HIS essay is the first of a series in which I have undertaken to study the formation and
disintegration of patriarchal society in Brazil, a society that grew up around the first sugar-
mills or sugar plantations established by Europeans in our country, in the sixteenth century.
It was upon this basis that the society in question developed: the production of sugar by
means of a socio-economic system that represented, in a way, a revival of European
feudalism in the American tropics. In the nineteenth century the system was to undergo an …