Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750-1850 / Francisco Vidal Luna, Herbert S. Klein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Luna, Francisco Vidal, Author.

Klein, Herbert S., Author.

Series:

Social Science History

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (288 p.) : 50 tables, 14 illustrations, 2 maps

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Today the Brazilian state of São Paulo is one of the world’s most advanced agricultural, industrial, and urbanized regions. Its historical evolution, however, is poorly understood. Most scholarly attention has been paid to the period after 1850, when coffee rose to economic dominance, or to the period since 1880, when large-scale European immigration turned the city of São Paulo into one of the largest metropolises in the world. This book thus provides the first comprehensive portrait of the economy and people of São Paulo during the critical transition from the traditional eighteenth-century colonial world to the modernizing world of the nineteenth century. The result is a major rethinking of the history of early slavery in Brazil—it shows that, contrary to previous beliefs, slavery was as deeply entrenched and exploited in São Paulo as elsewhere in Brazil, and that the state’s early economic growth (as the world’s leading coffee-producing region after 1850) was made possible by an expanding African slave labor force. This raises many questions about São Paulo’s supposed “exceptionalism” and challenges the standard account of the state’s economic history, which has been strongly shaped by ideas of path dependence. In addition to studying the slave-owning class, the authors investigate the economic role of free whites and colored who did not own slaves, and compare São Paulo’s slave society and economy with other such regions in the Americas.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

Introduction

Chapter 1 São Paulo to 1800

Chapter 2 The Rise of Commercial Sugar Production

Chapter 3 The Growth of Coffee in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 4 Subsistence and the Local Economy

Chapter 5 The Slave Owners

Chapter 6 The Slave Population

Chapter 7 The Free Colored in São Paulo

Chapter 8 The Non-Agricultural Sector: Artisans, Merchants, and the Liberal Professions

Conclusion

Appendix

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

0-8047-6685-1

OCLC:

1294424712