Monoculture, Slave Labour and Latifundia in Colonial Brazil

1 Introduction

In this chapter we will study the historical process of the introduction of the Portuguese civilisational project for the settlement and colonisation of Brazil.

Colonial Brazil, in Brazilian history, is the period from 1530 to 1822. This period began when the Portuguese government sent the first colonisation expedition to Brazil, led by Martim Afonso de Souza.

This project was based on the tripod of latifundia, slave labour and monoculture.

We know that in the first century of colonisation, no precious metals were found to give economic meaning to colonisation. It was therefore necessary to lay the foundations for the introduction of a profitable economic activity in Brazil.

This activity was the cultivation of sugar cane and the subsequent production of sugar in sugar mills, which at that time had a high resale value in Europe.

The Portuguese began to administer their American colony on the basis of large-scale agriculture.

The use of slave labour was to dominate this activity, first using indigenous labour and then, with the process of capitalisation of the plantation owners, African labour.

2.

2. The Portuguese civilising project in Brazil

As we said in the previous paragraphs, the Portuguese project of civilisation in Brazil was based on the tripod of latifundia, slave labour and monoculture.

Initially, the agricultural crop of choice was sugar cane, but as the colony developed, other monocultures were introduced, such as cotton, coffee and others.

In this sense, the whole colony was organised around this project of civilisation. This choice would undoubtedly help to define the social, cultural and economic characteristics of the emerging country.

According to Tamás Szmrecsányi:

Large landholdings, export monocultures and slave labour were the three basic components of the social organisation of colonial Brazil.

They combined to form a typical system of exploitation of labour and nature on which all the economic activities of colonial society were ultimately based – from agriculture to mining, including the rare urban and commercial activities.

Other patterns could only be found in marginal and subsidiary activities – such as extensive cattle breeding in the hinterland or small-scale subsistence farming – activities that in no way affected the dominant features of the colonial economy (1998, p. 12).

In order to do this, Portugal had to organise a civilisation project in Brazil that could manage the settlement and colonisation of Portuguese lands in South America, especially in the Brazilian northeast.

According to Gilberto Freyre:

When Brazilian society was organised economically and civilly in 1532, it was after a century of contact between the Portuguese and the tropics; after their aptitude for tropical life had been demonstrated in India and Africa.

With São Vicente and Pernambuco, the course of Portuguese colonisation was changed from the light, mercantile to the agricultural; with colonial society organised on a more solid basis and in more stable conditions than in India or the African trading posts, it was in Brazil that the definitive proof of this aptitude was to be found.

The basis, agriculture; the conditions, the patriarchal stability of the family, the regularity of work through slavery, the union of the Portuguese man with the Indian woman, thus incorporated into the economic and social culture of the invader (2003, p. 65).

Still according to Freyre:

In tropical America, a society was formed that was agrarian in its structure, slave-like in its technique of economic exploitation, hybridised with Indians – and later blacks – in its composition.

A society that was to be defended less by racial consciousness, of which the cosmopolitan and plastic Portuguese had almost none, than by religious exclusivism, unfolded in a system of social and political prophylaxis. Less by official action than by private gun and sword.

But all this was subordinated to the political spirit and the economic and legal realism that, here as in Portugal, had been a decisive element of national formation since the first century; and among us, through the great landowning and autonomous families: plantation owners with an altar and a chaplain in their house and Indians with bows and arrows or blacks armed with arquebuses at their command […] (2003, p. 65).

Thus, based on the Portuguese decision and, above all, inclination to turn Brazil into an agricultural colony, several mills began to appear in the north-east and south-east of colonial Brazil.

With the intention of intensifying sugar production in Brazil, Portugal created a series of incentives for this activity to flourish.

According to Celso Furtado (1989, p. 41), the sugar industry was implemented with great difficulty because

The rapid development of the sugar industry, despite the enormous difficulties posed by the physical environment, the hostility of the forest dwellers and the cost of transport, clearly shows that the efforts of the Portuguese government are concentrated in this sector.

The privilege granted to the grantee to build mills and watermills alone shows that the sugar plantation was the one to be introduced.

Later, those who established sugar mills were granted special privileges: tax exemptions, guarantees against confiscation of the means of production, honours and titles, etc. In the initial phase, the scarcity of labour offered the greatest opportunities.

The use of indigenous slaves, which seems to have been the basis of all initial plans, proved to be impracticable on the scale required by the large agricultural enterprises that were the sugar mills.

Moreover, this activity had to be combined with slave labour, as the Portuguese settlers were not very fond of manual labour.

Slaves thus became an extremely important part of sugar production.

The Jesuit priest Antonil states that slaves, both indigenous and African, “were the arms and legs of the plantation owners”.

However, according to Eduardo Bueno (2003, pp. 118-119), they were much more than that:

Slaves were planters and cane cutters, foresters and seed sowers; they were cowboys, oarsmen, fishermen, miners and farmers; they were craftsmen, boilermakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons and potters; they were domestic servants and page boys, bodyguards, henchmen and bush captains; overseers, foremen and even executioners of other blacks.

