ABSTRACT
Given the importance of sugarcane complex in the first centuries of Brazilian colonization, it is paradoxical that information about it is currently so scarce. The fact is that the data we have – whether about production, prices, uses of the slave and free labour – are very fragmentary and never constitute historically prolonged series. Therefore, those who venture into the study of the old world of sugar are required to be very creative in dealing with these issues. Even the French historian Fréderic Mauro (1989) and the Brazilianist Stuart Schwartz (1988), who studied the precious records of the Jesuit sugarcane plantations in Bahia, in particular the Engenho of Sergipe do Conde, were forced to make interpolations and conjectures to fill the gaps of the available documents.2
