This paper discusses Pires and Costa's (1995, 2000) claim that the Brazilian economy during the slavery period functioned under the direction of a specific form of capital, called mercantile slavery capital. Their proposal allows us to overcome a dichotomy between the traditional interpretive model of the Meaning of Colonization, originally proposed by Caio Prado Júnior in the 1940's, and the new model of Archaism as a Project, proposed by Fragoso and Florentino (2001). The former, by depicting the Brazilian colonial society as an immediate result of the European commercial expansion, has had difficulties in explaining recent empirical evidence that the colonial economy was relatively autonomous, being able to carry out endogenous capital accumulation. The latter, however, in trying to explicitly accommodate this evidence turns out to reject the original formulation of the Meaning of Colonization as a fundamental external determination of the colonial economy. In order to make explicit the way in which the concept of mercantile slavery capital overcomes this dilemma, we suggest an analogy with the way Marx's theory of value is developed in Capital.
Brazilian colonial economy; slavery economy; sentido da colonização; arcaísmo como projeto; slavery-commercial capital