Slavery and the Economy of Sao Paulo, 1750-1850 (review)
Slavery and the Economy of Sao Paulo is a welcome addition to the regional and economic history of Brazil. The large questions forming the backdrop of the book are: "How did Sao Paulo emerge from its condition as an impoverished backwater during the colonial and early independence eras to become one of the economic powerhouses of the third world?" and "How did the conflated racial and economic stratifications evolve from the legal statuses conferred by slavery?" This book also demonstrates that the questions are intricately inter-related. Luna and Klein have compiled data from previously unpublished manuscript censuses of population and production for Sao Paulo covering the period from the 1760s through the 1850s. This database allows them to trace the early economic and demographic development of the province to the decades prior to the Sao Paulo's well-studied coffee boom. The organization of the book cuts across both production and demography. The first four chapters consider agricultural production for both export markets (sugar and coffee) and domestic subsistence in a roughly chronological sequence. The final four chapters consider the population, organized by legal/occupational statuses: slave-owners, slaves, the free population of color (the largest group, with the shallowest historiographic tradition) and the non-agricultural population. In each chapter, judicious selections of counties for detailed consideration provides for a much richer understanding of regional conditions, and differences among microregions, than previously possible.