Tim Walker - Slave Labor and Chocolate in Brazil

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Slave Labor and Chocolate in

Brazil: The Culture of Cacao
Plantations in Amazonia and
Bahia (17th–19th Centuries)
a
Timothy Walker
a
Department of History , University of
Massachusetts Dartmouth , North Dartmouth ,
Massachusetts , USA
Published online: 06 Jun 2007.
To cite this article: Timothy Walker (2007) Slave Labor and Chocolate in Brazil: The
Culture of Cacao Plantations in Amazonia and Bahia (17th–19th Centuries) , Food and
Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment, 15:1-2,
75-106, DOI: 10.1080/07409710701260214
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07409710701260214
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Food & Foodways, 15:75–106, 2007
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ISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 online

DOI: 10.1080/07409710701260214
SLAVE LABOR AND CHOCOLATE IN BRAZIL: THE

CULTURE OF CACAO PLANTATIONS IN AMAZONIA AND
BAHIA (17TH–19TH CENTURIES)1
TIMOTHY WALKER
Department of History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth,
North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA
This article will explore the origins of commercial cacao production in Brazil,
specifically as it is linked inseparably to compelled human labor—first of Native
Americans employed in the Amazon rainforest and later of Africans imported
for regimented plantation fieldwork in Bahia state. Coerced or enslaved labor,
both Native American and African, produced almost all the cacao exported
from Brazil until the latter quarter of the 19th century. Although never used on
the same scale as that employed on sugar and tobacco plantations, slave labor
would play an important role in the creation of Brazil’s cacao fortunes until
the implementation of the abolitionist “Golden Law” in 1888. Even after chattel
slavery’s de jure demise, exploited and coercive labor practices remained common
on Brazil’s cacao plantations. This article will consider such topics as: working
conditions of slaves and exploited laborers on cacao plantations in Brazil;
the chronology, volume, and impact of the slave trade into Brazil; production
synergies of sugar and cacao in Brazil; and the lack of a consumer market for
chocolate in Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world. The link of slavery to
cacao production in early modern Brazil is little studied in English-language
historiography. The present article, based on extensive archival research and field
observation on historic cacao plantations, is an attempt to address this scholarly
lacuna and create some points of departure for further investigation into a field
of fundamental importance to Atlantic World foodways and folkways.
Keywords: Brazil, slavery, chocolate, cacao, colonial, plantation, native

American
In 1664, the Viceroy of Brazil, Dom Vasco de Mascarenhas,

wrote to a Jesuit missionary in the colonial state of Ceará, inquir-
ing about the possibility of introducing cacao trees into Bahia
from the Amazon rainforest, 2000 kilometers to the northwest,
Address correspondence to Timothy Walker, Department of History, University of

Massachusetts Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, North Dartmouth, MA 02747. E-mail:
twalker@umassd.edu
75
76 T. Walker
where the plants grew as an indigenous species2 (please refer

to map). Wild cacao originated in the headwaters of the mighty
Amazon River and grew in abundance along its tributary water-
ways, in the dense forests of “Amazonia” (a region in northern
Brazil that encompassed the states of Grão Pará and Maranhão).3
The following year, the Governor General of Brazil wrote from the
colonial capital at Salvador da Bahia to his subordinate governor
Slave Labor and Chocolate in Brazil 77
in Belém, capital of Grão Pará, to formally request that cacao

plant cuttings, along with directions for their proper cultivation,
be carefully packed and sent for transplant in the fertile hin-
terlands of Bahia. Cacao, he wrote, “would grow as well in this
province as in that one.”4 As an enthusiastic imbiber of drink-
ing chocolate (being convinced of this native American plant’s
unique health benefits), the Governor General wanted to ensure
a ready supply of the confection for his own table.5 However,
as the chief administrator of the sole Portuguese colony in the
Americas, he hoped to develop profitable mercantile cacao cul-

tivation in Bahia, as well, where a substantial enslaved African
workforce was already resident, and where colonial authorities in
Salvador could better monitor exports and collect lucrative duties
on the crop.
This article will explore the origins of commercial cacao
production in Brazil, specifically as it is linked inseparably to
compelled human labor—first of Native Americans in the Ama-
zon rainforest and later of Africans imported for regimented
plantation fieldwork. Coerced or enslaved labor, both Native
American and African, produced almost all the cacao exported
from Brazil until the latter quarter of the nineteenth century.
Food historians often consider the geographic origins and
intercontinental transplant of significant culinary commodities,
but rarely do they linger on the human exploitation and sacrifice
that was so often fundamental to expanding the supply of popular
comestibles in the early modern Atlantic World. Insatiable de-
mand in European and colonial markets for plantation-produced
agricultural commodities (sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cacao,
among others) drove the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The novel
foods and beverages that enlivened European tables following
the Columbian Exchange added great diversity and nutritional
advantages to the Western diet, but expanding the production of
those goods for a mass popular market was frequently achieved
only through brutal labor exploitation of non-Europeans. This
study will provide insight to the historical realities of cacao
labor practices in Brazil. On modern cacao plantations in West
Africa, these issues remain startlingly current—a grave concern
for chocolate consumers of the present day.6
The link of slavery to cacao production in early mod-
ern Brazil is little studied in English-language historiography.7
78 T. Walker
FIGURE 1 Slave market; Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, early 19th century.
Although Sidney W. Mintz discusses the intrinsic connection

between sugar and slavery in the British West Indies in Sweetness
and Power (1985), arguing that sugar production was the pri-
mary reason for the institution of African slavery in the western
hemisphere,8 the initial dependence on forced native American
labor in the Brazilian cacao industry—and later heavy reliance on
African slaves—has not been similarly explicated. William Gervase
Clarence-Smith discusses the matter briefly in a chapter of his
Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914, but no author has published
a systematic historical study of this important subject.9 Brazil, with
its unique socio-economic circumstances and historical trajectory,
is a case apart, not easily compared to conditions in the British
Caribbean. Studies by Mintz and Richard Sheridan,10 while useful
for gleaning an appreciation of African slavery’s importance
within the later colonial Atlantic sugar market, provide little help
in understanding slave systems on cacao plantations in Amazonia
and Bahia.11 The present article is an attempt to address this
scholarly lacuna and create some points of departure for further
investigation into a field of fundamental importance to Atlantic
World foodways and folkways.
Primary source research for this article was undertaken at
the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro (BNRJ); the Public
Archive of Bahia in Salvador (APS); the Public Archive of Ilhéus
(API); the Portuguese Historical Overseas Colonial Archive in
FIGURE 2 Clearing agricultural land; Bahia, Brazil, early 19th century.
Lisbon (AHU); and the Historical Archive of São Tomé and

Prı́ncipe (AHSTP). To glean a firsthand understanding of cacao
labor and production exigencies, the author visited working
cacao plantations in Bahia, Brazil (2003–2004; 2006) and in
São Tomé (2005), where basic traditional cultivation, collection
and processing methods remain essentially unchanged since the
nineteenth century.12
European-led cacao production in Brazil was not always
organized onto large plantations, but prior to the 1880s, the
cacao trade did rely universally (though not exclusively) on
compelled, exploited, or enslaved labor. Whether wild cacao pods
were collected in the Amazonian bush by Native Americans or,
later, taken from trees marshaled into neat plantation rows by
Africans or natives in Bahia, at every stage of Brazilian cacao
production, coerced human labor played a role in the gathering
and processing of this exceptionally valuable commodity.13 For
purposes of this article, “compelled labor” refers to workers not
necessarily owned as chattel property, but forced to toil under
threat of punishment or violence to themselves or their families.
These included, primarily, indigenous American peoples, but also
80 T. Walker
encompassed the coerced work of free blacks, mixed race laborers

and even European convicts who were forced to emigrate to Brazil
as punishment for crimes committed in Portugal.14 “Exploited
labor” connotes workers’ travail that was paid, but at very low
levels, far below the true value of profit that their labor produced.
Cacao laborers working under these conditions included Native
Americans, recently emancipated slaves, free blacks, and newly
arrived European immigrants late in the nineteenth century.
“Enslaved laborers” were property: owned, traded and worked
as human livestock. Full chattel slaves working in Brazil’s cacao

industry included, principally, Africans imported as a labor com-
modity, but many captured Native Americans, as well.
Although never used on the same scale as that employed
on sugar and tobacco plantations, slave labor would play an
important role in the creation of Brazil’s cacao fortunes until
the implementation of the abolitionist “Golden Law” in 1888.
Even after chattel slavery’s de jure demise, exploited and coer-
cive labor practices remained all too common on Brazil’s cacao
plantations.15 Moreover, because of the longevity of cacao trees,
much of Bahia’s cacao boom, which lasted into the late twentieth
century, was based on trees planted with enslaved labor prior to
abolition or exploited labor thereafter.
Bahia as a Slave Port: Chronology, Volume, and Impact of the

