Francisco Vidal Luna

Brazil since 1980

Introduction 1. Politics 2. Economy 3. Finance 4. Agriculture 5. Industry 6. Demography 7. Education, health and welfare 8. Inequality Conclusion.

Free Colored in a Slave Society: Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais in the Early Nineteenth Century

Brazil was traditionally depicted as a plantation economy dominated by slaves and slave owners. However, all recent studies have denied the picture painted so ably by Gilberto Freyre over a half century ago of a dichotomous society dominated by the plantation; in fact, most scholars have stressed that Brazil looked more like the United States than the West Indies in the relative weight of slaves and slave owners in the population.1 Our survey of São Paulo indicates

Slaves and Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Sao Paulo

Slaves and Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Sao Paulo The slave regime of Brazil has become the object of major research efforts in the last ten years. The traditional model of a plantation-dominated society presented in Freyres seminal work is no longer accepted as the norm, and the complexities and regional variations of the slave system are being systematically explored for the first time.1 In this context, recent work on the late eighteenthand nineteenth-century slave states of Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo has been particularly important.2

Slave Economy and Society in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, Brazil in 1830

The current analysis of slave society in Brazil has involved a rethinking of the traditional plantation dominated model, with a new stress on the wide dispersion of slaves among whites and non-whites and their involvement in a lively internal economy as well as in extractive industries. This general picture is confirmed in a detailed analysis of the economy and slavery practised in the two major provinces of Minas Gerais and São Paulo in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Slaves were held in small units and they could be found in every region and occupied in every major economic activity. In some regions there was even positive growth rates of the resident slave population despite the massive arrival of Africans. Finally we find women and free coloured as significant slave-owners, with the latter especially concentrated in the trades. In the last thirty years there has emerged in Brazil a new understanding of the slave society organised in the colonial and imperial periods, especially in relation to how slave labour was used. These new studies of slave-ownership and of slave labour have questioned the traditional vision of Brazilian slavery proposed by Gilberto Freyre in his work on the sugar estates of the Northeast, which argued for the model of the large slave plantation. That dominant vision began to be challenged in the 1980s with studies which showed that small slave-owners dominated the colonial extractive economy of Minas Gerais in the colonial and imperial period. How could one justify the large plantation model as the norm when the majority of slave-owners in Minas owned less than five slaves and controlled a large share of the labour force? In fluvial gold mining of eighteenth-century Minas Gerais it was such small slave-owners who dominated, not the imagined miner with hundreds of Francisco Vidal Luna is Professor of Economics at the Universidade de São Paulo. Herbert S. Klein is Gouverneur Morris Professor of History at Columbia University. 1 In the decade of the 1980s numerous studies were published on ownership of slaves in Minas Gerais appeared by Francisco Vidal Luna. See his Minas Gerais : Escravos e senhores. (São Paulo : USP, Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas, 1981) ; ‘Estrutura da Posse de Escravos em Minas Gerais (1718), ’História Econômica : Ensaios Econômicos (São Paulo, 1983), pp. 25–41; ‘Estrutura da Posse de Escravos em Minas Gerais (1804), ’ in Iraci del Nero da Costa (ed.), Brasil História Econômica e Demográfica. Série Relatórios de Pesquisa (São Paulo, 1986), pp. 157–72, as well as Francisco Vidal Luna and Iraci del Nero da Costa, ‘Demografia Histórica de Minas Gerais, ’ Revista Brasileira de Assuntos Polı́ticos, vol. 58 (1984), pp. 15–62. J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 36, 1–28 f 2004 Cambridge University Press 1 DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X03007053 Printed in the United Kingdom

Escravidão africana na produção de alimentos. São Paulo no século 19

A utilizacao do trabalho escravo na America esteve associada com a agricultura para exportacao. Entretanto, nao houve regime escravista no qual os escravos foram utilizados somente naqueles cultivos; mesmo nas areas mais orientadas para a exportacao, houve producao de generos alimenticios para consumo proprio e abastecimento do mercado local. Porem, em poucos casos essa atividade foi tao marcante como na economia escravista no Brasil, em especial nas areas pioneiras da cafeicultura em Sao Paulo, na primeira metade do seculo 19. A analise desse processo de producao e o objetivo deste artigo.

Slavery in Brazil: Slave Resistance and Rebellion

The growth of a sense of identity and community among Afro-Brazilian slaves was essential for their survival as a society and group. Families were established, children were educated, and beliefs were developed that gave legitimacy to their lives. Yet much of their lives were controlled by others. Their labor was defined by others and was not typically organized by households, as in the case of all other working-class persons. Even their social behavior was restricted by whites when it clashed with the needs for control or the norms of behavior found acceptable by whites. Physical violence was also inherent in chattel slavery and created a level of fear and uncertainty unmatched by any other form of class or labor relations in America. Finally, even the physical well-being of the slave and his or her family was at the whim of his or her master and could be affected by considerations outside the slaves control. Thus, no matter how adjusted their culture and community might make them feel toward the Brazilian society in which they found themselves, slaves always felt a degree of dependency and loss of control that created basic uncertainty and hostility toward the whole system. For those who were unable to conform, incapable of restraining their individuality, or unlucky enough to find themselves with no autonomy or protection within the system, resistance, escape, and rebellion were the only viable alternatives.