Slaves were everywhere: in the cities, on the plantations, in the towns, in the forests, in the slave quarters, in the ports, in the markets and in the palaces.

They carried trunks, boxes, baskets, crates, firewood, sugar cane, delicacies, gold and stones, earth and rubbish. They also carried chairs, hammocks and litters in which their masters could walk (or even travel), sitting or lying down.

But in Brazil, slaves were more than that: they were the eyes and arms of the mine owners; they were the shepherds of the flocks and the beasts of burden; they were the shoulders, backs and legs that made the colony, and later the empire, move. They were the womb that produced an immense mestizo population and the breast that suckled the children of the masters.

They left a profound legacy: in 500 years of history, Brazil had three and a half centuries of slavery compared to only one century of free labour.

By analysing Bueno’s words, we can get a deeper idea of the importance of slaves in colonial society.

The most interesting thing is that colonial society increasingly became a hybrid society in which whites, blacks and Indians formed a true cultural melting pot that contributed to the ethnic formation of Brazil. This will be discussed in more detail in the next topic.

On the subject of slavery and its relationship to the sugar cane monoculture, it is worth quoting Celso Furtado (1989, p. 42), who makes us reflect on the relationship between production, the success of the colony and slave labour.

From the outset, slavery proved to be a condition of survival for the European settler in the new land. As one chronicler of the time noted, without slaves the settlers “could not sustain themselves on the land”.

In fact, to survive without slave labour, the settlers would have had to organise themselves into communities dedicated to producing for their own consumption, which would only have been possible if immigration had been organised on a completely different basis.

Those groups of settlers who, due to a lack of capital or the choice of an unsuitable geographical location, found it more difficult to consolidate themselves economically, had to make every effort to capture the men of the land.

The capture and trade of indigenous people thus became the first stable economic activity of populations not dedicated to the sugar industry.

It was this indigenous labour force, which was considered second-class, that made it possible to support the population in those parts of the country that did not become sugar producers.

As Celso Furtado tells us, we must be aware that the cultivation of sugar cane initially led to the creation of a parallel economic activity.

This activity was linked to the hunting of Indians, of which the captaincy of São Vicente was the most important representative. This captaincy thrived on the trade in Indians, who were considered second-class labour. Initially, however, the plantation owners did not have the resources to buy slaves brought from Africa.

The fact that the Vincentians enslaved indigenous people led to conflicts with the Jesuit priests, who had tried to protect the natives since their arrival in Brazil.

With the success of the sugar industry, large ‘shipments’ of slaves were unloaded at the main ports in the northeast. African slaves were more expensive than native slaves, but they were more productive and more resistant to the rigours of slavery.

To better understand the issue of slave labour in the colony, we present a fragment from the book “O que se deve ler para conhecer o Brasil”, by the historian Nelson Werneck Sodré (1976, pp. 74-75-78).

Slave trade and slave labour

The emergence of slave labour at the beginning of the modern era has not been properly appreciated, with an analysis of the reasons that led to the re-establishment of a form of human exploitation that seemed relegated to the past.

Efforts to recognise this emergence as an exact reproduction of what had happened in antiquity have been fruitless and have led to erroneous conclusions.

Overseas expansion and the discovery of new lands, which opened up vast opportunities for trade, brought the slave trade to the fore, making slaves one of the most important commodities of the time.

However, there were only a few areas in Europe where slave labour could be established, especially those that relied on supplies from distant lands. The struggles against the Arabs made the Iberian Peninsula, and Portugal in particular, one of these areas.

However, it was the colonisation of the overseas possessions that gave the trade an extraordinary boost, turning it into a leading commercial activity.

Colonisation, which suddenly appeared in the context of overseas expansion, showed the impossibility of the dominant structure in the metropolises tackling the problem of production where it was not a pre-existing activity.

Wherever it became necessary to build a production structure from scratch, wherever it became indispensable to colonise, slavery appeared as an important factor and fuelled the drive towards the slave trade.

The slave trade, in the context of the commercial revolution, is a very different problem from that of other times when slave labour existed and even characterised an era of economic development.

In ancient times, this form of exploitation of human physical labour was the generalised regime, a stage of historical development.

This was not the case in modern times.

On the contrary, the driving forces of economic development were interested in eliminating the residual forms of slave labour that still existed.

Overseas expansion and colonisation forced them to compromise with its reconstitution, now on different terms, by accepting slave labour as a peculiarity of colonial territories, destined to become a subsidiary component of the great transformation of the economy of the West.

Accepting this, they took the slave trade to an organisational extreme, making it one of the factors in the development of accumulation.

In order to fully understand the problem of the slave trade and the problem of slave labour in colonial areas, it is therefore essential to distinguish what was different about it from ancient slavery and its ruin with the advent of settlement, from which medieval serfdom emerged in the historical process.

Without distinguishing these forms of labour exploitation in their historical context, any study of the slave trade and the colonial slave regime is distorted and leads to false conclusions.

It is therefore important to distinguish between what was Portuguese and what was not, in the activity of the slave trade and the importation of arms to which it corresponded, in other words, how and to what extent the slave trade influenced the accumulation of metropolitan wealth and how and to what extent it led to the evasion of wealth.

