In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the boom of the Brazilian sugarcane industry erupted. The Portuguese founded many large, clusters of plantations in Northeastern Brazil, called Engenhos (factories). By predominantly exploiting the usage of dirt cheap, African slave labor, and harvesting the desirable sugarcane crop, the Portuguese rapidly expanded their modest Engenhos into prosperous Sugarcane trading posts and vast plantation estates. The most prominent Engenhos were Bahia, Pernambuco and Sergipe, which contained up to thousands of slaves working on them. African slaves worked alongside white, indentured slaves on the plantations. The Engenhos forged into a cultural melting pot due to the large number of geographical, racial and religious backgrounds of the cane plantation workers.
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Work at the millDuring the harvest cycle a man would work from dawn and cut forty-two thousand canes a day. These canes would be bundled in a group of ten by the women and brought to the mill to be processed. The mills began operation at 4 p.m and ended at 10 a.m. Although the men and women worked alongside each other on the Engenhos, it was believed that Women were not as suitable for performing tedious labour on the fields, and that it should be left up to the male slaves. This ideology of gender inequality left the female slaves to transport the canes to the mills, and work around the house.
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While working on the Engenhos, the treatment of the slaves was so inhumane that the average slave only lived for approximately five years after arriving on the plantation. Due to the severity of slave deaths, constant reinforcements of captured Africans were brought from southern Africa and sold into slavery on the sugarcane plantations. The everlasting cycle of death and replenishment of slaves was a major issue the plantation owners had to deal with.
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RebellionAlong with high slave death rates, the Engenhos commonly were plagued with slave revolts, escapes, attacks on personal plantation owners, suicides, machinery destruction, burning of fields etc. This was due to the misery the slaves endured while working for the sugarcane plantation owners. As a direct result of the violence and protests from the slaves, the Engenhos began to try and prevent or minimize this, by implementing constant supervision by armed retainers on the plantations.
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RecapThrough incredibly cheap slave labor, discovery of the desirable and profitable crop of sugarcane in Brazil, constant replenishment of slaves and maintenance of order on the Engenhos. The sugarcane Engenhos and it’s owners became unprecedentedly rich and powerful during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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