Slave labor and chocolate in Brazil: The culture of cacao plantations in Amazonia and Bahia (17th-19th centuries)

Abstract

This article will explore the origins of commercial cacao production in Brazil, specifically as it is linked inseparably to compelled human labor-first of Native Americans employed in the Amazon rainforest and later of Africans imported for regimented plantation fieldwork in Bahia state. Coerced or enslaved labor, both Native American and African, produced almost all the cacao exported from Brazil until the latter quarter of the 19th century. Although never used on the same scale as that employed on sugar and tobacco plantations, slave labor would play an important role in the creation of Brazil's cacao fortunes until the implementation of the abolitionist "Golden Law" in 1888. Even after chattel slavery's de jure demise, exploited and coercive labor practices remained common on Brazil's cacao plantations. This article will consider such topics as: working conditions of slaves and exploited laborers on cacao plantations in Brazil; the chronology, volume, and impact of the slave trade into Brazil; production synergies of sugar and cacao in Brazil; and the lack of a consumer market for chocolate in Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world. The link of slavery to cacao production in early modern Brazil is little studied in English-language historiography. The present article, based on extensive archival research and field observation on historic cacao plantations, is an attempt to address this scholarly lacuna and create some points of departure for further investigation into a field of fundamental importance to Atlantic World foodways and folkways.