PRESENTATION: DOSSIER – ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF SUGARCANE BRAZIL (16th–19th CENTURIES)

Resumo

This text introduces the dossier Economic and Social History of Sugarcane Brazil (16th–19th Centuries), which brings together five research articles and one book review covering different Brazilian regions—from the Amazon Valley through Sergipe and Bahia to Minas Gerais—across the colonial period and, with particular emphasis, the nineteenth century. Taken as a whole, the dossier highlights the plurality of productive arrangements and spatial configurations of sugarcane-based economies while reaffirming the enduring relevance of sugar within Brazil’s economic and social structures, especially in the 1800s. The contributions collectively map, first, sugar production in nineteenth-century Grão-Pará (Amazonia), offering a detailed profile of property types, asset values, labor composition, and the integration of sugarcane into polycultural regimes that combined extraction, food crops, and cattle raising; they also stress the large domestic demand for sugar derivatives such as aguardente and challenge the tacit historiographical assumption of a limited African enslaved presence in the region by demonstrating the centrality of enslaved African and Indigenous labor. Second, the dossier examines late-nineteenth-century modernization efforts through the case study of the Rio Branco central mill (founded in 1885) in Minas Gerais’ Zona da Mata, linking state-led reform agendas to the role of small and medium-sized mills and to infrastructural spillovers such as subsidized transportation. Third, two articles focused on nineteenth-century Sergipe explore the legal and social mechanisms underpinning property, authority, and inheritance in the sugar world: one investigates how a female plantation owner asserted seigneurial authority and defended—and expanded—her assets through land and property litigation (1826–1828); the other employs Social Network Analysis (sociometry and graph theory) to argue that land and mill transmission along the Vaza-Barris river relied on non-economic mechanisms of control in which kinship ties, family cohesion, and the pro indiviso legal regime proved decisive, making neighborhood recognition and co-ownership political practices. The dossier also includes a study of the “sugar notarial archive,” featuring the transcription of a 1735 Jesuit letter written at Engenho Sergipe do Conde, which underscores the research potential of the Jesuit records at the Torre do Tombo archive for both established topics (production, circulation, accounting, slavery) and emerging agendas (environmental history, historical ecology, multidimensional inequalities). Finally, the book review discusses an interdisciplinary work on sugarcane’s territorial expansion and socio-environmental impacts from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Overall, the dossier offers a layered account of the sugar sector’s complexity by integrating economic, social, legal, and environmental approaches, and it expands its reach through bilingual publication.