Legacies of Slavery or a Brave New World? Labor productivity and remuneration in the Brazilian coffee economy – New microdata evidence from the Ibicaba plantation (1888-1958)

The beginning of mass migration to the coffee plantations of Southeastern Brazil, particularly to the province of São Paulo, was concomitant with the intensification of the abolitionist movement and of the slave revolts that led to Abolition in 1888. Despite the centrality of the coffee economy to the socioeconomic prospects of immigrants and freedmen, still little is known about the functioning of agricultural labor markets in the immediate post-Abolition era and in subsequent decades. This paper sheds new light on the economic performance of non-whites, European immigrants, and white Brazilians in the coffee economy. It draws on microdata from the Ibicaba Collection – a newly created repository dedicated to preserving and digitizing the primary sources of the homonymous plantation, at once the first to experiment with non-captive European laborers and a major slaveholder until 1888. Contrary to the classical hypothesis that Europeans replaced freedmen and colored Brazilians in colonato contracts – the labor arrangement considered the most advantageous to laborers –, the evidence compiled in this paper shows that non-whites were the second to third most common ethnolinguistic group working as colonos, even if Italians and their descendants far outnumbered all others. Results further show that, among colonos, plantation managers did not discriminate in remuneration against non-whites or in favor of Europeans for the execution of unskilled agricultural tasks. Nonetheless, non-whites still showed the lowest annual earnings profiles of any ethnolinguistic group. The number of economically active members in a household was the most consistent determinant of colonos’ earnings and of the earnings differentials between non-whites, on the one hand, and Europeans and their descendants, on the other. This paper thus concludes that a major burden of slavery for non-whites was the size of their households in the post-Abolition period. European immigrants and their descendants, in turn, showed distinct aggregate earnings profiles. Whereas the Portuguese and German-speakers closely tracked white Brazilians – a result attributable to these groups’ longer migratory history to the region –, Italians and their descendants split between higher and lower performers, suggesting the existence of a subgroup that failed to achieve its “(South-)American dreams†.