This dissertation seeks to investigate the determining aspects for the economic development of the Brazilian Northeast during the First Republic, focused on the transformations caused by the advance of capitalism on the economic and social relations registered in the region. The investigation will turn, in a first moment, to the consolidation of the periodization of the Northeastern economic history, with a brief recapitulation of the periods prior to the interval from 1889 to 1930, to, later, present and relate the social, political and economic elements that were determinant for the construction of the local economic complex, and, secondly, dedicating attention to the centrality of the creation of an agro-industrial matrix, focused on the exploitation and processing of sugarcane and cotton, provided by the articulation between local and external oligarchies, guided by the liberal bias of promoting agrarian activities and coercion of the working class, via an autocratic-bourgeois regime that sought to implement a model of conservative modernization of the economy and local society.