Changes In Colonial Latin America

The nature, development, and composition of the societies, economic institutions, and political institutions of Colonial Latin America and Portuguese Brazil were evolved up to 1700 due to drastic changes within those institutions. The changes within these political and economic institutions also changed the societies of these colonies affecting an individual’s persons status, opportunities, and quality of life including housing, diet, health from rural areas to cities. One of the most important aspects introduced to Latin America and especially Portuguese Brazil was the introduction of sugar cane to the colonies drastically changing the economy of Latin America and Brazil and the people of these colonial societies. The introduction of African

The economies of colonial Latin America and Brazil were heavily dependent on the extraction of raw resources with mining operations that extracted gold, silver, and mercury. The economy of Colonial Latin America and Portuguese Brazil was also heavily dependent on the cultivating and harvesting of plantation crops such as tobacco, indigo, cocoa, and rice. However, the most important plantation crop introduced to Spanish Latin America and Brazil was sugar cane introduced to Brazil by the nobility of Sao Tome and Madeira and later spreading throughout the South American continent and the Caribbean Islands this crop became the base of the colonial Brazilian and Latin American economies ensuring its importance. By the late fifteenth century “the planters of had enough investment capital and labor to give Brazilian sugar an important share of the European market”. Ownership of a sugar cane plantation and sugar mills made the owners extremely wealthy due to the high demand

However, the Native American population fells to such low levels that the Spanish and Brazilians turned to African slavery completely changing the economic and social dynamics of the colonial landscape. For sugar planters’ African slaves offered them a large economic benefit as their “goal was to extract the most and the most effective labor from the slaves”. This increased their profits furthering their social status and improving their quality of life. For the West Africans brought to Brazil and Latin America they were paid little to nothing for their labor, so they were dependent on their slave masters for their diet, housing, and clothing. The main job of the sugar planters and the Lavradores was to extract as much labor as possible from them in order to produce as much sugar cane as possible so in order to maximize profits the masters and Lavradores cut costs in the quality of life of the African slaves. The slave masters and Lavradores gave the slaves housing that consisted of “small mud-walled or thatched hut or, in the largest estates, single-story barracklike buildings”, poor diet, and poor clothing these factors cut the slaves life spans and forced them to find a way to supplement their diets and incomes. Their position as