O sugarcane cycle names the period when sugar was Brazil's main export product.
It began with the establishment of the Portuguese colonist on the Brazilian coast, in 1530, when the hereditary captaincies were created as a form of political and territorial organization.
The Brazilian sugar company was, during the 16th and 18th centuries, one of the biggest agricultural economic activities in the western world.
Summary
The cultivation of sugar cane was carried out in the Zona da Mata area, which extends along a coastal strip, from Rio Grande do Norte to the Recôncavo Baiano.
For the planting, harvesting and transformation of sugarcane juice into sugar grains, enslaved black and indigenous labor was used, in addition to free workers.
With the growth of sugar production, notably in Pernambuco and Bahia, the northeast became the dynamic center of social, political and economic life.
Portugal already had experience in sugarcane cultivation, production and sugar trade. Around 1440, the Portuguese colonies of Azores and Madeira supplied not only the metropolis, but also England, the ports of Flanders and some cities in Italy.
In 1530, the first sugarcane seedlings were brought from Madeira Island, in the colonizing expedition of Martim Afonso de Sousa. Two years later, Martim Afonso founded the village of São Vicente, in the current state of São Paulo, where he installed the first sugar mill, the "Engenho do Governador".
Sugar production in Brazil reached its peak during the first three decades of the 17th century.
See too: Brazil Colony
End of the sugarcane cycle
The main cause of the end of the sugarcane cycle was the competition of the mills implanted in the Dutch and English Antilles.
In 1580, Portugal came under the domain of Spain, which was at war with the Netherlands. In retaliation, they started to invade regions occupied by the Spaniards in the Americas and chose to do so in Pernambuco, because of sugar.
In 1640, when Portugal was freed from Spanish rule and concentrated on recovering the territories invaded by the Dutch, which would occur in 1654. However, sugar production had been severely damaged by the fighting and declined in the following decades.
Thus, when the Portuguese recovered the region, Brazil was no longer important in the world sugar market. The production of sugarcane in other European colonies, mainly in the Antilles, had surpassed the Brazilian one.
Despite the efforts, the settlers were unable to resume the same pace of production. With this, the sugarcane cycle ended, but not the production of this food, which still exists in the country.
With the discovery of gold in the region of Minas, in the century. XVIII, the Gold Cycle it would be the new economic phase in Brazil.
Engenho: sugar production unit
The mill was the place where sugar was manufactured and there were the mills, the furnace and the purge house. Over time, it came to be called "engine" to every large sugar-producing property.
Also part of this complex were the large house, the chapel, the slave quarters, the sugar factory, the cane fields and the houses of some free workers, such as the overseer, the sugar master, some hired farmers and artisans.
The planter lived in the big house with his relatives and relatives, exercising great authority over them. Blacks exploited as slave labor inhabited the slave quarters.
The chapels gave the mill its own social life and some of them had up to 4000 inhabitants.
See too: Sugar Mill in Colonial Brazil
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