The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil: The Liberation of Africans Through the Emancipation of Capital (Contributions in Latin American Studies)

THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN BRAZIL

Recent Titles in Contributions in Latin American Studies Mexico Faces the 21st Century Donald E. Schulz and Edward J. Williams, editors Authoritarianism in Latin America since Independence Will Fowler, editor Colombia's Military and Brazil's Monarchy: Undermining the Republican Foundations of South American Independence Thomas Millington Brutality and Benevolence: Human Ethology, Culture, and the Birth of Mexico Abel A. Alves Ideologues and Ideologies in Latin America Will Fowler, editor Family and Favela: The Reproduction of Poverty in Rio de Janeiro Julio Cesar Pino Mexico in the Age of Proposals, 1821-1853 Will Fowler Reinventing Legitimacy: Democracy and Political Change in Venezuela Damarys Canache and Michael R. Kulisheck, editors Sugar and Power in the Dominican Republic: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Trujillos Michael R. Hall Tornel and Santa Anna: The Writer and the Caudillo, Mexico 1795-1853 Will Fowler Exiles, Allies, Rebels: Brazil's Indianist Movement, Indigenist Politics, and the Imperial Nation-State David Treece One of the Forgotten Things: Getiilio Vargas and Brazilian Social Control, 1930-1954 R. S. Rose

THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN BRAZIL The "Liberation" of Africans Through the Emancipation of Capital David Baronov

Contributions in Latin American Studies, Number 17

GREENWOOD PRESS

westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baronov, David. The abolition of slavery in Brazil : the "liberation" of Africans through the emancipation of capital / by David Baronov. p. cm.—(Contributions in Latin American studies, ISSN 1054-6790 ; no. 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-31242-7 (alk. paper) 1. Slavery—Brazil—History—19th century. 2. Labor supply—Brazil—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series. HT1128.B35 2000 326'.8'0981—dc21 99-058881 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2000 by David Baronov All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-058881 ISBN: 0-313-31242-7 ISSN: 1054-6790 First published in 2000 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Para Maria Soledad e Andre Antonio

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Contents Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1. The Historical and Theoretical Origins of the Modern Industrial Working Class (1700-1817)

25

2.

The Historical and Theoretical Origins of the Modern Industrial Working Class (1817-1870)

55

3.

The Abolition of Servile Labor East and West

79

4.

The Legacy of Brazilian Slavery

117

5.

Brazilian Abolition: The Preparation

145

6.

Brazilian Abolition: The Process

173

Appendix A: Example of a 19th-century Colono Contract

205

Bibliography

209

Index

229

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Tables 3.1 Land/Labor Ratios in the Caribbean at the Time of Abolition

96

3.2 Number of Africans versus European Immigrants to the Americas, 1820-1859

102

3.3 Number of Slaves/Chinese Laborers Sent to Cuba, 1853-1874

103

4.1 Years of Ending Slave Trade/Abolition across the Americas

119

4.2 Value of Selected Export Products as a Percentage of All Exports

126

5.1 Brazilian Coffee/Sugar Earnings, 1841 -1900 (Measured in 1,000s of British Pounds)

153

5.2 Regional Slave Populations/Percentage in Coffee Regions, 1864-1887

154

5.3 Regional Slave Populations as Percentages of the African Population/Total Population (1872)

157

5.4 Percentage of Freed Slaves and Slaves Who Were Mulatto (Nationally and for Select Provinces)

158

5.5 Total Number of Immigrants to Brazil by Decade, 1820-1930

164

6.1 World Sugar Production/Brazilian Amounts, 1846-1905 (in Metric Tons)

176

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Acknowledgments Though the credit for most books is given to a single author, the great majority are the result of significant collaboration. This book is no exception. Indeed, this book has benefited immeasurably from the insights and inspiration of a great many friends and colleagues. Prodding me along throughout the research and writing process has been the steady encouragement and indispensable counsel of Anfbal Quijano. This work is the product of both Anfbal Quijano's original intellectual contributions to the study of Latin America's cultural origins (which in large measure provided the initial motivation for this work) as well as his generosity and patience in providing an at times difficult student with invaluable guidance and instruction. Giovanni Arrighi, Kelvin Santiago Valles, Dale Tomich, Erick Perez Velasco and Ravi Sundaram provided critical commentary and suggestions throughout the preparation of this work. For his careful review of the manuscript and prescient observations, I am grateful for the contribution of Vincent Peloso. Special thanks are due to Terence Hopkins. For his trust and guidance, I, and my fellow generation of graduate students, owe a tremendous debt. A Research Fellowship from Centro de Investigaciones Laborales, Documentation y Education de Sindicatos (CILDES) in San Juan, Puerto Rico provided me with critical resources and financial assistance for the completion of this book. A work of this nature begins, of course, with the cultivation of a basic intellectual curiosity. For that, importantly, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the enduring influence of both my mother and father. Lastly, I wish to acknowledge the essential contribution of Mrs. Druian, without whom, this book would never have been possible.

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THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN BRAZIL

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Introduction Free labor is indeed a defining feature of capitalism, but not free labor throughout the productive enterprises. Free labor is the form of labor control used for skilled work in the core countries whereas coerced labor is used for less skilled work in peripheral areas. The combination thereof is the essence of capitalism. (Immanuel Wallerstein, 1974, p. 127) ^Que le va pasar al trabajo? Esta es una cuestion que extrafiamente no esta en debate, desde hace mucho tiempo. . . . En este mismo momento es indispensable explorar y comenzar a discutir que pasa ciertamente con la categorfa trabajo, pero ya no solamente en el sentido conventional, trabajo salariado versus capital, sino en todas las multiples formas de trabajo que hoy estan directamente articuladas al dominio del capital. (Anfbal Quijano, 1992b, p. 53)

Sembene Ousmane, in depicting the 1947-48 Senegalese railway strike, records with particular poignancy the personal anguish and genuine befuddlement of the French colonial agent Dejean, preparing to meet with striking railway workers. [For Dejean] the crisis was not only the most unexpected but the most totally incomprehensible. A discussion between employer and employees presupposes the fact that there are employees and there is an employer. But he, Dejean, was not an employer; he was simply exercising a function which rested on the most natural of bases—the right to an absolute authority over beings whose color made of them not subordinates with whom one could discuss anything, but men of another, inferior condition, fit only for unqualified obedience. (Ousmane, 1962, p. 177)

2

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

Dejean is not alone in his confusion. The role of race and class within modern social analysis occupies a fiercely debated terrain throughout the Americas. In Brazil it is precisely this ongoing struggle to theorize and historicize race and class that provides the intellectual rudder for those navigating historical social analysis. Modern Brazilian history begins with an ending—the abolition of slavery. It is, however, an abolition of unique construction. The immediate reward for one's "freedom" ran along a continuum from complete marginalization from Brazilian society (as in the northeast sugar region) to reincorporation into a reconstituted, race-based division of labor (as in the western Sao Paulo coffee region). The abolition of slavery not only did not emancipate the African but in fact, arguably placed before capital an even more compliant, racially divided labor force. To fully appreciate the interplay of race and class in modern Brazil, therefore, one needs first to examine the origins and architecture of this reconstituted, race-based division of labor. The story of abolition is, at one and the same time, the story of racial subjugation and the story of working-class formation on a global scale. The concepts of a race-based division of labor and of non-wage-labor forms are, therefore, at the core of this study. A central contention of this work is that non-wage-labor forms—tied to a race-based, global division of labor—have been integral to capital-labor relations from the inception of capitalist production as a central organizing factor of the modern world and are, therefore, a principal determinant of the relationship's ongoing construction. At the same time, the dominant representations of capitalist production have been characterized by the exclusion of such race-based, non-wage-labor forms (e.g., slavery) from the theoretical and historical category of "labor." This is a modern atavism that may, in large part, be traced to the works of classical political economy. The failure to discern the analytically narrowed roots of historical labor in relation to historical capital has resulted in the privileging of core-based, predominantly white wage-labor. This study attempts to show this historical construction of labor to be neither theoretically nor historically justified. Toward this end, the abolition of slavery represents a uniquely apt historical chapter. The transition from slavery to "freedom" occupies a central place in the history of Western civilization. The popular notion of abolition is that it represented a transition from a precapitalist, slave society that was ruled by extramarket forces to a capitalist, wage-labor society ruled by market rationale. It is argued that the end of slavery resulted in conditions permitting the rational use of a complex division of labor organized via a market incentive structure. This occurred during a maturing phase of Western industrialization when capital-intensive production was overtaking labor-intensive production. Consistent with this depiction, it is premised that slave-labor is incompatible with a complex division of labor that is shaped by market forces. Capital accumulation on an expanded scale (based on capital intensive production) requires a complex division of labor that is shaped by market forces. Therefore, slave-labor is inconsistent with modern capitalist production. For this reason, the end of slavery has been associated with a move toward freedom and obeisance to market structures. Additionally, because free markets are assumed to operate

Introduction

3

without bias, the society that emerges should be race-neutral. Thus, in this popular interpretation of abolition, market forces are to play a predominant role in postslave society. It is argued here, however, that race-neutral market forces (guiding a transition from slave-labor to wage-labor) were not the primary factors shaping post-slave Brazilian society. Rather, extramarket forces were the primary factors shaping postslave Brazilian society. As discussed later, chief among these extramarket forces were three essential Euro-Brazilian traits: systematic racism, continued reliance upon new forms of coerced labor and a monopoly of the productive forces (and the state). In fact, extramarket forces were actually the primary factors shaping 19th-century, advanced, industrialized societies as well. Indeed, as Chapters 1 and 2 detail, the core-based working class was characterized by a combination of wage-labor and non-wage-labor. In fact, three of the most influential social theorists of modern capitalist development (Smith, Ricardo and Marx) were all forced to greatly distort the social reality of their day to support their theoretical notions. Given the emphasis this study places on non-wage-labor forms, it is important to consider the analytical and historical social category of "labor" itself. Labor, along with the modern industrial working class (as a historical social actor within modern capitalist society), raises a number of conceptual and theoretical issues. The analytical and historical efforts to represent working-class history are examined here by means of (1) tracing the analytical and historical roots of the modern industrial working class (as a social category) to the 18thand 19th-century tradition of political economy as it emerged from within European history and (2) examining the 19th-century Brazilian abolition of slavery in the context of working-class formation on a world scale.1 The 1888 abolition of slavery in Brazil marked the end of slavery as a legal labor form in Brazil (and throughout the Americas). It meant the promotion of a category of people from the condition of being property to the condition of (potentially) being proprietors. This was a fairly complex transformation. Africans, long held the cultural inferior, were suddenly free of the institution conferring upon them this status. Thus, aware of evolving mores, Brazil's elites moved swiftly to replace an outmoded, race-based division of labor with a new and improved, race-based division of labor. In came wave after wave of fair-skinned European immigrants. Immigrants came not simply to take over the slave's hoe or replace senzalas with homesteads but to create a larger society within which the Africans' inferior place could remain unambiguously clear. The scale and degree of change from the time of their arrival in 1502 until abolition in 1888 were literally beyond comprehension. Three hundred and 86 years later, there was a sizable, multigeneration, freed slave culture that was indigenous to Brazil—along with an African community with its own racial rivalries between light-skinned and dark-skinned members that were reinforced by the dominant Brazilian culture's privileging of mulattoes over darker-skinned Africans. There was a new and evolving national economy, within which the skills slaves had gained and the export-oriented sectors they had grown expert in were either in decline or off-limits to them. A new money culture, to which

4

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

many slaves were unaccustomed, awaited the freed slave. The size of the labor pool (and its diversity) completely dwarfed that of 1502, as European immigrants were sought to flood the labor market and transform (protect) Brazilian (European) culture. Lastly, by 1888 a vast state structure of coercion had been built up with an impressive array of police and prison systems to enforce labor laws, land laws and vagrancy ordinances. Three essential pillars of Brazilian society had not changed in the course of the 386 years leading up to abolition: the Brazilian elite's racist attitudes toward Africans, their continued use of coerced labor and their monopoly on the productive forces (and the state). Thus, Brazilian abolition, as in the rest of the Americas, was not about "How do we right a moral wrong?" but "How do we perpetuate race-based labor discrimination in a socially acceptable fashion?" It was not about "How do we extend freedom?" but "How do we construct the conditions of nonenslavement such that the former slaves have no choice but to continue submitting to us?" There was one overall goal of Brazil's elite with respect to the abolition of slavery: how to stop being a slaveholder while retaining all the prestige, power, and privilege attached to such a social role. Only the flexibility of capital would make this possible. Abolition yielded three basic outcomes in Brazil (and throughout the Americas): a strict racial hierarchy, extramarket methods of labor coercion and the previous capitalist class' continued monopoly of land, capital resources and the state. The "freed" slave remained a racially/ethnically excluded category of person. The "freed" slave could not voluntarily withdraw/offer their labor, organize (as laborers), obtain property or access to land, credit or capital, compete "freely" with European labor in a labor market, enter into free contract with capital, move about freely, take part in a race-neutral division of labor or adorn the cloak of citizenry. Slavery, a specific, race-based form of coerced labor, was replaced with new, race-based forms of coerced labor. In fact, the overall social position of the slave—never merely a legal or economic one— cannot be shown to have altered appreciably at all following the abolition of slavery. To the contrary, released of their servitude into a social morass specifically designed to deny them access, they were left penniless, landless and jobless—forced to submit to the frequently even harsher conditions of freedom. To quote Foner's aptly titled work on the subject, the former slaves had "nothing but freedom." This resulted not merely from capital-labor relations constituted by capitalist production but from a race-based division of labor employed by capital. In fact, one could say that true "emancipation" would have been contingent not on the fact that African labor could not be enslaved but on the possibility that European labor could be enslaved. Thus, contemporary, working-class formation carries with it these scars. Observing such trends on a more general level, Anfbal Quijano traces the racial and ethnic artifice across the Americas today to the legacy of slavery and colonial rule. The colonial structure of power produced the social discriminations that would later be codified as "races," ethnicities, anthropologized subjects, or nationalities, according to

Introduction

5

the given moment, agents, and populations. These intersubjective constructions, products of European colonial domination, were simply assumed to be actual categories— "scientific" and "objective"—without historic origin. . . . In effect, if one observes the principal lines of exploitation and social domination on a global scale within the matrices of current world power it is impossible not to see that the vast majority of exploited, dominated, and discriminated peoples are exactly those members of the "races," "ethnicities," or "nations" who were colonized. (Quijano, 1992a, p. 12) Concerns related to the conceptual framework of processes defining modern working-class formation, as a social process, in large part motivate this examination of 19th-century Brazilian abolition. The history of capitalist production, from the late 18th century in Europe and the Americas, is the history of evolving labor forms combined in order to continue to create surplus value on an ever-increasing scale by means of (1) subsuming vast new categories/forms of labor and (2) continuing to sustain and regulate a growing "surplus population." In this historical process, the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the latter 19th century marks a crucial epoch. The task at hand was to terminate labor forms seemingly antithetical to capital accumulation based in the generation of surplus value (not to mention the fragile sensibilities of an enlightened bourgeoisie) and to create a social order in which former slaves and former serfs could be integrated productively into global capitalist production. For the first time in world history, capital was to have at its disposal and would treat conceptually—if not always legally—all former labor forms (slave, serf, smallholding agricultural producer, artisan/craftsman) as one—the proletariat. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the category of labor within capitalist production, both in historical representation and in theoretical discourse, is, by and large, presented in one of two forms: wage-labor or wage-labor in formation. Slavery (and the longer, 500-year experience of Africans in the Americas) is but the most obvious example of this distorted representation. It is a fact, of course, that there were slaves across the Americas in the beginning of the 19th century and that there were none by the century's close. Equally, it is a fact that at both the beginning and the end of the 19th century there was a race-based division of labor across the Americas of varying degrees of coercion within which Africans occupied the lowest rung. Still, historians persist in discussing the abolition of slavery and the "emancipation" of slaves as if they were transformative events, heralding a new era with respect to the division of labor in the Americas. Marx himself fumbled somewhat awkwardly with the category of the slave. At one point, Marx presented an inverted notion of "emancipation," musing, "Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a Black skin" (Marx, 1977, p. 414). In fact, the opposite was true. The abolition of slavery did not emancipate a single African, while the expansion of slavery to include non-Africans would have emancipated all Africans. Why the West chose to abolish—rather than "democratize"—slavery provides the basis for understanding why the 19th-century abolitions of slavery did not (and could not) result in the emancipation of slaves. To the contrary, it guaranteed, for capital,

