Who Were the Coffee Workers on the Eve of Abolition? Enslaved, Immigrants, and Nationals in São Paulo, 1886-1887

This article presents new estimates of the number of enslaved workers, immigrants, and nationals employed in coffee production in the province of São Paulo during the years 1886-1887, just a few months before the Abolition and the beginning of mass European immigration. Drawing on slave labor, the expansion of coffee in the Paraíba Valley and the new areas of western São Paulo also incorporated different forms of free labor, whose numbers, distribution, and importance, however, remain an enigma and a subject of divergent and even opposing views. The main challenge is the scarcity — or lack — of quantitative data on each group of workers, especially in the case of free labor. This difficulty is exacerbated because the proportion of enslaved, immigrants, and nationals engaged in coffee cultivation may have varied substantially between different regions and periods of coffee expansion in São Paulo. As an alternative, this article adapts the method used by Van Delden Laërne (Brazil and Java, 1885) to estimate the distribution of the workforce on rural properties, using a variety of sources and data — such as the 1886 provincial census, the 1887 slave register (“matrícula de escravos†), reports from railway companies and farm records, as well as information from contemporary observers. The estimates indicate that, in 1886-1887, just over half of the labor force in São Paulo’s coffee agriculture was composed of enslaved workers. Thus, while the slave labor regime continued to be predominant on the province’s coffee farms, free labor (including freedmen) played a significant role on the eve of the Abolition and even before the Great Immigration began in the early months of 1887. The composition of this free labor was not limited to European immigrants. On the contrary, the importance of Brazilian workers appears to have been even greater than that of immigrants across the coffee farms of the time. The distribution of coffee labor also varied between regions, according to the timing of agricultural frontier expansion, with western São Paulo exhibiting a relative participation of enslaved workers in coffee cultivation almost identical to that of the Paraíba Valley. What distinguished the two traditional regions was the composition of free labor: in the older region, nationals made up almost half of the workforce engaged in coffee, while in the West free labor was distributed approximately equally between immigrants and nationals. In the new areas of coffee agriculture in the New West and the Frontier zones, with a relatively smaller number of immigrants and nationals, enslaved workers composed the dominant workforce until the beginning of the Great Immigration in 1887 and the collapse of slavery.