Capitalist Ventures in the Era of Second Slavery

Sugar and cotton contributed to the wealth of planters and their international associates, confirming the status of slavery as a profitable institution in both the West Indies and the United States.

How did Cuba contribute to the rise of the “second slavery”? The British occupation of the island during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) boosted agricultural slavery. During the eighteenth century, although Cuba was the only Spanish colony in the West Indies to produce and refine sugar, most ingenios were concentrated around the region of Havana. Not surprisingly, Cuban sugar production was not as robust as that of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, its French and British competitors in the region.⁷⁹ But in the last years of the eighteenth century, the number of ingenios increased in the western portion of the island and in the region east of the Bay of Havana.⁸⁰ When a Spanish royal decree of 1789 limited enslaved people’s working hours to between sunrise and sunset in the colonies of the West Indies, Cuban ingenio owners protested the order by arguing that enslaved people had to work by shifts day and night to keep the mills and boilers running during the harvest period.⁸¹

Cuba benefited from the disruption of Saint-Domingue’s sugar production between 1791 and 1804.

In the 1830s, a growing number of Cuban ingenios adopted high-compression steam-powered grinding mills. As more sugar could be processed, sugarcane plantations could also increase in size. Mechanization made all the stages of sugar processing faster and more efficient.⁸³ Nonetheless, this was a period of uncertainty for Spanish authorities. Not only did they entirely rely on the island’s fiscal contributions, they also feared external British or US invasion. In response, Cuba developed new local refining technologies to produce white sugar whose greater durability allowed the colony to increase exports. These developments were followed by the construction of a railroad system that facilitated the transportation of sugar from the ingenios to Havana’s large new warehouses and modernized wharves.⁸⁴

Figure 7.3. Ingenio Flor de Cuba, drawing by Eduardo Laplante, lithograph by Luis Marquier, in Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios: ColleciĂłn de vistas de los principals ingenios de azĂşcar de la isla de Cuba (Havana: LitografĂ­a de Luis Marquier, 1857). Via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license.

French-born artist Eduardo Laplante (Louis-Édouard de La Plante Dorson) documented Cuba’s impressive technological transformation in twenty-eight colored lithographs (among them figures 7.3 and 7.4) depicting the most profitable ingenios, which were published in an illustrated album in 1857.⁸⁵ The workforce in these mills was still composed of a majority of enslaved people.

Figure 7.4. Casa de calderas del Ingenio AsunciĂłn, drawing by Eduardo Laplante, lithograph by Luis Marquier, in Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios: ColleciĂłn de vistas de los principals ingenios de azĂşcar de la isla de Cuba (Havana: LitografĂ­a de Luis Marquier, 1857). Via Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license

Independent from Portugal in 1822, Brazil also entered the second slavery. During the eighteenth century, the then Portuguese colony became the largest slave society of Latin America. Favored by the halt of Saint-Domingue’s sugar and coffee production, like Cuba and the United States, Brazil participated in the new chapter of the development of plantation slavery in the Americas. Cotton production, although not comparable to the United States, developed in Brazilian captaincies of Maranhão and Pernambuco. Coffee cultivation started in the ParaĂ­ba Valley, in the country’s southeastern region, at the end of the eighteenth century. Cattle ranching also emerged in the south-central region of the colony, along with old and new crops such as rice and coffee.⁸⁶

Figure 7.5.

Although behind Cuba, after the rise of the Saint-Domingue Revolution, Brazil’s sugar industry resurfaced in Bahia, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro, and continued to grow during the nineteenth century.⁸⁷ In 1823, British traveler and writer Maria Graham visited the Afonsos’ engenho in the western region of present-day Rio de Janeiro, which by that time was operated by 180 enslaved persons and produced more than thirty-seven tons of sugar on an annual basis.⁸⁸ Likewise, French naturalist Auguste Saint-Hilaire reported his visit to several engenhos in the region of Campos de Goitacazes, north of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Among these large estates, there were several that once belonged to the Jesuits and another one owned by the Catholic order of Saint Benedict, which by that time relied on the workforce of hundreds of bondspeople. According to Saint-Hilaire, until 1769, there were fifty-six engenhos in the region, but in 1820 there were four hundred engenhos in operation.⁸⁹

