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

by Howard W. French

In remarkably little time, the conjoining of these elements (the boundless fertile land of northeastern Brazil, and the cheap and seemingly inexhaustible supply of slaves from Central Africa) produced one of the most spectacular events in the economic history of the early modern Western world. Starting from a paltry output in 1570, soon after Blacks began to be trafficked to Brazil in substantial numbers, sugar production grew at fantastical rates. By 1580, slave labor in the Portuguese colony already was generating 180,000 arrobas of the commodity, or three times the output of Madeira and São Tomé combined. By 1614, the crop had surpassed 700,000 arrobas, orders of magnitude greater than what those small islands had ever produced. Output would soon hit 1 million arrobas, or roughly 14.5 long tons. To modern ears, this may not sound like such an impressive quantity, but for its day and age, this was an unheard-of deluge of a good that was just beginning to wreak transformational effects on diet, economy, and society in Europe.