ABSTRACT
From the time Brazil was discovered until the end of the colonial period it was like all Latin America, a subsidiary part of the expanding mercantile-capitalist system of the western world. The colony was the great supplier of raw materials for the European market, thus contributing to the industrial development of the Occident. At that time, obviously, there were no such enterprises as are to be found in Brazil today, characterized by those impersonal labour relations which the sociologists designate as secondary relations. They were of the type, rather, that exist in archaic societies, where collective labour is characterized by essentially personal and family relationships typical of our traditional, patriarchal agrarian society. Among the expressions of this natural economy were rudimentary manufactures and the exportation of tropical food products and crude ores. There was practically no internal market and no regular communi-cation between the various small colonial settlements.
