Latecomer State Formation by Sebastián Mazzuca

Author:Sebastián Mazzuca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

State Failure: Coffee Boom and Liberal Mismanagement

The 1830s is the most paradoxical decade in the history of Brazil. At the same time that the state collapsed both in the capacity to preserve the union among the constituent regions and in the capacity to hold the monopoly of violence, the economy of Rio de Janeiro embarked on the most powerful expansion experienced by any Latin American country before the mid-nineteenth century: the boom of coffee production and exports.

The Coffee Boom

Coffee was an economic novelty in independent Brazil. If the Brazilian economy in the nineteenth century was coffee, in colonial times it had been sugar. A common denominator in both periods was slave labor. Plantations of sugar and coffee were highly profitable. The commerce of African captives, although a subsidiary activity, was even more profitable. Together with fertile lands, slave labor was the main input of the plantations. In colonial times, sugar was cultivated in the lowlands of three areas: the northeastern provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco and the Center-South province of Rio de Janeiro. Cane plantations and sugar mills were much more numerous and productive in the Northeast than in the Center-South. Higher economic output throughout the seventeenth century made the city of Salvador (da Bahia) the original capital of Portuguese America. Plantations were voracious consumers of African people. Slave traders, negreiros, had a lower social status but were wealthier than the large plantation owners.

Rio de Janeiro became the capital of colonial Brazil only in 1763, two full centuries after its foundation. The capitalization of Rio was the recognition of its commercial preeminence. Starting in the 1730s, Rio boomed as an international city-port. By the mid-eighteenth century, it became the undisputed commercial emporium of the South Atlantic. The new status was the result of the fabulous discoveries of diamonds and gold in the last decade of the seventeenth century in what was then the Captaincy of São Vicente. When mining began to produce torrential levels of income, Portuguese authorities seeking tighter control decided to divide the São Vicente captaincy into the coastal province of São Paulo, which was left with no mineral endowments, and the landlocked province of Minas Gerais, which was separated from the province of Rio de Janeiro by the great natural escarpment of the Serra da Mantiqueira.

The discoveries of mineral wealth produced what by preindustrial standards was an economic miracle. Economic expansion induced a desperate search for passage from the highlands of Minas Gerais to the port of Rio de Janeiro. A major infrastructural achievement was the construction of the Estrada Real (Royal Road), which connected the port of Rio de Janeiro to the mineral-rich regions of Vila Rica (present-day Ouro Preto), Serro, and, at the northernmost point, Diamantina. A vast network of communications began to cover not only Rio and Minas but also São Paulo. São Paulo became an integral part of the region because of the active mule market in the town of Sorocaba, one hundred kilometers south of the provincial capital. Transportation of minerals, sugar, and imports was entirely based on mule trains.

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