“Without Blacks, There Is No Pernambuco”: Racial Imaginations over African Slavery and Sugar Production in Portuguese Amazonia, 1670s–1700s

This presentation focuses on Portuguese racial discourses over the relationship between African slavery and colonial development in late seventeenth-century Amazonia. It argues that Portuguese settlers had racial frameworks that imagined Africans as particularly predisposed to sugar cultivation, and that a successful colonial project must rely on African enslaved labor. Through most of the seventeenth century, Portuguese Amazonia had a small population of enslaved Africans, relying on indigenous slavery and a small-scale economy primarily based on the extraction of the drogas do sertão, naturally occurring resources found in the region’s hinterlands. By the 1670s, we see an increased number of treatises and petitions discussing sugar production as the best means to develop Amazonia’s economy. My presentation looks at how these treatises and petitions responded to specific conditions on the ground, such as the destruction of early engenhos in the region by Amerindian groups resisting Portuguese colonial encroachment. Yet it also shows how these petitions reveal a certain settler racial imagination that linked the presence of enslaved Africans with colonial agricultural development. These ideas, most evident in a 1684 treatise by the Portuguese vassal João de Moura, emphasized that sugar cultivation was possible through the work of enslaved Africans. These writings often credited the success of the sugar-producing economies of Pernambuco and Bahia to the institution of African slavery, while attributing Amazonia’s underdevelopment to its reliance on Amerindian enslavement and extractive economy. This presentation focuses on settler petitions, missionary letters, and in particular João de Moura’s 1684 treatise, to unpack these racial discourses that imagined African slavery as essential to the ‘conservation and augmentation’ of Portuguese Amazonia.