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

Studying the historical origins of income differentials in the past is crucial for explaining the socioeconomic mobility of distinct ethnolinguistic groups, in the short- and long-run. This issue is particularly pressing in Brazil, a country characterized by extreme levels of income inequality that correlate with racial components traceable to the country’s historic slave-based economy. Yet rural labor markets in post-Abolition Brazil remain poorly understood, from a quantitative viewpoint, despite those emerging non-captive markets being also the main channel for the mass immigration of European fieldhands from the late 1880s to the 1920s. Such an important research gap reflects the scarcity of adequate microdata. The Ibicaba Project has begun to address this problem by creating a new archive in that plantation. Ibicaba is one of Brazil’s most important historical plantations precisely for being the first rural unit to employ indentured European laborers during the early transition from slavery in the country, while, simultaneously, remaining the largest slaveholder in São Paulo’s Old Western coffee zone. Drawing upon sixteen ledgers that record Ibicaba’s entire resident labor force between 1888 and 1958 (with gaps), this paper studies the emergence of labor markets in the post-Abolition era and tests competing hypotheses about the role of ethnolinguistic origins in determining labor remunerations. The empirical analysis does not support the hypothesis of taste-based discrimination. After controlling for households’ quantity-based TFP, ethnolinguistic origins did not lead to higher (positive discrimination in favor of European immigrants and their descendants) or lower (negative discrimination against Non-Whites) prices earned for the same type of homogenous agricultural task. However, results support the hypothesis of statistical discrimination. Based on labor arrangements highly dependent on intrahousehold divisions of labor, larger households were hired more frequently to cultivate coffee in the lean season and engaged for longer in harvesting. A major burden from slavery to the Black population in Ibicaba was the small number of economically-active household members. Finally, the paper traces the income profiles of various European immigrants and their descendants. German-speakers and Portuguese had labor income profiles closer to that of White Brazilians. The income profile of Italian immigrants and their descendants, however, shows evidence of households who performed rather poorly and probably failed to reach their “South American dreams†.