Large landholdings, export monoculture and slave labour were the three fundamental components of Colonial Brazil’s social organisation.

They combined into a typical system of exploitation of labour and nature, on which all the economic activities of colonial society ended up being based – from farming to mining, including the rare urban and mercantile activities.

Different patterns could only be found in marginal and subsidiary activities – such as extensive cattle-raising in the hinterlands or small subsistence crops – activities that in no way affected the dominant attributes of the colonial economy (1998, p. 12).

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

In São Vicente and Pernambuco, the course of Portuguese colonisation changed from the easy, mercantile to the agricultural; colonial society was organised on a more solid basis and in more stable conditions than in India or the African trading posts.

The base, agriculture; the conditions, the patriarchal stability of the family, the regularity of labour 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).

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

A society that would develop defended less by race consciousness, almost none of which existed in cosmopolitan and plastic Portuguese, than by religious exclusivism unfolded in a system of social and political prophylaxis. Less by official action than by private arm and sword.

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

The rapid development of the sugar industry, despite the enormous difficulties arising from the physical environment, the hostility of the forest dweller and the cost of transport, clearly indicates that the efforts of the Portuguese government will be concentrated in this sector.

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

Subsequently, special favours were granted to those who set up sugar mills: tax exemptions, guarantees against the seizure of production tools, honours and titles, etc. The greatest possibilities found in the initial stage came from the scarcity of labour.

The use of indigenous slaves, on which all the initial plans were apparently based, turned out to be unfeasible on the scale required by the large-scale agricultural enterprises that were the sugar mills.

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

In fact, in order to survive without slave labour, the settlers 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 shortage of capital or the choice of an unsuitable geographical base, 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 came to constitute the first stable economic activity of population groups not dedicated to the sugar industry.

It was this indigenous labour force, considered second class, that made it possible to sustain the population groups located in those parts of the country that had not become sugar producers.

Black Trafficking and Slave Labour 

The appearance of slave labour at the beginning of the Modern Age has not been appreciated in its proper terms, with an analysis of the reasons that required 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 taken place in antiquity have been fruitless and have led to erroneous conclusions.

Overseas expansion and the discovery of new lands, opening up broad prospects for trade, brought the slave trade to the fore, making it one of the most important commodities of the time.

There were few European areas, however, where slave labour had succeeded in establishing itself, particularly that which was fed by supplies from distant lands. The struggles against the Arabs made the Iberian peninsula, and particularly Portugal, one of these areas.

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

Colonisation, appearing suddenly 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 the ground up, wherever it became indispensable to colonise, slavery appeared as an important factor and fuelled the impetus for the slave trade.

The slave trade is a very different problem in the context of the Commercial Revolution from what it was in other times, when slave labour existed and even characterised an era of economic development.

In ancient times, this form of exploitation of man’s physical effort was the generalised regime, a stage in historical development.

This would not be the case in the Modern Age.

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

Overseas expansion and colonisation forced them to compromise with their reconstitution, now on other terms, accepting slave labour as peculiar to colonial areas, destined to make them subsidiary components of the great transformation that was taking place in the economy of the West.

Accepting this, they took the slave trade to organisational extremes, making it one of the factors in the developing 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 between these forms of labour exploitation in their historical context, any examination of the slave trade and the colonial slave regime is distorted and leads to false conclusions.

It is important, then, to distinguish, in the activity of trafficking, with the import of arms to which it corresponded, what was Portuguese from what was not, that is, in what way and to what extent trafficking had an influence on the accumulation of metropolitan wealth, and in what way and to what extent it led to an evasion of wealth.

Slaves were the highest-priced commodity introduced into the colonial areas dominated by the Lisbon court.

As time went by, however, Portuguese capital was reduced, with the English dominating supplies.

In the final phase, as it neared its total disappearance as a trading activity, Brazilian capital was invested in the trade. The role and importance of the slave regime in the colony must then be appreciated, since it was the basis for the production structure that arose from the need to colonise.

Having been a basic part of this production structure, the slave regime conditioned its manifestations and it was only to the extent that the field of free labour gradually expanded that other forms of production emerged and developed.

Land ownership was not difficult to conquer, accept that inevitable discrimination.

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

From the earliest times, there was a fundamental difference between the sesmeiro who was just a planter and the sesmeiro who, as well as being a planter, was also a mill owner.

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

How was it eliminated?

As the plantations developed, and with them the mills, the mills were more numerous than the planters, i.e. there were a large number of planters, but a small number of mill owners.

Necessity forced those who were only planters to take their crops to the mill owner, who bought them at his convenience. With the passage of time, there is no longer a place for planters.

The occupation of the land took place using instruments that made commercial colonisation possible.

Thus, from 1534 onwards, 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 property that Portugal set up ended up enshrining the power of the plantation owners, making life difficult for the small and medium-sized landowners.

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

The need to control production through the sugar mill greatly complicated the existence of smallholdings, which were disconnected from the production process and not destined for commercial purposes.

Despite this, little by little a significant number of free men became smallholders, in addition to the traditional slave masters, fighting against the soil and diversifying.

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