Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil

Abstract

IN RECENT YEARS INTEREST in the early years of European conquest and colonization in the New World has undergone remarkable resurgence. No longer concerned solely or primarily with the effect of this process on subsequent national histories, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the role that the New World colonies played in the creation of an Atlanticeven a world-economic system. This resurgence of interest has resulted in lengthy and often heated debates on the nature of colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and on the dominant mode of production which prevailed in these colonies. Recently, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that the Americas, as a peripheral zone of capitalist expansion, experienced certain forms of coerced labor such as chattel slavery and the encomienda, both of which were necessary forms of colonial exploitation that permitted the formation of a surplus sufficient to make such colonial ventures worthwhile.1 A Brazilian scholar, Fernando Novais, has even suggested that European merchants seeking high returns on investments were responsible for imposition of the Atlantic slave trade and that the slave trade created African slavery in the