This book examines the social-economic history of the region known as the Reconcavo in the province (now state) of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil. In the early nineteenth century, the Reconcavo ranked as one of the oldest and most important slaveholding regions in the Americas and, within Brazil, as a major center of sugar and tobacco production. A Babian Counterpoint shows that, although often dismissed as peripheral or marginal activities in the literature on Brazil, the production and marketing of foodstuffs for internal consumption played a crucial role in the development of the Reconcavo's slave-based export economy.