CREANDO UN ESTADO DE BIENESTAR EN UN RÉGIMEN AUTORITARIO: EL CASO DE BRASIL

espanolEste articulo detalla los origenes y la evolucion del sistema de proteccion social brasileno desde la epoca del Estado Novo de Getulio Vargas hasta los regimenes militares de 1964 a 1985. El caso de Brasil es bastante inusual, ya que el Estado de Bienestar fue creado por gobiernos no democraticos. Este enfoque de arriba hacia abajo respondio a las necesidades del gobierno tanto de satisfacer las demandas de una clase trabajadora moderna en un pais de reciente industrializacion como de controlar protestas populares y concitar apoyo. A pesar de sus origenes y su estructura autoritaria, gran parte de este sistema ha sobrevivido en la era post-militar, siendo hoy, con modestos cambios de enfasis, la base del Estado de Bienestar brasileno. EnglishThis article details the origins and evolution of the Brazilian welfare system from the time of the Estado Novo of Getulio Vargas through the military regimes of 1964-1985. Brazil’s case is fairly unusual in that its construction of the welfare state was created by non-democratic governments. This top down approach we argue responded to government needs to provide for a modern working class for a newly industrializing nation and to control popular protest and generate support. Yet for all its authoritarian origins and structure, much of the system which was created has survived into the post-military era, with only modest change of emphasis, and is today the basis for Brazil’s social welfare state.

A Agricultura Paulista em 1905

This study analyzes the importance of the coffee plantations in Sao Paulo in 1905 and shows that the major coffee producers coexisted with thousands of small and medium farmers also dedicated to coffee production. This analysis of the agricultural sector also shows the existence of a large sector committed to production for the internal market, in many cases in units dedicated to coffee production. The Mogiana region was the most important agricultural zone in the state, with the Valley of Paraiba having lost its importance by this period. Our study also demonstrates the high productivity of the new agricultural zones. The expansion of the railroad system permitted paulista agriculture to expand production and to maintain its productivity. With land available and an intense European immigration providing labor, it was inevitable that coffee production was expanding. This occurred despite the low level farming technology adopted. Few farmers, even in the most dynamic region, utilized the plow or similar equipment or applied chemical fertilizers.

Slavery in Brazil: The Establishment of African Slavery in Brazil in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Why did the Portuguese decide massively to import Africans into Brazil, when this was a minor part of their world empire and when the dominant overseas institutions it developed were trading factories and not colonies? In fact, the first thirty years of colonial contact in Brazil fit the African and Asian patterns more than the colonization of Madeira and the Azores. The initial conquest and contact with Brazil was marginal to the great Portuguese international imperial expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Claiming the region through expeditions that found Brazil on the road to the East Indies, the Portuguese were little interested in its immediate development. With the riches of Asia available to them as the Portuguese opened up a water route to the islands of Indonesia and then to India, Japan, and China, there was little demand for the development of Brazil beyond an emporium for tropical products unavailable in Europe. The first commercial exports in fact were woods, from which were extracted dyes. These so-called Brazil wood trees were usually cut by local Indian groups and then shipped by the Portuguese to Europe on a seasonal basis, with no permanent Portuguese settlers residing in America. Castaways and other marginal Portuguese began living with local Tupi–Guarani-speaking Indian communities along the coast and became the crucial cultural brokers who kept the contact with the mother country alive.

Slavery in Brazil: Life, Death, and Migration in Afro-Brazilian Slave Society

The expansion of the export sector in Brazil during four centuries of its evolution was the driving force behind the forced migration of African laborers to the shores of Brazil. Portuguese merchants made this migration possible by opening up the African Atlantic markets and organizing a slave-trading fleet. At the same time, the subsequent growth or decline of these African slaves and their descendants in Brazil was determined by classic demographic factors, such as their birth and death rates, as well as their rates of internal migration and manumission. These are themes that will be explored in this chapter as we summarize the latest studies relating to the population history of these several million forced migrants who arrived in Brazil in the period to 1850. To transport these estimated 5.5 million workers shipped from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil, there emerged a sophisticated and complex system of the purchase of African slaves with goods demanded by the African markets, which in turn linked the economies of Asia, America, and Europe to the evolving market economy in Africa. There is little question that Brazil was the single most important arrival place for African slaves in America. Of the estimated 10.7 million Africans who safely crossed the Atlantic from the late fifteenth century until the late nineteenth century, an estimated 4.8 million survived the crossing and landed in Brazil.