6

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

the continued legacy of slave society—a race-based division of labor across the Americas. Most debates on the abolition of slavery have centered on how well slave-labor "fit" within capitalist production and, consequently, why abolitions occurred when they did. This results (implicitly or explicitly) in the fetishized privileging of wage-labor (the abolition of slavery becomes the transition from slave-labor to wage-labor). Thus, it is argued that slavery was abolished at a certain point in the development of capitalist production when it was required. Debate, from Eric Williams forward, then searches high and low for capital's vested interests to explain the processes of abolition. It is necessary to locate the causation of an event, however, only if that event brought about significant change (in need of explanation). Discussions of 20th-century African "independence," for example, tend to center on the lack of significant change, on continuities—hence, the emergence of the condition of neocolonialism. One wonders, therefore, how it is that, on one hand, historians are able to expound on the continued structural dependency linking neocolonial African states to Europe through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European-language parliaments, financial markets, export markets and so on and, on the other hand, with respect to freed slaves one hears talk of abolition, liberation, emancipation, freedom, free labor, and so on. The answer, of course, lies in the fact that most are unable to conceive of labor outside the narrow confines of wage-labor. Capitalist production is imagined to be comprise of a working class of wage-laborers and laborers in transition to becoming wage-laborers. While such a world may provide convenient, synthetic arenas of analysis, they unfortunately conform to no actually existing social arrangements past or present. As a result, the slave's (and former slave's) role in working-class history remains a much-neglected subject. It is in light of such tenuous presuppositions that this study takes up the topic of 19th-century Brazilian abolition. The modern institution of slave-labor in the Americas, in fact, provides a useful conceptual and historical tool for examining the evolution of the working class as the combination of varied labor forms on a global level. Slave-labor was unique among labor forms. For the first time in modern history a racial hierarchy was explicitly associated with specific labor forms. Hence, with the European introduction of African labor on Native American land, Europe was forced to formally establish and codify the category of race itself. Not all Africans were slaves. However, all slaves were Africans (with the exception of early experiments in Native American slavery, particularly in mining regions and the Caribbean). Europeans, who frequently performed labor similar to that of the slave (at times working right beside the slave), were given the distinct title of "indentured laborers"—carrying with it important legal and social distinctions from the slave-laborer. Thus, in a sense, the destruction of the institution of slavery was held to be the modern world's elimination of a final obstacle to realizing the Enlightenment's project of universalizing labor forms, that is, throwing African slave-laborers into the general category of abstract

Introduction

7

labor. In this sense the period of abolition has been construed to be the apogee of the modern process of working-class formation on a global scale. Four basic arguments support the notion that the 19th-century abolition of slavery in Brazil (and throughout the Americas) did not result in the "emancipation" of slaves. First, non-wage-labor forms, in general, are historically and theoretically compatible with capitalist production. Second, slave-labor, in particular, as a raw materials-producing labor form located in the periphery, is historically and theoretically compatible with capitalist production. Third, 19th-century abolition from the legal condition of slavery in the Americas resulted in either (1) the marginalization of former slaves from capitalist production or (2) the incorporation of former slaves into new, race-based regimes of coerced labor. Fourth, the new regimes of coerced labor following slavery located in the periphery retained and reified three distinct features of modern slave-labor: a strict racial hierarchy, extramarket methods of labor coercion and the previous capitalist class' monopoly of land, capital resources and the state. ORGANIZING THEMES Several organizing themes—representing central characteristics of capitalist production—help shape the presentation of this work. Capitalist production is understood to be a historically specific form of social reproduction, with its own logic and processes. These processes, along with capitalist production as a system (though not so often as an epoch), were the subjects of classical political economy. One of the central features of political economy's depiction of capitalist production is the role of labor—or the industrial working class. As Marx wryly points out, however, rather than examining the actual original process whereby an industrial working class was brought into existence, most political economists considered merely the relations of an already formed proletariat to their social and economic environs.2 For this reason, the origin of the modern industrial working class is a rarely explored phenomenon in the world of political economy. Likewise, the category of the working class itself is rather uncritically treated, as if it were of uniform character. It is presumed that the working class consists of a vast reservoir of laborers who are dispossessed of the means of production and have neither the means of obtaining subsistence nor the capacity to reproduce themselves—save for entering into "free" contract with the owners of capital to work for wages that are then exchanged (again in a free market) for articles of consumption. Hence, the modern industrial working class is a collection of wage-laborers. In the annals of political economy and modern labor history the modern industrial working class (i.e., the labor form appropriate to, and created by/for, capitalist production) has come to be identified with the wage-laborer. In fact, of course, it remains the case that labor forms other than wage-labor (slaves, serfs, indentured servants, petty-commodity producers, household producers) have existed alongside the wage-labor form (both as an antecedent and as a consequence) for as long as capitalist production has sputtered along.

8

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

Just as capitalist production is a historically specific form of social reproduction with processes of production, distribution, circulation and consumption that take unique forms as they subsume processes outside capitalist production's domain, the continuous process of working-class formation itself takes unique forms as it subsumes labor processes outside capitalist production—or, in fact, creates new zones of capitalist production (e.g., the Americas). Capitalist production, therefore, as it expands and intensifies (on a global scale), has exhibited the historical tendency to distribute distinct labor forms in rough conformity with a core/periphery global division. That is, wage-labor is most commonly found in core regions, and extramarket forms of coerced labor are more often found in peripheral areas. Wage-labor, it may be argued, in this sense is historically a rarity—if not the exception—among labor forms. Slave-labor is not a theoretical (anomalous) category to be resolved but reflects an internally consistent, historical trajectory of capital's spatial development of wage-labor-dominant manufacturing, core regions alongside non-wage-labor-dominant, raw materials-producing, peripheral regions. Following the 1960s/1970s "modes of production" debates, a consensus has been reached that slavery was a "part o f capitalist production.3 However, the general nature of that debate—efforts to analytically define the relationship between structures within (and outside) capitalist production—led to a body of literature attempting to analyze and categorize the nature of particular social formations as social-historical entities and the nature of the relation between (articulation of) social formations. Hence, with respect to labor, by and large, much of this debate resulted in redefinitions of particular periphery-based, non-wage-labor forms so as to "fit" a definition of capitalist production, rather than a redefining of capitalist production so as to fit actually existing capitalist production. In other words, the slave was redefined as an economic category proper of capitalist production, rather than pursuing a redefinition of the general category of labor within capitalist production. Relevant to the present work, this resulted in continuing to treat abolition as a moment of transition—a progression to wage-labor. With respect to these debates, for purposes of analysis, this study adopts the spatial model of World-Systems Analysis in which a single, geographically broken mode of production provides the arena for articulation between a manufacturing core and a raw materials-producing periphery. In this sense there are two levels of analysis. At the level of the single, global mode of production there is the narrative of capital, conforming to long-term historical processes. At the level of social history there is the narrative of social actors (labor) conforming to shorter-term social processes (local or regional history). Referencing one's level of analysis then determines the relative importance of particular historical events or processes. For example, viewed from the level of the single mode of production, the abolition of slavery appears as a major event of considerable proportion. Viewed from the level of local or regional history, however, the transformative nature of the same event appears far less compelling—or so it is argued later.

Introduction

9

For the purpose of challenging a wage-labor-centric notion of the working class (both as a theoretical category and as a historical subject), this work treats the category of labor (the working class) as a theoretical abstraction that takes a multitude of concrete, historical forms, one of which is wage labor. This work, by and large, forgoes a discussion of the precise nature of the articulation of the different labor forms that constitute the working class. Rather, the purpose here is to avoid conceptualizing the working class as an abstracted whole and to focus on concrete moments of "transition" or working-class formation. With this in mind, two key organizing principles (and/or caveats) require explicit mention in the context of the overall design of this study. First, there is a need to detail the centrality of wage-labor as an organizing feature (social relation) within the structures of capitalist production. Second, there is a need to explicitly address the spatial distribution of labor forms conforming roughly with a wage-labor manufacturing core and non-wage-labor raw materials-producing periphery. Wage-labor has played the historical role of (1) providing capital with greater flexibility with respect to its workforce (enhancing its capacity for expansion/intensification) and (2) restructuring the work environment (separation of factory and home) and social institutions (social order as an outcome of market interactions). Reducing capital-labor relations to a set wage freed capital to restructure production processes and more "rationally" deploy its labor force. Hence, while detailing the complementarity of labor forms within capitalist production, as done later, it is important to keep in mind the centrality of wage-labor as an organizing social relation within capitalist society. In other words, the fact that capital employs labor in a variety of forms— not all of which are necessarily moving toward wage-labor—does not negate the fact that there is a logically ordered structure to the working class. Indeed, only by recognizing this point does the question of why capital consciously chose not to turn some segments of the working class into wage-labor becomes at all important. All labor forms contribute to the process of capital accumulation within capitalist production. The specific role of wage-labor within such processes has been historically—though not necessarily logically—to provide capital with social structures and institutions allowing for the heightened expansion and intensification of capital's accumulation. Dipesh Chakrabarty has made the point that while, indeed, the capital-labor relation may act to dissolve previous social relations and generate new social arrangements, the emerging social institutions may well serve the interests of capital while remaining antithetical to European cultural forms (Chakrabarty, 1989). That is, historically speaking, wage-labor (and its associated social impact) is culturally (spatially) a core (or European) phenomenon that may not be the form of labor that automatically emerges in noncore regions that are penetrated by capital. In this sense, the relation of space to the distribution of labor forms is a critical consideration. The emergence of core wage-labor and the emergence of peripheral non-wage-labor were simultaneous events that defined the global reach of capital, shaped the core-dominated imagery of labor (and hence the privileging of wage-labor) and solidified the imbrication of

10

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

relations of power—as associated with the designation of "backward" labor forms (i.e., defining one's relation to modernity). Capital did not need the presence of wage-labor in peripheral regions to locate structures of capital accumulation there. Thus, 16th-century gold and silver expeditions gave way to 17th/18th-century sugar production, as the Americas turned from a region of raw plunder to an arena of capitalist production. The core-periphery relation continued to develop such that the "modern" core stood in relation to the "backward" periphery. Modern, free contractual wage-labor—the epitome of Enlightenment ideals—stood in relation to the backward periphery's forced labor arrangements. Wage-labor thus became—for historical reasons—the theoretically privileged segment of the modern industrial working class. To the extent that conceptualizations of the working class are manifestly lifted from a history of core-centered wage-labor, labor history becomes little more than an extension of the colonial project with respect to periphery-located labor. In this sense, it has been argued, working-class history is turned into a crude vehicle for continued North/South domination (Chakrabarty, 1983, 1989; Guha, 1983; Sarkar 1983, 1985a, 1985b; Chatterjee, 1986). The global division of labor from the 16th century forward has resulted in a division between manufacturing wage-labor in the core and raw materials-producing non-wage-labor in the periphery. European efforts to historicize the development of this global arrangement have generated "modern" and "backward" categories, respectively associated with wage-labor and non-wage-labor. The implicit presumption of such taxonomies is that backward forms should develop into modern forms. The entire history of non-wage-labor forms, therefore, lies outside the purview of modern working-class history per se insofar as it is viewed as "in transition" to modern wage-labor. A central feature of capitalist production is the simultaneous generation of a "surplus population" alongside the subsumption of new labor forms. All previous societies, for purposes of simple reproduction, have produced a surplus beyond the immediate consumption needs of one cycle of production. Capitalist society, however, is among the first to produce a growing "surplus population" alongside its surplus production. In fact, as explored later, from Ricardo through Marx, it was quickly discovered in the 19th century that the growth of a "surplus population" was directly proportional to the growth of surplus production (or surplus value). The "surplus population" is here understood to mean that portion of the population that innovation in production has made superfluous to the production process at the previous level of productivity and whose numbers grow greater than the rate of growth in the productive capacity of capitalist society. Ricardo's term is redundant population. Malthus' term is surplus population. Marx's term is reserve army of labor. The advantage of Marx's term lies in how it is contrasted with the active army, thus demonstrating flux and mobility within the system. (All the same, Malthus' term is invoked for much of this work, as—consistent with his brashly unapologetic style—it conveys most plainly both the social and the political implication of the concept.)

Introduction

11

This process, the evolution of a capitalist system of production based on the creation of surplus value and beside it an expanding reserve army of labor (i.e., proletarianization, i.e., the expropriation of the means of production, i.e., original accumulation), is an ongoing, historical project. Some moments may stand out as more dramatic than others: the abolition of Russian serfdom, the U.S. Civil War, Luddite "terrorism," the Bolshevik Revolution, and so on. However, it is an ongoing, never complete, never linear process of configuring and reconfiguring the labor force to meet the needs of capital. The central, social theme (contradiction) of capitalist production has been the creation and maintenance of a "surplus" population. Corollary to this process, yet of a distinct nature, is the process whereby capital incorporates new segments of global labor (in a variety of forms). This process of subsuming labor forms previously external to capitalist production (or altogether nonexistent) is the second half of the process of working-class formation. Each half, however, is generally considered without regard to the other. The generation of a "surplus population" (under/unemployment) is treated, owing to 18th/19th-century political economy, as a "logical consequence" without historical contingency. The subsumption of new labor forms (original accumulation) is treated as a random, historical process outside the purview of any strict, logical pattern. As a consequence, the tendency for economistic interpretations of latter-day histories of capitalist society is greater than for earlier epochs of capitalist production. The challenge is to capture the interplay of both processes (occurring at the same time) within a given era of capitalist production, shaping the nature of working-class formation. The 19th-century period of abolition encompassed a time when global labor processes were first integrated in a manner to maximize the rational application of abstract labor on a larger scale. This process, by its very nature, created a "surplus population" on an ever-increasing scale. This latter consideration thus accounts for the fact that pure wage-labor could not always and everywhere pop up to replace earlier labor forms. Wage-labor may have become an essential labor form, driving capital accumulation, however, by its very creation of a surplus it caused the labor process, as a social process, to combine varying labor forms of greater and lesser dependence on a wage: sharecropping, petty-commodity-production, crime, penal servitude. The history of capital's reconfiguring of the labor process—and labor's reaction to this reconfiguration—is the story of modern industrial working-class formation on a global scale. A survey of Europe and the Americas in the late 18th century would have revealed, for the most part, a variety of unfree labor forms combined in a manner to serve local markets and to contribute to patterns of local accumulation (with the important exception of slavery in the Americas). With only slight difficulty one could fit most labor into one of four categories: (1) slaves, who were owned outright and treated as fixed capital,4 (2) serfs, who owed labor obligations to a lord and owned no property directly, (3) a "free" smallholding class of agricultural producers, who owned their own land and tools and were burdened with taxes/fees and (4) artisans and craftsmen, who owned tools and

12

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

access to certain guild monopolies. (A fifth, small but growing, group of full/part-time wage-laborers separated from the means of production were primarily employed in agriculture.) The task for capital in the 19th century was the reassembling of these categories. Slaves and serfs took up forms of sharecropping, subsistence production and/or wage-labor. Smallholding agricultural producers were forced to turn the use of their land and tools into economically profitable enterprises by turning to commercial production and forcing the surplus (economically inefficient) population into wage-labor or indentured servitude (immigration). Artisans and craftsmen were separated from their tools, broken of guild protection and forced into wage-labor. Slave and serf-production had already undergone a significant transformation by the late 18th century. Slavery was no longer chiefly a supplier of luxury goods profiting from high demand for low-cost produce. Raw materials (U.S. cotton) replaced luxuries (sugar) along with fast-depleting American mineral deposits. Tomich provocatively calls this the "second slavery." Magdoff describes the late 18th century as the era of formal imperialism (Tomich, 1988, Magdoff, 1978). For both, a shift in the productive role of slave products in the economies of the core signified a fundamental reorganization of the relation of slave labor to global capitalist production.5 As with slavery, serf production was turning toward an emphasis on raw material production for more distant markets (Russian hemp, cotton from the Levant) along with the development of long-distance grain markets. Raw material production was replacing luxury and local-market production. The 19th century gave rise to (1) a speedup of these changes and (2) a generalized transformation of all labor forms to make them more compatible with newly developing production needs. This "generalized transformation of labor forms" has been tarred historically with the less-than-apt term "proletarianization." The term "proletarianization" itself has been reduced to a description of the process whereby labor is separated from the means of production and left with nothing to sell but its labor-power for a wage. In fact, the 19th century was a period of proletarianization—in this limited sense—for an extremely minute portion of labor in general. Just as Feuerbach observed the perfected species of humanity in the collective totality of imperfect individual human beings (in The Essence of Christianity), one may observe such a pure proletariat only if viewing the modern industrial working class as a totality of semiproletarian labor forms. The history of 19th-century labor is the history of capital's continual reconfiguring of preexisting labor forms for purposes of capitalist production. This became the history of commodity production for the market and, more importantly, the production of surplus value (profit) as a motive of production. This, then, was the context for the abolitions of slavery. Labor history, as a discipline, akin to political economy a century earlier, fails to take into account the rather precarious presupposition undergirding its works,6 that is, the mistaken notion that wage-labor, as a modern historical phenomenon, is understandable (and/or explainable) outside its larger context, that is, as a minority labor form. The irony of labor history, as currently

