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Colonial Commodities in Historical Capitalism: Brazil for Export book cover

1st Edition

Colonial Commodities in Historical Capitalism Brazil for Export

Edited By Gustavo Acioli Lopes, Leonardo Marques, Felipe Souza Melo Copyright 2026
296 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

296 Pages 24 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
From the role of sugar in the early history of the colonial era to coffee in the long nineteenth century, commodities have played a crucial role in the development of the Brazilian economy. Drawing on the history of commodities approach, this book explores both the external and internal commodity markets since the time that Portuguese settlers established new commodity frontiers to supply... Read more

Lists of figures, tables, and maps

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Toward an economic history of Brazil’s commodity chains: the environment and the development of historical capitalism

GUSTAVO ACIOLI LOPES AND FELIPE SOUZA MELO

1 Brazilwood and dyeing: a global history

THIAGO DIAS

2 Tapping the forest: the timber export economy in late-colonial Rio de Janeiro

DIOGO DE CARVALHO CABRAL, CAROLINA TORRES AND VERONICA MAIOLI

3 Brazilian sugar’s persistence in global context, 1500-1900

THOMAS D. ROGERS

4 From holy herb to pleasant commodity: Brazilian tobacco and the global Atlantic

GUSTAVO ACIOLI LOPES

5 Brazil and the Atlantic leather market: Production, circulation, and consumption (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

JONAS MOREIRA VARGAS

6 Cacao and the drogas do sertão in the Luso-Brazilian Amazon region (seventeenth to nineteenth century)

RAFAEL CHAMBOULEYRON AND JOSÉ MAIA BEZERRA NETO

7 The nature of money: Brazilian gold and the environmental foundations of historical capitalism

CAROLINA MAROTTA CAPANEMA AND LEONARDO MARQUES

8 The political economy of Brazilian cotton in the age of industrial capitalism

RAFAEL DE BIVAR MARQUESE AND MARCELO ROSANOVA FERRARO

9 Rice in southeastern Brazil: the case of the Ribeira Valley, 1801-1836

AGNALDO VALENTIN

10 The international trade in whale commodities during the rise of the whaling South Atlantic, 1750-1850

WELLINGTON CASTELLUCCI JUNIOR

11 The coffee economy in Imperial Brazil (c. 1800-c. 1850)

BRENO APARECIDO SERVIDONE MORENO AND GABRIEL GONZÁLEZ STERMAN

12 Brazil in the global circuits of commodification from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century

LEONARDO MARQUES

Biography

Gustavo Acioli Lopes is a professor of economic history in the Department of History at Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Brazil.

Leonardo Marques is a professor of colonial American history at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Felipe Souza Melo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History, University of Geneva.

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