ABSTRACT
The oldest historiography emphasized patriarchy and, in the realm of material life, placed the natural economy in the foreground. The changes currently underway have made that notion of the past problematic. The advancement of an urban industrial economy obliged a representation of its contrast with the surviving rural economy. The dualism between the “modern” and “archaic” sectors, in reference especially to the present day, was formulated in its most simple and finished form in Jacques Lambert’s renowned work on “the two Brazils.” Regarding the line of interpretation that focused on the export nature of the colonial economy, its evolution led to the notion of colonial slavery as a sort of inferior stage of capitalism or incomplete capitalism. A slave social formation does not necessarily contain a single mode of production based on slave work.