Introduction

13

constituted, rests in its obsessive concentration on a particular labor form. This has resulted in an enormous collection of studies of 19th-century artisans and craftsmen (and, to some extent, smallholding agricultural producers) in transition to pure proletarians. Therefore, despite the fact that artisans and craftsmen constitute perhaps 2% of the 18th/19th-century laboring population of Europe and the Americas, artisans and craftsmen have arguably been afforded well over 90% of the labor history literature. This has resulted in a gross distortion of labor history in the modern Western world. If one takes the totality of all labor history studies produced to date, proportionally speaking, in relation to the history of all laborers they represent a mere monograph.7 It is a premise of this work that such labor histories have evolved less as a consequence of inadequate attention to 19th-century social history than from an uncritical appropriation of 19th-century social theory, specifically, 19th-century political economy's models of development. The linear development schemata of classical political economy with their tight taxonomies and tautological narratives, along with Marx's critique/adaptation of capitalist reproduction schemata, provide the bases for identifying the proletariat exclusively with wage-labor. It is true, of course, that many have raised the concern that such formal schematizing does not take into account a great amount of labor performed "alongside" wage-labor. The informal economy, marginal communities, household labor, petty-commodity-production have all been cited as evidence of activity outside wage-labor. By such categorizations, however— "informal," "marginal," and so on—the critique concedes the existence (and predominance) of a "formal" or "center" area of economic behavior, presumably the domain of wage-labor. While the current academic fashion may be to "legitimate" (for whom, it is not always clear) the informal or marginal (more generally spoken of as "otherness") vis-a-vis the formal or center, it is more the intention here to recast the "formal," "center," and so on. in a manner that will discourage a history of such dualisms. To do so, this work borrows much from the contributions of Subaltern Studies: specifically, the work of those from the subaltern tradition who view their work as the tracing of a basic narrative (the history of capital) as it is deployed through space and time, assuming a variety of forms and giving rise to a variety of struggles historically appropriate to its place and time in a global, historical epoch of capitalist production.8 ORGANIZATION OF MATERIAL This book first outlines, in parallel fashion, (1) the evolution of the concept of the modern industrial working class within 18th/19th-century political economy from its Smithian birth through Marx's critique/reinterpretation and (2) the actual social, political and economic conditions of 18th/19th-century Europe informing political economy's schemata. The purpose of examining the former is to trace the theoretical origins of the proletariat as a key concept and category of contemporary social theory—that is, to examine its original utility and relation to models of social explanation. The purpose of examining the latter

14

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

is (1) to examine the extent to which the concept/category of the proletariat within political economy's development models accurately captured the reality of the 18th/19th-century setting and (2) to provide a historical context (with regards to world capitalist production) for discussions of serfdom and slavery in the second section of this study. One must begin with capitalist production as a historically specific form of social reproduction, comprising processes that are both universal and unique. Classical political economy's general schemata of social reproduction to this day dominate the representation of capitalist reproduction (and the heuristic theoretical constructs describing it). This work weaves between theoretical categories (the working class) and historical forms (wage-laborer, slave, serf) both to enhance the explanatory ken of the categories and to better understand the historical story of capital's global trek. One must first, therefore, provide the theoretical basis for conceptualizing working-class formation—that is, schemata of expanded social reproduction specific to capitalist production—along with the historical, European setting influencing the construction of these theories— 18/19th-century Europe and its colonial domains. The notion of working-class formation (or of transition in general) has its roots in theories of development and modernization. The 18th/19th-century formulations of the engine driving capitalist production, the accumulation of capital via the self-expansion of value, form the bedrock of contemporary analyses of historical development. This book outlines a common intellectual heritage (Smith, Ricardo and Marx's writings on capitalist production) wherein lies a set of shared general assumptions, alongside the fundamental bases for their disagreement. The study of the accumulation of capital—placed within the valorization process (itself placed within capitalist production in general)—is the root of contemporary analyses of historical development. Pursuing its lineage in the works of Smith, Ricardo and Marx provides both the vocabulary and theoretical framework for contemporary discussions. Properly framed, the theoretical scope of the first two chapters entails the processes of capitalist production (the labor process and valorization process) as manifest in expanded social reproduction (the accumulation of capital) insofar as the representation of these processes (by Smith, Ricardo and Marx) forms the presuppositions for modern theories of historical development (e.g., transitions, working-class formation). Classical political economy's representation of the social processes of capitalist production (in particular, that of working-class formation) and Marx's critique thereof constitute the subject of these chapters. Its parameters are set by Smith, Ricardo and Marx's attempts to come to terms with the developmental tendencies of, and contradictory/harmonious elements inherent within, capitalist production. The central dilemma involves schematically representing the dynamics of capitalist production as a process of historical development and social change. The conceptualizations, categorizations and taxonomies that one invokes reflect an approach's ability/inability to represent social processes of development. With respect to the analytical category of the working class, it is a question of the extent to which the working class (defined exclusively as wage-labor) served

Introduction

15

(explicitly) as an ahistorical, heuristic tool for investigating specific tendencies within capitalist production versus the extent to which wage-labor served as a historical description of the proletariat within capitalist production. Further, it is a question of to what extent wage-labor was a logically necessary component of capitalist production (to the exclusion of all other labor forms) as opposed to being a logically necessary component of capitalist production (in combination with other labor forms). It is argued later that, given the underdeveloped state of wage-labor as a component of the labor force in the very societies from which 18th/19th-century political economy was generated and further, given the greater and greater degree of ahistorical abstraction within political economy (as it developed as a discipline), it is impossible to view the use of wage-labor (as a historical form) to represent the theoretical category of the proletariat as anything but an abstraction from (and not a description of) actually existing capitalist society, undertaken as a conscious strategy to highlight specific features and tendencies of capitalist production. Indeed, it is argued later, that post-18th/19th-century political economy's theorists' disregard for the analytical use versus historical application of the proletariat (as a concept) is what has led to a blindly wage-labor-centric portrayal of capital-labor relations and the reduction of the historical process of working-class formation to an economistic process of wage-labor creation. Forbidden to break from this arcane, rigid notion of the modern industrial working class, vast segments of the workers who have gone not one day from under the grip of capital have somehow managed to escape the notice of generation after generation of labor historians. Chapter 1 considers the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the context of their 18th/19th-century European settings. The chapter addresses Smith and Ricardo's use of the concept of the proletariat. In his efforts to probe the sinews of capitalist production and reveal its inner laws, Smith moves from the broadest possible concept of labor, labor in general, to increasingly narrow descriptions. First, Smith establishes that the application of general, abstract labor is the source of all value. Turning then to the social distribution of value, he privileges wage-labor by maintaining that all social value takes the form of either wages, profits or rent. General, abstract labor, within a model of capitalist production—necessarily—becomes wage-labor, according to Smith. Wage-labor is further narrowed to exclude nonproductive wage-labor. The working class is defined as productive wage-labor. Smith is particularly careful throughout his presentation to make clear—by historical example—that this notion of the proletariat is a purely heuristic device designed to highlight certain features and tendencies of capitalist production. Ricardo's contributions with respect to the concept of the proletariat are two fold. First, with his exclusive focus on the distribution of value within capitalist society, Ricardo moved Smith's discussion of productive wage-labor out of the realm of production. A consequence of this was the creation of the category of living, productive wage-labor (as distinguished from dead labor). This maneuver allowed his second contribution—the discovery that the generation of a

16

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

redundant population (of former wage-laborers) was, in fact, a logically necessary outcome of capitalist production. Chapter l's presentation of European history alongside the development of capitalist production is divided into two halves. The first half traces the social, political and economic developments across Europe for the years 1700-1789, as they constituted the expansion of capitalist production and the rising influence and power of the bourgeoisie across societies. The focus here is on developments in the 18th century, tracing Britain's hegemonic rise within the world economy along with the increasingly pivotal role of the bourgeoisie within European societies (with particular attention paid to French developments leading up to the 1789 convening of the Estates General). The second historical period considered in this chapter traces the social, political and economic developments across Europe for the years 1789-1815, as they constituted the maturing state of capitalist production, the bourgeoisie's strengthening hegemonic grip on society and growing intercapitalist rivalry between states. Chapter 2 turns to the work of Marx and the further developments of capitalist production within the European setting. Marx began his life's work with extended exegeses on basic epistemology inquiries (essentially ongoing polemics with the Left Hegelians). His earliest writings concentrated on the theme of alienation—that is, the social construction of mediated forms obfuscating individuals' capacity to directly appropriate and/or perceive the true nature of their relation to one another. While this is a level of analysis that Marx can never be said to ever really leave, it is applied to a variety of subjects. This theme is most evident in Marx's critique of classical political economy's methodology, an ahistorical positivism employing uniform notions of spatial/temporal dimensions, and in Marx's critique of classical political economy's universalist representation of a historically specific epoch—capitalist production. This latter critique involves both an immanent critique of the categories employed therein (and an inversion of their meanings) along with, importantly, a shifting of the analysis from a market-centered to a workplace-centered analysis (from commodity-commodity relations to capital-labor relations). Marx's work combined a phenomenally rich scope of analysis with a fundamentally self-limiting project, cast as it was in so broad a structural abstraction. No other theorist of the period goes further in (1) contributing to the reductionist association of wage-labor with the "true" industrial working class and (2) affording theorists the analytical tools to escape this reductionism and expand the notion of the proletariat. Chapter 2 goes on to trace the social, political and economic developments across Europe for the years 1815-1873. The history of Europe and the world economy (and the Industrial Revolution) in this period moved technologically from modest textile production through the age of railroads, coal and iron to the age of steel, electricity and chemistry. Commercially, it evolved from nascent banking structures to joint-stock banking, international investment and international finance of national development. Socially, it developed from agrarian-based to urban-industrial-based societies. Politically, it was dominated

Introduction

17

by the move from absolute/constitutional monarchies to parliamentary rule, along with the emergence of nationalist strivings across Europe (highlighted by the territorial/political unifications of Italy and Germany). This chapter thus attempts to engage this history while continually questioning the historical relevance of the modern industrial working class—narrowly defined as wage-labor—as a theoretical category within the heart of global capitalist production. Chapters 3 to 6 carry forward a critique of Smith, Ricardo and Marx's notions of labor (and the working class) by applying their theoretical categories directly to a period of history that, arguably, should have been exemplary of their contentions. Specifically, this is done by examining the process of working-class formation (and the emergence of wage-labor) and the role of extramarket forces in shaping developments in the latter half of 19th-century Brazil. The abolition of slavery (resulting in a former slave population that constituted over one-half of the total population), alongside grand schemes of European immigration combined with new regimes of race-based, coerced labor, contributed to the radical transformation of Brazilian society in a remarkably compressed time period. To begin, however, these chapters examine the contours and social bases of 19th-century labor forms commonly portrayed as on the "margins" of capitalist production (spatially and theoretically)—serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe and slavery in the Americas. The particular focus here is on how capital reorganized these labor forms in the period of abolition (for serfdom, essentially 1848-1862 and for slavery, 1834-1888) and afterward. The issues that inform the debate between owning classes and the state are present on both sides of the Atlantic: the moral rights of persons in the Age of Enlightenment versus the subhuman, animal-like characterization of serfs and slaves by landlords and planters,9 levels of compensation for freed serf or slave, periods of apprenticeship/restricted freedom, the redistribution of land and other resources, state subsidization of "Reconstruction," the role (and state subsidization) of migration to fill labor shortages, the nature of the freed serf/slave vis-a-vis the category of citizen (i.e., "The Rights of Man"), vagrancy laws or ordinances to force laborers to sell their labor. From Havana to Vienna, from Moscow to Washington, these were the issues taken up by the ruling classes in the abolition era. These chapters, thus, examine three basic themes: (1) the historical relationship between non-wage-labor forms of labor (specifically, serfdom and slavery) and world capitalist production, (2) forms of labor assumed by former serfs and former slaves in periods of "Re-construction" following the abolition of serfdom and slavery across Central and Eastern Europe and the Americas and (3) the specific case of Brazil's transition from a slave-based society to a society based on "free" labor following the close of the Middle Passage to Brazil in 1850. The purpose of the first theme is to demonstrate both the historical compatibility as well as the historical necessity of serf/slave-based production for capital accumulation in the core. The purpose of the second theme is to consider the wide variety of labor forms available to capital following the abolition of serfdom and slavery and capital's strategic indifference to the "new"

18

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

labor forms it appropriated. The purpose of the third theme is to illustrate a particular moment in capitalist production's transformation of labor forms in the context of a specific, historical epoch of world capitalist production to examine the degree to which the categories and concepts of 18th/19th-century political economy may be rescued and redeployed as useful explanatory tools and the degree to which they may need to be discarded. The 19th-century institutions of serfdom and slavery represent markedly dissimilar and yet compatible labor systems in the capitalist world economy. Serfdom was organized around family-based production units on a lord's manor geared to local accumulation. Slavery was organized around large-scale chattel-slave-based production units geared to global accumulation (principally in Europe). The lords stood in relation to serfs as monopoly owners of the means of production. Slaveholders stood in relation to slaves as the owners of their labor-power. This work does not attempt to equate the practices and histories of the institutions of serfdom with those of slavery. Such attempts as have been made in this regard (such as most recently by Kolchin) for the most part focus on the general condition of "unfreedom," abstracting from the concrete situations in the West and East. These chapters present—in outline form—the two institutions, noting similarities and dissimilarities relevant in the context of their contributing to a global division of labor in the larger process of capital accumulation. At the same time, these chapters focus on the more commonly shared period of abolition for these two forced-labor systems. What were the postserf, postslave labor forms that evolved in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Americas in the establishment of a new international arrangement of labor forms in the second half of the 19th century? Across the Americas, the banning of slavery as a labor form took place over a protracted period of the 19th century from British abolition in 1834 through Brazilian abolition in 1888.10 With the exception of British, French and Dutch abolitions, which were applied to colonial holdings, the abolitions of slavery took place in the context of—and are generally treated historically as parts of— national development. However, though the actors were principally national heroes, and national traits were called upon to explain the details of abolition, the process was a global one, occurring across large sections of Central and Eastern Europe and the Americas in the fairly condensed period of 1848-1889. This was no minor blip on the chart. This was a phase of national development coinciding with a maturing, expanding process of industrialization across Europe and the Americas. Hence, the period of "Reconstruction" in the latter 19th century—perhaps more properly entitled "construction," akin to "original accumulation," was a crucial epoch in the development of the modern capitalist world economy and specifically in the development of the modern global industrial working class. The case of Brazil stands out and is chosen for further consideration for principally four reasons. (1) The scale of Brazil's participation in slave-based production alone marks Brazil as unique. This participation was high both in regard to participation in world slave-based production—Brazilian slavery lasted

Introduction

19

longer and involved more slaves than any other slave-based society in the Americas—as well as in regard to the weighted importance of slave-labor to the Brazilian economy and to Brazilian society. At the close of slavery, for example, the United States may have held 3 million more slaves than Brazil, but with a rapidly industrializing North, as well as a slave and freed slave population of less than 20% in the United States, the institution of slavery could not approach the level of social integration across all facets of economic life and popular culture as it did in Brazil.11 (2) The diversification of slave-labor activities in Brazil made it a particularly unique case in the Americas. Along with performing every conceivable role in the production of sugar, coffee, cotton and other export goods, slaves could be found occupying nearly every position in 19th-century Brazilian society, including factory workers, skilled craftsmen, ranchers, sailors, whalers, couriers, plantation overseers, rented day-laborers, miners and soldiers. Related to this diverse labor arrangement was the development in Brazil of strong regional cultures and economies based, to some degree, along the lines demarcated by the captaincies established in the 16th century. Hence, Pernambuco and Bahia—long associated with sugar cultivation—developed strong regional economies based on production for other regions as well as foreign export, as happened in Minas Gerais with mining, Maranhao with cotton, Sao Paulo with coffee, Rio Grande do Sul with ranching, and so on. In conjunction with regional specialization, a large internal slave trade developed, resulting in the movement of slaves from areas with poorly selling export crops (such as 19th-century Bahian sugar) to areas with crops doing well on the world market (such as 19th-century Sao Paulo coffee). (3) Brazil's participation at such a high rate in the slave trade for so long a period (from the 1580s through 1850) combined with the long tradition in many Iberian-ruled slave societies of a relatively high rate of manumission, resulted in the creation of the largest concentration of freed slaves prior to abolition in the Americas.12 (This was true whether measured as a proportion of the overall population, as a proportion of the African population or in absolute numbers.) Hence, a strong freed slave cultural presence was a crucial consideration in the reconfiguration of Brazilian society (and labor forms) following slavery. (4) The final characteristic of Brazil to be considered was its location (and participation) in the world economy (and in conjunction with this the development of a home market). For the better part of its colonial history, Brazil followed the classic pattern of boom-bust export cycles, riding first the wave of sugar, then gold/silver, then coffee, with all the associated dislocations and disruptions to the local economies that go with export-oriented development. However, Brazil's uniqueness among export-oriented slave economies was associated with the latter-18th-century development of domestic markets and the extensive use of slave-based production for domestic consumption goods. The regions of Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais were both, by the 19th century, devoting large portions of their resources (and slave-labor) to production for domestic consumption. In fact, over the course of the 18th century, Minas Gerais actually reversed its earlier pattern of trade with the

