Abstract
By using analytical instruments like the Global Commodities Chains and those of Karl Polanyi’s economic anthropology, this paper seeks to highlight the importance and significance of the coffee economy that developed in the Mata region of Minas Gerais. In this sense, this paper emphasizes the region’s positioning as one of the leading producing and exporting areas of coffee not only in Brazil but throughout Latin America, in the first place. Secondly, this paper shows the establishment of capitalist markets in the region, a process that gradually permitted the Mata region of Minas Gerais to develop the main mechanisms of resource retention and of internal capital accumulation.