While Pierre and Huguette Chaunu’s monumental eleven-volume Séville et l’Atlantique (1956-60) merited an extended review essay in the HAHR, Frédéric Mauro’s parallel, if shorter, study of the Portuguese Atlantic economy, Le Portugal et l’Atlantique au xviie siècle, 1570-1670: Etude Economique, published in 1960, received no notice whatsoever. Although published in a single volume, Mauro’s book was still a “brick,” one of those monumental French theses, in the extremely important “Ports-Routes-Trafics” series of the VI section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, forbidding in its size and scholarly apparatus to all but the dedicated specialist; and it was about the Portuguese empire, a topic in which Spanish Americanists have often demonstrated only passing interest. Chaunu himself realized the central importance of Mauro’s book for understanding the Atlantic economy, and in a long review essay entitled “Brésil et Atlantique au xvii siècle” (Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations [Nov.-Dec. 1961], 6, 1176—1207) he drew out some of the parallels. Mauro’s book has been a baseline for work on the Luso-Brazilian economy and it has stood the test of time for almost twenty-five years. Its republication with a slightly different title, an updated bibliography, and the incorporation of some subsequent work by Mauro himself is a welcome event because it makes available once again an essential study of the Atlantic economy in the seventeenth century that should be of interest to all historians of the early modern period and to Latin Americanists in general.
The new edition has placed Brazil in the title, which is appropriate since the book deals essentially with the predominant role of Brazilian products, especially sugar, in the Luso-Brazilian economy. During the period covered, Brazil became the world’s leading producer of sugar and the keystone of the Portuguese economy, and Mauro gives primary attention to that commodity. He also provides data and analyses on the commerce of dye wood, grains, wine, and other products, and, by doing so, integrates the history of Brazil, the Atlantic islands, Portugal, and to a lesser extent North and West Africa. To do this is no small task because commerce was not centralized to the same extent as in the Spanish empire, so that there is no single repository that holds most of the commercial records. Moreover, the Casa da India, which did serve as the clearing house for colonial commerce, was destroyed by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Thus, Mauro was forced to construct his series of production, sales, and prices from a wide variety of sources scattered all over the Portuguese Atlantic territories and in European archives. Rather than histoire sérielle this effort could be called histoire pastiche, the weaving together of bits and pieces of economic data from various origins. While there are many gaps in the series, and econometricians may find their construction subject to criticism, they still provide in their totality the best available economic data on the Portuguese Atlantic in the seventeenth century.
Above all else, this is a book about the age of sugar in the Luso-Brazilian economy. Mauro indicates that the sugar economy was already in difficulty before the discovery of gold in Brazil, but because the volume ends abruptly in 1670 it misses the general Atlantic depression of the 1680s. While Mauro avoids Lucio de Azevedo’s characterization of a “sugar cycle,” this volume’s periodization does continue to lead the reader to that concept. This is misleading because sugar continued to be Brazil’s leading export throughout the eighteenth century. Since the original publication of this book, much of the scholarship on the economy of the Portuguese empire has concentrated on the late eighteenth century, and thus Mauro’s data and conclusions have not been subject to major revision. His conclusions continue to dominate the field. It is clear, however, that the subsequent period from 1670 to 1760, which was not simply an age of gold, is sorely in need of the kind of integrated economic analysis that Mauro has so masterfully provided in this classic study.