Using the concept of ‘Ancien Régime on the Tropics’, this article aims to investigate how social hierarchies and politics in Brazil, during the 18th century, reflected into concrete local strategies. Our objective is to understand the gadgets of an imperfect market, based on agents’ choices who were all involved in lands, sugar mills and credit commercial transactions in the Campo Grande civil parish, in the Rio de Janeiro. All agents had gotten to reproduce its extended senhorial condition. Our methodology is based on microanalysis, so we composed local social nets we guest had supported the agents’ strategies in question. We consider strategies to achieve long term incomes; bonds between purchaser, creditor, salesman and debtors (both involving sugar mills commercial transactions); the overlapping of dependence bonds by strategic exchanges created by sugar mill masters among consanguineous, matrimonial and fictitious relatives had been factors that made possible the economic accumulation and the extended reproduction of the master condition.
sugar mills; land market; local credit