20

The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

coastal regions (Rio de Janeiro) whereby they were provided with subsistence goods in exchange for booty from their gold/silver production. Before the close of the 18th century Minas Gerais actually provided the coastal regions, such as Rio de Janeiro, with subsistence goods as the coastal regions shifted production to the coffee-export industry. Thus, in consideration of these four factors—Brazil's scale of participation in slave-based production, diversification of slave-labor occupations, long tradition of liberal manumission policies and specific location in the world economy—Brazil has been selected as a particularly opportune slave society to consider. Chapter 3 examines the 19th-century processes of abolition across the Americas as well as across Central and Eastern Europe. The chapter places its emphasis on the development of new labor forms and social arrangements following the abolition of slavery and serfdom, rather than concentrating too heavily on the campaigns and social processes leading up to abolition. The reorganization of postabolition societies was marked by significant diversity; however, the principal theme centered around the construction of new social relations for the purpose of extracting labor from the former slave or serf labor force with minimal disruption to production. The two most common avenues pursued were (1) apprenticeship schemes (and later a variety of sharecropping arrangements) and (2) new forms of forced migration (this time of East Indians, Chinese coolies, freed slaves from other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, along with some West Africans and European smallholding agricultural producers). Hence, the society to which the former slaves or serfs were slated to be adjusted to took less the appearance of a "former slave or serf society" and more the appearance of a fast developing, radically new society. The degree to which the new social order in the Americas was shaped— not only by the abolition of slavery but by the introduction of tremendous infusions of new capital and labor—is almost analogous to preColumbian/post-Columbian America. That is, just as forced labor (slaves) had been brought in centuries earlier to be organized by capital in an environment with an "inadequate" labor supply, capital was forced once again, with the "freeing" of slaves, to enhance its labor pool so as to force former slaves to continue to offer their labor to capital. The introduction of vast new populations of labor into previously slave-dominated economic arenas effectively forced the former slaves to throw their labor onto the labor market as all other options—access to land, negotiating advantage in a situation of a labor shortage—were instantly taken from them. Chapter 4 details the specific historical development of the institution of slavery in the context of Brazilian society over four centuries. The chapter surveys the nearly four centuries of Brazilian history from Portuguese colonial rule, to the Portuguese establishment of an empire through independence, on up to the 1889 republic. Throughout this period, Britain's dominance of Brazilian economic development (by means of its stranglehold on Portugal established by the Triple Treaties) from the mid-17th century through the mid-19th century heavily influenced events. This was a factor of immense importance with respect

Introduction

21

to the development of Brazil's slave-based society and economy, as it followed the predictable boom/bust pattern of export-driven, economic development. Brazil emerged over the centuries as a dynamic society, combining diverse African/European/Native American elements. As outlined earlier, alongside one of the Americas' largest slave societies— in which the color of people's skin was unmistakably attached to their slave status—there lived the largest freed slave (and mulatto) population. Alongside traditional slave plantations—which were among the technologically crudest and inhumanely crudest in the Americas—there evolved a sophisticated division of labor employing slaves as welders, sailors, day laborers, and so on. Alongside a boom/bust export-oriented colonial economy there were flourishing domestic and regional markets with elaborate intraregional trade networks. Chapter 4 illustrates the evolution of Brazilian slave society—focusing on the four themes from earlier—in the context of what has been treated historically as a "contradiction" between modernity and tradition in Brazil. Chapter 5 examines the relatively brief epoch of abolition in Brazil in the post-1850 period. This process was most heavily shaped by two developments. The first development involved the implementation of a body of legislation and social policies designed to rein in the unfolding events that would define the former slave's postslavery condition. Labor laws, land laws and a series of abolition laws ensured that abolition would be a protracted, purposely drawn-out affair, allowing gradual adjustments to be made by the planter class. In 1871 a "free-womb" law was passed "freeing" the children who were born to slaves after that date. In 1885 the Sexagenarian Law released all slaves who were 65 or older. Finally, in 1888 the so-called Golden Law released all remaining slaves (approximately 800,000). In addition, following the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850, an active internal slave trade—from the sugar region to the coffee region—blossomed and remained in place until 1882. The second development involved the establishment of a state-organized campaign of European immigration. One of the primary strategies employed by Brazilian elites to guarantee the continued subservience of the former slave population was to flood the labor market with privileged, European labor. Once Europeans had taken the more desirable social positions, the former slaves would be left to fend for the remaining subsistent opportunities. This distorted labor market, essentially, kept wages low and left the former slaves with few options other than submitting to the new labor regime. At the same time, reserving the better positions only for European immigrants (or European-Brazilians) was a cornerstone of Brazilian social policy, helping to preserve a race-based division of labor in the postslavery era. Chapter 6 focuses on the specific regional processes of abolition across Brazil. The first region considered is the northeast. Northeast Brazil was dominated by large sugar plantations on the coastal plain, cotton and rice production just beyond the plains and cattle raising in the hinterland. Slave-labor was used extensively in all three areas. Following the close of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850 there was a large out-migration, as slaves were sold to coffee plantations in the south. Through manumission and aging, further slaves left

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The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

traditional slave occupations, taking up subsistence production outside the active economy. As a consequence, by the time of final abolition (1888), the northeast had a large subsistence population from which to draw labor. There was no mass immigration program as developed in the south, and—due to the difficulty of surviving merely on subsistence—planters were less in need of punitive, coercive instruments to force former slaves to work their lands. This section of Chapter 6 also considers developments in the cattle-raising satellite region of Maranhao with respect to abolition. The second major region, the central/southern coffee region, was itself divided into two regions. The Paraiba Valley had been the first successful coffee region, dominating Brazilian production from the 1830s through the 1880s. Coffee plantations in this region were similar in structure to sugar plantations in the northeast and relied heavily on slave-labor on through the 1880s. With the end of slavery, there was no effort to reorganize production, and, consequently, when slaves left, so did coffee production. Within a decade after final abolition, cattle replaced coffee as the principal economic activity in the Paraiba Valley, and former slaves were forced to migrate from the area. Western Sao Paulo was the second major coffee region. Coffee production in this region began in the 1850s, not really picking up until the 1880s. Though this region is identified with the greatest immigration campaign, it remained the case through the 1870s that slave-labor provided the bulk of the region's labor needs. Beginning in the 1870s, however, an ambitious immigration campaign was begun that would eventually bring over 4 million Europeans to Brazil by the 1920s. (The entire slave trade over nearly four centuries had brought just a little over 4 million Africans.) Hence, western Sao Paulo was able to completely restructure its labor market and effectively force former slaves in the area to comply with its wishes. In addition, a formidable state apparatus was built up in this period to ensure compliance. This section of Chapter 6 also considers developments in the satellite region of Rio Grande Do Sul with respect to abolition at this time. Attached to these developments in the changing character of the national economy and basic organization of society there was the not-so-small task of reorganizing the state (the formation of a republic in 1889). The comparatively delayed emergence of a predominant native ruling class in Brazil provided a significant backdrop to the abolition of slavery. Consideration of all these factors then allows the story of working-class formation in Brazil to be told—the history of stripping the slaves of their former social context and redeploying them in new clothes to feed the continuing appetite of capital. NOTES 1. Working-class formation is understood to mean that process whereby capital appropriates and reorganizes labor in a variety of forms and labor's resistance to this process. 2. Marx notes that this point, significantly enough, was made most evident by Wakefield's work on colonialism.

Introduction

23

Original accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, inriotousliving. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. (Marx, 1977, p. 873) 3. The modes-of-production literature is considerable. Among the more influential essays are Semptat, Ciafardini and Laclau in Arico, 1973; Ianni, 1973b; Bartra, Cueva, Olmedo, Pena and Cardoso in Bartra and Semo, 1975; Gorender, 1978; Cardoso, Barros de Castro, Gorender, Ianni and Santiago in Amaral, 1980; Libby, 1988a. The earlier essays generally addressed defining and classifying a given social formation while examining the nature of the relationship between social formations for the purpose of delineating the limitations and/or potential for economic development in peripheral societies. 4. "Slave labor may be compared to the equipment of a plant: investment consisted of the purchase of the slaves, and their maintenance was similar to fixed costs" (Furtado, 1963, p. 53). 5. Further east, this period was associated with a process of forced deindustrialization—for instance, India and Egypt—as colonial regions were reorganized to purchase manufactured goods from the core in exchange for raw materials. 6. In mind here is the tradition stretching back to the Webbs and Hammonds, through Hobsbawm, Hilton and Dobb and up to Berquist, Katznelson and Zolberg. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sydney Mintz, Carmen Deere, Veronica Bennholdt-Thompsen, Dale Tomich, Sumit Sarkar and Paula Beiguelman, among others, provide rare glimpses at an alternative approach, broadening (or at least critically engaging) the concept of the modem industrial working class. 8. See for example, the works of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ramachandra Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Gyan Pandey. 9. In submitting to the basic tenets of the Enlightenment, landlords and planters were forced to portray serfs and slaves as beneath the category of humans, lest they themselves be judged barbaric and inhuman in light of the evolving social values of the new day. 10. The earlier successful slave revolution in Haiti (1791) played a critical role in shaping this history as well. 11. Slave-based production in the United States was largely concentrated in monocultural regions that stood in relation to the North much as the "sugar islands" stood in relation to Europe. 12. To take the two extreme examples, the United States, at the time of abolition had a population of 4 million slaves and fewer than 500,000 freed slaves. Brazil, at the time of abolition, had 800,000 slaves and just over 3 million freed slaves.

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Chapter l

The Historical and Theoretical Origins of the Modern Industrial Working Class (1700-1817) A world was uncovered the very existence of which had not been suspected, that of the laws governing a complex society. The form in which the nascent reality came to our consciousness was political economy. (Polanyi, 1957, p. 84) The burden of history is to unfold in a manner that is, at one level, unique to the moment while remaining, on another level, the guarded repository of timeless, universal themes that emerge with great effort as grand theory. The process of working-class formation presents just such a wonder. The processes shaping the development of a modern industrial working class are unique to each locale; however, the larger processes defining this social transformation (the inevitable, linear march to wage-labor and subsumption to market forces) have long been held to be universal, iron laws. The three who bear as much responsibility as anyone for this depiction of working-class formation are Smith, Ricardo and Marx. It is important, therefore, before attempting to critically engage these concepts to briefly examine both these thinkers' theoretical constructions of labor as well as the actual 18th- and 19th-century European social milieu giving rise to these constructions. In particular, it is helpful to examine the extent to which, historically, non-wage-labor forms and extramarket forces were, in fact, determining factors in the process of modern European working-class formation. EUROPEAN HISTORY AND THE STATE OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION (1700-1789) The modern working class may trace its origins both to a historic age as well as to a theoretical tradition. The historic age was the advent of European

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The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

capitalist production. The theoretical tradition was classical political economy. Marking the sinews of this historical/theoretical intersection were both the trumpeted emergence of a dynamic European social order of the late 18th and early 19th centuries as well as the parallel and contemporaneous effort on the part of philosophers, economists, the clergy and others to understand and explain this complex, evolving social order. At the core of these developments was the creation of a modern working class through the destruction of previous labor forms. The Setting Two processes stand out as convenient landmarks for gauging 18th-century capitalist development: (1) the consolidation of British hegemony within the world economy and (2) the bourgeoisie's sudden ascendancy to historical prominence. The conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763 marked the opening of the modern era of global capitalist production. The Treaty of Paris all but assured British dominance from this time forward with regard to sea power, colonial trade and, consequently, commercial power. Already having secured the asiento through the Treaty of Utrecht and having effectively marginalized Dutch shipping via the 1751 Navigation Act, the British stood poised to dominate the world economy vis-a-vis France and other Continental powers for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, the convening of the Estates General may actually provide a more analytically precise genesis for our story. The crises of the old regime sounded the coming crises across Europe: war, national debt, tax inequities, a class of smallholders burdened by antiquated labor obligations and manorial dues and a rising bourgeoisie hamstrung by an antiquated system of taxes, tolls/duties and property rights. The crises of 1789 had only been exasperated by France's "victory" in America 7,000 miles away over its enemy just across the Channel. Following on the heels of France's 1757 "loss" in the Indian Battle of Plassey, it was becoming evident that the Anglo/French rivalry would be dominated by their interests overseas. Sea power and a strong national treasury became the instruments to guard such interests. The early works of classical political economy were thought to have universal, trans-European appeal and application. However, the social, economic and political settings of the Europe they surveyed at the time were far from uniform. Though commerce, trade and industry began their steady climb in the 18th century, it was still the case, at the close of the 18th century, that the great majority of Europeans were still smallholding agricultural producers who were largely insulated from market crises1 and distinctly nonindustrial. Any industrial working class to speak of prior to 1789—beyond the isolated cases of silk weavers in Lyons or mine workers in Saxony—took part in the putting-out system.2 In this manner they worked to supplement their incomes as smallholding agricultural producers; however, they were a far cry from full proletarians.3

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Very early, urban merchants came to realize that the countryside was a reservoir of cheap labor: peasants eager to eke out the meager income off the land by working in the off-season, wives and children with free time to prepare the man's work and assist him in his task. And though the country weaver, nail-maker, or cutler was less skilled than the guildsman or journeyman of the town, he was less expensive, for the marginal utility of his free time was, initially at least, low, and his agricultural resources, however modest, enabled him to get by on that much less additional income. (Landes, 1969, p. 44) European agriculture remained technically traditional and inefficient. East of the Elbe, the Junker class dominated, with a comparatively "unfree" class of smallholding agricultural producers governed by surviving remnants of the 16th-century "second" serfdom. Many regions in the East had grown increasingly dependent on trade. They were producing foods (buckwheat, sheep, beef cattle) and raw materials (wool, flax, hemp) for the more advanced regions of Western Europe. Western Europe, agriculturally more advanced than the East, had seen production for the market erode a considerable portion of the earlier feudal order. Unlike the East, estates in the West functioned less and less as complete economic units. Iberian Europe, meanwhile, along with the Italian states, remained fairly backward, with little development of internal markets or dissolution of surviving feudal property relations. Monarchical rule—after a brief bout of liberalism—was tightening its controls on the eve of the French Revolution. The enlightened despotism of Maria Theresa and Joseph II was on the verge of Leopold IPs 1790 reversal. Catherine the Great, following the Pugachev Rebellion (1773), had already taken measures to intensify Russian serfdom. Frederick the Great—through the capture of Silesia—had begun the Prussian campaign of creating a greater Germany, while a wavering Louis XVI looked on from a turbulent, debt-laden France. Thus, after some initial excitement, the influence of Enlightenment thought was in decline. Following the Seven Years' War (and the ascendancy of Britain) disperse production processes across Europe and the globe were increasingly integrated and technologically revolutionized. This was the tale spun by political economists. Following the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie came to enhance its role in the refashioning of society and politics. This was the province of Balzac, Dickens and Goethe. The former's thought crystallized the "proletariat" as a social/theoretical category. The latter explored the ideological bases for equality and freedom, configuring a language of liberation and emancipation. Revolution of Industry Thus, the 18th century witnessed both the birth of an Industrial Revolution and the opening volleys of the bourgeoisie's appearance on the historical stage. As regards an Industrial Revolution, the 18th century is most frequently deemed the age of "revolution" for commerce (its expansion and greater integration of the globe), agriculture (in yield if not technologically) and demography (primarily after the 1760s).