Slaves were the most expensive commodity introduced into the colonial territories dominated by the Lisbon court.

Over time, however, Portuguese capital in the trade diminished, with English capital dominating the supply.

In the last phase, when it was on the verge of disappearing completely as a commercial activity, Brazilian capital was invested in the trade. The role and importance of the slave system in the colony must then be appreciated, since the productive structure that resulted from the need to colonise was based on it.

Being a fundamental part of this production structure, the slave regime determined its manifestations, and it was only as the field of free labour gradually expanded that other forms of production emerged and developed.

According to Nelson Werneck Sodré’s text on the “slave trade and slave labour”, the slave was the master’s most valuable asset.

The wealth of a plantation owner was not measured by the amount of land he owned, but by the number of slaves he owned.

Despite being the master’s most valuable asset, the slave was treated very badly.

Just look at the picture below to see how black people were transported from Africa to their final destination: Brazil.

According to Nelson Werneck Sodré (1976, p. 69):

Land ownership was not difficult to conquer, accepting the inevitable discrimination.

The land was donated, free of charge. But the seeds weren’t free, the mills weren’t free and the animals weren’t free.

From the earliest times, there was a fundamental difference between the sesmeiro, who was only a planter, and the sesmeiro, who was both a planter and a miller.

History and chronicles only recognise the latter as a type, but the former did exist. What were the reasons for their disappearance?

How did they disappear?

As the plantations developed, and with them the mills, the mills outnumbered the planters, i.e. there were many planters but few mill owners.

Necessity forced those who were only planters to take their crops to the mill owner, who bought them at his convenience. Over time, there was no place for planters.

This means that the planters were gradually replaced by the mill owners, who virtually monopolised sugar production.

This replacement, through the monopoly of the plantation lord, would make it difficult to establish a middle class in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the free settlers found themselves exploited by the great lords, which made their agricultural production impossible.

It is believed that the implementation of this elitist, purely mercantilist system was responsible for the emergence of the embryo of a scenario that would only serve the economic aspirations of the metropolis, ignoring the initiatives of the small settlers established in the newly formed colony.

The refusal to encourage the emergence of a colonisation process that had the intention of populating and, at the same time, providing the conditions for the development of settlers of humble origins, eventually ceased to prevail, indicating Portugal’s intention to privilege the power of the great lords.

The occupation of the country was carried out using instruments that made commercial colonisation possible.

Thus, from 1534, the hereditary captaincies and sesmarias multiplied. Posseiros and aggregates from Portugal were among the crown’s top officials.

However, the model of large, monocultural, slave-owning estates established by Portugal ended up entrenching the power of the plantation owners and making life difficult for small and medium-sized landowners.

Those who couldn’t even afford to rent land gravitated to the mills, which were set up from the beginning of colonisation, as specialised sugar workers or service providers.

The need to control production through the sugar mill made it very difficult for smallholdings to exist, as they were detached from the production process and not intended for commercial purposes.

Nevertheless, a significant number of free men gradually became small farmers, alongside the traditional slave owners, in order to fight the land and diversify.

Traditional agriculture was regulated by the four seasons of the year (PRIORE; VENÂNCIO, 2006, p. 31).

The possibility of economic growth for small producers would only be possible through the establishment of cattle ranching in the Northeast of Brazil.

Livestock farming would allow the emergence of a new social class based on free labour.

3. The structure of the colonial economy was based on a tripod:

• latifundia
• slave labour
• monoculture

These three elements formed the initial basis of the colony. Without them, the colonisation process would certainly not have been successful.

In the next chapter, we will study the structure of the colonial sugar mill, stressing that this structure allowed the coexistence of at least three different races – Europeans, Africans and Indians – who, through their process of miscegenation, would give rise to the Brazilian people.

4. Slavery in Brazil

The first African slaves arrived in Brazil in the mid-16th century.

The blacks brought from Africa were destined for jobs such as sugarcane farming in the northeast and precious metal mining in Minas Gerais.

The total liberation of the slaves did not take place until 1888, with the passing of the Golden Law.

5. In this chapter you have learned about

• The idealisation of the Portuguese civilising project to colonise Brazil.
• The institution of sugarcane monoculture, slave labour and latifundia as the basis for the process of settlement and colonisation of Brazil.

See the following periods in the history of colonial Brazil:

1. Brazilian Independence – Breakdown of colonial ties in Brazil
2. Portuguese Empire in Brazil – Portuguese royal family in Brazil
3. Transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil
4. Foundation of the city of São Paulo and the Bandeirantes
5. Transition from colonial to imperial Brazil
6. Colonial sugar mills in Brazil
7. Monoculture, slave labour and latifundia in colonial Brazil
8. The establishment of the General Government in Brazil and the founding of Salvador
9. Portuguese maritime expansion and the conquest of Brazil
10. Occupation of the African coast, the Atlantic islands and the voyage of Vasco da Gama
11. Pedro Álvares Cabral’s expedition and the conquest of Brazil
12. Pre-colonial Brazil – The forgotten years
13. Establishment of the Portuguese Colony in Brazil
14. Periods in the history of colonial Brazil
15. Historical periods of Brazil

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