The Slave Economy of Nineteenth Century Bahia: Export Agriculture and Local Market in the Reconcavo, 1780-1860

614 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991.A narrowly "plantationist" perspective has long dominated the social and economic historiography of colonial and nineteenth-century Brazil. Historians have focused their attention on the "plantation"--the large estate that employed slave labor in the extensive production of a single export staple--and, by extension, on the trade in export staples. Scholars working within this perspective have generally assumed that no significant local markets could have developed in an export economy based on slave labor.This dissertation challenges those views through a case study of the Bahian Reconcavo. One of the birthplaces of planatation agriculture in the New World, the Reconcavo in the years 1780-1860 remained a major producer of sugar for overseas markets. Indeed, the spread of plantation agriculture within the region led to a large increase in sugar production. The Reconcavo also supplied nearly all the tobacco Brazil exported. Yet, even when applied to this archetypical plantation region, the "plantationist" perspective proves inadequate. A large urban and rural market for locally produced cassava (the chief breadstuff in the local diet) had developed in the Reconcavo. Owners of sugar plantations regularly bought large amounts of cassava flour to feed their slaves. The use of slave labor in highly specialized export agriculture, instead of forestalling the development of a local market, encouraged hundreds of small farmers to harvest marketable surpluses of cassava. Not isolated peasants, these farmers often owned their own slaves. Production of cassava flour increased in the early nineteenth century despite real growth in the export economy (increases in the volume of commodities shipped overseas and in the value of exports).The "plantationist" perspective also fails to account for the fundamental differences between sugar and tobacco production in the Reconcavo. Although tobacco was also an export staple, the tobacco farms were not simply smaller versions of sugar plantations. Bahian tobacco farmers relied not on the transatlantic slave trade, but rather chiefly on the natural growth of the slave population to obtain labor. Where sugar production was characterized by extensive monoculture, tobacco farmers practised a form of mixed husbandry and rotated tobacco with food crops. They were thus able to harvest large marketable surpluses of cassava. The differences between sugar and tobacco--in labor recruitment, field techniques, patterns of landholding, and estate management--point to the existence of different agrarian systems within slave-based export agriculture.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Et in Arcadia ego: West Indian planters in glory, 1674–1784

The decline of West Indian planters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was both remarkable and, to an extent, inexplicable outside the context of a determined abolitionist onslaught against them. During the eighteenth century, planters in the biggest and most important West Indian colony, Jamaica, created a highly profitable plantation economy in which annual returns on investment were satisfactorily high, debt levels manageable, and productivity rapidly improving. Jamaica on the eve of the American Revolution was one of the wealthiest places in the world. Planters were justified in thinking the future for their colony, for slavery, and for the plantation system was rosy in both the short and long term. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Rootstock influences the effect of grapevine leafroll‐associated viruses on berry development and metabolism via abscisic acid signalling

Grapevine leafroll‐associated virus (GLRaV) infections are accompanied by symptoms influenced by host genotype, rootstock, environment, and which individual or combination of GLRaVs is present. Using a dedicated experimental vineyard, we studied the responses to GLRaVs in ripening berries from Cabernet Franc grapevines grafted to different rootstocks and with zero, one, or pairs of leafroll infection(s). RNA sequencing data were mapped to a high‐quality Cabernet Franc genome reference assembled to carry out this study and integrated with hormone and metabolite abundance data. This study characterized conserved and condition‐dependent responses to GLRaV infection(s). Common responses to GLRaVs were reproduced in two consecutive years and occurred in plants grafted to different rootstocks in more than one infection condition. Though different infections were inconsistently distinguishable from one another, the effects of infections in plants grafted to different rootstocks were distinct at each developmental stage. Conserved responses included the modulation of genes related to pathogen detection, abscisic acid (ABA) signalling, phenylpropanoid biosynthesis, and cytoskeleton remodelling. ABA, ABA glucose ester, ABA and hormone signalling‐related gene expression, and the expression of genes in several transcription factor families differentiated the effects of GLRaVs in berries from Cabernet Franc grapevines grafted to different rootstocks. These results support that ABA participates in the shared responses to GLRaV infection and differentiates the responses observed in grapevines grafted to different rootstocks