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The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

The rate of growth for all these "revolutions" was phenomenal.4 The rate of social change wrought by them (urbanization, migration, working-class formation, etc.) was astounding and accounted for the physiocrat and classical political economist's sense of urgency—in the Age of Enlightenment—to understand the nature of this social change and, likewise—in the Age of Progress—to direct its forces toward general social advance (e.g., The Wealth of Nations). Political economy was absorbed into the wider programme of philosophical and historical studies which was characteristic of the secular intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Many of the leading economists of the second half of the 18th century— Hume, Smith, Quesnay, and Turgot for example—were prominent members of this movement, and contributed not only to political economy but to other aspects of the movement's programme. The full significance of the change which took place in the 18th century lies in the concepts, methods, and values which the philosophers of the Enlightenment brought to the study of political economy. (Winch in Cipolla, 1973b, pp. 514-515) These writers produced the first modern schemata of social reproduction on an expanded scale that were based not on human agency but on the workings of an internal logic within a rational process of capital accumulation. In this manner, classical political economy constructed Ideal types to explain processes of capitalist production. Emerging from within these historical/theoretical developments was the industrial working class—a peculiar class of laborers meticulously dispossessed of the means of production. To consider this development, we turn first to the material world of the theoretician: 18th- and early 19th-century Europe and its colonial holdings. Above all, the 18th century was the century of commerce and trade. By the close of the 18th century the older forms of wealth based in precious metals (gold) had been definitively replaced by centuries-old forms of wealth based in banks, credit and finance. Commercial, financial and trade networks linked European countries and regions within countries, as well as Europe with colonies. This provided an infrastructure for more fully integrating global production processes—hence, the shift in importance from sugar (originally an article of luxury consumption) to cotton (or raw materials for the textile industry). Magdoff distinguishes post-1760 colonial trade from previous colonial trade by the nature of trade and the articles sought in trade (Magdoff, 1978). Previously, Europe had been the buyer of colonial goods. Increasingly, colonies were serving as markets for European goods. Previously, slaves, sugar and spices were the primary articles of colonial trade. Increasingly, raw materials for industry (cotton, wool, vegetable oil, jute) along with food (wheat, tea, coffee, cacao, meat)5 were dominating colonial trade. This transformation of European/colonial trade relations after 1760 is conceptualized by Wallerstein as "incorporation" and "peripheralization." "If an analogy may be permitted, incorporation involves 'hooking' the zone into the orbit of the world-economy in such a way that it virtually can no longer escape,

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while peripheralization involves a continuing transformation of the mini-structures of the area in ways that are sometimes referred to as the deepening of capitalist development" (Wallerstein, 1989, p. 130). These processes entailed establishing new patterns of exports and imports (along with an increase in cash crops and a decrease in manufacturing goods), the creation of larger economic enterprises (plantations and clearinghouses) and an expanded use of coerced labor. The irony of the commercial revolution was its peculiar impact on long-distance (colonial) trade vis-a-vis intra-European trade or trade within a single state. The greatest volume of trade was domestic. Foreign trade, however, involved the largest enterprises and provided the greatest commercial profit (per capital invested). Thus, though the largest Continental power, France, was able to increase its trade with other European countries fourfold in the 18th century, it remained the case that Europe's internal trade remained less developed than its colonial trade. "Europe's internal economy was still relatively untouched by the expansion of her overseas commerce. Internal trade remained backward and limited, bogged down by poor communications and (in countries such as France) by a proliferation of restrictive tariffs and tolls levied by governments and privileged landowners" (Rude, 1964, p. 12). In 1789, for example, one-third of British commercial trade involved the Americas alone6 (and this only a decade after the American Revolution). Above all, this was the Golden Age of the West Indies. For the period 1713-1789, Britain imported £162 million from the West Indies, dwarfing its North American trade. At the same time, Britain imported £104 million from Asia. In conjunction with an accelerating slave trade, expansion of goods to Africa increased tenfold from 1713 to 1789. The relation of slavery in the New World to capitalist development in Europe and (Britain in particular) can hardly be exaggerated. If we add British imports from the American mainland, including what in 1776 became the United States, the importance of Negro labor to the British economic system will appear still greater, since a great part of exports from the mainland consisted in agricultural products, such as tobacco and indigo, produced partly by slaves. It can scarcely be denied that the phenomenal rise of British capitalism in the 18th century was based to a considerable extent on the enslavement of Africans. The town of Liverpool, an insignificant place on the Irish Sea in 1700, built itself up by the slave trade and the trade in slave-produced wares to a busy transatlantic commercial center, which in turn, stimulated the industrial revolution in Manchester. (Palmer, 1950, p. 230) By the close of the 18th century, industry—relative to commerce—still lagged. There was little use of steam-powered machines. For all intents and purposes, there was no "modern industry"—only that based on commercial capitalist production (dominated by merchants in the putting-out system) and handicrafts. Thus, most industry was carried out by smallholding agricultural producers and part-time agricultural workers in the countryside for merchants in the towns. In the fast industrializing England, it has been estimated that by 1739 there were 4.25 million persons employed in industry (Palmer, 1950, p. 226).

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The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil

This would have been one-half the working population.7 Still, for all their advances (primarily in agriculture), the British produced no more iron than Russia and remained less industrialized than France, which had twice the population of England and Scotland combined. Industrialization and the mechanization of production made only modest gains in the 18th century. Hand tools dominated industry into the 19th century. Steam power had actually first been applied to industry in 1702 to drive pumps in coal mines. It was not, however, until the 1780s that it was first effectively outfitted for the textile industry, leading to the concentration of spinning machines and workers in the so-called Satanic Mills. The first steamboats appeared in 1800, the first locomotive in 1829—traveling from Liverpool to Manchester at a clip of 16 mph. The power supplied by human and animal muscle, along with running water or air, was significantly eclipsed by other sources (steam, coal) only in the 19th century. "Social not technical invention was the intellectual mainspring of the Industrial Revolution. The decisive contribution of the natural sciences to engineering was not made until a full century later, when the Industrial Revolution was long over" (Polanyi, 1957, p. 119). Landownership was increasingly concentrated, with larger amounts of food being produced by fewer workers across Britain. For an appreciation of the rate of social change, one need only be reminded that the most far-reaching Enclosure Acts of the late 18th century—as far as population displacement was concerned—were almost instantly followed by the first Factory Acts in 1802. Smallholding agricultural producers disappeared. They were hired by larger-land holders or were forced to turn to work in spinning and weaving cottages for merchants in towns. As a result, wage-labor was emerging within the British labor force long before the predominance of factories and machinery. Landes notes that the immediate impact of the 18th/19th-century Enclosure Acts was actually to draw people into agricultural regions as opposed to driving them out. "Recent empirical research indicates that the agricultural revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labor, that indeed those rural areas that saw the most enclosures saw the largest increase in population. From 1750 to 1830, Britain's agricultural counties doubled their inhabitants" (Landes, 1969, p. 115). Thus, the late 18th century's emerging European working class was neither urban nor exclusively wage-labor. Cotton provides ample evidence of this. Through 1840, the Industrial Revolution meant textiles. Early factories were almost exclusively cotton mills. A still larger number of hand-loom weavers (dispersed in homes and factories) made up a significant minority of factory workers.8 Thus, by 1830 only a minute fraction of the British, let alone the larger European workforce, labored in factories or as pure wage-laborers. At the same time, 18th-century politics revolved around the agitations of two classes—the smallholding agricultural producers and the bourgeoisie. The old regimes (at times in careful concert with the Church) maneuvered between granting concessions and strengthening their rule over each. One sought greater freedom to trade and invest; the other, greater access to land and greater control

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of their own labor. Enlightened despotism sought to redress such destabilizing circumstances. Diderot's 17-volume Encyclopedie (1751-1772) came to symbolize the need (and capacity) of rulers to understand and reform modern society. The ideas of many of its contributors (Voltaire, Montesquieu, Turgot, Quesnay and Rousseau) held sway in many European courts. The Physiocratic tradition, represented by Turgot and Quesnay, insisted on liberalized trade along with the economic planning of an enlightened government, for example, the abolition of serfdom, tax reform, tariff unions, and so on. Reform in the East proved fairly challenging. Catherine the Great's early attempts at reform vis-a-vis serfdom were quickly reversed by the need to put down smallholding agricultural producer unrest, which culminated in Pugachev's Rebellion in 1773. As a result, serfdom was actually intensified in 18th-century Russia. "The number of serfs increased and the load on each became more heavy. Catherine's reign saw the culmination of Russian serfdom, which now ceased to differ in any important respect from the chattel slavery to which Negroes were subject in the Americas" (Palmer, 1950, p. 316). Frederick the Great—though among the most learned and progressive of his contemporary monarchs—could do little to ease conditions in Prussia at the expense of the entrenched Junker class. The Hapsburg's Joseph II, following Maria Theresa's lead, got somewhat further with reforms than those in Prussia or Russia. Serfdom was abolished, taxes and sentences were applied equally, greater civil liberties with regard the press and religion were granted and the state was centralized with a unified German language imposed on the Hapsburg's subjects (Czechs, Poles, Magyars) in a Germanification campaign. Most reforms were reversed, however, with the rise of Leopold II to the throne following the death of Joseph II. Indeed, the close of this period of enlightened despotism ended with a general return to monarchical rule by divine right. Of course, enlightened despotism was neither about sharing power nor about providing the bourgeoisie a greater role in governance. It was about adjusting monarchical rule (the old regime) to perceived changes in society. From this, two basic themes predominated: freedom and equality. Above all, the social classes sought freedom to move freely within their station in life and— when possible—between stations in life. Such freedom for the smallholding agricultural producer meant freedom from corvee labor, manorial dues and monopoly rents. For the bourgeoisie such freedom meant freedom from tolls, duties and taxes blocking investment and exchange. Joseph IPs abolition of serfdom was an example of the former. Maria Theresa's 1775 tariff-free union was an example of the latter. In this regard, the work of Adam Smith and his colleagues must be considered in the context of both the emerging social structures of capitalist production and the development of 18th-century Enlightenment thought.

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The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil Adam Smith and 18th-Century Political Economy

A great many pages into The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith announces, with uncharacteristic hyperbole, that in all of human history two events tower above all others: the creation of the New World and the discovery of safe passageway to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope (Smith, 1965, p. 590). Further on, Smith cites approvingly the bold pronouncement of Mirabeau that humankind has to its credit three paramount inventions: writing, money, and Quesnay's Tableau Economique (Smith, 1965, p. 643). Within both pithy observations lay the two central themes of Smith's work: the role of an expanding, all-encompassing market and his analysis of a social system of reproduction. It is useful to focus on these two themes to illuminate the concepts and categories Smith devised to describe and explain social development. In particular, this focus helps in the deciphering of Smith's concept of wage-labor. Smith's analysis, with respect to labor, does not begin with wage-labor per se. The first category of labor systematically deployed by Smith was that of abstract, general labor. This was contrasted with the Physiocrats' singular fixation on agricultural labor and, as such, was an effort to broaden their concept of labor. In deepening his analysis of capitalist production, however, Smith shed the abstract, general layers of labor and focused on increasingly narrower labor forms appropriate to capitalist production. His progression/regression moves across three forms of labor—from abstract, general labor, to wage-labor, to "productive" wage-labor. Thus, by the end, Smith's category of labor is even more narrow than that of the Physiocrats. This portrait of labor is developed within the context of the two themes mentioned earlier. The former theme presents itself as the division of labor and the expanded production and exchange allowed thereby. The latter entails the social production and reproduction of a surplus and its distribution (division) between labor (wages), capital (profits) and landlords (rent). Smith's work moves ceaselessly between these two themes, motivated, in large measure, by his efforts to counter prevailing mercantilist doctrines. The Division of Labor and the Emergence of Wage-Labor as a Social Category Smith attributes social abundance or scarcity to two principal factors: (1) the skill of labor (in general) applied to production and (2) the proportion of those performing "productive" labor to those not so employed. The application of skilled labor (in general) to the production process acts as the lynchpin of societal prosperity. The productivity of this labor is a function of the organizational arrangement of the labor process—the division of labor. Improvement in the productivity of labor is directly attributable to improvements in the division of labor. "The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor" (Smith, 1965, p. 3). Smith argues that the division of labor, viewed as an act of "assistance and cooperation," is capable of expanding social productive capacity by means of

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three inherent advantages. The division of labor permitted (1) an increased development of individual dexterity and proficiency, (2) an increased savings of time and (3) the introduction of machinery—by means of its organizational restructuring—which "enabled one man to do the work of many" (Smith, 1965, p. 7). As Smith notes, "A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures were originally the inventions of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it" (Smith, 1965, p. 9). Conceived as such, the division of labor is a social structure facilitating the development of social wealth. As the social division of labor expands (both intensively and extensively), so expands the wealth of society. The limit to such expansion is the market. The number of items to be exchanged dictates how minute the divisions within the labor process may be. "When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labor, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labor as he has occasion for" (Smith, 1965, p. 17). Hence, expansion west and trade with the East stand out for Smith so definitively as watersheds of human history. To this point, the form of labor is irrelevant to Smith's conceptualization of the division of labor. In other words, a division of labor in general employing slaves and serfs is possible—and arguably necessary—within the context of Smith's comments on the division of labor in general and the social benefits derived therefrom. Indeed, it is not only conceptually possible to portray slaves and serfs as participating in the larger division of labor but logically impossible not to do so—especially at the time of Smith's writing.9 In fact, including slaves and serfs within such a division of labor is the only way to maintain a notion of general, abstract labor, historically speaking, within world-capitalist production of the latter 18th century. Carl Biicher, contributing some 80 years later, formalized Smith's notion to include four forms. Consideration of Biicher's analysis demonstrates the ease with which slave-based production fits within a generalized division of labor. (1) The division of production involves the division of the whole process of production into several industrially independent sections, that is, vertical disintegration, as it were. An example would be sugar cultivation in the Americas and sugar refinement in Europe. (2) The subdivision of labor involves the breaking up of a department of production into simple dependent acts of labor, that is, intensification or specialization. An example would be the use of task work, gang work and domestic work on slave plantations. (3) The division of trades involves the application of a similar process to a smaller (more specialized) class of goods. An example would be the extension of slave-labor to the cultivation of tobacco, cotton, or charque.10 (4) The formation of trades involves the separation of domestic labor from the household, such as pottery. An example would be the use of provision grounds for subsistence/market production.

