Twisted Roots: Producing and Reproducing Families, Labor, and Cacao in 19th-Century Bahia

Understanding the history and impact on economies, societies and cultures of the production of tropical commodities for export is one of the classic themes in Latin America history, yet historians still do not know enough about the lived experiences of those who labored on the properties where they were enslaved. Based on plantation records recently discovered in Switzerland covering the period from 1823 to 1853, this paper explores the creation of enslaved families on a Swiss-Brazilian plantation in southern Bahia as the production of timber and sugar was giving way to cacao. These records show that the owners of the Victoria Plantation outside of the city of Ilhéus, Bahia, were endeavoring to reproduce an enslaved labor force and that the roots of the enslaved and free Afro-descended families in the district at the end of the nineteenth century lay in those socially engineered families. The paper reconstructs those families and then uses the lens of the history of emotions to delve into both the impact of high mortality rates and the development of multi-generational families that grew out of twisted roots.