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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 219

sugarcane. They were subject to the same brutal punishments and received the same
rations as their male counterparts, though they were seldom permitted to under-
take the more skilled labor inside the sugar mills. Women who worked in urban
areas, mostly for white female owners, did domestic chores and were often hired
out as laborers in various homes, shops, laundries, inns, and brothels. Discouraged
from establishing stable families, women had to endure, often alone, the wrenching
separation from their children that occurred when they were sold. Mary Prince, an
enslaved Caribbean woman who wrote a brief account of her life, recalled the pain
of families torn apart: “The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor
slave’s heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations as these. All that we
love taken away from us — oh, it is sad, sad! and sore to be borne!” 15
The extensive use of African slave labor gave these plantation colonies a very
different ethnic and racial makeup than that of highland Spanish America, as indi-
cated by the Snapshot: Ethnic Composition of Colonial Societies in Latin America
(1825). Thus, after three centuries of colonial rule, a substantial majority of Brazil’s
population was either partially or wholly of African descent. In the French Carib-
bean colony of Haiti in 1790, the corresponding figure was 93 percent.
As in Spanish America, interracial unions were common in colonial Brazil.
Cross-racial unions accounted for only about 10 percent of all marriages, but the use of
concubines and informal liaisons among Native Americans, Africans, and Portuguese
produced a substantial multiracial population. From their ranks derived much of the
urban skilled workforce and many of the supervisors in the sugar industry. As many as
forty separate and named groups, each indicating a different racial mixture, emerged in
colonial Brazil. The largest group at the time were the product of European- African
unions, which the Portuguese called mulattoes, a highly derogatory term widely used
in the eighteenth century but offensive to many people then and now.
The plantation complex of the Americas, based on African slave labor, extended
beyond the Caribbean and Brazil to encompass the southern colonies of British North
America, where tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo were major crops, but the social
outcomes of these plantation colonies were quite different from those farther south.
Because European women had joined the colonial migration to North America at an

®
AP
SNAPSHOT Ethnic Composition of Colonial Societies in COMPARISON
Latin America (1825) How did ethnic
composition differ within
Highland Spanish America Portuguese America (Brazil) Latin America?
Europeans 18.2 percent 23.4 percent
Multiracial 28.3 percent 17.8 percent
Africans 11.9 percent 49.8 percent
Native Americans 41.7 percent 9.1 percent
Source: Data from Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25.
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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