Slave Trade into Brazil
Strategically situated on the Bay of All Saints, Salvador da Bahia

was the Portuguese colonial capital of all Brazil from 1549 until
1763. This key port city was also the colony’s principal agricultural
hub for nearly three centuries, from which powerful merchants
shipped Brazil’s cash crops to markets around the world.16 Com-
merce in plantation-grown commodities made Salvador one of
the largest and wealthiest cities anywhere in the Americas from
the sixteenth century to the eighteenth.17 Within the global
Portuguese maritime empire, Salvador thus became a trade and
political center second only to Lisbon.18 Salvador’s prosperity, of
course, rested heavily on African and indigenous slave labor.19
The Portuguese first imported Africans as slaves to Salvador
da Bahia from Guinea in 1538. Legal slavery lasted three and a
half centuries. Brazil absorbed approximately forty percent of the
entire volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (the region that

would become the United States, by contrast, absorbed less than
five percent).20
Salvador da Bahia developed into one of the top slave-
receiving ports of all time. Between 3.5 and five million African
slaves entered Brazil between 1538 and 1850, when imports
were banned by international treaty.21 Approximately 1.2 million
enslaved Africans passed through the Bay of All Saints—that is,
between a quarter and one third of Brazil’s total intake of foreign
slaves, and nearly ten percent of the volume of the whole trans-
Atlantic slave trade.22 No other single port in history has ab-
sorbed and processed so many enslaved human beings. Following
the horrors of the “middle passage,” many Africans landed on
the quay at Salvador found themselves on the auction block at
the Mercado Modelo, the waterfront slave market that dates from
the mid-19th century (though humans had been imported and
sold on that site since the earliest days of colonial occupation).
From Salvador, slave agents redistributed Africans throughout the
Recôncavo hinterland (fertile territory surrounding the Bay of All
Saints), across southern and western Bahia, and into Minas Gerais,
as well.23
Why were the lands surrounding the Bay of All Saints such
an important destination for enslaved African workers? The
Recôncavo, colonial Bahia’s most fertile agricultural land, sup-
ported a vital plantation economy that specialized in the labor-
intensive production of agricultural products that were exception-
ally valuable on world markets: sugar above all, but also tobacco
and cacao. Demand for such luxuries—all stimulants—expanded
enormously during the 17th and 18th centuries. Consumers in
Europe, Africa, and Asia consistently bought as much of these
Bahian plantation commodities (or their by-products, such as
rum) as the available slaves could produce. Sustained high prices
created an ever-increasing demand for plantation labor that
caused multitudes of Africans to be taken forcibly from their
homelands and shipped across the Atlantic.24 The toil of enslaved
Africans thus supported the entire economy of colonial Bahia;
slaves performed virtually every type of labor in the Brazilian
capital territory, from the most arduous fieldwork to that of
skilled artisans and clerks.25 Their presence was ubiquitous in
every industry and, throughout most of the Recôncavo, in regional
82 T. Walker
FIGURE 3 Husking roasted cacao beans on a plantation; Recôncavo, rural

Bahia, 2003. (Photo by the author.)
market towns like Santo Amaro and Cachoeira, slaves formed a

heavy majority of the population.26
Because of its direct water link with Salvador via the
Paraguaçu River, Cachoeira in particular became an important
entrepôt for slaves. For nearly three hundred years, thousands of
African laborers were landed annually on the stone quay along the
Cachoeira riverfront, to be sold in the adjacent town square and
marched into the interior to toil in the plantation fields. Later,
with the expansion of cacao cultivation in southern Bahia, many
slaves sold out of Cachoeira and other nearby towns augmented
the labor force of new cacao plantations in Ilhéus.27
Thus, the wide availability of enslaved Africans in Bahia

contributed to the commercial expansion of cacao in Brazil. They,
along with indigenous American slaves, provided almost all of the
labor on Bahia’s cacao plantations during the critical founding
phase of production. The massive expansion of cacao production
in Bahia in the later 19th century was achieved with a mix of
enslaved, compelled, and exploited paid laborers, with economic
repercussions that lasted well into the twentieth century.
Early Commercial Demand and Production of Brazilian Cacao
By the middle of the 17th century, European fashion, both on the

Continent and in Spain’s colonies, had adopted the Native Amer-
ican practice of drinking chocolate, but had altered the recipe,
adding sugar and various spices—some imported from Asia (pep-
per, nutmeg, and cinnamon) and some indigenous to America
(vanilla and occasionally chilis).28 Spanish aristocrats and their
ladies fancied drinking petit cups of chocolate morning, noon,
and night29 (unlike their Portuguese-speaking counterparts,
among whom imbibing cocoa never caught on with the same
fervor).30 Between 1580–1640, when rule of the Portuguese state
and colonies was subsumed under the Spanish crown, New Spain
became one of the main regions that imported and consumed
Brazilian cacao.31 During this early period, native Túpi labor
gangs controlled by Jesuit missionaries gathered most of the wild,
Amazonian forest-grown cacao exported from northern Brazil.32
There was thus an obvious expanding commercial demand
for cocoa by 1665 and, to foster its development as an export com-
modity, the Portuguese colonial Governor General encouraged
systematic cultivation of cacao on Brazil’s proven plantation lands.
As the chief administrator of a colonial enterprise constantly at
pains to increase profits, the Governor General hoped to acquire
a larger share of the market for chocolate in the Spanish colonies,
Europe and the Portuguese network of trading enclaves across
Asia.33
By the time of the Governor General’s request for cacao
cuttings in 1665, the plant, harvested in the wild by Native
Americans under Jesuit direction, had been an important eco-
nomic commodity in Brazil for over a century (and would remain
so for more than three hundred years thereafter).34 Although
84 T. Walker
Bahia state would not develop into the primary location of cacao
production in Brazil until the late 1800s, two centuries earlier the
peripheral lands around the original colonial capital city became
the first region in Portuguese America where European settlers,
using compelled and enslaved workers, systematically cultivated
cacao trees. That is, in Bahia, Brazilian cacao was first planted and
tended as a crop, as opposed to being gathered from natural trees
growing in the wild.35
Systematic cacao cultivation in Bahia had begun on mission-
ary landholdings on the coasts south of Salvador in the late 1660s,

shortly after the colonial Governor ordered plant cuttings from
Grão Pará. However, these initiatives were modest, carried out
by the Jesuits for their own ends. The very earliest cacao grown
systematically as a commodity in Bahia was cultivated in Jesuit
missionary gardens at Olivença, Camamu and Canavieiras, all
coastal communities south of Salvador.
In 1679, the Portuguese Crown and Overseas Council in
Lisbon explicitly backed the Brazilian governor’s initiative with
a royal directive that not only authorized but encouraged all
Brazilian landowners to plant cacao trees on their property.36 The
number of colonial landholders who attempted to take advantage
of the king’s ruling can never be known, but certainly some
secular farmers in Portuguese America began to follow the Jesuits’
example and experiment with slave-based cocoa growing around
Bahia, having been prompted by royal permission.37
The sugar plantations and small farms that initially experi-
mented with cacao along the southern Bahian coast and around
the Bay of All Saints (near Recôncavo towns like Cachoeira and
Santo Amaro) in the seventeenth century would serve as exam-
ples for later large-scale production facilities that, in the 18th
century, were so important to the economies of Grão Pará and
Maranhão.38 In the later 19th century, plantation-based cacao pro-
duction dependent on exploited labor would become absolutely
central to Bahian commerce and prosperity.
Production Synergies of Sugar and Cacao in Brazil
Sugar and cacao grown side-by-side in Brazil quickly (and pre-

dictably) developed a strong commercial co-relationship in Amer-
ican and European markets. Elite consumers learned to combine
bitter natural cacao with a sweetening agent to make the food

more palatable. During the 1600s, Brazil was the center of world
sugar production; the Portuguese had introduced sugarcane from
Europe (by way of Madeira) during the first half of the 16th
century.39 Sugar planters concentrated their activities in Bahia
and along the coast of Pernambuco, in regions that were also ideal
for cacao cultivation.40 No plantation-grown commodity in Brazil
in the 17th century was more bountiful than sugar, after all, so
the synergistic commercial potential of that crop with cacao was
manifest.
Because of a confluence of environmental, historical and eco-
nomic factors—proper latitude and climate, rich soil, abundant
rainfall, and the presence of planters keen to engage their labor-
ers in the cultivation of these highly lucrative crops—sugar and
cacao production expanded in relatively close geographic prox-
imity in Bahia. Consequently, Bahia, Brazil became one of the few
agricultural regions in the world that could, from the 18th century
onward, simultaneously supply large quantities of the two essential
ingredients that fueled the burgeoning chocolate industry. Com-
modities exporters in Salvador da Bahia benefited profoundly
from this fortunate agricultural circumstance; in the 19th century,
they grew wealthy by sending enormous shipments of sugar and
dried cacao to supply foreign chocolate manufacturers.41
Sweetened chocolate, seasoned with spices from Asia and the
Americas, encapsulates the symbolic meeting of the Old World
with the New. European settlers first experimented with combin-
ing sugar and cacao in the colonial kitchens of Brazil and Central
America. This blending of new and old world plant products
created the widespread confectionary attraction of cacao and
vastly increased the popular market for drinking and, later, solid
“eating” chocolate. In the historical and gastronomical literature
of chocolate, far too little has been made of this momentous
bittersweet culinary and commercial encounter.42
Forced Labor and Cacao Production in the Brazilian Amazon
Coerced labor and cacao also have a long mingled history in

