Sugar, more than gold or silver, drove the largest forced migration in history. Portuguese settlers began growing sugarcane in northeastern Brazil, in Pernambuco and Bahia, in the mid 1500s. At first they enslaved indigenous people, but epidemics killed many, others fled inland, and Jesuit missionaries opposed their enslavement. Planters turned to Africa, where Portugal already traded along the coast. Sugar spread from Brazil to the Caribbean in the 1600s, as English, French and Dutch colonists turned islands such as Barbados, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue into plantation societies.

Scale

Of roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto slave ships across the Atlantic, about 10.7 million survived the crossing. Brazil received the largest share, roughly 40 percent of all the Africans carried across the Atlantic, far more than the British colonies of North America, which received under 5 percent. The Caribbean took most of the rest. Brazil's demand rose again after gold was found in Minas Gerais in the 1690s and kept rising with coffee in the nineteenth century.

The sugar colonies were deadly. Work in the cane fields and the boiling houses was brutal, food was poor and disease was common. In most sugar colonies deaths among the enslaved outnumbered births, so the enslaved population did not grow on its own. Planters found it cheaper to buy new captives than to improve conditions, which kept the slave ships coming.

Resistance

Enslaved people resisted in countless ways: slowing work, breaking tools, running away, keeping African religions alive inside Catholic forms, and rising in revolt. Runaways formed communities called quilombos in Brazil and maroon settlements in the Caribbean. The most famous was Palmares, a large community of escaped slaves in Brazil, in the hills of the northeast. It held thousands of people and fought off expeditions for most of the seventeenth century until it was destroyed in 1694; its last leader, Zumbi, was killed the next year. Brazil now marks Black Consciousness Day on the anniversary of his death, 20 November. In Bahia in 1835, Muslim Africans led the Malê revolt, one of the most organized urban slave risings in the Americas. The greatest revolution of all, in French Saint-Domingue, created the free nation of Haiti in 1804, an event that terrified slaveholders across the hemisphere.

Was Iberian slavery milder?

In 1946 the historian Frank Tannenbaum argued that Iberian law and the Church made slavery milder in Latin America than in the United States. Spanish and Portuguese law recognized enslaved people as persons with souls, allowed them to marry in church, and permitted manumission, the freeing of individuals. Brazil did end up with a large free population of color long before abolition. In 1933 the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre went further, describing Brazil as a society where mixing had softened racial lines, an idea later called racial democracy.

Later scholars pushed back hard. Death rates on Brazilian and Caribbean plantations were higher than in the United States, which is hardly a sign of mildness. Laws on paper were often ignored on remote estates. And researchers, together with Brazil's Black movement, argued that the myth of racial democracy hid persistent racism and inequality, since Afro-Brazilians remained far poorer and less represented in power. The debate now asks less which slavery was worse and more how different systems produced different patterns of race after slavery ended.

The long road to abolition

Britain banned its own slave trade in 1807 and then pressed others to stop. Brazil ended its Atlantic slave trade in 1850 under British naval pressure. The Free Womb Law of 1871 freed children born to enslaved mothers, though they owed labor to their mothers' owners until adulthood. Abolitionists such as the politician Joaquim Nabuco and the journalist José do Patrocínio built a mass movement, and enslaved people fled plantations in growing numbers. Finally, on 13 May 1888, Princess Isabel signed the Golden Law while acting as regent for her father, Emperor Pedro II. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, two years after Spain ended it in Cuba. The freed received no land and no compensation; their former owners, angry at losing property without payment, helped bring down the monarchy the next year.

Worked example: a Bahian sugar mill

In 1711 the Jesuit André João Antonil published a detailed study of Brazil's economy. On sugar estates, he wrote, the enslaved were the hands and feet of the mill owner, since without them nothing could be planted or ground. His book shows how a mill ran almost around the clock in the harvest season: cane had to be crushed within a day of cutting, the juice boiled in a row of copper kettles, and the syrup cured into loaves for export. A worker who dozed at the rollers could lose an arm. Antonil advised owners to feed and clothe their workers decently, but as a matter of good management. Reading him, we see both an economic machine and the human cost built into it. The source also reminds us how much history of slavery comes from the owners' side, which is why historians work hard to recover the voices of the enslaved from court records, runaway notices and testimony.