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Biicher's contribution was twofold. First, his extension of Smith's concept of the division of labor provided clear illustration that the concept is (1) not specific to any one labor form and (2) impossible to properly theorize/historicize without assuming the combination of a variety of labor forms. Second, he treated the division of labor as a historical creation, corresponding to a specific moment in social development. Treating the division of labor as "(the) adaptation of the tasks of labor to the variety of human powers" makes clear that among these "tasks" are going to necessarily be those of slaves, serfs and a variety of other non-wage-labor forms (Biicher, 1965, p. 293). Social System of Expanded Reproduction Having constructed a model of society (a division of labor) in which ground rules of proprietorship govern property relations, and reciprocity governs exchange relations,11 Smith set out to develop the specific laws governing the social processes of production and distribution of the social product. He thereby resurrected Mirabeau to expunge political economy of its mercantilist superstitions and to expand the Physiocrats' application of models of social reproduction to the process of social development. Contrary to that of the mercantilists, the Physiocratic tradition that Smith adopted went beyond examining the moment of exchange—highlighted by mercantilists as the source of wealth (and surplus) in society—to encompass the process of production as well. Smith first extended the Physiocrats' concept of agricultural labor as the exclusive source of all exchange value to include labor in general. Associating labor in general with "value-creation" provided Smith with a basis for setting his social system in motion. This consideration of value is crucial to understanding (1) the persistent theme within political economy regarding contradictory/harmonious labor/capital relations and (2) political economy's persistent fixation on a particular labor form—that of wage-labor. Three essential elements flow from Smith's analysis of social reproduction. The first is Smith's notion of value. Its source (abstract labor) and its measure (labor-time versus the value of labor's subsistence goods) provides the theoretical basis for political economy's fixation on wage-labor. The second is Smith's depiction of the distribution of this value (wealth) between laborers, capitalists and landlords, which highlights the limitations of considering only wage-labor. The third element concerns the social forms value takes in its production/reproduction—fixed and circulating capital. With this final element emerges Smith's analysis of productive/unproductive labor and the role of human agency (in the form of the capitalist) in the process of value's social reproduction and expansion. This brings out many of the contradictions of focusing exclusively on wage-labor in the analysis. Smith's investigation into value concluded with two measurements of value. One, based on his beaver/deer hunters, measured exchange value by labor-time. The second, based on the actual consumption of a worker, equated the value of the product of labor with the value of the subsistence items consumed by a laborer. The logical cohesion of Smith's presentation of value

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aside, the important point is his having located the creation of social value in the productive application of abstract labor. His attempts to then measure (or quantify) this value resulted in his isolating wage-labor as the most accessible and measurable form in which abstract labor appears. By his own presentation, however, the logical necessity of this maneuver is found wanting. This is perhaps best illustrated by Smith's own choice of examples. For instance, Smith cites the fact that the rent paid by smallholding agricultural producers in the form of corn is historically more stable than that rent paid in the form of money. This is an explicit comparison of serf- and wage-labor, implicitly assuming both to fall into the same category of abstract labor. Having sketched the source and (in genuinely contradictory form) the means of measuring value, Smith moves to a consideration of what proves to be the bulk of his work, the social distribution of this value. First establishing the three great classes and corresponding sources of income—labor (wages), manufacturers/traders (profits) and landlords (rent)—Smith sets out to identify the social laws governing their interrelationships. It is here that Smith's construction of heuristic categories begins to distort and deviate from the social reality. Wages, profits and rent are considered to represent the three components of the price of a given commodity. The "real value" of each part is measured by the quantity of labor it may command. Thus, "wages, profits, and rent are the three original sources of all revenue as well as exchangeable value" (Smith, 1965, p. 52). By such a formulation, Smith had suddenly abandoned his category of abstract, general labor, resolving all labor forms exclusively into the category of wage-labor. It is important to recognize in Smith's work the relation between the sacrifice of an accurate, social history (for the purpose of gleaning fundamental insights into the nature of capitalist society) and the essentializing of the distorted social forms that follows therefrom. While resolving all social forms of income into wages, profits and rent may be a gross distortion of the social reality, as a strategic suspension of "reality," this maneuver does allow Smith to uncover and access the underlying nature of the capital-labor relation. That he (or other political economists) lacked the theoretical sophistication to expand this analysis to other forms of labor beyond wage-labor in capitalist society does not harm, or diminish the basic insights derived therefrom with regard to antagonistic capital-labor relations. Smith's consideration of wage levels provides a good example of, at times, the absurd lengths to which political economy was forced to go to maintain wage-labor as an exclusive historical form. Smith cites three examples proving that 18th-century British workers received wages above subsistence. (1) Despite the fact that the cost of living is greater in the winter than summer, wages are higher in summer than in winter. Thus, as the lower wages cover higher expenses (in winter), the higher wages must be well above workers' lower expenses in the summer. (2) Despite the constant fluctuations of the cost of provisions, wages remain unchanged. Thus, since in lean years the poor do not starve, Smith presumes that in good years they must fare particularly well. (3) Additionally, wages are not differentiated regionally (as were the prices of

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provisions). Thus, those in areas of lower-priced provisions, again, must fare particularly well, compared to those in higher-priced regions. Such reasoning illustrates well the limitations of applying the "logical" principles of political economy directly to a given social reality. Smith's consideration of these examples does not allow for either consideration of labor savings or the possibility of procuring subsistence outside a money economy. Thus, the contingency that labor saves "surplus" wages in good times to subsidize poor times (or functions within an informal economy during poor times) is not considered by Smith. Smith's conclusion that nonuniform wage levels are evidence of wages above minimal subsistence from time to time is valid only minus such social adjustments. Unlike wages, profits fluctuate greatly (year to year, hour to hour). "Profit is so very fluctuating that the person who carries on a particular trade cannot always tell you himself what is the average of his annual profit" (Smith, 1965, p. 87). Ascertaining the actual profit rate is difficult. Smith relies on interest rates (as competing investment opportunities) to monitor profit rates. There is a tendency for both wages and profits to tend toward equality and uniformity. That is, discrepancies between wage levels or between rates of profit (not between wage levels and profit rates) tend to be minimized. Smith cites three conditions necessary for equalization to take place between profit rates and between wage levels. These conditions are crucial to distinguishing his work from a more general study of capitalist production, as they had never before and have never since applied to any capitalist society anywhere. (1) Employments must be "long-established" and "well-known." Newer employers must pay higher wages to attract labor. (2) Employments must be in their "natural" state. There can be no under/overemployment affecting supply/demand force. (3) An employment must be the sole employment of its laborers. Individuals must receive their complete social wage from a single occupation. There still subsists in many parts of Scotland a set of people called Cotters, though they were more frequent some years ago. They are a sort of out-servants of the landlords. The usual reward which they receive from their masters is a house, a small garden, as much grass as will feed a cow, and, perhaps, an acre or two of bad arable land. When their master has occasion for their labor, he gives them, besides, two pecks of oatmeal a week, worth about 16 pence sterling. During the greater part of the year he has little or no occasion for their labor, and the cultivation of their own little possession is not sufficient to occupy the time which is left at their own disposal. When such occupiers were more numerous than they are at present, they are said to have been willing to give their spare time for a very small recompense to anybody, and to have wrought for less wages than other laborers. (Smith, 1965, pp. 116-17) [Early manufacture] was probably a household manufacture, in which every different part of the work was occasionally performed by all the different members of almost every private family; but so as to be their work only when they had nothing else to do, and not to be the principal business from which any of them derived the greater part of their subsistence. The work which is performed in this manner, it has already been observed,

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comes always much cheaper to market than that which is the principal or sole fund of the workman's subsistence. (Smith, 1965, pp. 246-47) Smith's work has been cited here at some length because the historical examples he chooses to illustrate this point entail two further crucial implications. (1) Employers may not yield an "extra" profit from the employment of individuals at less than the social wage. This would create different wage rates. Some laborers would work 12 hours for a social wage, while others worked 14 or 16 hours. This would, in turn, create different profit rates, with some manufacturers "subsidizing" the cost of labor of others. (2) Laborers must not own the means to create value on their own—tools, raw materials, and so on.12 Thus, laborers must rely wholly and completely on the labor market for access to the commodity market to satisfy subsistence needs. Again, for all his historically grounded analysis, these assumptions alone point out the at times highly abstract nature of Smith's work. Ricardo, who abandons Smith's use of historical anecdotes wholesale, is at least better able to capture the reality of actually existing proletarianization (with respect to greater pauperization) than Smith. In large part, this is due to the fact that Ricardo's abstract models are so far removed from reality that it is readily apparent that they can apply only to a specific, relatively small social class—wage-labor proper. Among Smith's more disturbing observations with respect to the evolving capitalist society were the inherently antagonistic social relations emerging from divergent interests of the social classes. Here again, however, Smith's exclusive focus on wage-labor distorts his understanding of basic class interests. Smith identifies three social classes among which the annual produce of society is distributed: (1) those who live by rent and whose interests are in concert with those of general society; (2) those who live by wages and likewise share in a common interest of societal affluence and (3) those who live by profits, whose interests are in conflict with those of general society. Unlike rent and wages, the rate of profit does not rise and fall with the prosperity of society. Indeed, the rate of profit is naturally low in rich countries and "highest in countries going fastest to ruin" (Smith, 1965, p. 250). The dilemma unearthed by Smith lies in the three social classes' varying degrees of cognizance of the preceding conditions. Landlords, due to "indolence," and wage-workers, due to poor understanding, take little notice of these differences in interest. Indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of [the landlord's] situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind which is necessary in order to foresee and understand the consequences of any public regulation. . . . Though the interest of the laborer is strictly connected with that of the society, he is incapable either of understanding that interest, or of understanding its connection with his own. His condition leaves him no time to receive the necessary information, and his education and habits are commonly such as to render him unfit to judge even when fully informed. (Smith, 1965, p. 249)

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Those living on profits, meanwhile, remain keenly aware of their vested interests. "As during their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, they have frequently more acuteness and understanding than the greater part of country gentlemen. Their superiority over the country gentlemen is not so much in their knowledge of the public interest, as in their having a better knowledge of their own interest than he has of his" (Smith, 1965, p. 250). Smith could easily have added that, though it may have been arguably to the advantage of labor to be turned into wage-labor, clearly those who live by profit recognized that it was not to their advantage to convert all labor to wage-labor. Rather, it was of greater benefit to maintain a combination of labor forms across society, dipping into each as needed—as their actual practice reflected. It is important to note that Smith refers here to wage-labor exclusively and not abstract, general labor. Abstract, general labor is actually a more historically concrete category (and accurate description) than wage-labor, which, as a social class, represents a complete abstraction. Thus, as Smith narrows in on his subject (abstract, general labor) it becomes increasingly abstract, that is, less applicable to historical analysis. At the same time, however, this narrowed focus brings most sharply into focus the basic underlying antagonisms between the social classes. Having discussed the original source of value (generalized, abstract labor), the dual and contradictory means of measuring value (labor-time versus the price of subsistence goods reproducing labor) and the distribution of social wealth between wage-laborers, capitalists and rentiers, Smith moves to a discussion of the forms that value takes in the social production of further value (wealth) along with the more particular functions labor performs in society— productive versus unproductive. With this maneuver, Smith resigns labor to a yet narrower analytical category—productive wage-labor. The division of labor proceeds progressively in proportion to the previous accumulation of stock, each feeding off the other. For the purposes of accumulation, stock is divided into two parts. That part affording a revenue (profit) is capital. That part fulfilling immediate consumption needs constitutes individual income. Capital is of two forms—circulating and fixed capital. Circulating capital is that "employed in the raising, manufacturing, and purchasing of goods," along with the reselling of them with profit. "Circulating capital consists of the provisions, materials, and finished work of all kinds that are in the hands of their respective dealers, and of the money that is necessary for circulating and distributing them to those who are finally to use, or to consume them" (Smith, 1965, p. 266). Fixed capital constitutes that capital invested in improvements of land, machinery or tools that do not change hands in production. (Ricardo, later, points out the dubious nature of this distinction between fixed and circulating capital.) The labor applied to fixed and circulating capital is of two varieties— productive and unproductive. Productive labor, quite simply, is that labor that "adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed" (Smith, 1965, p. 314). Clearly, slave labor fits comfortably within this definition. Unproductive labor does not add value and is maintained by a portion of annual produce

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(surplus). "Like the declamations of an actor, the harangues of an orator, or the tune of a musician, the work of all of them perishes in the very instant of its production" (Smith, 1965, p. 315). The ratio of expenditure on productive/unproductive labor determines (1) a society's growth in productivity and (2) the general character of its inhabitants as industrious or idle. In mercantile and manufacturing towns, where the inferior ranks of people are chiefly maintained by the employment of capital, they're in general industrious, sober, and thriving; as in many English, and in most Dutch towns. In those towns which are principally supported by the constant or occasional residence of a court, and in which the inferior ranks of people are chiefly maintained by the spending of revenue, they are in general idle, dissolute, and poor; as at Rome, Versailles, Compiegne, and Fontainbleau. (Smith, 1965, p. 319) To reiterate, as with his discussion of the general division of labor, for the sake of logical cohesion alone, there is no reason to limit a discussion of "productive/unproductive" labor to wage-labor, and there are quite compelling reasons to include non-wage-labor within such a discussion. Certainly, capital did not hesitate to use them in production. It is as a carryover from his use of wage-labor to illustrate the inherently contradictory relations at the level of capital/labor vis-a-vis the creation and distribution of social value that Smith's analysis does not go beyond a consideration of wage-labor. Hence, as Smith moves from abstract, general labor, to wage-labor, to "productive" wage-labor, forms of labor that have the appearance of greater concreteness, in fact, melt into increasingly abstract and ahistorical concepts. It is noteworthy that, as Smith's analysis jettisoned the category of labor to the nether realms of abstraction, he quite carefully integrated evolving, historically concrete forms of capital to weave his tale. There are four specific subject forms of capital: cultivators, manufacturers, wholesale traders and retail traders. Each employs productive labor of various kinds, while at the same time—as employers of such capital—Smith contends that they themselves represent productive labor. "The persons whose capitals are employed in any of those four ways are themselves productive laborers. Their labor, when properly directed, fixes and realizes itself in the subject or vendible commodity upon which it is bestowed, and generally adds to its price the value at least of their own maintenance and consumption" (Smith, 1965, p. 343). Hence, the development of Liverpool and Nantes in the long shadow of slavery, the explicit extramarket efforts to discipline labor via the French Le Chapelair Law, Speenhamland, the Anti-Combination Acts—all melted into historical amnesia. By Smith's account, capital assumes a variety of historically concrete forms associated with separate functions, while value-creating labor assumes a single, abstract form (wage-labor) and serves a single function (productive labor). Thus, Smith's reader can be left with no doubt as to the subject/object positioning of capital/labor, respectively, within his formulations. Ricardo, some 40 years later, would—quite unconsciously—by tracing out the underlying contradictions of political economy to their logical (contradictory)

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conclusions, provide the basis for freeing the social category of labor from the determinism of Smith's subject/object confinement. EUROPEAN HISTORY AND THE STATE OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION (1789-1817) Forty-one years passed from the time of the publication of The Wealth of Nations until Ricardo's Principles appeared in 1817. In that interim a host of social, political and economic developments and disruptions had taken place throughout Europe and across the oceans. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had left their marks from Paris to Port-au-Prince. The map of Europe had been drawn and redrawn. After an initial, triumphant advance, a period of reaction had settled over Europe. Britain—dominant before and now having expanded its markets to the East and West during the Continental System—was without peer in commanding the world economy, exchanging manufactured goods for raw materials and food worldwide as the true workshop of the world. The French Revolution—signaling the bourgeoisie's ascension to state power and the establishing of hegemonic bourgeois cultural norms— dominated the ongoing social, political and economic changes of the period. Despite extraordinary economic growth and the fast expanding realm of capitalist production, non-wage-labor forms and extramarket forces still dominated European social development. Nothing epitomized the importance of extramarket forces more than the French Revolution and its reshaping of European society. Europe and Its French Revolution On the eve of 1789, fully four-fifths of the French population was rural, with land ownership reflecting the old regime's system of privilege. While actually working all the land, smallholding agricultural producers owned only two-fifths of the land outright. Feudal relations (serfdom) per se no longer bound the labor of smallholding agricultural producers. They leased land from a nobility who retained considerable privileges. The nobility often held a right of "eminent property" for all land within the manorial village. Individuals could own land. To do so, however, one had to pay certain rents and transfer fees. Such an arrangement, along with fluctuating economic conditions, led to a growing squeeze on smallholding agricultural producers. Meanwhile, the fivefold increase in foreign trade for the period 1713-1789 was an indication of the rising power and interests of the merchant class in France on the eve of revolution. In rough parity with de Toqueville, Palmer mused that "the [French] Revolution was the collision of two moving objects, a rising aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie" (Palmer, 1950, p. 335). Hobsbawm, meanwhile, tipping his hat to a more immediate conjunctural crisis, emphasized economic and political dislocations more specific to the moment. "The calling of the Estates General coincided with a profound economic and social crisis. The later 1780's had

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been, for a complexity of reasons, a period of great difficulties for virtually all branches of the French economy. A bad harvest in 1788 (and 1789) and a very difficult winter made this crisis acute" (Hobsbawm, 1961, pp. 82-83). The causes of the French Revolution, however, interest us here less than the circumstances and outcomes associated with the period. The French Revolution, in this sense, was a central event in the shaping of the modern European bourgeois state. It defined the architecture (and how historians define the architecture) of the internal balance of power between contending social classes. At the same time, by means of the Napoleonic Wars, it entailed a reappraisal of the external balance of power between contending ruling classes internationally. The French Revolution is essential not for what it accomplished per se but for the social crises and emerging Enlightenment ideals that it reflected and embodied. Of particular relevance to this work is the extent to which the French Revolution shaped 18th/19th-century European thought with respect to the notions of emancipation, liberation and the rights (and concept) of labor. The French West Indies, for example, while still under French dominion, was the only part of the slave world in the Americas where manumitted slaves were—de jure—given equal citizen status with Europeans. Napoleonic Reforms The aim of reforms within France, largely concentrated in the 1800-1804 period, was twofold: (1) to extinguish any remaining bastions of privilege hindering the expansion of bourgeois property rights and (2) to discipline the lower classes to the reality of emerging property relations. The nobility no longer enjoyed special access or veto powers. All public authority was concentrated in paid agencies of government. No longer could offices or professions be purchased, as the doctrine of "careers open to talent" was instituted. Tax exemptions were curtailed, and taxes were collected by professional collectors representing the central government. Laws were codified, and the Napoleonic Codes gave France a legal and juridical uniformity. At the same time, labor was kept in its place. Labor unions were outlawed, and the word of a worker remained impermissible in court as testimony against an employer. The Napoleonic Codes were considered to be universal and, therefore, applicable everywhere. Exporting these codes to foreign soil, the French devised reforms with the intention of attacking the surviving social arrangements of the other European aristocracies in line with their experiences in France. Estates were wiped out. Manorial systems with lords enjoying legal jurisdiction over smallholding agricultural producers were destroyed. East of the Rhine, however, unlike the French experience, landlords were usually compensated, with smallholding agricultural producers having to pay indemnities to break obligatory relations of the past. Whereas in France the peasants escaped from these burdens without having to pay compensation, because they had themselvesrisenin rebellion in 1789 and because France

