Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. STUART B. SCHWARTZ (ed.) The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London 2004.

Abstract

From "Hell" to "The Land of Cockaigne": this is the road one travels when reading the volume of articles edited by Stuart Schwartz, a well-known historian of colonial Brazil and Latin America. "Hell" or "Inferno" is an image often evoked in descriptions of the "Middle Passage" of Africans across the Atlantic and of the life of slaves on the sugar plantations or engenhos in Brazil and the Caribbean.