Early Nineteenth Century Brazilian Sugar Plantations (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

“Early Nineteenth Century Brazilian Sugar Plantations” is a description of Brazilian sugar plantations and production techniques in the 1810s. It was written by an English resident of Brazil named Henry Koster. Henry Koster (c. 1793-1820) was born in Lisbon, Portugal. He was the son of an English merchant. He was a sickly adolescent, and he travelled to Brazil in 1809 in the hopes that its climate would improve his health. Koster died in Brazil, however, around the age of 26 or 27. Before his death, however, he travelled extensively in Brazil and wrote about his experiences. In this excerpt he describes the sugar plantations in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Along with nearby northeastern Brazilian states like Bahia, Pernambuco was part of the heart of Brazil’s sugar country. Brazil had been one of the first major sugar producing region in the New World. From the late sixteenth century onward, Brazil became the world’s largest sugar exporter. Brazilian sugar production was eclipsed, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by Caribbean planters in the British and French West Indian colonies. Sugar planters in Barbados, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), Cuba, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname, and other territories supplanted Brazil as the world’s leading sugar producers. By Koster’s time the glory days of Brazilian sugar were long gone. While the sugar planters in the newer producers often embraced the latest technology, Brazilian producers tended to cling to more outdated production techniques. Nevertheless, Brazilian planters in Pernambuco, Bahia, and other parts of the northeast, continued to produce and export sugar into the nineteenth century and beyond. Here Koster describes sugarcane cultivation and sugar production in Pernambuco in the second decade of the nineteenth century.