on its return to Europe, thus enormously enriching the Company's coffers.
Another major fleet and army was outfitted by the Company in 1630, and after bitter fighting, the Dutch captured Recife and most of the province of Pernambuco. With this base in sugar production, the Dutch were now direct competitors of their former Brazilian partners. The next step in this competition was to deny Brazil access to its sources of African slaves. Thus, new expeditions were mounted by the Company to seize Portuguese African possessions, which also resulted in the Dutch themselves becoming a dominant power in the Atlantic slave-trading system. First the fortress of São Jorge de Mina on the Gold Coast was captured in 1638, and then came the fall of Luanda and the whole Angolan coastal region in 1641.24
The seizure of Pernambuco and the Portuguese African settlements by the Dutch affected sugar production and the slave system in both Brazil and the rest of America. For Brazil, the Dutch occupation resulted in Bahia replacing Pernambuco as the leading slave and sugar province, it led to the reemergence of Indian slavery, and the ensuing interior slave trade opened up the interior regions of Brazil to exploitation and settlement. For the rest of America, Dutch Brazil would become the source for the tools, techniques, credit, and slaves that would carry the sugar revolution into the West Indies, thereby terminating Brazil's monopoly position in European markets and leading to the creation of wealthy new American colonies for France and England.
For the first fifteen years, Pernambuco proved to be a source of great wealth for the West Indies Company, and the city of Olinda (Recife), under the governorship of the Prince of Nassau, became an unusual multiracial and multireligious community of considerable culture. However, the long, drawn-out war for the interior engenhos of Pernambuco led to a decline in production and the emergence of Bahia as the premier site of Brazilian production (see Graph 2.2), especially after the planters’ revolt in 1645. At the same time that the Dutch stranglehold over African slave sources reduced supplies and increased prices, Brazilian planters once more resorted to Indian slave labor, which the Crown temporarily permitted. The source of slaves was now no longer the Tupi speakers of the coast, but distant interior tribes of various linguistic families. These tribes were captured in slave-raiding expeditions by the special bands
GRAPH 2.2.
GRAPH 2.2. Dutch sugar exports from Pernambuco, 1631–1651.
Source: Henk Den Heijer, “The Dutch West India Company, 1621–1791,” p. 88.
of hunters (or bandeirantes) coming from the interior settlement of São Paulo. These paulista bandeirantes roamed the whole interior of Brazil and into the upper reaches of the Rio de la Plata basin, seeking slaves and shipping them to the coast. As a result, much of the interior of Brazil was explored for the first time, and São Paulo itself expanded from its very crude beginnings into a thriving settlement. All of this would lead to new uses of slave labor being developed in the Brazilian interior by the end of the century.
In terms of the rest of America, the Dutch control in Pernambuco led to their active intervention in the overseas West Indies settlements of the French and English. Although the fighting between the Dutch and Portuguese in the interior reduced Pernambuco's role as the region's leading sugar producer, the province still sent a large quantity of sugar into the European market and revived Dutch sugar commercialization networks that had been badly disrupted by the previous closure of the Dutch trade to Brazil. In need of furnishing their Amsterdam refineries with American sugar, especially after the precipitous post-1645 drop in Pernambuco production, the Dutch began to bring slaves and the latest milling equipment to the British and French settlers in the Caribbean and carried their sugar into the European market. In the 1640s, Dutch planters with experience in Pernambuco arrived in Barbados as well as Martinique and Guadeloupe to introduce modern milling and production techniques. Dutch slavers provided the credit to the local planters to buy African slaves, while Dutch West Indian freighters hauled the finished sugar to the refineries in Amsterdam.
