ABSTRACT
The plantation form had different socioeconomic contents through history, but here the only and well-delimited objective is to examine slave plantations. Slave plantations never fully constituted a mercantile organization. There was always an internal duality that tended toward monoculture, its vital motivation, but was always in conflict with the limits of the natural economy. Given the type of workforce used, the qualitative division of labor in slave plantations implied little individual specialization. Brazil’s slave sugar production succumbed to competition in the nineteenth century and fell to a marginal position in the international market, slowly incorporating some of the technical innovations created by European capitalism. Despite all of this, colonial slave plantations were able to surpass family agriculture thanks to the employment of collective work teams under a unified command and the division of labor. When examining the level of productive forces employed in agriculture, and especially agriculture from previous centuries, it is necessary to take into account the natural conditions.