Brazil. Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century had, with notable
success, attempted to monopolize the cacao trade in northeast
Brazil (Ceará, Grão Pará, and Maranhão), but not through
86 T. Walker
systematic cultivation. Such was cacao’s abundance in the

Amazon rainforests that, instead of founding cacao plantations,
the Jesuits organized expeditions of knowledgeable aboriginal
workers to scour the interior jungle and riverbanks, gathering
the wild-growing indigenous foresteiro variety of cacao pods.43
These coerced native laborers, however, required a great deal
of autonomy as they fanned out through the forest to work.
Those who became dissatisfied with the arduous travail of cacao
harvesting could simply flee; after all, they were being forced to
work independently in lands that they knew intimately. Hence,

the Jesuits’ compulsion of natives to collect cacao in the wild
with little supervision was fraught with labor difficulties, since the
opportunities for escape were countless.44 Harvesting wild cacao
thus did not lend itself to the exclusive employment of enslaved
or coerced labor. Although indigenous slaves did participate as
porters in rainforest cacao expeditions, the Jesuits had to find
other incentives to convince skilled natives to collect cacao pods
without absconding into the bush.
Chocolate’s value was sufficient for the Jesuits to experi-
ment with hiring free native laborers to gather cacao. However,
free indigenous laborers demanded relatively high compensation
from the Jesuit brothers for cacao pod collection. Knowledgeable
rainforest natives understood that the Jesuits prized them for their
ability to consistently find the most valuable plants. The Jesuits
also recognized the Túpi Indians for their conscientious skill in
stripping only the ripest pods, thus leaving green pods to mature
for future collection.45 In practice, therefore, cacao expeditions
into the Amazon jungle frequently employed a mixture of paid
indigenous workers—“free” native laborers familiar with cacao
who received wages (based on volume and time worked) to locate
and gather the ripe pods—and compelled laborers or chattel
slaves to do most of the heavy unskilled work of carrying cacao
out of the bush, paddling dugout canoes, and making camp.
The Jesuits employed native workers (enslaved and free) for
processing and drying the seeds, as well, which the natives did with
notable efficiency and less wastage than newly enslaved African
workers or indigenous peoples from other regions who were
unfamiliar with wild cacao.46 However, poor wilderness working
conditions in areas that lacked adequate drying, processing, and
storage facilities inevitably resulted in some of the crop being
spoiled by rainforest dampness. Ultimately, the Jesuits’ unsys-

tematic gathering methods in the northeastern Brazilian jungles
could not match the efficiency of purpose-built cacao plantation
complexes, with their deliberate field plans and trained, regi-
mented laborers who protected the plants and processed the
cacao beans.47 Although carefully cultivated, shaded plantation
cacao trees did not necessarily produce higher quality fruit than
wild foresteiro plants or yield a greater number of cacao beans
per tree,48 sheer economies of scale and controlled forced labor
produced larger total crop yields at less cost.

In fact, the majority of cacao production in Brazil until
the latter half of the eighteenth century remained centered in
Amazonia, in the northern state of Grão Pará, in the hinterlands
of the regional capital, Belém. Native Americans, both enslaved
or compelled, provided most of the labor. Organized planting of
Theobroma cacao in Grão Pará began in 1678, following the arrival
of a royal order from King Pedro II in Lisbon, dated November
1, 1677, that mandated systematic cacao cultivation in northeast
Brazil.49
Jesuit missionary resourcefulness and a keen eye for eco-
nomic opportunity brought cacao production to northeast
Brazil’s coastal Maranhão district, as well, even in advance of
the king’s command. In 1674, João Felipe Bettendorff, admin-
istrator of the Jesuit missions in Pará, was appointed to direct
the newly founded Jesuit College of São Luı́s do Maranhão.
Bettendorff journeyed to his new post in a large dugout canoe,
carrying amongst his supplies cacao seedlings, part of a plan to
augment the fledgling college’s revenues. Coerced native laborers
in Maranhão planted and tended the seedlings; within three years,
the college had over one thousand cacao trees under cultivation,
from which the Jesuits would soon earn a regular income.50 Slaves
dried, packed and shipped cacao seeds coastwise from Maranhão
to Belém for export to international markets.
By 1678, expanding Jesuit missions had begun to send canoes
laden with enslaved native Indian work gangs far into the Sertão
(the interior of Maranhão and Pará) to collect wild cacao pods.
Such expeditions often met with difficulties when confronted by
roaming slave hunters and crown revenue collectors.51 In a rare
petition from Jesuit Padre Filipe de Borja to the Governor of Pará,
dated October 31, 1731, the missionary asked that the canoes
88 T. Walker
of the Jesuit College of Maranhão, while engaged in collecting

cacao deep in the interior along the river Solimões, may not be
“molested” by government agents, nor that their native Indian
“servants” be taken from them by meddling parties of slave raiders
(known in Brazil as bandeirantes).52
Jesuit attempts to make Amazonian forest-grown cacao prof-
itable persisted into the eighteenth century. In lower Amazonia,
the Jesuits’ laborers planted a cacao zone “consisting of 40,000
trees on the right [south] bank of the river, a little below Óbidos”
in the mid-18th century.53 Poorly compensated or compelled

native workers tended these cacao trees, spread broadly and un-
methodically along the river shoreline. Collection and transport
of the ripened pods using large dugout canoes (pirogues) was
thus simplified; merchant houses in the regional capital, Belém,
coordinated export of the fermented and dried beans. By 1749,
slaves had also systematically planted about seven thousand cocoa
trees in Grão Pará, generating admirable profits for merchants in
Belém and Lisbon.
During the reign of King José I (1750–1777), cacao produc-
tion in Grão Pará and Maranhão would expand enormously due
to the intervention of the autocratic Portuguese Prime Minister,
the Marquês de Pombal. In 1755 Pombal, his attention drawn to
the potential for profit through expanded agricultural commerce
in northern Brazil, founded a new monopolistic state-regulated
trading firm, the Company of Grão-Pará and Maranhão. Pombal’s
plan gave the Company a complete monopoly on the export of
cacao from Amazonia to Lisbon (from whence about two-thirds
was re-exported, mainly to Italy).54
Pombal’s commercial policy in Brazil was a direct attack on
Jesuit power and lucrative cacao interests. Shortly thereafter, in
1759, the Jesuit order was expelled from Brazil and all other
Portuguese dominions. The Jesuits’ Amazonian cacao lands were
incorporated into the holdings of the Portuguese crown in 1789,
but were allowed to deteriorate due to administrative neglect and
the lack of a disciplined, dedicated and, above all, invested free
local workforce. Enslaved workers from neighboring estates were
regularly told to violate the King’s lands and plunder cacao pods
from the surviving trees for the private profit of their masters.55
Under management of the Company of Grão-Pará and
Maranhão, Brazilian cacao exports after 1755 rose to constitute,
on average, more than ten percent of total world production,

a level sustained for three decades.56 Such a striking expansion
in cacao cultivation was only accomplished through dramatically
increased recourse to slave labor. By the late 18th century, planta-
tions worked by native American and African slaves in the Belém
hinterlands exported about one thousand tons of cacao annually,
drawn from an estimated 700,000 cultivated foresteiro cacao trees.57
By 1800, cacao produced with compelled labor was the principle
and most lucrative crop exported from Belém by the Company.58
During the six decades prior to Brazilian independence (1823),

cacao accounted for over half of Grão Pará’s total export earnings
(though much of this was not plantation-raised cacao; forced
laborers still gathered the majority of foresteiro pods in the wild).59
The extent or volume of cacao production in Bahia never ap-
proached such levels until the end of the 19th century, just at the
end of the legal slavery era, when Bahian cacao exports eclipsed
those of Amazonia.
Forced Labor and Cacao Production in Bahia
Already famous in Europe since the late 16th century as the

