The Raw Cotton Trade

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Without Brazilian cotton, Europe's first factories would have struggled to thrive. This book reveals how Maranhão plantations, Northeastern Brazilian smallholders, and Lisbon merchants sustained an Atlantic trade that supplied France, England, and beyond. It exposes how diverse labor systems, imperial monopolies, and foreign merchant networks shaped global commerce in ways that historians have overlooked. Drawing on unpublished archives and using new data, Felipe Souza Melo demonstrates how Brazil powered early industrialization and why scholarship has largely ignored it. To have a more comprehensive story of cotton and capitalism, it is essential to start with Brazil, and this book provides the missing chapter.