Western Cuba, the Lower Mississippi Valley and the South Paraíba Valley played an important role in the 19th century capitalist world-economy as the largest producers of sugar, cotton and coffee, respectively. New slave-driven plantations emerged in these areas with production units that broke away from previous practices in the Atlantic World. This article discusses how an ensemble of contemporaneous images related to such slave-driven plantations constituted a specific visual regime. The author takes the Paraíba Valley as a unit of observation and carefully examines the case of the Resgate coffee plantation, located in Bananal, São Paulo.
Slavery; Visual regime; Coffee production; Brazil; 19th Century; Bananal (State of São Paulo)