Portuguese imperial center for an extremely productive and
profitable sugar and tobacco industry, the remarkably fecund
Bahian Recôncavo benefited commercially from a combination
of factors: a critical mass of colonial settlers, good waterborne
transport networks, and a growing supply of enslaved African
and indigenous agricultural laborers.60 Bahian cacao produc-
tion, therefore, expanded using highly regimented plantation
cultivation methods—a system markedly different from that
prevalent in Amazonia: cacao gathered haphazardly by native
laborers in the wild.
Although cacao had been transplanted from the Amazon to
southern Bahia as an incipient cash crop in the mid-17th century,
exports began only in the mid-18th century: a cocoa cargo arrived
in Lisbon aboard a fleet from Bahia in 1750, and a foreigner visit-
ing Salvador in 1756 reported seeing slave workers stacking sacks
of cacao beans on the quayside, ready for lading.61 Secular Bahian
plantation owners based in the Recôncavo, if they experimented
with cacao at the behest of the crown, maintained slave-based
cultivation on a very limited scale until the mid-1700s.62
90 T. Walker
Despite its expanding value in the global market, large-scale

commercial expansion of cacao production in southern Bahia
did not begin until 1746. The earliest site was on a plantation
called the Cubı́culo, on the north bank of the River Pardo in the
municipality of Cannavieiras, approximately 300 kilometers south
of Salvador by sea. A Portuguese plantation owner, António Dias
Ribeiro, used seedlings brought from Grão Pará by an associate,
the French immigrant Colonel Louis Frederic Warnaux.63 Ribeiro
employed African slave laborers purchased in Salvador to cultivate
his large holdings with cacao trees that would thrive and, in time
(seven to ten years), prove profitable. From there, larger-scale
cacao cultivation spread into the coastal lowlands of the Ilhéus
region, north of Cannavieiras, beginning in 1752.64
By the 1770s, most cacao production within Bahia state
had become concentrated in the region around Ilhéus (prior to
1759 an autonomous colonial zone), and expanded tremendously
thereafter. The Ilhéus district benefitted from good navigable
waterways, like the Pardo, de Contas and Jequitinhonha rivers,
which gave access for cargo boats to plantation fields in the
interior,65 and a small port, Ilhéus town, that could accommodate
shallow-draft coastal transport vessels for the lading of cacao. The
first recorded cargo of cacao beans shipped from Ilhéus, a modest
consignment of 900 kilograms, left the harbor for export from
Salvador in 1778.66
During the 1780s, the Marquêz de Valença, then the
Governor General of Bahia, encouraged further cultivation,
introducing the culture of cacao at different points along the
coastal waterways that led into the Ilhéus district hinterlands.67
On August 5, 1783, the customs officer of Ilhéus port wrote to
the Bahia Governor to inform him that “the planting of coffee
and cacao trees, formerly unknown [in Ilhéus], has reached an
excellent beginning, with four hundred thousand plants” under
cultivation.68 Enslaved Africans and Native Americans performed
almost all of the labor of growing, processing, packing and
shipping cacao in Ilhéus at this time.
In the 19th century, then, Ilhéus was destined to become the
epicenter of cacao production in Brazil. The region lies more
than 1100 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro, but only about
160 kilometers coastwise south of Salvador da Bahia. For small
steamers or cargo schooners under sail, it was an easy one- to
two-day journey to take sacks of dried fermented cacao beans up

the coast to Salvador, the large commercial port and slave labor
entrepôt on the Bay of All Saints. There the cacao was loaded onto
ocean-going ships for export to processing centers and markets
in Europe and North America.69 Prior to the 20th century, all
Bahian-grown cacao passed through Salvador for export.70 After
all, the large merchant houses with links to international markets
operated from the Bahia state capital. Cacao production thus
never had a direct commercial impact on Rio de Janeiro.
Although the initial phase of cacao production in Ilhéus

would taper off by the 1820s, it revived strongly between 1836
and 1852, cultivated primarily by new German, French, and
Portuguese immigrants (and their modest numbers of slaves) who
were dissatisfied with the results of coffee growing in the region.71
Thereafter, cacao cultivation expanded steadily in southern Bahia
for the next seventy years; in 1890, two years after the emanci-
pation of Brazil’s remaining slaves, Ilhéus surpassed Amazonia
as Brazil’s top cacao-producing region. By 1900, southern Bahia
ranked among the world’s top cacao-producing areas (Table 1).72
Development of the Bahian cacao export trade in the 19th
century was hampered generally by chronically high export
duties and poor infrastructure; throughout the Ilhéus region
there existed few developed ports outfitted with proper wharfs,
warehouses and docks, even at the end of the 19th century.73
But more than anything else, according to contemporary local
sources, it was a shortage of labor (a falta de braços, or “lack of
arms”) that impeded greater expansion of cacao exports from
Bahia.75 This reality made slave labor all the more important
to cacao growers in Ilhéus. In fact, the tremendous increase
of cacao and coffee production in Brazil during the latter half
of the nineteenth century implied a simultaneous intensification
of chattel slave ownership.76 Booming cacao and coffee produc-
tion drove an expanded commerce in African slaves across Brazil
that only ended gradually, due to the curtailment of legal imports
of new slaves after 1850 and the subsequent arrival of a critical
mass of hundreds of thousands of free peasant field laborers from
northeast Brazil (Sergipe) and southern Europe in the 1870s,
1880s and 1890s.77
Properly cultivated and managed, financial returns per acre
for cacao in southern Bahia (the Ilhéus district) averaged three
92 T. Walker
TABLE 1 Comparative Cacao Exports:

Bahia and Amazonia (1778–1900)
Year Bahia Amazonia
1778 900 kilos 888 tons

1835 26 tons 2320 tons
1870 1435 tons 4191 tons
1880 1668 tons 3121 tons
1890 3502 tons 3385 tons
1900 13,131 tons 3085 tons74
to seven times that of other cacao-producing regions in Brazil.78

One contemporary Brazilian agricultural economist noted that
“the farming of cacao is the principle factor of the economic
wealth of the State of Bahia, and occupies the fourth place among
the principle export products of [Brazil].”79 Of course, following
the abolition of slavery in 1888, maintaining high profit margins
depended largely on keeping workers’ wages low and exploiting a
desperately poor labor force.
Conditions of Slaves and Exploited Workers on Cacao

Plantations in Bahia
Because Native American slave labor had proved problematic to

control in the forests of Amazonia and insufficient in number to
meet the needs of cacao plantations, the Portuguese colonists in
Bahia turned increasingly to imported African slave workers.80 As
early as the mid-seventeenth century, European settlers in Brazil,
bemoaning the lack of available manual laborers, slave or free,
had lobbied the governing Overseas Council in Lisbon to allow
the import of further African slaves to expand the plantation
economic base, thereby protecting the future viability of the
colony. The sympathetic and responsive Overseas Council soon
allowed for greatly expanded imports of enslaved Africans into
Bahia from the Mina and Angola coasts.81
One great benefit of cacao cultivation, from the perspective
of slave owners who constantly strove to employ their entire labor
force of slaves, from the oldest to the youngest, most efficiently,
was that the diversity of the intensive manual labor required to
prepare cacao beans and bring the product to market meant
that older, infirm slaves, as well as women and small children,
could be profitably employed in these tasks. Most phases of

cacao production—stripping the seeds from cacao pods and then
sorting, fermenting, drying, roasting, and winnowing them (so-
phisticated processing techniques which the Portuguese learned
initially from indigenous American laborers82 )—did not require
great physical strength; small nimble fingers of children were
especially useful for this type of intricate but not heavy toil.83
In a letter dated September, 10 1719, the Governor General
of Brazil, Dom Sancho de Faro e Sousa, wrote to the Portuguese
King João V to assert that old or invalid slaves were becoming an

