The Slave Industry in Bahia: aspects of the industrial process in the 19th century

The present work aims to discuss the industrial presence in Bahia in the 19th century. To do this, we aim to deconstruct the perspectives that there was an industrial backwardness in Brazil in the 1800s. Therefore, we took the province of Bahia as the center of the analysis, addressing: the number of existing factories; the main manufacturing sectors in these factories; the market dynamics of these factories and the identification of an absence of incompatibility between industry and slavery in the period. To do this, we used documentation from the administrative and mercantile Almanacks of Bahia from mid -1845 to 1863 and also analyzed the editions of the reports of the provincial presidents, in addition to the factory provision request processes contained in the Court of the Board of Commerce, Agriculture, Factories and Navigation. We concluded that the number of factories in Bahia was significant, that they exported their goods to other provinces of the Empire and also to foreign countries, in addition to being part of the dynamics of slavery..