Economic Rationale, Transition to Free Labor, and The Political Economy of Abolition: The Strategy of Campinas (1870-1889)

Abstract

The final decades of the Brazilian Empire witnessed the advent of a group of coffee growers from the state of São Paulo who understood the crisis of slavery as a window of opportunity to expand economic affairs and their participation in national public administration. Despite their use of captive workforce, these coffee growers, based in Campinas, reckoned that abolition, if offset by immigration in São Paulo, would weaken the rival slave-owning coffee producers - especially those from Rio de Janeiro. A policy of strategic patience was adopted, which was conceived to avoid division among fellow coffee producers in São Paulo and to predict the most appropriate time to act. The assent to abolitionism, paradoxically, occurred in a scenario in which the use of servile labor was not economically archaic. Considering the primary sources concerning the cost of coffee production, it is possible to conclude that the profitability of a captive workforce was not dwarfed by the gains concerning free-labor production. The adherence of coffee producers in Campinas to abolition, therefore, was not rooted in the accounting spreadsheet for each coffee plantation. It rather addressed, as confirmed by correspondence among the coffee producers in Campinas, an equation of political economy that included such factors as the abolitionist movement, the dismantling of rival coffee producers and the gaining of ground within the country’s public administration.

Keywords:
Economic rationality; Transition to free labor; Political economy of abolition; Western São Paulo; Crisis of the Brazilian Empire