Brazilian sugar's persistence in global context, 1500–1900

Sugar production catalyzed Brazilian social transformation, settlement and land use, labor regimes, economic development, and political patterns, starting at the very beginning of Portuguese colonization in 1500. Its transformative power derived in part from its central economic importance to the colony and, in the nineteenth century, empire. As the commodity that outshone the Portuguese Empire’s Asian trade, outearned Brazil’s gold and diamond exports, and persisted across centuries, sugar demands attention to its production and sale over time. This chapter examines the pathway that connected cane fields to buyers of crystallized sugar for the long period between 1500 and 1900, showing the links between production and labor processes, on the one hand, and commercialization on the other. A stable production, transportation, and trade regime emerged around Brazilian sugar by the late sixteenth century, but it subsequently adapted to accommodate competition from the Caribbean cane producers, rapid technological innovation, and then competition from European sugar beet growers. Even as production methods and trade dynamics shifted repeatedly, a great deal remained the same at the local level of producing regions. For hundreds of years, sugar reliably generated profits and secured the hereditary power of Brazil’s lords of the mills.