No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil: A Comment on Mauricio Font's Analysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
Extract
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
“If monoculture is an evil, this was not so with coffee. Coffee was autarkic; it demanded for its cultivation the simultaneous production of the most varied crops, even cattle raising. These were subsidiary crops, no doubt, but their total production was voluminous. It was cheap production, because it was an accessory that offered the people abundant and healthy food.” Thus asserted Joaquim Sampaio Vidal, a federal deputy for the Partido Democrático of São Paulo and president of the Sociedade Rural Brasileira in 1940.
- Type
- Commentary and Debate
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1989 by the University of Texas Press
References
Notes
1. As quoted in the Revista da Sociedade Rural Brasileira, Sept. 1940, p. 13.
2. The main contenders in this controversy fall into two camps. On the side of the skeptics regarding colono opportunities for accumulation are Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820–1920 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976); Michael M. Hall, “The Origins of Mass Immigration in Brazil, 1871–1914,” Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1969; and José de Souza Martins, O Cativeiro da Terra (São Paulo: Livraria Editora Ciências Humanas, 1979). The optimists are Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mauricio Font, “Planters and the State: The Pursuit of Hegemony in São Paulo, Brazil, 1889–1930,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1983; and Thomas W. Merrick and Douglas H. Graham, Population and Economic Development in Brazil, 1800 to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), who offer the most optimistic interpretation of all.
3. Letter by Antônio Prado published in the Correio Paulistano, 20 Aug. 1889, quoted by Brasílio Sallum, Jr., Capitalismo e Cafeicultura: Oeste Paulista, 1888–1930 (São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1982), 108.
4. See Verena Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on São Paulo Plantations, 1850–1980 (Oxford: Macmillan and St. Antony's College, 1988), especially chap. 2.
5. See Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil,” LAR 22, no. 3 (1987):73.
6. For further details on the cost flexibility of the colonato and colono opportunities of social mobility, see Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives.
7. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 73.
8. Mircea Buesco, Evolução Económica do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: APEC, 1974), 126.
9. Sérgio Milliet, Roteiro do Café e Outros Ensaios (São Paulo: Coleção Departamento de Cultura, 1939).
10. Angela A. Kageyama, “Crise e estrutura agrária na agricultura paulista na década de 30,” master's thesis, Escola Superior de Agricultura “Luiz de Queiroz,” Universidad de São Paulo, 1979; and Wilson Suzigan, Indústria Brasileira: Origem e Desenvolvimento (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986).
11. Suzigan, Indústria Brasileira, 350.
12. Joseph L. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1980).
13. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 80.
14. Ibid, 81.
15. Affonso de E. Taunay, Pequena História do Café no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Departamento Nacional do Café, 1945), 297.
16. Francisco Ferreira Ramos, O Café: Contribuição para o Estudo da Crise (São Paulo: n.p., 1902).
17. For a more detailed discussion of the question of labor supply, see Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, especially chap. 2.
You have
Access