The political economy of Brazilian cotton in the age of industrial capitalism

This chapter revisits the economic history of Brazilian cotton during the nineteenth century and reevaluates traditional and recent interpretations based on a new theoretical perspective. The research covers the cotton commodity chain, integrating the conditions of production in Pernambuco and Maranhão with the routes of international finance and trade and its main consumer markets between 1760 and 1888, especially the British factory system. This investigation differs from previous studies by integrating these multiple spheres of the economy and focusing on the environmental, material, and labor conditions of production on the plantations and farms, which have been relatively neglected by historiography. Second, this study offers an incorporated comparison of the cotton economies of Brazil and the American South, understood as mutually constitutive experiences in the formation of the cotton world market and, therefore, the cotton commodity chain. The history of the nineteenth-century Brazilian cotton economy requires a perspective that incorporates multiple variables and scales of analysis and integrates the production processes on the ground with the dynamics of global capitalism.