O longo caminho da diversidade à desigualdade: um ensaio de interpretação da formação histórica de Minas Gerais

The historical formation of Minas Gerais stands out for its structural heterogeneity as its most important axis, with indissociable diversity that arose in the colonial period, which consolidated in the imperial period and turned into inequality in the republic. In the XVIII century, the gold economy translated to polarization that transcended the capitancy space, promoting the first process of macro regional integration of the country and propelled the most expressive migrational process and population growth of the Colony. In the XIX century, the biggest regional slave system of the Império was structured in Minas Gerais, the elevated populational growth rates were sustained and there was a great expansion of the agricole frontier in all the geographic directions of the province. In the XX century and in the beginning of the XXI century, a conjecture of changes atrophied the transformations that, since the second the second half of the XIX century, converged to the transition to a advanced economic system, and conducted Minas Gerais to a peripheral position in the inter-regional division of work and the biggest reservoir of immigration population of Brazil, as well as fracturing the territory of the state following multiple external polarizations that overlapped to the belo-horizontino pole. In the synthesised terms of timeline, it is proposed periodization in the prevalence of three regional economic systems and two periods of transition, that justified the dynamic of the economic and demographic growth of Minas Gerais.