Part I. Formations, 1500-1600 -- The sugar plantation: from the Old World to the New -- A wasted generation: commercial agriculture and Indian laborers -- First slavery: from Indian to African -- Part II. The Bahian Engenhos and their World -- The Recôncavo -- Safra: the ways of sugar making -- Workers in the cane, workers at the mill -- The Bahian sugar trade to 1750 -- A noble business: profits and costs -- Part III. Sugar Society -- A colonial slave society -- The planters: masters of men and cane -- The cane farmers -- Wage workers in a slave economy -- The Bahian slave population -- The slave family and the limitations of slavery -- Part IV. Reorientation and Persistence, 1750-1835 -- Resurgence -- The structure of Bahian slaveholding -- Important occasions: the war to end Bahian slavery -- Appendixes -- A. The problem of Engenho Sergipe do Conde -- B. The estimated price of white sugar at the mill in Bahia -- C. The value of Bahian sugar exports, 1698-1766
Summary
Colonial Brazil was a multiracial society, profoundly influenced by slavery and the plantation system. 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
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 581-592) and index
