Ingenios

Ingenios (Port., engenhos), water-driven sugar mills established throughout Spanish and Portuguese America in the early sixteenth century. The ingenios became a major commercial enterprise for the colonies in Cuba and Brazil. Sugar production in the New World was the most intensively organized agro-industry in the Indies. Mill ownership was often more important than land ownership as it meant the control of the actual production process. The ingenios, along with the animal-driven mills (trapiches) ground the sugar cane and processed sugar for export and local consumption. The ingenio was also a central social institution that fostered the development of permanent settlements. Frequently, slaves provided labor in the ingenio until the abolition of slavery, which was late in both Brazil and Cuba. Modernization of the industry in the late nineteenth century led to their replacement with steam-drive mills, and the term "ingenio" fell out of common usage. In Cuba, for example, larger steam-powered "centrales" replaced the older ingenios. A romantic depiction of a sugar ingenio—not completely uncritical of the slave system that was its backbone—can be found in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's 1841 novel Sab.

See alsoEngenho; Slavery: Brazil; Sugar Industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lyle McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World 1492–1700 (1984).

James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (1983).

Additional Bibliography

Araújo, Tatiana Brito de. Os engenhos centrais e a produção açucareira no Recôncavo Baiano, 1875–1909. Salvador: FIEB, 2002.

Gaytán Ruelas, J. G., and R. González. "Mecanización del campo cañero ingenio 'San Sebastián,' Michoacán." Revista Chapingo: Serie Ingeniería Agropecuaria 2, no. 2 (1999): 147-151.

Knight, Franklin W. "Origins of Wealth and the Sugar Revolution in Cuba, 1750–1850." Hispanic American Historical Review 57, no. 2 (1977): 231-253.

Knight, Franklin W. "The Caribbean Sugar Industry and Slavery." Latin American Research Review 18, no. 2 (1983): 219-229.

                                        Heather K. Thiessen