Sugar became in the sixteenth century the predominant Brazilian export, and until the middle of the nineteenth century it never lost its leading position. Even during the gold rush of the eighteenth century, when Brazilian gold poured into the coffers of Europe and, as Adam Smith noted, helped fuel the industrial revolution, the value of Brazilian sugar exports always exceeded those of any other commodity. But the impression often given in the historiography of the Brazilian economy is that sugar experienced its heyday in the early seventeenth century and then fell into a long period of stagnation or decline, becoming in tjie process virtually moribund. Although it is true that foreign competition severely reduced the Brazilian share of the world sugar market after the mid–seventeenth century, the subsequent history of the sugar sector was not simply one of decline.