O Engenho de açúcar: André João Antonil and the Anatomy of the Seventeenth-Century Brazilian Slave Plantation

Abstract

Jesuit João André Antonil’s Cultura e Opulência do Brasil is perhaps the first comprehensive treatise on slave plantation agriculture in the Americas. However, it is neither a manual nor an economic analysis. Rather, it is a moral and ethical guide for the administration of a sugar mill. This article examines the concepts, categories of thought, structures of meaning, and interpretive strategies through which Antonil comprehends the process of commodity production for the world market on the slave engenho. Antonil’s conceptual horizon was constrained by the Jesuit synthesis of Aristotelean thought and post-Tridentine Christian doctrine and the conception of the Last Judgement as the end of historical time. Consequently, he could not conceptualize the modernity of Atlantic slavery, the world market, and the plantation as a new temporality. Instead, he analyzes the engenho through the Aristotelean concept of oikos or household. The categories of thought and action through which Antonil comprehends the slave plantation and world market reveal the contradictory relation between slave production and the world market in the Iberian Atlantic.