In 1691, the regent of the Company of Jesus and the Ouvidor of Rio de Janeiro sent letters to Lisbon denouncing certain outrages suffered by the Company in Campos, a cane-growing region in southeastern Brazil. The general tone of the complaints can be seen in the following example:

The episode, which was not a rare occurrence in seventeenth-century Brazil, highlights a little-explored dimension of Brazilian slavery: the important role Indian and African slaves played in power disputes among the colonial elite – the self-named nobreza da terra, or “good families of the land” – and between these elites and the several factions of the imperial state.

Throughout the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, the Portuguese colonies of the Americas were the largest buyers of Africans in the Western Hemisphere. More than 45 percent of all slaves transported to the Western Hemisphere wound up in Brazil. It is now estimated that 30,000 arrived during the sixteenth century, 784,000 during the seventeenth, and 1,989,000 during the eighteenth century.