Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

During Brazil’s first decades of sugar cultivation, production was too small and the available investment capital from Europe insufficient to finance a large-scale trade in African slaves. The Portuguese in Brazil thus relied almost exclusively on forced indigenous labor until about 1560, when they began a gradual but fateful transition to Black labor that took forty years to complete. But once African slavery began to take hold, there would be no turning back. Brazil would eventually account for more traffic in slaves for plantation labor than any other country— roughly 40 percent of the total of Africans landed in the Americas. Surprisingly, given this, Africans were originally imported not as field slaves at all, but as manservants and as skilled workers, used in such roles as sugar master, purger (whose job was to remove impurities from the cane during the refining process), and blacksmith. But as forced African labor in Brazil came to predominate, most of the work performed by Blacks inevitably consisted of backbreaking plantation labor.