ABSTRACT
Important events in Brazil and the world in the late 1970s facilitated the understanding and success of Colonial Slavery in the decade following its publication and the radical reversion of its academic reception in the 1990s. Colonial Slavery overcame that chronological/historicist standpoint, defining Brazil’s slaveholding colonial structure in a categorical/systematic manner. In 1928, during the sixth Congress of the Communist International, this interpretation was officialized for the semicolonial and colonial world. The transition from mercantile, colonial slave production based on allodial forms of land property to capitalist production demonstrates the conservative nature of the national bourgeoisie, which never encountered “obstacles to acquire land property and which found in land speculation one of its sources of original accumulation of capital.” In the long and arid social context characterized by the proposals of the end of history, the debates on the multiplicity of modes of production ceased, anathematizing the proposal of a tendential understanding of the past.
