Os caminhos do açúcar no Rio Grande do Norte: o papel dos engenhos na formação território potiguar

Abstract

Sugar was one of the first economic products in Brazil and its production was responsible for the occupation of much of the coast of what is currently defined as the Northeast, a region where the cultivation of sugar cane and the production of sugar still have economic relevance. In the State of Rio Grande do Norte it was no different. The first sugar mill was established in the seventeenth century, soon after the start of the effective colonization process of the captaincy, and sugar cane cultivation remained virtually uninterrupted to the present day. However, few studies address the old sugar mills in Rio Grande do Norte and their relation with the process of formation and organization of the state’s eastern coast, a region historically associated with sugar cane plantation. The analysis of this territory occurred according to three dimensions: the regional, the urban and the architectural. In the regional dimension, we analyze the environmental characteristics of the state’s eastern coast that conditioned the implementation of sugar cane and how this contributed to the development of the main communication routes in the region. In the urban dimension, we study the emergence and development of the east coast’s main cities associated with sugar production and commercialization. In the architectural dimension we describe the remnants of old buildings (casa grande, capela, fábrica) that made up the east coast’s mills – that is, the material vestiges of the sugar cane culture – and we try to identify some general characteristics of the sugar architecture in the State of Rio Grande do Norte. Such mills were the center of a network that developed along the time involving sugar production, transport and commercialization. The flow of goods (but also labor, capital, etc.) circulated among production centers (mills) and distribution and commercialization centers (ports and commercial plazas within urban nuclei) through the use of articulations (such as rivers, routes, roads and railways) therefore boosting the region. These sugar flows contributed to the strengthening of urban centers and to the development of communication routes and, ultimately, to the very process of structuring Rio Grande do Norte’s eastern coast.