ABSTRACT
Modern demography brought to light significant regularities in the movements of human populations. An entirely different approach is to study the relationship between a certain population or sector of the population and the dynamics of a mode of production. In the original process of the constitution of Europe, the capitalist mode of production absorbed impoverished peasants and artisans from a precapitalist mode of production. The law of the enslaved population imposed an internal readjustment of the Brazilian slaveholding system, so that the regions with declining economies started to supply enslaved people to the region with the most flourishing economy. In short, the fact that the movement of the enslaved population in the United States was contrary to that of Brazil and other slaveholding countries can only be understood in accordance to the law of the enslaved population, which as the people have seen must have led to the emergence of slave exporting and importing regions.