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passed through a radical popular revolution in 1793, in other parts of the Grand Empire the peasants were committed to payment of indemnities, and the former feudal class continued to receive income from its abolished rights. (Palmer, 1950, p. 393) Generally speaking, outside France, lords and landlords survived. The Church's social position was redefined by the French insistence on religious tolerance. At the same time, guilds were abolished, and "right-to-work" laws were established. Internal tariffs were removed as free trade (within the Continental System) was enhanced. The metric system was instituted throughout Europe at this time to aid commerce, along with significant tax and finance reform. As Moraze has argued, the success (or degree) of reform was largely related to the political and economic maturity of the native bourgeoisie. The prestige of French currency and credit was all that was then needed to modernize the Rhineland, since it was ripe for these changes. Farther east the situation was not the same. Whether the princes in their anxiety hastened to join the French alliance or whether they passively waited for the victors to impose their terms, the old social structure baffled the imperial administrators, who could not, in fact, do without the local dynasties if they were to conduct business at all. Thus Prussia could be dismembered and lose the outlying western possessions which were too far from the centre, but she could not be suppressed. Napoleon, east of the Elbe, could act only in accordance with the old feudal system. . . . In fact, the French Code had succeeded in France, and partially succeeded in western Germany, only because its way had been prepared by much past history and by a hundred years of progress of which it was merely the culminating point. (Moraze, 1968, pp. 186-87) By 1810 the Grand Army had occupied or entered into alliance with most of Europe (against Britain). In its wake the Grand Army had reconstituted and reorganized the German and Italian states, 13 as well as instituted a battery of reforms to liberalize property rights and enhance commerce and free trade throughout all of Europe. A cornerstone of Napoleon's European campaign was the Continental System. This was an overt attempt to choke British trade and drain the island of its gold. The principal result, however, was the strengthening of British hegemony through its securing of trade and commercial supremacy with the Americas. One-third of all British exports and three-fourths of British re-exports (of colonial goods) went to the Continent (Rude, 1964, p. 250). Since 1793, Britain had exercised a virtual monopoly on exports to the Continent. At the same time, for this period, Britain had as yet not developed too great a reliance on the import of goods from the Continent. Indeed, interests within the Continent (such as French agriculture) in many ways had a greater interest in British trade than Britain. This would prove a tremendous dilemma in sustaining the Continental System. 14 The aim of the Continental System was, therefore, foremost to destroy Britain as a commercial power—its capacity to dominate the export/re-export of goods to Continental Europe. The Continent's shipping industries were allowed to atrophy. Whereas the port of Trieste had in 1807 handled bulk tonnage of 208,000 by 1812, its tonnage had fallen to 60,000 (Palmer, 1950, p. 400). Britain, meanwhile,

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pursued a policy of vast economic expansion in colonial markets. British exports to Latin America rose from £300,000 in 1805 to £6.3 million in 1809. New commercial agreements were reached with Argentina in 1806, Brazil in 1808, the Near East in 1809 and the Baltics in 1810. For the period 1792-1814, Britain had its estimated annual income more than double from £140 million to £335 million. Additionally, British finance suffered very little. "[British financial credit] remained good because the financial links with the continent were never really broken, not to speak of the fact that Britain was the steady recipient of a bullion inflow as the haven for the flight of capital, first from the Revolution, then from Napoleon's Continental System" (Wallerstein, 1989, p. 117). Close of the Napoleonic Era: British Economic Hegemony, Rationalization of the European State The British emerged from this era without peer. With its colonial network,15 commercial enterprises, financial stability and unparalleled sea power,16 the British set out on a century of unrivaled hegemonic world leadership. Controlling most of Europe's colonies by 1815, dominating the maritime routes and the profitable re-export trades, and well ahead of other societies in the process of industrialization, the British were now therichestnation in per capita terms. During the next half-century they would become even richer, as Britain grew to be the "superdominant economy" in the world's trading structure. (Kennedy, 1987, p. 139) More generally, across Europe, the period of the French Revolution resulted in a rationalization of the modern European state. The state was made a territorially coherent, unbroken area, governed by a single sovereign authority under a uniform system of administration and law. The warfare of this period had been far less devastating to life and property than earlier wars such as the Thirty Years' War or the Northern Wars. No area affected by the wars of 1792-1815, not even in the Iberian peninsula where military operations were more prolonged than anywhere else and popular resistance and reprisal made them more savage, was devastated as parts of Central and Eastern Europe were in the Thirty Years' and Northern Wars of the 17th century, Sweden and Poland in the 18th century, or large parts of the world in war and civil war in the 20th. (Hobsbawm, 1961, p. 118) The period of 1792-1815 had been, in fact, a period of almost uninterrupted warfare in Europe. As Hobsbawm has remarked, there were two principal battles: those between powers (over territory) and those between systems (the old regimes versus bourgeois reformation) (Hobsbawm, 1961). The Grand Army represented the former; the French Revolution, the latter. The expense of war had led to further innovations.17 To finance the armies, new means of paying for war had been introduced. Napoleon had for the first time made wide use of unconvertible paper currency in France (issuing the assignats). The British for the first time introduced a direct income tax in 1799.

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Napoleon's impact on reform throughout Europe was not always by direct imposition. At times, a counterrevolution forced reforms through as effectively as the Grand Army, reflecting an increased rationalization of the state apparatus. The influence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic reforms was transmitted into other lands not merely by the forces of liberalism or capitalism—but by conquest, by nationalism, and ultimately by reaction against French dominance. . . . Perhaps the most spectacular consequence was indirect—a reaction in the form of a counter-nationalism to the humiliating conquests of the French armies. This happened in Prussia, where the defeats of Jena and Auerstadt led to a sense of political humiliation. (Supple in Cipolla, 1973b, p. 318) An important period of German nationalism/romanticism—going back to Herder's 1784 Ideas in the Philosophy of the History of Mankind—coincided with the ongoing European drama, both reflecting and informing developments in this era. Seeking the basis for civilization in the expression of the common people (volksgeist), this form of cultural nationalism cut across universalist claims of the Enlightenment as encapsulated in the French Revolution. Throughout the German states this national, cultural awakening after 1800 took the form of antagonism for Napoleon and for Prussia's Francophile German rulers. Prussia, considered the least compromised in its alliances with France, advanced important reforms within the army to capture this spirit. Baron Stein (and his successor, Hardenberg) moved to break down the caste system whereby officers were drawn exclusively from the Junker class and soldiers from smallholding agricultural producers.18 These reforms allowed the Edict of 1810 to further break down Prussian social divisions within the countryside. Smallholding agricultural producers were given the right to convert their tenure into private property, provided that one-third of the land became the property of the lord.19 The result of the 1810 Edict, predictably enough, was the enlargement of Junker estates and the creation of a large pool of wage-laborers. Alongside a reduction in their patriarchal powers, therefore, the Junker class saw its economic powers proportionally increase. On one hand, Prussian reforms granted a new legal status and new freedoms (such as movement) to the smallholding agricultural producers. On the other hand, the newly "freed" smallholding agricultural producers essentially found themselves turned into hired agrarian day laborers. Far from reducing their dependence on the Junker class, this had the effect of heightening their dependence. The Napoleonic era formally came to a close in 1815. As yet, large-scale industry (steam-powered machines, locomotives, telegraph communications) was unknown or in early stages of development. Advances, to this point, in the techniques of production would hardly warrant the term "revolution."20 The disintegrating impact of the "invisible hand" across regions was far less evident than the state's active imposition of land tenure arrangements, regimentation of labor and codification of private property's constraints and freedoms on capital. Thus, the actual economic conditions of the French popular masses may have improved under Napoleon21; however, the 1789-1815 period was one with no particularly significant transformation of labor processes within Europe (or

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its colonies—with the important exception of Haiti). Those changes described earlier with regard to early manufactures and the putting-out system developed at a steady pace. At the level of the world economy, meanwhile, with respect to networks of finance and investment, integrating dispersed labor processes, there was an important period of consolidation and further development (a period of intensification). The expansion of commercial networks, increasing production for export markets and, as a by-product, the further integration of global labor processes organized by internationalized capital were engineered, at this point, principally through the constitution of the British empire. In this period, the bourgeoisie began to take its rightful place within the modern capitalist state—institutionalizing its command of capital (abolishing feudal structures, designing a social order based in private property) and labor (Speenhamland, Le Chapelair Law, Anti-Combination Acts) by the kidnapping of the state in the name of the General Will.22 In this sense, the French Revolution represents both the thought and deeds of the late 18th-century bourgeoisie. Its efforts went into the creation of a market society. To buy and sell land, one needed to commodify land—create private, alienable property. To buy and sell labor, one needed to commodify labor—to create a working class comprising wage-laborers[The vested powers] were all equally averse to the idea of commercializing labor and land—the precondition of market economy. Craft guilds and feudal privileges were abolished in France only in 1790; in England the Statute of the Artificers was repealed only in 1918-14, the Elizabethan Poor Law in 1834. Not before the last decade of the 18th century was, in either country, the establishment of a free labor market even discussed; and the idea of the self-regulation of economic life was utterly beyond the horizon of the age. (Polanyi, 1957, p. 70) Thus, the commodification of European society was not so much an evolution as a violent, artificial creation, forcefully imposed, that erected whole societies atop the corpses of past, backward peoples. The point—as Wakefield discovered (along with the celebrated Mr. Peel of Australia)—was that capitalist production required a specific social order. Once up and running, the political economists were convinced, this social order would be self-reproducing, as well as self-correcting. Among the first to notice a few chinks in the armor of capitalist production—as a system of expanded social reproduction—was Ricardo. Ricardo wrote at a time when the groundwork had been fairly well laid. With the passing of the French Revolution—the core of its social reforms within Europe still in place—and the positioning of the British empire at the helm of global capitalist production, workers from around the world appeared set—via the further integration of global labor processes—to leap headlong into the, at first bumpy, though all the same necessary, process of international working-class formation. As Ricardo settled in to finish his opus in 1817, it remained the case that the majority of European and colonial laborers remained serfs, petty-commodity-producers, slaves or indentured servants. At the same

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time, though dwarfed by their counterparts, there was a tiny, but growing, minority of wage-laborers. Ricardo and Early 19th-century Political Economy: A Shift to the Distribution of Wealth Ricardo's analysis of capitalist production is concerned exclusively with Smith's category of "productive" wage-labor, which he further specifies (and abstracts) as living, productive wage-labor in contrast to the dead wage-labor embodied in the products of living labor. Whereas Smith focused his sites on the origin of the wealth of nations (along with the expanded reproduction of capital), Ricardo—taking issue with several key tenets of Smith's—embarked upon an investigation of the precise laws governing the distribution of wealth. Indeed, political economy for Ricardo was little more than a means to "determine the laws which regulate this distribution" (Ricardo, 1986, p. 5). The distribution of wealth for Ricardo, as with Smith, is between three principal social classes: landed proprietors, owners of capital and labor. Ricardo deviated from Smith in two areas, at times in emphasis and at other times more definitively. First, Ricardo placed far greater faith than Smith in the capacity of market forces to restore social equilibrium. Second, Ricardo moved the discussion even further from the realm of the production of value to the realm of its distribution, simply presuming the existence of a great many phenomena that he went on to detail within his schema. This resulted in a stronger tendency toward an ahistorical analysis of capitalist production. At the same time, this approach brings to light even more sharply than Smith's approach the contradictions inherent within an expanding system of equal exchanges—as Ricardo tripped upon antinomies of his own creation. This is especially telling with regard to the tendency of profits to fall and the growing "redundant" population that accompanies accumulation. There are three points to be considered with respect to Ricardo's contribution to political economy. First, there is Ricardo's use of labor-time as the measure of value. This was a key development for later analyses of exploitation and, from von Bohm-Bawerk forward, became the first principle of classical political economy to be renounced. Ricardo's use of labor-time as the measure of value is, furthermore, based on a quantitative conceptualization of "exploitation" that results in the generation of a "model of exploitation," which by definition, cannot include non-wage-labor forms—thus, substantiating the claim that within capitalist production only wage-labor may be properly exploited. The second point of Ricardo's contribution to political economy considered here is his distinction between fixed and circulating capital (and its effect on the rate of profit). This provided the basis for political economy to develop the nature of the relation between increasing wealth and increasing poverty. This particular maneuver required Ricardo's further restriction of the category of labor to that of "living, productive wage-labor." The third point with respect to Ricardo's contribution to political economy concerns his chapter "On

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Machinery." This chapter applies many of the preceding principles and allows him to discover, with characteristic detachment, the emergence of a "redundant" population. Ricardo's Measure of Value: Wage-Labor as a Quantitative Relationship Ricardo begins by attempting to set straight Smith's indeterminate measure of value. Ricardo takes issue with a basic postulate of Smith's that "labor alone, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate real standard by which the value of all commodities may be measured" (Ricardo, 1986, p. 16). As this value is an expanding quantity, evolving with the productivity of labor, Ricardo concludes that only embodied labor can provide a commonly measurable exchange value. "It is the comparative quantity of commodities which labor will produce, that determines their present or past relative value, and not the comparative quantities of commodities, which are given to the laborer in exchange for his labor." (Ricardo, 1986, p. 17). This value, with general societal improvement, will be a diminishing variable, as production requires less and less labor per output, that is, the same labor produces more, or labor's capacity to create use-values increases. Arguably, of course, both measures are equally correct depending on what one is measuring. Ricardo, nonetheless, took this distinction as his point of departure. One cannot, therefore, determine the "fair and equitable" price (or value) of a wage—only of a commodity. Hence, an "exploitative" exchange of one's labor-time for a bundle of subsistence goods containing less labor-time than expended is based on the value of the commodity. Labor itself has no intrinsic exchange value. To this extent, slave-, serf- and wage-labor all produce commodities with labor-embodied value. However, only when compensation takes the form of a universal exchange form (money) can the exploitative nature of the capital-labor relation be quantified. Hence, we see the basis for the purely heuristic privileging of wage-labor for the purpose of developing insights that are equally valid for (generalizable to) other labor forms within capitalist production. The condition of "unfreedom" is a moral one, not an economic one, and so may include slavery. The condition of being exploited is an economic one, not a moral one, and so is reserved for an economic category—wage-labor. The Distinction between Eixed/Circulating Capital and the Notion of Living Versus Dead Wage-Labor This refinement of Smith's theory of value provided Ricardo with a useful segue into a discussion of the labor process and fixed and circulating capital. The value of a given commodity consists of that labor directly applied to its production along with that labor indirectly applied to its production. Labor indirectly applied refers to the transfer of "dead" labor's value—embodied in the instruments of production—to the commodity through the production process.23 Ricardo treats the distinction between fixed and circulating capital (for Smith, qualitative, functional distinctions) as existing along a continuum of physical

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durability. In other words, the more lasting a capital good, the more "fixed" it may be considered. Fixed capital is consumed more slowly; circulating capital, more rapidly. Distinguishing between the two is "a division not essential and in which the line of demarcation cannot be accurately drawn" (Ricardo, 1986, p. 31). An important distinction for Ricardo, however, is the relation of wage levels to the durability of the fixed/circulating capital supporting (employing) labor. The relation of fixed and circulating capital is of crucial importance to Ricardo's model. Where fixed capital predominates over circulating capital, a wage increase will affect the price of commodities produced less so than where circulating capital predominates. The implicit assumption is that the employment of circulating capital in production is associated with direct (living) labor, and the employment of fixed capital is associated with indirect (dead) labor. Ricardo thus fastens the value of commodities to embodied labor-time, which is divisible into direct (living) labor (associated with, but not identical to, circulating capital) and indirect (dead) labor (associated with, but not identical to, fixed capital). This allows him (1) to discard nominal measurements of value and fix it to a uniformly comparable standard (abstract labor) and (2) to more accurately gauge the impact of changes in capital (fixed and circulating) upon the distribution of value. 4 Smith moved from abstract labor (in contrast to agricultural labor), to wage-labor in general, to "productive" wage-labor. Now Ricardo moves even further—to living, "productive" wage-labor in contrast to dead, "productive" wage-labor. However, in so doing, Ricardo had qualitatively altered the category of wage-labor itself. Productive wage-labor and unproductive wage-labor (Smith's highest level of abstraction) were categorizations linked to the production process. As Ricardo's concerns were more the distribution than the creation of value, living labor and dead labor were categorizations linked to the exchange process. So long as categories were productive versus unproductive, non-wage-labor forms could be conceptually integrated. With categories of living versus dead labor, labor no longer took a form of any kind—it was a quantitative relationship. Thus, following Ricardo, labor could take the form of wage-labor only by definition, as opposed to strategic abstraction. Wage-labor was transformed from a heuristic tool to an essentialized, ahistorical social category. This represents the pinnacle of classical political economy's contradiction of replacing the category of abstract, general labor with wage-labor exclusively. Within a rigorous, internally consistent model, Ricardo had succeeded in mapping the intricacies and details of dead labor's role in capitalist production, while simultaneously obscuring that of slave-, serf- and all other non-wage-labor forms. Only the further examination of his social model could make possible (and, in fact, necessary) a portrayal of the role of marginalized, non-wage-labor forms—that is, a redundant population.

