Visuality and Slave Management in the Brazilian and Cuban Coffee and Sugar Plantations, c.1840-1880

Abstract The aim of the present article is to understand how the new mechanisms of slave management developed in the Cuban and Brazilian sugar and coffee frontiers during the 19th century were connected to a new visuality of slavery. The argument is that it is possible to identify a cluster of new strategies to extract more labor from slaves in the coffee and sugar cane plantations of Brazil and Cuba, which was a response not only to the major reorganization of the world economy under industrial capitalism but also to new patterns of slave resistance. Those strategies can be conceived as part of a new visual regime of New World slavery.