Abstract

The history of modern Brazil has always been interpreted on the basis of one central question or another: cattle raising in the Valley of São Francisco, the relations between masters and slaves, the structures of dependency generated by merchant capital, bureaucratic privilege or the stakes of the gold economy in the 18th Century. New research on the slave trade, on the subjugation of the Indians, on internal and international migrations, allows for the elaboration of an interpretive axis of wider scope: the transformations of labor in the colonial and national context through the middle of the 19th century. These transformations inscribe themselves in a larger space that conditions the history of Portuguese America and Brazil from 1550 to 1850: the South Atlantic. This horizon imposes a new periodization. The rupture with the colonial order occurred not with the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808 or with independence in 1822, but in 1850, with the definitive end of the African slave trade