Comments on “Slavery in a Nonexport Economy”I.
When submitted to the organizers of an economic history conference in Sao Paulo, an earlier draft of the Martins' article was rejected on the grounds that it was only of regional, not national, importance.' The criticism could scarcely be less justified, and only confirms the Martins' assertion that scholars have tended to equate the slave system with the plantation and to neglect the analysis of other economic contexts in which the institution was significant. Without a doubt, the article is of unusual interest for challenging this bias in theory and research. The authors' painstaking and original work in a variety of published primary sources offers newA insights and provocative conclusions. Some of these conclusions I find convincing; others I do not. The Martins' evaluation of the size of the African slave trade to Minas from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries appears to be correct, and it is a major contribution. To be sure, one might question the accuracy of the population data on which they rely. The 1873 census in Minas was characterized by the provincial president as Ino more than a "trial run" (ensaio).2 Still, the concurrent 1872-73 matrfcuila ("slave registration"), while yielding a total below that of the census, confirms that the slave population in Minas was very large, greater thain that of any other province.3 The information for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is probably less reliable. Nonetheless, even if the highest of the figures the Martins cite were only 50 percent of the real population, Minas would