Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

BRADLEY D. NARANCH
The Brazilian export economy was undergoing a massive reorientation
away from slave-produced sugar in the north east to coffee cultivation
in the southern states, using a mixture of free and slave
labour. 38 The profitability of coffee cultivation and the difficulty of
recruiting immigrants from Europe to perform the work-intensive
cultivation prolonged the widespread use of slave labour in Brazil
until its legal abolition in 1888, making it the last state in the western
hemisphere to do so.
The long-running Brazilian struggle over slavery marked
Adolphine Schramm’s unfolding narrative of Hanseatic tropical do -
mes ticity in indelible ways. To pass the long hours of solitude,
Schramm maintained a steady stream of correspondences with
friends and family, in which she provided them with a detailed portrait
of plantation life. When asked why her letters contained relatively
few criticisms, Schramm replied: ‘when you have to wait three
months for someone to learn of your complaints and offer comfort,
you just forget about it. For it only makes that person depressed to
read of such things.’ 39
Unlike her husband, who conducted business in four languages
(German, English, Portuguese, and French) and who could travel at
will in and around town, Adolphine found it hard to leave the house
or access the wider variety of reading materials that were at his disposal.
Heavy rains in the winter season made outdoor riding and
walking ‘impossible’, and the combination of heat, dust, and poor
roads during the parched summer months of drought and tropical
heat made such excursions unpleasant. Even a visit to her nearest
neighbour was a formidable obstacle, as the evening walk home
required her to enlist the services of two torch-bearers and two male
escorts, who needed to be paid a high gratuity for their services. 40
ment interest in Brazil as it relates to the history of globalization in the nineteenth
century, see Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 229–78.
38 Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 17–43; Steven C. Topik, ‘Coffee’, in id.
and Allen Wells (eds.), The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen,
and Oil during the Export Boom, 1859–1930 (Austin, Tex., 1998), 43–6; Steven C.
Topik, The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930 (Austin, Tex.,
1987), 59–92.
39 A. Schramm to Mina Schramm, 20 July 1860, 463.
40 A. Schramm to Mina Schramm, 29 Nov. 1859, 461.
112