Even more dramatic was the actual migration of Dutch planters and their slaves to these islands in 1654 when Pernambuco and Olinda finally fell to the Portuguese troops. In Guadeloupe, some six hundred Dutchmen and three hundred slaves arrived in this period, and an equal number landed in Martinique. To Barbados came another thousand or so. Although many of these new colonists eventually returned to the Netherlands, enough remained in America to give a major boost to the Caribbean sugar industry in the 1650s. It was these transplanted Dutchmen who proved decisive in effectively implementing the sugar plantation system on the islands.25
But the rise of the French and British West Indies slave plantation economy ended the importance of the Netherlands as a major American factor in the production and marketing of plantation staples. Also, several English-Dutch wars from the 1650s onward and the various tariff and navigation acts that the British and French issued in this period eventually denied the Dutch access to their imperial markets. This growth of the French and British American empires was also at the expense of Brazilian sugar production and the role of Brazilian sugar in the markets of Europe. Not only were the French and British islands both equaling Brazilian sugar output by the first quarter of the eighteenth century, but the trade restrictions imposed by these two powers to end the Dutch influence over their new colonies also had a direct impact on Brazilian sugar markets. By the first half of the eighteenth century, England and France were satisfying their own needs as well as the demands for sugar of practically all of northern and eastern Europe. France, which had been a heavy consumer of Brazilian sugars until the 1690s, put up tariffs in that decade that eliminated Brazilian sugar from the French market. By the eighteenth century, only the top grades of Brazilian clayed sugar could still be found in any of the northern markets, and most Brazilian output was confined to southern Europe and the Mediterranean. So efficient were the French West Indies producers that they soon dominated even these southern markets and also eliminated the more expensive British West Indies producers from the European continent.26
This severe restriction of Brazil's international markets and its relative stagnation in production, however, did not eliminate Brazil as an important world sugar producer. Its monopoly position was overturned, but the continued growth of European consumption, the excellent quality of its best grades of clayed white sugar, and the growth of demand in the home and imperial markets guaranteed that the Brazilian plantations would remain a major force in the world market. In 1760, Brazil was still ranked as the world's third-largest producer behind the British and French West Indies and accounted for 17 percent of world production.27 At the same time, the colonial economy would be revitalized and transformed by the opening up of new slave industries at the very end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. Thus, the volume of the traffic of African slaves would continue at an ever-increasing rate into the new century.
1 A good survey of the expansion of Portugal in the fifteenth century is found in A. H. de Oliveira Marques, A expansão quatrocentista (vol. 2 of the Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, edited by Joel Serrão and A. H. de Oliveira Marques; Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998). On the products of this new world trade of the Portuguese, the best source remains Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial (2nd ed. rev.; 4 vols.; Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1981–1983). For the impact of Portugal on Indian Ocean trade, see K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 3. Still worth consulting is the classic work of Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969).
2 The most detailed discussion of this trade is found in Frédéric Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670), étude économique (Paris: SEVPEN, 1960), pp. 118–45. It is estimated that the pau brasil trade, which was a royal monopoly, saw an estimated 150,000 tons exported between 1502 and 1625, and the returns to the Crown represented between 1 and 2 percent of total imperial income in any given year. Harold Johnson, “Desenvolvimiento e espansão da economia brasileira,” in Harold Johnson and Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, eds., O império luso-brasileiro, 1500–1620 (vol. 6 of the Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, edited by Joel Serrão and A. H. de Oliveira Marques; Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998), pp. 222–3.
3 On the various Indians in contact with the Portuguese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, ed., História dos índios no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992). On the Indian-Portuguese trade relations to 1533, see Filipe Nunes de Carvalho, “Do descobrimento a União Ibérica,” in Harold Johnson and Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, eds., O império luso-brasileiro, 1500–1620 (vol. 6 of the Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, edited by Joel Serrão and A. H. de Oliveira Marques; Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1998), pp. 111–13. A discussion of the intermediary mamelucos or Portuguese-Indian population who acted as cultural brokers between the Indian and Portuguese worlds is found in Alida C. Metcalf, Go-betweens and the Colonization of Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
4 A good survey of this period is found in Harold Johnson, “Portuguese Settlement, 1500–1580,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America (11 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. I, pp. 249–86.
5 For a history of French Antartica, see Vasco Mariz and Lucien Provençal, Villegagnon e a França Antártica (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2000) and Frank Lestringant, L’expérience Huguenote au nouveau monde (XVIe siècle) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1996).
6 The standard study on the shift from Indian to African slave labor is Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chapter 2.