economic liability for their masters, who no longer valued their
service and wished to manumit them, to be rid of the obligation
to feed, clothe, and house them.84 While such assertions applied
across Bahia for most of the heavy plantation employments slaves
performed, the concern did not hold true for cacao cultivation.
In the multi-phased production of fermented dried cacao beans,
delicate repetitive light work was central to turning out an export-
quality product for shipment to Europe. Children and older
slaves, therefore, were assigned these tasks, and slave owners
found that, by planting cacao on their estates, they could extend
the effective working lives of their chattel.85
A few early Brazilian government-funded and private studies,
published in the 18th and 19th centuries specifically to encour-
aged planters to cultivate cacao in southern Bahia, actually recom-
mended women, children, and infirm slaves as being particularly
suited to cacao production. Cacao was hailed as the solution to
the problem of an aging slave workforce (a result of bans on legal
slave imports after 1850)—the perfect crop to employ workers
who otherwise would have been useless in sugar or tobacco
agriculture, or any other heavy labor.86 Elite cacao planters in
Bahia followed this advice; women outnumbered men among
the slaves they purchased in the 19th century and, by the 1870s,
several hundred of their children (a third of the entire slave labor
force in the Ilhéus region) were employed in cacao cultivation.87
During the second half of the 19th century, as cacao cultiva-
tion burgeoned in southern Bahia, the families who ran about
two dozen large plantations, comprising well over half of the
Ilhéus district’s cultivated land, constituted the region’s elite
class.88 Thus, it should come as no surprise that these families
were also southern Bahia’s primary slaveholders. According to
94 T. Walker
the government census taken in 1872, the enslaved population of

the Ilhéus region numbered 1051 souls (eighteen percent of the
total Ilhéus population), over half of whom were female (555 to
496) and about a third of whom (365) were minors under fifteen.
Almost all of these slaves were either African-born or the children
of Africans (though a few were Native American or mixed-race
slaves), and nearly all of them were employed in cacao cultivation.
Although the “Law of the Free Womb,” passed in Brazil in 1871,
required that all children born to slave mothers would be freed
upon reaching age twenty-one, effectively this meant that, until

emancipation in 1888, cacao plantation owners could still exploit
the labor of all their slaves’ offspring. In the event, slave women
in Ilhéus gave birth to 587 children between 1872 and 1888,
providing a tremendous, nearly cost-free enhancement to their
masters’ workforce.89 Ilhéus’ elite families owned more than three
quarters of the district’s slaves, while the rest were divided in small
numbers amongst the roughly three hundred small landholding
cacao planters in the region—less than a third of whom owned
any slaves at all.90
Although humble free farmers commonly raised cacao prof-
itably on small landholdings, production economies of scale
did apply, especially where extensive irrigation works and water
management were necessary. Large plantations operated most
efficiently when the labor was carefully managed and divided into
specialized gangs. Generally, the lands of the largest plantations
were subdivided into working units based on the amount of land
each labor gang could manage: checking the trees, collecting
pods, stripping out the pulp-covered cacao seeds, repairing irri-
gation canals, and planting new trees. Each subdivision typically
had its own laborers’ quarters and overseer’s house; these tended
to be located near the center of the parcel that the gang oversaw.
During harvest times, workers transported wet cacao beans from
the subdivisions to a central processing area for fermentation,
drying, sacking, and shipment. In addition, specialized groups of
laborers performed all of the ancillary support roles necessary
for the functioning of the plantation as a whole: some cleared
land for new cacao groves; others built and maintained buildings
and transportation ways (wagon roads or light railways); some
worked as carpenters, teamsters, or watermen, while still others
maintained and operated the equipment for drying raw cacao

beans, readying them for shipment.91
On large cacao estates, workdays were highly regimented.
Overseers mustered their laborers at least once a day to issue
orders and check for runaways or malingerers. Hours were long,
particularly during seasonal harvests, when planters monopolized
their workers’ time from dawn to dusk. Respites were brief; the
workers’ midday meal was generally taken communally in the
fields.92 Even so, owners had some incentive to treat their slaves
well. During this era, labor was so dear in southern Bahia that
discontented slaves who fled their masters could expect to be
sheltered clandestinely by rival planters who promised better
treatment. Moreover, owners obviously stood to gain if they
provided their female slaves with favorable conditions—ample
nutrition, shelter, and support—to carry a pregnancy through to
a healthy birth.93
Working rhythms on cacao plantations in Bahia proceeded
steadily year-around. Two major pod collection seasons annually,
once in the fall and once in late spring, followed seasonal rains.
Cacao plants might produce up to three crops per year, but
pods ripened at different rates, so plants had to be monitored
regularly to collect the individual pods as they became ready.
Workers, whether slave or free, also had to remain vigilant in their
supervision of the cacao trees to ensure that troublesome animals
did not eat the pods and destroy a lucrative harvest.
Harvesting was a delicate process involving sure-handed ma-
chete work, so that pods were cut from the trees without harming
the integrity of the plant. The pods then had to be split open,
usually near the groves where they had been picked, and the pulp
and seeds stripped out of the pod shell.94 Piles of empty pod husks
were typically left in the fields as compost, or along carriageways
as fodder for cattle and pigs. Next, the wet, pulp-covered cacao
seeds were transported to processing areas—usually in baskets on
workers’ backs or, on larger plantations, in special narrow-gauge
railway wagons drawn by hand or draught animals.
The wet seeds next had to be left for several days in wooden
bins or heaped in palm-leaf covered mounds to ferment. Fer-
mentation periods depended on the type of cacao tree being
harvested. The wine-colored beans of foresteiro cacao, the most
96 T. Walker
common variety in Brazil, required a prolonged fermentation

period of six to eight days.95
After fermentation, the cacao seeds needed to be thoroughly
dried to protect them from rot. Typically, beans were air dried in
the sun, either in forest clearings on woven mats on the ground,
on paved drying “balconies” or “patios,” or atop raised wooden
platforms constructed specifically for this purpose. Some raised
platforms were built on rollers so that they could be retracted
under a roof in the event of rain. No matter what the drying
technique, workers (usually slaves) spread out the cacao beans,

turning and stirring them with wooden rakes until they were fully
desiccated. Sun drying was the simplest and cheapest method,
but also the least certain to completely dry the seeds. Rushing
this process could spoil the product; premature bagging of cacao
seeds that had not been thoroughly dried after fermentation
contributed to the rot that ruined a high percentage of Bahian
cacao.96
In damp weather, wet fermented cacao beans could also be
dried indoors on a long rectangular platform—a metal grid or
broad ceramic tiles built above a fire pit or furnace. Typically
the platform would cover a broad earthen pit through which
ran metal or ceramic pipes to convey the heat of a furnace; the
fire would be stoked by workers in a deeper pit on one end of
the drying platform, and smoke from the fire exited through a
chimney on the other end. Heat from the fire drawn through the
pipes warmed the tiles on which the cacao beans rested. Thus,
the beans were desiccated with a dry, even heat, with very little
contact with the firewood smoke that could penetrate the beans
and contaminate their taste. In the later 19th century, workers
began to spread cacao beans on porous metal drying racks (some
purely solar-warmed, others heated by purpose-built wood-fired
ventilating engines). Over time, as plantation-based cacao pro-
duction grew in economic importance, the methods of preparing
cacao for export became increasingly efficient. Compared with
the relatively unsystematic collection and processing of cacao
pods by Native Americans in the Amazon jungle, plantations
developed more profitable methodical ways to process and export
precious Theobroma cacao.97
Cacao cultivation in a plantation setting implied careful
husbandry of the trees, which are notoriously problematic to
grow. Fear of various insects, worms, foraging monkeys, rooting

pigs and cattle preoccupied planters’ minds, as well as poorly
understood diseases that could destroy plants that had taken
ten years to bring to peak pod-yielding maturity.98 Plantation
overseers in the late 19th century therefore watched carefully for
signs of the blight called “witches broom.” Also known as Crinipellis
perniciosa, “witches broom” is a fungus that rots the leaves and
stems of mature cacao trees. Plantation owners believed that,
if they could quickly uproot and burn any plants that showed
signs of the disease, they could prevent the spread of “witches

