Cultura E Opulencia Do Brasil Por Suas Drogas E Minas: Com Varias Noticias Curiosas Do Modo De Fazer O Assucar; Plantar E Beneficiar O Tabaco; Tirar Ouro Das Minas, E Descubrir as Da Prata; E Dos Grandes Emolumentos Que Esta Conquista Da America Meridional Da' Ao Reino De Portugal, Com Estes, E Outros Generos, E Contratos Reaes

In 1711, the Portuguese Crown declared war on a book. André João Antonil had written the most comprehensive account of Brazilian colonial wealth ever assembled: detailed instructions for cultivating sugar cane and tobacco, techniques for extracting gold and silver from mines, and portraits of the lives lived by colonists, enslaved people, and workers throughout the territory. The Crown found this knowledge dangerous. Within months of publication, every copy was ordered destroyed. Seven survived. Only seven. This is one of the rarest books in existence, a survival that reads like thriller fiction yet constitutes one of the most important primary sources for understanding colonial Brazil and the Atlantic economic world that made the Portuguese empire possible. Antonil writes with the precision of a technocrat and the eye of a journalist, documenting not just techniques but the human cost of empire: the enslaved laborers in the mills, the indentured workers in the mines, the merchants and landowners whose fortunes built a colonial machine. For historians of Latin America, the Atlantic world, and early modern economics, this book is legend made tangible.