IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/31833.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The end of plantation? Coffee and land inequality in early twentieth century São Paulo

Author

Listed:
  • Colistete, Renato P.
  • Lamounier, Maria Lucia

Abstract

This paper examines the concentration of land ownership in the leading coffee export region in the early twentieth century, the northeast area of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Critics of the so-called plantationist perspective have rejected the classic view that large estates shaped colonial and nineteenth century Brazilian economy and society, arguing instead for a major role of small and medium-sized landholdings. We describe the size distribution of landholdings and estimate alternative measures of land concentration based on a detailed agricultural census of the state of São Paulo. We find that, despite variation across municipalities, large farms and latifundia controlled most of the productive resources in northeast São Paulo, resulting in high levels of inequality when compared to those of other agrarian societies in the past. These results contrast with the view of the critics of classic historiography and suggest that the large estate and high concentration of wealth were remarkable features at least in the most important coffee region in Brazil during the early twentieth century.

Suggested Citation

  • Colistete, Renato P. & Lamounier, Maria Lucia, 2011. "The end of plantation? Coffee and land inequality in early twentieth century São Paulo," MPRA Paper 31833, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:31833
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/31833/1/MPRA_paper_31833.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Land inequality; coffee plantations; Gini index; Generalized Entropy indexes; São Paulo; Brazil;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O18 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure
    • Q15 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture - - - Land Ownership and Tenure; Land Reform; Land Use; Irrigation; Agriculture and Environment
    • O13 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Agriculture; Natural Resources; Environment; Other Primary Products
    • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
    • N56 - Economic History - - Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment and Extractive Industries - - - Latin America; Caribbean

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:31833. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.