The development of capitalist agriculture has had a wide variety of effects upon pre-existing agrarian societies in Latin America. The forms it has assumed have in part been determined by variations in such factors as climate, ecology, demographic structure and history, ethnic patterns, and land tenure. The central theme of this volume is that such variations, whilst important in explaining localized phenomena, should essentially be seen as aspects of a basic process of change from one mode of production to another in the rural sector.

This is not of course a new idea, and indeed a number of writers, especially in the fields of economic history and social anthropology, have already dealt with many of the questions of particular relevance to the theme of this volume. Broadly speaking, their various approaches can be divided into three different levels of generalization. First, there are those works principally concerned with identifying the general mode of production in contemporary Latin American agriculture, in which the argument has centred around the question of whether the social organization of agriculture is essentially feudal or capitalist. Secondly, there is a more limited amount of theoretical discussion relating to the different types of agricultural enterprise to be found in Latin America, in which the principal distinction is drawn between the hacienda and the plantation. Finally, there is a very considerable body of literature dealing with types of peasantry and rural labour, where discussion concentrates upon the role-structure of rural economic life.

The period from the 1880s to the 1920s was the ‘Golden Age’ of coffee in western São Paulo. Santos, Sao Paulo's only major port, had replaced Rio de Janeiro as the world's most important coffee export centre by 1894. Santos’ share of the world coffee market rose from less than 25 per cent in the late 1880s to 50 per cent by the first years of the twentieth century, and it continued to supply more than half the world's coffee until after the First World War. In absolute terms the annual production of the Santos coffee zone increased from an average of under two million bags during the last years of slavery to more than eight million bags in the first five years of this century, and continued at high levels thereafter. The transition from slave to free labour, the rapid expansion of coffee cultivation, and massive European immigration into Sao Paulo characterize the period here under examination – the four decades from the decline of slavery in the 1880s to the Great Depression.

The geographical area being considered is the coffee region which exported its production through the port of Santos – that is, the interior plateau west and north of the city of São Paulo. The section of the Paraíba River Valley in eastern São Paulo, together with the coffee areas of southern Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro state, exported through the port of Rio de Janeiro. The coffee boom in the Paraiba Valley preceded that of the western plateau and was characterized by the slave labour system.