Cacao and the drogas do sertão in the Luso-Brazilian Amazon region (seventeenth to nineteenth century)

The chapter examines the exploitation, trade, and consumption of Amazonian forest products, known as drogas do sertão , especially cacao, from the seventeenth until the nineteenth century. From one side, it argues that since the late seventeenth century, the exploitation of the drogas do sertão , mainly through extraction and the use of the Indigenous labor force, connected the Amazon region to the global trade networks of medicinal products and the international trade circuits of chocolate production. On the other side, it engendered specific forms of expanding territoriality and labor regimes in the colonial Portuguese and post-Independence Amazonia.