European Aristocracies and Colonial Elites, Paul Janssens and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 2005
There has long been a seeming contradiction in the history of the European colonization of Brazil... more There has long been a seeming contradiction in the history of the European colonization of Brazil; the senhores de engenho, the slave-owning, seignorial class of sugar planters that composed the colony's early aristocracy and which often wielded seemingly feudal power, ultimately owed their authority and position to the creation of market-oriented agricultural enterprises managed with considerable attention to profit and loss within an aggressive system of mercantile capital. While the sugar planters came to define and conceive of themselves as a nobility and sought to reproduce the privileges and style of life of the Portuguese titled nobility, in their origins, in fact, they owed little to the traditional Portuguese aristocracy. Nevertheless, their managerial strategies and conceptions of estate administration did not differ greatly from those of aristocratic large landholders in Portugal, except that in Brazil these reflected the realities of a colonial, slave-based agriculture which fostered racial as well as seignorial attitudes and, in the long term, encouraged attitudes and practices that proved inefficient or shortsighted. Nevertheless, their attachment to slave labour and their general concepts of economy were broadly shared by other groups in Brazilian society and as a colonial elite, they had only limited abilities to alter or influence fiscal or economic policies at the level of the state. The Brazilian sugar economy had begun to flourish in the mid-sixteenth century and by the 1580s Brazil had become the principal sugar producer in the Atlantic world. Centered first on the northeastern coast, especially the captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia, and later including areas near Rio de Janeiro, the industry between roughly 1570 and 1620 grew at a rate of five per cent per year, stimulated to some extent by the acquisition of land and laborers through conquest and incorporation of the indigenous peoples; a situation which paralleled to some extent the historical precedent of Reconquest Iberia. By 1630, there were some 350 engenhos or mills operating in the colony producing about 10,000 to 15,000 tons of sugar a year. 1 A general Atlantic depression (1619–22) followed by warfare and political turmoil leading to the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco (1630–54) and consequently to a partial disruption of that
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