Tecnologia e escravocracia no Brasil durante o século XIX: uma reinterpretação

Résumé

This work attempts to revise the existing historiographical assumption that slavery and capitalism were not compatible and that for this reason the slavocracy lacked a modernizing mentality. It isargued that the Brazilian sugar plantation system was a variant of the capitalist agriculture of the larger Atlantic world-economy. Furthermore, it is argued that the Brazilian slavocracy embodied certain characteristics which have traditionally been ignored by historians but should now be viewed as integral features of the Brazilian capitalist agriculture: a desire to invest in new projects, an ability to accumulate capital, and a willingness to risk capital in order to maximize economic gains. Admittedly, not all planters developed such a mentality. Between 1790 and 1840 Brazil went through a host of crises, especially in its export agriculture, which provided both incentives and the necessity for selective agroindustrialization in the succeeding decades. Two cases of slavocratic clans, one in Bahia and another in Rio province, were chosen here to observe the regional variations as well as to generalize the attitudes of the hegemonic elite at large. The Bahian and Fluminense cases were also contrasted, when and where schematically desirable, with the experiences in other provinces such as Alagoas, Maranhão, and São Paulo. It is hypothesized that capitalist agriculture based on a coercive labor regime as in the case of Brazil did not necessarily impede a modernizing process, but rather placed limits on its growth and diversification.