Brazil’s coffee industry borrowed techniques from Saint-Domingue’s and Cuba’s planters. Benefiting from the increasing demand of North American and European markets that could no longer rely on Saint-Domingue’s supply, Brazil quickly saw coffee become its most important export crop in the 1830s. The development of a profitable coffee industry made Brazil the world’s largest coffee producer in the middle of the nineteenth century, surpassing the production of Cuba and Puerto Rico combined. Entire families of planters and slave owners made their fortunes with coffee production.⁹⁰ In the second half of the nineteenth century, Brazilian coffee estates comprised more than one hundred enslaved persons, a size comparable to that of the largest sugar estates once found in the country’s northeast and in the West Indies.⁹¹ At the height of the coffee industry during the era of slavery, large Brazilian estates could comprise between two hundred and five hundred enslaved workers.

Coffee was grown on mountainsides of the ParaĂ­ba Valley, a region located on the border of the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. Enslaved people cleared the forest and planted the trees. As the trees grew, bondspeople trimmed them to a height of six to eight feet to allow them to spread, facilitating the harvest process that occurred between April and September. Coffee trees started producing large red berries in four years and reached full maturity in six years. As emphasized by historian Rafael de Bivar Marquese, in the ParaĂ­ba Valley, Brazilian coffee planters adopted both the gang system, in which enslaved people worked all day picking coffee, and the task system, in which each enslaved person was assigned with a daily quota of berries to pick.⁹²

A series of photographs taken by photographer Marc Ferrez in the 1880s, a few years before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, illustrate the various stages of coffee production on plantations of southeastern Brazil. Under the surveillance of overseers in a period when massive flights from Brazilian coffee plantations anticipated the legal abolition of slavery, enslaved people most likely posed for these photographs against their will. In some pictures, enslaved men, women, and children display their working tools, such as straw baskets and trays, hoes, and wooden shovels, while defiantly looking directly at the camera (figure 7.6).⁹³ Although staged, these visual images provide a wealth of information not only about the coffee industry during the second slavery but also about the bondspeople who toiled in these plantations.

Figure 7.6. Marc Ferrez, Going to Work at a Coffee Plantation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, c.

Figure 7.7. Marc Ferrez, Picking Coffee, São Paulo, Brazil, 1885. Gilberto Ferrez collection of photographs of nineteenth-century Brazil, Series I. Marc Ferrez photographs. ID/Accession 92.R.14.-b15.14. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA, United States.

Figure 7.8. Marc Ferrez, Coffee, São Paulo, Brazil, 1885. Gilberto Ferrez collection of photographs of nineteenth-century Brazil, Series I. Marc Ferrez photographs. ID/Accession 92.R.14.-b15.16. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA, United States.

Organized in gangs (figure 7.7), enslaved people worked in shifts handpicking the coffee berries the entire day under the supervision of overseers and drivers. One photograph shows how young these enslaved workers were, among whom there were children and even pregnant girls (figure 7.8). Bondspeople transported the baskets filled with berries to terraces where the berries were washed and set out to dry in the sun. Once the drying process was complete, enslaved workers manually removed the shells to obtain the beans. The rhythm of this stage of coffee processing was obviously slow. But again, technology evolved. By the middle of the nineteenth century, coffee planters adopted water-powered shelling machines that sped up this stage of production. In 1866, US businessman William Van Vleek Lidgerwood, then based in Rio de Janeiro, patented a water-steamed coffee hulling and cleaning machine that allowed a dramatic acceleration in coffee processing. One photograph showcases the machine (figure 7.9) employed to wash the coffee beans. Yet, enslaved men and women worked spreading the coffee beans across large terraces to get them dried. After this process was concluded, bondspeople selected and weighed the beans, which were then ready to be brought to Rio de Janeiro for export. Ultimately, despite these technological innovations bondspeople provided essential the work to Brazil’s coffee production, in part explaining why Brazil was the last country of the Americas to abolish slavery (in 1888).

Figure 7.9. Marc Ferrez, Washing Coffee in a Plantation in the State of Rio, Brazil, 1880–90. Gilberto Ferrez collection of photographs of nineteenth-century Brazil, Series I. Marc Ferrez photographs. ID/Accession 92.R.14-b19.33. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA, United States.