On 13 August 1759, an alvará confirmed the Companhia Geral de Pernambuco e Paraíba. The company received a 20-year monopoly over commerce in Pernambuco and associated captaincies. In a region where sugar and other plantation production relied on enslaved Africans, protected shipping and credit could support the slave-based colonial economy. The charter did not itself create slavery, but it strengthened commercial infrastructure through which imperial authorities and merchants organized production and trade. African people and their descendants remained the laboring subjects of an economy whose official records usually foregrounded investors and administrators.
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