The phenomenon of the primitive accumulation of capital in Colony Brazil: approximations and differences between the approaches by Caio Prado Júnior and Fernando A. Novais

Abstract

In ‘Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo’, Caio Prado Júnior indicates that the brazilian colonial history carries a certain linearity or succession of events that overlap with the others and revel the sense of the colonization. This sense is related to the establishment of a large commercial enterprise in the american colonies with the purpose of supplying the european economy with the agricultural products found in the New World, which were of extremely limited access to the europeans before. Posteriorly, this contribution by Caio Prado Júnior would be complemented by Fernando A. Novais in the book Portugal e Brasil na Crise do Antigo Sistema Colonial (1777-1808) (1978), in which the historian records that the colonization is not restricted to this large exporting commercial enterprise, but it also constitutes an initiative that reveals one of the fundamental facets of the development of capitalism in the XVIII-XIX century: the phenomenon of the primitive accumulation of capital.