Sugar Rush
International competition among European powers seeking to seize and control the new land shaped the expansion of slavery in the Americas, as we have seen in chapter 3, and affected slave trade operations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As the major European nations and empires fought to take over the new colonies as well as the slave markets in Africa, the Atlantic slave trade intensified. The number of enslaved people transported to the various regions of the Americas in each century remains approximate, especially for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on existing records, however, scholars have estimated that, in the seventeenth century, around 964,700 enslaved Africans were transported to Brazil, 327,000 to the British West Indies, 104,000 to the Spanish Americas, and 32,800 to the French and British colonies in North America.12Although the enslaved African workforce was employed in all kinds of economic activities, including mining and pearl fishing, the majority of these imports were intended to provide workers for the sugar plantations in the West Indies and Brazil. Portuguese traders, who initially acquired wealth in South and Southeast Asia, provided capital, credit, and technology for the development of this emergent sugar industry, which somewhat followed the preexisting plantation models that existed in the Mediterranean and had already been tested by the Portuguese on the islands of Atlantic Africa.
In the West Indies, as most of the Indigenous populations were exterminated during the two decades following the arrival of the Spaniards in Hispaniola, gold mining activity declined by giving space to the development of sugar cultivation. In his second voyage to the Americas in 1493, Columbus likely brought the first sugarcanes from Madeira to Hispaniola. By the 1520s, dozens of sugar mills were in operation on the island.
However, an economic crisis involving internal and external factors, such as the shortage of an African enslaved workforce and the competition with Brazilian sugar production, led to a steady decline of the sugar industry in the 1550s.13 Sugar production did not fully reemerge until the seventeenth century when the French took control of the western part of the island, which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Still, during this early period African slavery was not yet significant in the French portion of the island, as the number of enslaved people was smaller than the number of indentured servants transported from France.14Enslaved men, women, and children who toiled on plantations faced working and living conditions shaped by the crops cultivated, as well as regions and time periods. In Brazil, Portuguese demand quickly exhausted brazilwood reserves, but sugar emerged as another promising source of wealth. The Brazilian Northeast offered good soil and plentiful rainfall for sugarcane cultivation. Relying on their previous knowledge of sugar production tested in Atlantic Africa, the Portuguese introduced sugarcane cultivation in Brazil starting in the 1530s.15 Plantations established in the captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia, in the northeast region of the colony, were the most successful. As in Atlantic Africa, the greatest challenge for the development of sugarcane plantations was the need for a sizable workforce, one capable of intensive and long work hours in a tropical environment, especially during the harvest period. With its small population, Portugal could not propel the migration of its peasants to toil in sugarcane fields that required a substantial number of workers; exploiting the enslaved Indigenous and African populations was the cheapest and fastest available alternative.16
Until the end of the sixteenth century, enslaved Indigenous workers outnumbered enslaved Africans in sugarcane plantations in Brazil.17 As the Brazilian sugar industry expanded, however, relying only on the Indigenous workforce became unsustainable.
Native Brazilian populations had been decimated, displaced, and enslaved. Although the Portuguese crown prohibited Indigenous slavery in 1570, enslavement of Indigenous people through “just war” was still permitted. Thus, insurgent groups who fought and resisted Portuguese colonization could still be captured and sold into slavery as late as in the middle of the seventeenth century.18 Working conditions in sugarcane fields were atrocious, as we will see shortly, and the local populations, who had been unfamiliar with intensive agricultural labor, continued to resist enslavement. They attacked Portuguese settlements and fled to the interior of the territory, the terrain of which they knew better than anyone else.Ultimately, the available Indigenous population became insufficient to provide the required number of hands for the growing Brazilian sugar industry.19 The Portuguese realized that turning once more to Africa for its labor supply was the logical solution. They had already exploited the work of enslaved Africans on plantations established in the Atlantic islands along the African coast in the fifteenth century. They could also rely on sustained trade relations with West Africa and West Central Africa to provide them with the necessary number of slaves to toil in the sugar plantations of their only colony in the Americas. More important, to the Portuguese, the slave trade was a profitable business. Ultimately, purchasing slaves on the coasts of Africa (especially in the region of present-day Angola) and transporting them to Brazil was more viable and safer than insisting on the enslavement of insurgent local populations who resisted enslavement in their homeland.