broom” to nearby healthy cacao trees. Even so, if not contained
and extirpated rapidly enough, “witches broom” could sweep
through entire cacao regions. Such blights periodically proved
very expensive to Brazilian cacao producers.99
About half of the cacao grown in 19th-century Bahia, how-
ever, came from numerous small farms run by a poor family
and perhaps a slave or two. Small growers could be free Afro-
Brazilians, mixed-race Euro-Indians, new emigrant Europeans, or
Brazilian-born whites, but all had little capital and few resources
to work their modest plots.100 Hundreds of families cleared and
planted small farms in the Ilhéus district during the Bahia cacao
boom time; many were squatters, some were tenants, while others
registered legal titles to small parcels of property. Unlike the elite
estate owners, they worked the land they occupied themselves
with remarkably meager tools (perhaps just a machete, hoe, and
spade), growing some subsistence foodstuffs and raising a few
livestock animals, and cultivating relatively modest numbers of
cacao trees as their main cash crop. Most did not own slaves,
but some hired local indigenous peoples as casual field hands
during harvest time. More often, small farmers pooled their
labor resources, helping out their neighbors at various tasks in
exchange for assistance in their own fields. They usually lived
next to their cacao groves in rough lean-tos or rude huts. To that
extent, their lives differed little from that of the slaves owned by
the local elites.101
Besides their slaves, elites exploited the labor of their small-
time neighbors, as well. Of necessity, small growers often de-
veloped commercial relationships with large adjacent estates.
Marginal producers rarely had the necessary equipment or con-
ditions to ferment, dry, and transport their cacao to market, so
98 T. Walker
they usually sold their crop of wet beans, freshly stripped from
the pod, to large estate owners who had facilities and laborers
to prepare the cacao for shipment. In exchange, smallholders
might receive cash, foodstuffs, manufactured goods, or credit
in a shop run by the large plantation owner. Such transactions
nearly always put the small-time growers at a disadvantage. Often
illiterate, poorly appraised of the market value for their crops and
with meager legal resources to protect themselves, small growers
frequently found themselves in debt to dishonest elite planters. In
19th-century Bahia, wealthy creditors frequently used the courts

to foreclose on loans and take their impecunious neighbors’ land,
incorporating it into their own holdings.102
Living conditions of enslaved laborers on cacao estates varied
greatly, depending in part on the size and wealth of the operation,
and also on the character and disposition of the slave owner.
Many small cacao planters owned just two or three slaves, who
usually resided under primitive rustic conditions that differed
little from that of their masters.103 By contrast, large 19th-century
landholders who annually sent hundreds of tons of cacao to
market might own a luxurious manor; their numerous slaves
typically resided in crude shacks, barracks or simple houses not
far from the main plantation residence. A typical large estate
in Ilhéus in the first quarter-century of the cacao boom owned
approximately 100 to 120 slaves; these workers cleared, cultivated,
maintained and harvested plantations that could comprise as
much as 8700 hectares of land.104
Lack of a Consumer Market for Chocolate in Brazil and the

Lusophone World
Ironically, despite being a world leader in cacao production,

cocoa consumption was not widely popular in Brazil, nor in the
continental Portuguese metropôle, nor anywhere else in the Lu-
sophone maritime empire. During the late 18th century, Brazilian
per capita use of chocolate was the lowest in Latin America, with
Portuguese colonists’ total consumption averaging only fifty tons
of cacao per year.105 Regardless of the considerable import costs,
Portuguese settlers much preferred drinking tea and coffee, a
habit they had learned in their Asian colonies quite early on,
during the 16th century.106
Favoring tea and coffee had everything to do with perceived

class distinctions and conspicuous consumption in the Portuguese
colonial world. Ever sensitive to matters of status and eager to set
themselves apart from the enslaved Africans, Indians and poor
European laborers who composed the great mass of Brazilian
society, colonial elites opted to drink beverages that, because of
their exotic Asian provenance and consequent inflated prices,
were considered more prestigious. Chocolate, an indigenous
American libation, simply did not have the same social cachet as
coffee or tea. Moreover, the hated Spaniards favored chocolate;

by selling them their cacao crop, Portuguese elites in Brazil could
profit handsomely, but they did not care to emulate their rivals’
consumption habits.
Brazilian native groups, on the other hand, were more fond
of drinking an infusion produced with guaraná, a common indige-
nous plant found in Amazonia. Guaraná is a strong natural stimu-
lant, containing a substance similar in effect to caffeine. Though
native peoples sometimes imbibed guaraná mixed with ground
cacao powder that they produced themselves, their demand for
chocolate was never commercially significant.107
Because of low demand locally among Europeans in Brazil,
therefore, during the colonial period the vast majority of Brazilian
cacao was produced for export. Most often in the 18th and 19th
centuries, plantation owners in Brazil shipped sacks of cacao
beans to Portugal with very little processing following the most
basic fermentation and drying process. In fact, until Brazilian
independence (1823), most of the cacao produced in Portuguese
South America was shipped directly to Lisbon, where it was sent
on for processing and consumption elsewhere in Europe. Only
a very small amount of the cocoa crop was retained and manu-
factured into confections for the domestic Portuguese market.108
Following independence, Brazil’s shippers were free to send their
cacao directly to Northern Europe and the United States; the
internal market remained miniscule into the twentieth century.109
Besides edible products, items manufactured in Brazil and
Portugal from raw cacao included medicinal cocoa butter, soap,
oil, and a chocolate-flavored liqueur.110 These luxury items, never
produced in great quantities, found consumers among elites
in Europe, Portugal and throughout the Portuguese maritime
colonial network.
100 T. Walker
Portuguese Transplant of Brazilian Cacao to Colonial West Africa
Just a few years before Brazil won its independence, in a re-

markable act of prescient pragmatism, the Portuguese monarchy
ordered the transplant of cacao seedlings from Brazil to the tiny
West African colonial islands of São Tomé and Prı́ncipe. João
Baptista da Silva de Lagos, Governor of São Tomé and Prı́ncipe, at
the behest of a royal order from King João VI dated October 30,
1819, accomplished the transplant of “boxes of small cacao trees”
from Bahia.111 This commercial coup was completed by 1820,

two years before Brazil severed sovereign ties with Portugal. In
his report, Governor Silva de Lagos claimed that the marvelously
fecund equatorial volcanic soil of São Tomé “embraced” the
Bahian plants; he predicted that, in time, given the “foreign
demand” for cacao, its large-scale cultivation in São Tomé would
provide “great lucre” to the royal treasury and the inhabitants of
those islands.112
Portuguese authorities therefore became the first to trans-
plant the cacao plant to West African colonies. But the Portuguese
transplanted more than just Brazilian cacao trees to São Tomé:
Portuguese landowners replicated Brazil’s entire slave-driven ca-
cao plantation system and perpetuated it well into the 20th
century.113 Thus, for three generations, São Tomé and Prı́ncipe
became a major cacao production zone. In 1910, tiny São Tomé
was the top cacao-producing region in the world.114 By the
late 19th century, however, plantation-based cacao production
had begun to move definitively from the Portuguese islands to
the African mainland. Widespread cacao cultivation—relying on
enslaved or exploited workers—soon extended across immense
plantation facilities in coastal Ghana, Guinea, Cameroon, Nigeria,
Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, where the global production of
cacao remains centered today.115
The forced labor-based plantation system for cacao produc-
tion that the Portuguese brought from Brazil endures in West
Africa to the present day.116 The destinies of incalculable numbers
of African slaves have therefore been shaped by the trans-Atlantic
dissemination—and vast expansion in production of—cacao un-
der Portuguese colonial rule.
Cacao cultivation in equatorial northern and eastern Brazil
was of fundamental economic importance in several regions at
different times, but production in the peak growing areas prior
to 1888 depended on coerced or enslaved Native American

and African workers. Even after chattel slavery’s de jure demise,
exploited and coercive labor practices remained common on
Brazil’s cacao plantations. Through the exploitation of slaves
and coerced laborers, the early Brazilian cacao industry became
successful and profitable. The legacy of these labor practices is
evident across the “cacao lands” of Brazil—Bahia, Ceará, Grão
Pará, and Maranhão—where indigenous peoples and innumer-
able descendants of African slaves still make their homes. The
Afro-Brazilians’ critical mass and strong adherence to African

root traditions has allowed them to shape the cultural landscape
and foodways of modern Brazil in a way that is unique in the
Americas. As a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—supplying
hands to grow sugar, tobacco, and cacao—Bahia today pulses with
one of the most dynamic African cultural legacies in the western
hemisphere.
This brief article has provided only an initial look at the link
between slavery and chocolate in early modern Brazil. To fully
understanding the role of forced labor in the production of cacao
and chocolate in world history (indeed, to examine exploited
labor as a fundamental element in supplying world markets with
many luxury crops, both historically and currently), much more
detailed work remains to be done. Through new research I have
been able to offer a glimpse into the working conditions of slaves
and exploited laborers on cacao plantations in Brazil, noted the
curious lack of a consumer market for chocolate in the early
modern Portuguese-speaking world, and provided insight into the
transfer of plantation-based cacao production from Brazil to West
Africa—topics that heretofore have received almost no scholarly
attention, either in general English-language historiography or
in the more specialized literature of food history. By suggesting
some points of departure for further investigation into these
fields of research—subjects that are of elemental importance to
Atlantic World foodways and folkways—I hope to challenge future
researchers to continue this line of inquiry.
Notes
1. The author would like to thank the Center for Portuguese Studies and
Culture of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for financial support
that made possible some of the research used for this article. In addition,
102 T. Walker
the author is grateful to the organizers of the Boston University Symposium

“Chocolate Culture” for the opportunity to develop this theme for publica-
tion, to Dr. Louis Grivetti of the University of California Davis for support
through the Colonial Chocolate Society Project, and to professor Mary
Ann Mahony of Central Connecticut State University for her pioneering
work and kind assistance.
2. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move: The Portuguese in Africa, Asia and
America, 1415–1808. Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 1992, p. 155.
3. Recent genetic research has established the origins of all cacao in the
headwaters of the Amazon River. See Motamayor, J.C. et al. 2002 “Cacao
Domestication I: The Origins of the Cacao Cultivated by the Mayas.”
Heredity (89): 380–386.

