124 CHAPTER 6 COLONIAL BRAZIL
attract settlers and defend their captaincies against
indigenous attacks and foreign intruders. One of the
most successful was Duarte Coelho, a veteran of the
India enterprise who was granted the captaincy of
Pernambuco. His heavy investment in the colony
paid off so well that by 1575, his son was the richest
man in Brazil, collecting large amounts in quitrents
(rents paid in lieu of feudal services) from the fi fty
sugar mills of the province and himself exporting
more than fi fty shiploads of sugar a year.
By the mid-sixteenth century, sugar had re-
placed brazilwood as the foundation of the Brazil-
ian economy. Favored by its soil and climate, the
northeast (the provinces of Pernambuco and Ba-
hia) became the seat of a sugar-cane civilization
characterized by three features: the fazenda (large
estate), monoculture, and slave labor. There soon
arose a class of large landholders whose extensive
plantations and wealth marked them off from their
less affl uent neighbors. Only the largest planters
could afford to erect the engenhos (mills) needed to
process the sugar before export. Small farmers had
to bring their sugar to the millowner for grinding,
paying one-fourth to one-third of the harvest for
the privilege. Because Europe’s apparently insatia-
ble demand for sugar yielded quick and large prof-
its, planters had no incentive to diversify crops, and
food agriculture was largely limited to small farms.
Although the basic techniques of sugar mak-
ing remained relatively unchanged from the late
sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the repu-
tation of the Brazilian sugar industry for being tra-
ditional and backward appears unjustifi ed. In the
seventeenth century, the Brazilian system was con-
sidered a model, and other powers sought to copy it.
Not until the mid-eighteenth century, when declin-
ing demand and prices for Brazilian sugar produced
a crisis and Brazil’s Caribbean rivals developed some
new techniques, did that reputation for backward-
ness arise, and even then, according to historian
Stuart Schwartz, “the charge was undeserved.”
PORTUGAL’S INDIGENOUS POLICY
The problem of labor was fi rst met by raids on local
villages, the raiders returning with trains of cap-
tives, who were sold to planters and other employ-
ers of labor. These aggressions were the primary
cause of the chronic warfare between indigenous
peoples and the Portuguese. But this labor was
unsatisfactory from an economic point of view
because the natives lacked any tradition of organ-
ized work of the kind required by plantation agri-
culture, were especially susceptible to Old World
diseases to which they had no acquired immunity,
and offered many forms of resistance, ranging from
attempts at escape to suicide. (In this last respect, of
course, their response did not differ from that of the
African slaves who gradually replaced them.)
As a result, after 1550, planters turned in-
creasingly to the use of black slave labor imported
from Africa. But the supply of black slaves was
often cut off or sharply reduced by the activity of
Dutch pirates and other foreign foes, and BrazilianSoldiers of mixed racial background, like this mu-
latto soldier, played a large role in expeditions into
the Brazilian interior in search of gold, indigenous
slaves, and runaway black slaves. [Albert Eckhout,
A Mulatto Soldier, 1640. © The National Museum of Denmark,
Department of Ethnography. Photographer: Lennart Larsen]