“Substitution and Survival: Brazilian Sugar and Tobacco in European Markets, 1690–1763”

A colloq with Thiago Krause (Wayne State University). Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

Between 1690 and 1763, Brazilian sugar and Bahian black-roll tobacco followed sharply different paths through European markets. French Caribbean sugar became an acceptable substitute for Brazilian varieties, while repeated efforts to reproduce Bahia’s molasses-sweetened tobacco failed, revealing how the expertise of enslaved African workers helped create a distinctive commodity for which consumers continued to pay a premium. Drawing on price currents, merchant correspondence, monopoly records, and diplomatic reports, the paper argues that substitutability shaped commodity survival through its interaction with consumer preference, procurement institutions, and geopolitics, revising North Atlantic accounts of plantation competition and the early modern Consumer Revolution.

Thiago Nascimento Krause is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Wayne State University. A historian of colonial Brazil and the early modern Atlantic, he writes on slavery, the trade in enslaved Africans, transimperial commerce, consumer demand, and the political economy of empire. His current book project, The Global History of a Colonial Capital, reconstructs Salvador da Bahia as a hub connecting American plantations, West African markets, European consumers, Asian textiles, the Río de la Plata, and Indigenous North America. His article with Christopher Ebert, “‘That Cursed Bewitching Weed’: Consumer Demand, Merchant Strategies, and the Global Diffusion of Brazilian Tobacco,” is forthcoming in the American Historical Review.

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