4. João da Silva Campos, Crônica da Capitania de São Jorge dos Ilhéos (Rio de
Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Cultura, 1981), p. 126; cited in Mary
Ann Mahony: “The World Cacao Made: Society, Politics, and History in
Southern Bahia, Brazil, 1822–1919” (Ph.D. dissertation; Department of
History; Yale University, 1996), p. 77.
5. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society:
Bahia, 1550–1835. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p.
85.
6. Kevin Bales. 2005. Understanding Global Slavery. University of California
Press, p. 21.
7. One of the most comprehensive studies to date is an unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation by Mary Ann Mahony: “The World Cacao Made: Society,
Politics, and History in Southern Bahia, Brazil, 1822–1919” (Department of
History; Yale University, 1996). Among works in print, Ruth Lopez touches
briefly on the link between chocolate and slavery in Brazil in Chocolate: The
Nature of Indulgence 2002. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. similarly, Kevin
Bales makes a passing reference in Understanding Global Slavery.
8. Sidney W. Mintz. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern
History. New York: Penguin Books, p. 6.
9. See chapter 8, “Coerced and Free Labour,” in William Gervase Clarence-
Smith. 2002. Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914, London and New York:
Routledge, pp. 195–226.
10. Richard B. Sheridan. 2000. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the
British West Indies, 1623–1775, University of the West Indies Press.
11. Closer to the mark would be Stuart Schwartz’s work, Sugar Plantations
in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835, and his recent
edited volume, Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World,
1450–1680 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
12. Original nineteenth-century laborers’ houses, drying machinery and
narrow-gauge transport railways, in fact, were frequently found in situ, still
in use, in both Bahia and São Tomé.
13. Clarence-Smith, pp. 195–212; and Schwartz, Sugar Plantations. . ., pp.
338–339; 455–459.
14. See the excellent study by Timothy J. Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced
and State-Sponsored Colonization in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stan-
ford University Press, 2002), pp. 78–85.
15. Vivid first-hand accounts about life on Bahian cacao plantations in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be found in the works of
author Jorge Amado: Cacau (1933) and The Violent Land (1945). Though
fictionalized and interpretive, the accounts are taken from life as witnessed
by Amado and his family.
16. Ibid., pp. 67–71. In fact, much of Brazil’s agricultural wealth in the
nineteenth century tended to accrue to Salvador, long after the Bahian
capital had lost its status as the principle administrative hub of the country.
17. Ibid., pp. 22–26.
18. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations . . ., pp. 75–80.
19. Joseph Smith, A History of Brazil, 1500–2000 (London: Pearson Longman,
2002), pp. 22–24; 33–34.

20. David Eltis, “The Distribution of the Slave Trade in the Americas,” revised
manuscript copy of table 4.1, originally published in The William and Mary
Quarterly, January 2001. See also Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 210–211.
21. Eltis, ibid.; Klein, ibid. Abundant extant manuscript documentation
demonstrates the volume of slave trafficking into Salvador da Bahia. For
examples, see Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; Baı́a, cx. 76, doc. 5 (dated 13
July 1741) (AHU; Administração Central; Conselho Ultramarino; Series
005 (Baı́a), Cx. 71, D. 5965), and Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; Baı́a,
cx. 168, doc. 43 (dated 30 April 1769) (AHU; Administração Central;
Conselho Ultramarino; Series 005 (Baı́a), Cx. 162, D. 12353).
22. Eltis, ibid.
23. Klein, p. 198. See also, for example, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; Baı́a,
cx. 25, doc. 42 (dated 8 February 1727)(AHU; Administração Central;
Conselho Ultramarino; Series 005 [Baı́a], Cx. 29, D. 2624).
24. Joseph Smith, pp. 20–25; 33–35.
25. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations . . ., pp. 81–82; 338–339; 455–459. See also
Joseph Smith, pp. 23–24 and 33–34.
26. Joseph Smith, p. 24.
27. See Stuart Schwartz, “Brazil,” in Seymour Drescher and Stanly L.
Engerman (eds.), A Historical Guide to World Slavery (Oxford University
Press, 1998), p. 104. For comparison, see also Mary Ann Mahony, “In
the Footsteps of Their Fathers? Family Labor, Enslaved and Free, in
Brazil’s Cacao Area, 1870–1920” (presentation at the Boston Area Latin
American History Workshop; Harvard University, 16 November 2005),
pp. 7–8.
28. Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (New York:
Thames and Hudson, 1996), pp. 133–176.
29. See, in this volume, April Najjaj and Beth Forrest, Is Sipping Sin Breaking
Fast?: The Catholic Chocolate Controversy and the Changing World of Early Modern
Spain.
30. See Clarence-Smith, pp. 18, 21, 23, 30, and 35.
31. Coe and Coe, p. 194; Clarence-Smith, pp 7; 34–35.
32. Serafim Leite, S.J., História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (São Paulo:
Edicões Loyola, 2004), Vol. V, p. 262 and Vol. VIII, pp. 105, 238, 243.
33. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, p. 85.
104 T. Walker
34. Joel Serrão, ed., Dicionário de História de Portugal (Porto: Livraria Figuerin-
has, 1979), Vol. I, p. 419.
35. Leite, Vol. V, p. 262.
36. Arquivo Público do Salvador, Bahia; Seção Colonial e Provincial, Vol. Nr. 1
(Cartas Régias, 148–1690), ff. 22–23.
37. Paulo de T. Alvim and Milton Rosário, Cacau Ontem e Hoje (Itabuna, Bahia,
Brazil: CEPLAC [Commissão Executiva do Plano da Lavoura Cacaueira],
1972), p. 14.
38. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations . . ., p. 417.
39. Ibid., pp. 5–9.
40. Joseph Smith, pp. 21–24.
41. Clarence-Smith, pp. 109–111; see also Schwartz, Sugar Plantations. . ., pp.
417 and 429.
42. Kenneth Maxwell, Naked Tropics; Essays on Empire and Other Rogues (New
York: Routledge, 2003), p. 40.
43. Coe and Coe, pp. 193–194.
44. Clarence-Smith, pp. 195–196.
45. Ibid., pp. 204–207.
46. Coe and Coe, pp. 193–194.
48. Coe and Coe, p. 21.
49. Serrão, p. 420.
50. Russell-Wood, p. 155.
51. Leite, Vol. VII, p. 105.
52. Cited in Leite, Vol. VIII, p. 243. Original manuscript held in the Arquivo
Provincial do Portalegre (Brazil), pasta 176, doc. nr. 38.
53. Ministério da Agricultura, Industria e Commércio; Serviço de
Informações, “Producção, Commércio e Consumo de Cacão” (Rio
de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1924), p. 11.
54. Dauril Alden, “The Significance of Cacao Production in the Amazon
Region during the Late Colonial Period: An Essay in Comparative History,”
in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120:2 (1976), pp. 124; 130.
55. Ibid.
56. Clarence-Smith, tables, pp. 234–235.
57. Serrão, p. 420.
58. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations. . ., p. 417.
59. Russell-Wood, p. 171. See also Alden, pp. 103–135.
60. Joseph Smith, pp. 20–26 and 33–34. Colonial regulations for the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century grappled with the fiscal exigency
of taxing the ever-increasing volume of incoming African slaves. See,
for example, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; Baı́a, cx. 17, doc. 36 (dated 4
September 1724)(AHU; Administração Central; Conselho Ultramarino;
Series 005 (Baı́a), Cx. 20, D. 1753).
61. Mauricio Puls, “A Produção de cacau no sul de Bahia, 1850–1930,” cited in
Mahony: “The World Cacao Made. . .,” p. 77, notes 58 and 59.
62. Clarence-Smith, pp. 40, 44. See also Gregório Bondar, A Cultura do Cacau
na Bahia (São Paulo: 1938), pp. 8–9.

