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The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands, 1595–1630

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2836808

1527-1900

Juan A. Giusti-Cordero,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

The Sugar Trade is a large book on a major topic: the trade in sugar between Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands from 1550 to 1630, a key period in the consolidation of the Atlantic economy as it evolved from an imperial to a global network. Classic works on Brazilian sugar production and trade by Vitorino Magalhães Godinho and Frédéric Mauro covered price trends and profitability, while Stuart Schwartz and Vera Ferlini delved into local and regional sugar plantation economies. Eddy Stols, David Grant Smith, and, more recently, Leonor Freire Costa and Christopher Ebert studied the trade's organization, financing, and participants. The Sugar Trade offers a critical synthesis of existing scholarship for the period and spans the circuit of the Brazil-Portugal-Netherlands trade.Moreover, The Sugar Trade highlights research that questions the familiar Mediterranean-to-Atlantic commercial transition. By 1500, the Baltic trade circuits displaced the Mediterranean in sheer volume and value: grain, lumber, and copper from the North were traded for sugar, salt, and wine from Portugal and its early colonies. There were long-established patterns in the Baltic trade, in which Brazil sugar was but a further phase. The “birth” of an Atlantic system centered on sugar must be taken with more than a grain of salt, literally. Thirdly, Daniel Strum dates broad-based sugar consumption not from the late seventeenth–early eighteenth centuries (as is often believed) but to the sixteenth, in the case of countries that were major producers, refiners, or reexporters such as Portugal and Flanders.The book offers a detailed, well-illustrated presentation of the types of ships, sea routes, cargo transport procedures, and shipping fees of the Brazilian-Portuguese-Dutch trade and explicates the practical strategies. Risk spreading was the norm, as it minimized loss in the case of sunk ships, piracy, depreciation, and price fluctuations. Larger vessels were preferred only if a full load was viable. Well-armed ships were slower and clumsier, and they required larger crews. Convoys were avoided, since assembling them in port usually entailed delays and forewarned corsairs or wartime foes. However, risky wartime shipments could generate quite extraordinary profits.Practical strategies and realities often blurred the very distinction between “Portuguese” and “Dutch” vessels: their multiple owners could be Dutch or Portuguese Jews based in Amsterdam (and the line between Old and New Christians was blurrier than commonly believed, Strum emphasizes). Amsterdam-financed ships often had Catholic saint names and a Portuguese crew, and they could even be integrated into the Portuguese fleet. Trade was carried out by individual merchants, and partnerships were multiple and fluid. Fragmentation of shipments and investment, overlapping roles, and staggered shipping routes were integral to the epoch's social relations (and complicate historical research!). The paper trail for most shipments was slim, as most business was done verbally by merchants and shippers who knew each other personally.Later chapters trace monetary and financial aspects: forms of payment, fiduciary media and credit, and the networks of overseas agents and merchants. Veiled forms of interest-bearing loans were common through silent partnerships with wealthy individuals who entrusted part of their capital to merchants. Bills of exchange rather than paper money were used, and the monetary system was “chaotic” (p. 423). Legal and cultural dimensions were critical. The complex networks of the sugar trade, and of Dutch-Flemish trade generally, were governed by customary law, which avoided lawsuits and attorneys and widely employed arbitration. Trust was rooted in daily, face-to-face contact, kinship, dense urban settings, and ample flows of information through correspondence. Like risk spreading and multiple financial instruments, these networks were a general pattern in Dutch trade.Exhaustively researched in regard to published works, The Sugar Trade footnotes the historical literature on substantive issues that Strum ably synthesizes for nonspecialists. In terms of archival material, the book's major sources are the Porto notarial records, which are not particularly useful given that decisions on Porto trade (as Strum recognizes) were largely made elsewhere, particularly Amsterdam. Strum also consulted Inquisition documents in Porto, Bahia, and Pernambuco.The major absence in The Sugar Trade is the slave trade. The book's passing references to the trade actually underscore how integral it was to the sugar circuit (pp. 289, 447, 499). And not only as labor power: trading in specie was common in Brazil, and enslaved Africans were often traded directly for sugar. Indeed, trading in slaves could be seen as just one more risk-spreading strategy. The period covered by the book was especially significant for Brazilian slavery, as it comprised the shift from predominantly Tupi to African slave labor. This transition was integral to transformations in the sugar trade network and in the commercial and political relations between the Netherlands, Portugal, and Brazil. Yet the compartmentalization of the slave trade tends to be the norm in European and Atlantic historiography.An international editorial team produced this boxed, large-format, quite readable book, which is superbly illustrated by nearly 400 artworks and maps on heavyweight glossy paper. The Sugar Trade was funded by the Odebrecht Historical Research Prize, a “genius award” of sorts of no preestablished amount that develops book projects as major-format publications. The Odebrecht Organization, a major player in culture funding in Brazil, is Latin America's largest petrochemical, construction, and bioenergy conglomerate. The Sugar Trade was published in Portuguese in 2012 and the following year in English translation.