Ideas, Values, and the Institutionalization of Social History: An Introduction

Taking the Brazilian-Portuguese sugar cane industry as the starting point, the article presents empirical evidence that, due to the amount, the public and private agencies involved, and the employ-ment of slave labor, the production, trade, and consumption of sugar from the sixteenth century has built what has recently been acknowledged as the “global commodity chain,” thus contributing to the formation of the capitalist world-economy. To achieve this goal, this article reconstructs the sugar commodity chain from 1550 to 1800, identifying and locating the required activities for sugar to be produced and consumed.