Informações, p. 13.
64. Ramiro Berbert de Castro, O Cacao na Bahia (Rio de Janeiro: Pimenta de
Mello, 1925), p. 10.
65. Gregório Bondar, Terras de Cacau no Estado da Bahia (Bahia: Typographia
de São Joaquim, 1923), pp. 20–21.
Informações, p. 14.
67. Ramiro Berbert de Castro, p. 11.
68. Cited in Ramiro Berbert de Castro, p. 11.
69. Clarence-Smith, pp. 106 and 110. See also Salvador port export records:
Arquivo Público da Bahia (Salvador), Inventário da Alfândega, Nr. 060.10,

“Mapa de importação e exportação” (1880–1889), and “Mapa de estatistica
dos produtos exportados pelo Porto da Capital” (1905).
70. Mahony, “In the Footsteps of Their Fathers. . .” (presentation com-
ments). Direct export from Ilhéus began only in 1925, when the port
entrance was finally dredged to accommodate deep-draft trans-oceanic
vessels.
71. Ibid., p. 12. See also Clarence-Smith, p. 110. Original manuscript docu-
ments referring to this wave of immigration may be found in the Arquivo
Público da Bahia (Salvador), Seção Colonial e Provincial, Nr. 173, ff. 57v
and 130v; and Nr. 423, pasta 8, Doc. 2.
Informações, pp. 3, 6–7, 14.
73. Clarence-Smith, p. 61.
74. Ibid.
75. Ramiro Berbert de Castro, p. 50–51.
76. Klein, pp. 197–198.
77. Joseph Smith, pp. 76–77.
78. Bondar, Terras de Cacau no Estado da Bahia (1923), p. 21.
79. Ramiro Berbert de Castro, p. 7.
80. Joseph Smith, pp. 23–24; 33–34.
81. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; Baı́a, cx. 1, doc. 79 (dated 16 December
1644)(AHU; Administração Central; Conselho Ultramarino; Series 005
(Baı́a), Cx. 1, D. 61).
82. Russel-Wood, p. 178.
84. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino; Baı́a, cx. 10, doc. 69 (AHU; Administração
Central; Conselho Ultramarino; Series 005 [Baı́a], Cx. 12, D. 1047).
86. See Manuel Ferreira da Camara, “Ensaio de descripção fizica, e economica
da Comarca de São dos Ilhéus,” in Memórias Economicas da Academia das
Sciencias da Lisboa 1 (1879), 304–350; Miguel Calmon du Pin e Almeida,
“Memôria sobre a Cultura do Cacao,” in Boletim da Sociedade d’Agricultura
da Bahia (1846), reprinted in the Gazeta de Ilhéos, October 16–30, 1904;
and Joaquim Rodrigues de Souza, Memôria sobre a lavoura de cacao e seus
vantagens principalmente na Bahia (Bahia: Typographia de Carlos Pogetti,
106 T. Walker
Rua d’Alfandega, No. 57, 1852). I am grateful to Mary Ann Mahony for
these references.
87. Mahony, “In the Footsteps. . .,” p. 1.
88. Ibid., pp. 1–3.
89. Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia; Registro dos Nascimentos dos filhos
d’escravas que tiverem occorido de 28 de Setembro de 1871 em diante,
conforme a lei 2040 d’aquella data. Cited in Mahony, “In the Footsteps. . .,”
pp. 2; 12–13.
90. Brazil, Directoria Geral de Estatı́stica, Recenseamento da população do Brazil a
que se procedeu no dia 1 de agosto de 1872, Vol. 3, p. 278. Cited in Mahony, “In
the Footsteps. . .,” pp. 1, 12–13, 18, 25.
91. Analysis based on observations of nineteenth-century cacao plantation

physical plant ruins and interviews with descendants of enslaved cacao
plantation workers made in situ in Bahia, 2003–2004, and in São Tomé,
2005. See also Lopez, pp. 19–24; and Coe and Coe, pp. 22–25.
92. Analysis based on interviews with descendants of enslaved cacao plantation
workers in Bahia, 2003–2004.
93. Mahony, “In the Footsteps. . .,” p. 7.
94. Lopez, pp. 19–20.
95. Gregório Bondar, Cacau Criollo de Venezuela na Bahia (Bahia: Imprensa
Official de Estado, 1923), pp. 1–3.
96. Ibid., pp. 19–23.
97. Clarence-Smith, pp. 207; 211–212.
98. Gregário Bondar, “Cacao; a cultura e as pragas do cacaoeiro no Estado da
Bahia, Brasil” (Bahia: Imprensa Official do Estado, 1922), pp. 2–18.
99. Lopez, p. 111.
100. Mahony, “In the Footsteps. . .,” pp. 1; 18–24.
101. Ibid., pp. 18–21.
102. Ibid., pp. 1; 18–24.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid., pp. 10, 12.
106. Ibid., pp. 18; 21; 23; 30.
107. Ibid., p. 26.
108. Ibid., p. 40.
109. Smith, pp. 65–67.
110. Serrão, p. 420.
111. AHU; São Tomé collection; caixa (box) 54; doc. 15.
112. Ibid. See also AHU; São Tomé collection; caixa 54; doc. 31.
114. The diminutive Portuguese colonial West-African island of Fernando Pô
was important, too; in 1910 it ranked fourteenth among world cacao-
producing regions. Ministério da Agricultura, Industria e Commércio;
Serviço de Informações, pp. 6–7.
115. Lopez, pp. 79–79; and Clarence-Smith, pp. 238–239.
116. Bales, p. 21.

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Sussex Library]

On: 26 March 2015, At: 08:15

Food and Foodways:

Slave Labor and Chocolate in

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07409710701260214

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ISSN: 0740-9710 print / 1542-3484 online

SLAVE LABOR AND CHOCOLATE IN BRAZIL: THE

North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, USA

Keywords: Brazil, slavery, chocolate, cacao, colonial, plantation, native

In 1664, the Viceroy of Brazil, Dom Vasco de Mascarenhas,

Address correspondence to Timothy Walker, Department of History, University of

where the plants grew as an indigenous species2 (please refer

in Belém, capital of Grão Pará, to formally request that cacao

Americas, he hoped to develop profitable mercantile cacao cul-

FIGURE 1 Slave market; Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, early 19th century.

Although Sidney W. Mintz discusses the intrinsic connection

FIGURE 2 Clearing agricultural land; Bahia, Brazil, early 19th century.

Lisbon (AHU); and the Historical Archive of São Tomé and

encompassed the coerced work of free blacks, mixed race laborers

as human livestock. Full chattel slaves working in Brazil’s cacao

Bahia as a Slave Port: Chronology, Volume, and Impact of the

Strategically situated on the Bay of All Saints, Salvador da Bahia

entire volume of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (the region that

FIGURE 3 Husking roasted cacao beans on a plantation; Recôncavo, rural

market towns like Santo Amaro and Cachoeira, slaves formed a

Thus, the wide availability of enslaved Africans in Bahia

Early Commercial Demand and Production of Brazilian Cacao

By the middle of the 17th century, European fashion, both on the

ary landholdings on the coasts south of Salvador in the late 1660s,

Production Synergies of Sugar and Cacao in Brazil

Sugar and cacao grown side-by-side in Brazil quickly (and pre-

bitter natural cacao with a sweetening agent to make the food

Forced Labor and Cacao Production in the Brazilian Amazon

Coerced labor and cacao also have a long mingled history in

systematic cultivation. Such was cacao’s abundance in the

work independently in lands that they knew intimately. Hence,

spoiled by rainforest dampness. Ultimately, the Jesuits’ unsys-

produced larger total crop yields at less cost.

of the Jesuit College of Maranhão, while engaged in collecting

in the mid-18th century.53 Poorly compensated or compelled

on average, more than ten percent of total world production,

During the six decades prior to Brazilian independence (1823),

Forced Labor and Cacao Production in Bahia

Already famous in Europe since the late 16th century as the

Despite its expanding value in the global market, large-scale

two-day journey to take sacks of dried fermented cacao beans up

Although the initial phase of cacao production in Ilhéus

TABLE 1 Comparative Cacao Exports:

Year Bahia Amazonia

1778 900 kilos 888 tons

to seven times that of other cacao-producing regions in Brazil.78

Conditions of Slaves and Exploited Workers on Cacao

Because Native American slave labor had proved problematic to

could be profitably employed in these tasks. Most phases of

King João V to assert that old or invalid slaves were becoming an

the government census taken in 1872, the enslaved population of

upon reaching age twenty-one, effectively this meant that, until

maintained and operated the equipment for drying raw cacao

common variety in Brazil, required a prolonged fermentation

technique, workers (usually slaves) spread out the cacao beans,

grow. Fear of various insects, worms, foraging monkeys, rooting

signs of the disease, they could prevent the spread of “witches

19th-century Bahia, wealthy creditors frequently used the courts