Sugar Makes Brazil the World's Largest Producer
Plantations and mills spread along the coast, and Brazil overtakes every rival
Quick facts
- Mills in 1570
- 60 engenhos
- Mills by 1645
- 350 engenhos
- Rank
- World's largest sugar producer within decades
- Labor
- Enslaved Indigenous, then enslaved African
What happened
As the coastal brazilwood was cut out, colonists replaced it with sugarcane. The plantation and mill complex, the engenho, spread fast: the Library of Congress country study records that by 1585 the sugar zones were served by more than sixty mills. World History Encyclopedia states that within a few decades Brazil had become the world's largest producer of sugar, with 60 mills in 1570 rising to 350 by 1645. Sugar was capital-intensive and brutally labor-hungry, and colonists turned first to enslaved Indigenous people and then, as those populations collapsed, increasingly to enslaved Africans.
Why it matters
Sugar transformed Brazil from a coastal trading post into a plantation economy and made it the engine of Portugal's empire. Its appetite for labor is the direct cause of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, which would bring more enslaved Africans to this one colony than to any other destination in the Americas.
How we know
The mill counts and Brazil's status as the world's largest sugar producer are documented verbatim in World History Encyclopedia and the Library of Congress country study, drawing on colonial economic records.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Portuguese Brazil · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Library of Congress, Country Studies (Federal Research Division). Brazil: The Colonial Era (Country Studies) · General sourcecountrystudies.us · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineHistory of Brazil24 events · A land of hundreds of nations before 1500, the destination of nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, and the only monarchy the New World's republics ever toleratedView all →