Alencastro, Luiz Filipe de, O trato dos viventes. Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul. Séculos XVI e XVII

The most recent historiographical trends with regard to slavery in the modern age consider it to be one of the most important elements that enabled the incorporation of the New World into the international economy. Based on the principle that the vast and extremely fertile agricultural tracts of land in America were worth very little in themselves, this theory opines that America’s assimilation into the world economy came about on account of the regular introduction of African slaves. It was this forced black labour that enabled the European nations to fully reap the benefits of their conquests in the New World, both when one considers the case of the sugar industry in Brazil, the Caribbean and the Antilles, the fishing, tanning and lumber trades in New England or the mining industries in Brazil and the Spanish Americas. Slavery and its associated mechanisms thus unified North and South America, Europe and Africa, with the Atlantic Ocean as the medium that brought these three continents together enabling the circulation of people, products, capital, services and ideas, giving rise to a triangular economy between the European kingdoms, the American colonies and the slave ports of Africa.