Quinta Ibicaba, owned by Senator Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro throughout the 19th century, was the subject of studies focusing on the experience with the partnership system it has opened up. This article aims to revisit Ibicaba by means of new observation lenses. As a first step, we will try to place Vergueiro’s farm in the context of change that the world economy went through in the first decades of the eighth century, and then stress the importance of the spatial dimension of reality in that historic text. The following two sub-items, which form the core of the article, analyse the mainly spatial protocols for controlling the workforce used by Vergueiro, with a view to the maximum extraction of slave and settler work, and the strategies that captive and immigrant workers have used to escape such surveillance. Finally, there is a brief reminder of the main points raised and some considerations about the tensions that emerged in Ibicaba during the period studied.