The Planter Class and Labour

Abstract

As a country with abundant land and a relatively scarce population, Brazil confronted special problems in the creation of a labour force. Until the 1850s, slaves made up the bulk of the workforce needed by large-scale export agriculture. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, as slavery came under increasing attack, at least some São Paulo coffee planters began experimenting with free labour. The abolition of the slave trade in 1850, moreover, coincided with the penetration and rapid expansion of coffee in western São Paulo, due to the decline of the other main coffee-growing region — the Paraíba Valley — and in response to the growing international demand for coffee. The introduction of free labour in São Paulo agriculture is, in effect, an instance of the creation of a free labour force in a situation of extensive agricultural development under conditions of potentially scarce labour supply. “Our soil offers unlimited wealth, but we lack labour”, as one contemporary put the crucial obstacle to continued agricultural development which São Paulo planters faced in the second half of the nineteenth century.