7 An excellent study of the style of slavery typical in the major urban centers of colonial Spanish America is Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
8 On such atypical mining role of slaves in Spanish America, see William F. Sharp, Slavery in the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Chocó, 1680–1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976) and María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
9 On the evolution of the Spanish American colonial population in this period, see Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, La población de América Latina: Desde los tiempos precolombinos al año 2025 (2nd rev. ed.; Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1994), chapters 4 and 5.
10 It has been estimated that “approximately 50,000 British convicts were sentenced to servitude and forcibly transported to America between 1718 and 1775 [and] they represented roughly a quarter of all British arrivals and half of all English arrivals in this period.” Farley Grubb, “The Transatlantic Market for British Convict Labor,” Journal of Economic History, 60, no. 1 (March 2000), p. 94.
11 For the indentured servant trade and its rise and fall in British America, see David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and his two essays on this subject, “White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America,” Journal of Economic History, 41, no. 1 (March 1981), and “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History, 44, no. 1 (March 1984); and Farley Grubb, “The End of European Immigrant Servitude in the United States: An Economic Analysis of Market Collapse, 1772–1835,” Journal of Economic History, 54, no. 4 (December 1994).
12 On the use of private contracts and temporary government grants in the establishment of overseas Portuguese settlements and the subsequent establishment of full royal control, see Francisco Bethencourt, “Political Configurations and Local Powers,” in Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the evolution of these captaincies in Brazil, see the survey by Johnson, “Portuguese Settlement, 1500–1580,” pp. 249–86; and most recently, the various essays in Johnson and Silva, eds., O império luso-brasileiro, 1500–1620. For the evolution of sugar production in this period, see Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550–1670,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 158–200.
13 Genaro Rodríguez Morel, “The Sugar Economy of Española in the Sixteenth Century,” in Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons, p. 87.
14 J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 61–70.
15 On the Atlantic background and early sugar industry in Brazil, see Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, chapter 4; and the sources cited in note 18.
16 On the evolution of the Dutch sugar trade with Brazil, see Christopher Ebert, “Dutch Trade with Brazil before the Dutch West India Company, 1587–1621,” in Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven, eds., Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
17 Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, p. 19.
18 The most detailed estimate of Brazilian production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is found in Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle (1570–1670), pp. 192–257; also see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chapter 7.
19 Based on the estimates in Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle, chapter 3.
20 Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, pp. 127–8.
21 On the evolution of the sugar industry in the northeastern region, see Mauro, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au XVIIe siècle, pp. 192–201; and Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chapter 7.
22 The standard source on the use of enslaved Indians in the northeastern sugar industry is Stuart B. Schwartz, “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil,” American Historical Review, 83, no. 3 (June 1978).
23 On the movements of slaves to Brazil, see Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (2nd printing; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chapter 13.
24 On the expansion of the Dutch in the seventeenth century and their conflict with Portugal, see Charles R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1965); Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, chapter 4; Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); and the important new collection of essays edited by Postma and Enthoven, Riches from Atlantic Commerce, which includes studies on the Dutch West Indies Company. On the Dutch colony in Brazil, there are numerous studies, including the classic work of José Antônio Gonçalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos: Influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do norte do Brasil (3rd ed. rev.; Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Editora Massangana, 1987); and Evaldo Cabral de Mello, O Negócio do Brasil: Portugal os Países Baixos e o Nordeste 1641–1669 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1998). A recent survey is that of Leonardo Dantas Silva, Holandeses em Pernambuco: 1630–1654 (Recife: Instituto Ricardo Brennand, 2005).
25 Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux antillais françaises (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Basse-Terre: Société d’Historie de la Guadeloupe, 1974), p. 178. For the crucial role the Dutch played in the origins of the Barbados sugar revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, see William A. Green, “Supply versus Demand in the Barbadian Sugar Revolution,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18, no. 3 (Winter 1988), pp. 409ff.
26 The best survey of the Brazilian sugar trade throughout the colonial period is found in Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, chapters 7 and 15; and on the rise of competition from the British and French West Indies, see Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, chapters 4 and 5.
27 Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (3 vols.; Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978), vol. I , p. 42. Although Brazil's relative position would decline in the last half of the eighteenth century, by 1815–1819 it had doubled production to some 79,000 tons per annum and now accounted for 20 percent of world sugar cane production. Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. II, p. 173.