Paisaje, esclavitud y medio ambiente en la economía cafetalera brasileña: Vale do Paraiba, Siglo XIX

Abstract

The article analyses the landscape and labor management devices adopted in the nineteenth-century Paraiba Valley slave coffee plantations. It argues that the presence of an enormous mass of enslaved Africans in a turbulent local and global conjuncture framed by world competition between different coffee producers and increasing slave resistance led planters to adopt measures of landscape management that closely restricted slave autonomy in the labor process as they tried to extract the maxim amount of labor from the slaves. The outcome of these forms of landscape and labor management was a process of unprecedented environmental devastation. At the time of slavery crisis in the 1880s, these historical patterns turned against slaveholders, who however managed to maintain dominion over the land by means of a specific reconfiguration of the forms of agronomic exploitation.