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Ricardo on Machinery (Social Immiseration) The revelation that the generation of a "redundant" population followed from the logical application of Ricardo's model of expanded capital accumulation was most fully developed in his chapter "On Machinery." Before turning to the details of that discovery, it is important to reiterate, as noted in the introductory chapter, that the process of working-class formation is punctuated by two essential moments. The first concerns the original appropriation of labor forms for capitalist production. The second, uncovered here by Ricardo, concerns the generation of "redundant" laborers who are then cast aside. This latter process, detailed by Ricardo's chapter "On Machinery," has, in large measure, dominated political economy's depiction of working-class formation. This is no doubt, in large part, due to the fact that it represents a social problem to be resolved as opposed to the former, which presents a necessary act of violent appropriation to be attributed to premodern barbarism. Ricardo observes that the discovery of laborsaving machinery may both "cause a rise in the net income" while, at the same time, "rendering the population redundant."25 "All I wish to prove, is, that the discovery and use of machinery may be attended with a diminution of gross produce; and whenever that is the case, it will be injurious to the laboring class, as some of their number will be thrown out of employment, and population will become redundant, compared with the funds which are to employ it" (Ricardo, 1986, p. 390). The application of machinery always leads to an increase of net produce without necessarily increasing value in the long term. That is, a greater quantity of goods may embody fewer labor hours. Thus, an increase of net produce is not inconsistent with nongrowth of gross produce. Unless an improvement in the means of production increases the net produce of a country to an extent that does not diminish gross produce, then all social classes may not be equally benefited. Therefore, "The opinion entertained by the laboring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded upon prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy" (Ricardo, 1986, p. 392). Ricardo thus stumbles upon a hitch in capital's endless accumulation. Indeed, over the long term, there is a tendency for profits to fall with the progress of society, according to Ricardo. "The natural tendency of profits then is to fall; for, in the progress of society and wealth, the additional quantity of food required is obtained by the sacrifice of more and more labor. This tendency, this gravitation as it were of profits, is happily checked at repeated intervals by the improvements in machinery, connected with the production of necessaries" (Ricardo, 1986, p. 120). These "checks" are themselves, however, called into question by this theory of mechanization. Ricardo sets in motion a whirling state of crisis. As society improves, it employs more fixed capital—in proportion to circulating capital. This produces a greater quantity of goods of lower individual value. At the same time it renders large segments of the population redundant. Profits fall both absolutely and as a

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proportion of the social product. Wages fall as a portion of the social product. Malthus is invoked to treble the rising surplus population. Ricardo arrives, the savior of Smithian political economy. He has only to right a few laws, tighten a few theories, and Smith's system may be made whole. His mission concludes by "discovering" that the wealth of a nation may be expanded in one of two ways. There may be an absolute increase in the revenue base, employing a proportionally larger body of labor. This would increase both abundance and value. It is akin to the proverbial golden goose, however, so far as conquest and plunder—a rather unreliable long-term strategy—would be the only means of achieving it. Or there may be an increase in the productivity of revenue acting with the same amount of labor, thereby increasing abundance and decreasing (proportionally) the value in society. Value, therefore, expands on an increasingly diminished scale. Returning, then, to Ricardo's consideration of fixed and circulating capital, the importance placed upon their ratio of investment becomes more clear. Ricardo, with all the naked abandon of a young geometry student given his or her first protractor, was positively mesmerized by his new model of society and set out to measure all sorts of phenomena. It did not take long for Ricardo to (surprisingly?) discover that, given the absurdly ahistorical assumptions of his static, closed model of society, one could deduce that greater productivity (i.e., the displacement of living labor with dead labor) may actually lead to the creation of greater social wealth and raise the general level of social poverty. Nonetheless, it remained a useful insight, not because Ricardo had based it on an exchange process between abstract social categories but precisely because Ricardo had, inadvertently, returned his analysis to the sphere of production, finding the key for greater pauperization in the incremental substitution of machinery for living "productive" wage-labor. The category of wage-labor was being marginalized within the production process. Labor, for the first time in political economy's history, could be conceived of as having a social existence outside its relation to capital. The implicit determinism of the subject-object relation had been ruptured, and a reserve army emerged. Hence, for the first time in political economy's history, wage-labor confronted its antithesis: the beggar, the vagabond, the hobo, and so on. Until this point, all labor forms confronted their negations as logical, dialectical necessities: nonproductive but contributing members of the social order. Thus, the progression of political economy's conceptualization of labor through Ricardo encompassed: - concrete, agricultural labor contrasted with general, abstract labor; - general, abstract labor contrasted with wage-labor in general; - wage-labor in general contrasted with "productive" wage-labor (contrasted itself with "nonproductive" wage-labor); - "productive" wage-labor contrasted with living "productive" wage-labor (itself contrasted with dead "productive" wage labor). Now, for the first time, Ricardo stumbled upon a logically necessary social form that was defined as the negation of living, "productive" wage-labor. As a

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result, a theory of (and an analytical social category for) a marginalized, non-wage-labor form was made possible. This was an important advance for political economy beyond Smith's treatment of all non-wage-labor forms as atavistic, historical remnants.

NOTES 1. The first market-induced, nonharvest-generated crisis did not come until 1857, by Hobsbawm's estimation (Hobsbawm, 1961). 2. Landes makes the observation in this regard that the putting-out system, as well, was a source of class conflict. "[The Industrial Revolution] did not create the first true industrial proletariat: the blue-nails of medieval Flanders and the Ciompi of the Florence of the quattrocento are earlier examples of landless workers with nothing to sell but their labor" (Landes, 1969, p. 7). 3. Rude estimates that 80% of the French population were smallholding agricultural producers on the eve of the French Revolution (Rude, 1964, p. 23). 4. Though censuses do not exist for all of Europe, some have estimated that the population of Europe, as a whole, grew from 120 million in 1700 to 180 million in 1800 (McMannus, 1969, p. 4). Trade between countries for the years 1717-1750 increased 400% for all of Europe. Trade for the same period one century later increased 130% (McMannus, 1969, p. 5). In deciphering such numbers, it is important to bear in mind Dehio's reminder that the "science" of statistics itself was a product of the late 18th century—for obvious reasons. 5. This development also entailed the deindustrialization of segments of the colonial world, most dramatically India and later Egypt after the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Convention. 6. Throughout the 18th century, the British fleet increased in size five times from 3,300 ships carrying 206,000 tonnage in 1702, to 16,500 ships carrying 1.3 million tonnage in 1800 (Rude, 1964, p. 8). 7. Cotton's nascent development to this point is telling. The estimates were that one-half of the 4.25 million were engaged in weaving and processing of woolens, the other half being spread across such diverse fields as copper, iron, leather, paper, glass, porcelain, silk and linen. Significantly enough, only 100,000 were estimated in 1739 to be involved in cotton goods (Palmer, 1950, p. 226). 8. The British cotton industry expanded 10 times between 1760 and 1785 and another tenfold between 1785 and 1827 (Lilley in Cipolla, 1973b, p. 192). Cotton goods accounted for nearly one-half of all British exports in 1820 (Palmer, 1950, p. 425). 9. Adam Smith acknowledged as much, counseling, "We are apt to imagine that slavery is entirely abolished at this time [1770s] without considering that this is the case in only a small part of Europe; not remembering that all over Moscovy and all the Eastern parts of Europe and the whole of Asia, that is, from Bohemia to the Indian Ocean, all over Africa and the greatest part of America, it is still in use" (Smith, 1978, p. 181). 10. Charque, a form of salted, dried beef was a popular food item. 11. J. B. Say held that "the very act of production implies an act of mutual exchange" (Say, 1841, p. 286). It was the exchange of the direct producer's "personal exertion" for a product. 12. One of the earliest descriptions of the separation of the means of production and labor is attributed to James Steuart. "[Steuart] examines the process [of separation] particularly in agriculture; and he rightly considers the manufacturing industry proper only came into being through this process of separation in agriculture. In Adam Smith's

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writings this process of separation is assumed to be already completed" (Marx, 1971a, p. 43). 13. While Italy was never unified under Napoleon, its division into three parts and reorganization led to its later unification. The reduction of 396 German free states/cities and duchies to 38 was eventually ratified by the Congress of Vienna. 14. Eighty percent of the wheat Britain imported in 1810 came from France (Rude, 1964, p. 252). 15. Between 1783 and 1816, the British acquired, in the Atlantic Ocean, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Tobago, Bathurst, Sierra Leone, Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island; in the Indian Ocean, the Cape Colony, Mauritius, the Seychelles, the Laccadive Islands, the Maldive Islands, Ceylon, the Andaman Islands and Penang; in the Australasia, New South Wales, New Zealand, Macquarie Islands, Campbell Islands, Auckland Island, Lord Howe Island and Chatham Island; in the Mediterranean, Malta and the Ionian Islands (Wallerstein, 1989, p. 122). 16. By 1840 Britain had as many ships as the other four powers combined. 17. The very act of rationalizing the structure of the modem state had made war on this scale possible through the mobilization of national resources. "The state obtained more freedom in the use of its human and material resources. With the feudal barriers down, the state [was able to] recruit, train, officer, and equip its armies with regard only to military efficiency" (Palmer, 1950, p. 395). 18. Like most reforms of this period, reform of the army was not fully attempted until much later. As late as 1870, 70% of the Prussian officers were of the aristocracy. This figure was brought down to 30% by 1913 (Landes, 1969, p. 8). 19. Stein had "abolished serfdom" in a manner of speaking in 1807, making it possible for smallholding agricultural producers to break hereditary subjection by moving off the land. However, those who remained were still subject to previous labor obligations to the lord. 20. "As late as the 1810s William Fairbairn found that in Manchester 'there were then no self-acting tools. The whole of the machinery was executed by hand. There were neither planing, slotting nor shaping machines'" (Minchinton in Cipolla, 1973b, p. 167). 21. "The economic conditions of the popular masses improved considerably under Napoleon. His was an era dominated by a 'rise in wages.' This improvement in material conditions was 'unquestionable,' so much so that, after the economic downturn of 1817, peasants and urban workers looked back upon the Empire as a sort of golden age" (Wallerstein, 1989, p. 119). 22. Britain, as would be expected, provides the most fitting model: enclosures in the 1760s, Speenhamland in 1795 and Factory Acts by the early 1800s. 23. This point was not lost on Smith, who noted that at a certain point in the development of capitalist production, the instruments of production themselves become commodities. "When manufactures have advanced to a certain pitch of greatness, the fabrication of the instruments of trade becomes itself the object of a great number of very important manufactures" (Smith, 1965, p. 607). 24. Establishing labor-time as the measure of value and distinguishing between direct and indirect labor do not alter Smith's original claim that labor in general is the "source" of all value. It merely indicates more precisely (and consistently) the distributive "laws," if you will, of that value. 25. J. B. Say actually recognized this possibility as well but chose to sail blindly into the inevitable rather than peer inside a venerable Pandora's box. "It would be vain to attempt to avoid the transient evil, consequential upon the invention of a new machine, by prohibiting its employment. If beneficial, it is or will be introduced somewhere or other; its products will be cheaper than those of labor conducted on the old principle; and

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sooner or later that cheapness will mn away with the consumption and demand" (Say, 1962, p. 87).

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Chapter 2

The Historical and Theoretical Origins of the Modern Industrial Working Class (1817-1870) While the world of Smith and Ricardo may have embodied the nascent, early stages of capitalist development, the world emerging throughout the 19th century represented a distinct, maturing phase of capitalist growth. Thus, even if the social reality of Smith and Ricardo's day did not precisely reflect their exaggerated emphasis on wage-labor and their inattention to the role of extramarket forces, such an analysis could at least be seen as reasonable conjecture with respect to the future. By the 1870s, however, while it is undeniable that wage-labor and market forces were occupying central roles within important spheres of capitalist production, it still remained the case that the majority of labor employed by capital did not take the form of wage-labor and that extra-market forces continued to dominate the working class' daily lives. It would seem that any remaining exclusive focus on wage-labor and market forces would, therefore, be more the result of ideological purity than a reflection of the historical reality. One of the persons bearing the brunt of the responsibility for such an exclusive focus has been Marx. As will become evident, Marx, indeed, deserves a great deal of the blame. However, at the same time, it is precisely through an examination of Marx's major works that an alternative understanding of the working class may be developed. Marx's "discovery" of a heterogeneous working class—though by no means consistently applied across his own theoretical works—provides a critical path for understanding why the Brazilian abolition of slavery should not be seen simply as a linear process of working-class formation, dictated by blind market forces and inevitably moving former slaves toward wage-labor.

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EUROPEAN HISTORY AND THE STATE OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION (1817-1870) The period from 1817 to 1870 was one of remarkable transformation across Europe and across the globe. International production processes were increasingly standardized, and world markets were more fully integrated. The era of laissez-faire free trade led to a period of opulence and splendor that reached dizzying heights before crashing to a close with new protectionist tariffs and the first truly international, market-induced depression. Millions had migrated from the countryside to the towns (as well as from Europe to the colonies), though the number of workers employed by factory production remained a minority.1 In 1851 factory workers represented a mere 5% of the British population in 1841, 2% of the Prussian population, 3% of the French population and 2% of the Swiss population (Bergier, 1973a, p. 426). The United States, Germany and Japan were surpassing Britain and France in economic growth. The age of textiles was replaced by the age of iron and coal, as railroads and telegraphs patched together capitalist production across the globe. Enormous populations of serfs and slaves throughout Europe and the Americas saw the formal institutions of serfdom and slavery abolished. Entire new political structures were ushered in under the careful stewardship of Bismarck, Napoleon III and Cavour. Whole new political entities came into being—Germany, Italy, the Austrian-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Suffrage was extended, the rights of labor to organize were slowly recognized and land tenure rights were transformed. Early 19th-century Developments (1817-1848) The year 1817 opened with less than ideal conditions to support any kind of large-scale, sustained social and political transformation across Europe. The concert of Europe emerging from Vienna had its basis in tradition, continuity and the status quo. This proved to be a fairly stable arrangement. By 1848 the map of Europe (save for Greece and Belgium) remained undisturbed. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the 1820s was a period of independence. Both the United States' 1823 Monroe Doctrine and British resolve to protect its markets (as well as Latin American nationalism) contributed to American republics' breaking from their European colonizers. The years 1817-1848 marked an era of effective repression of social movements across Europe. In this regard, two striking moments reflected different levels of development of the bourgeoisie's project to retain and reform the state and its institutions. The July Monarchy of 1830, though not a working-class movement per se, revealed the growing strength and influence of the French working class and served as a warning to both ancient regimes and bourgeoisies across Europe. Meanwhile, the Reform Acts of Britain revealed the contradiction between, on one hand, an expanding economy and civil society and, on the other hand, stagnant political institutions. Nonetheless, the general sentiment throughout Europe following the Napoleonic Wars put a premium on stability.

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The population of Europe in this era grew from 167 million in 1815 to 266 million by 1848 (Droz, 1967, p. 21).2 At the same time, Europe's population remained quintessentially rural. In fact, the transition from rural (agrarian) to urban (industrial) societies was painstakingly slow. Forty-two percent of the German population remained in agriculture as late as 1882. The urban population outstripped the rural population in England and Wales only in 1851, Germany in 1891 and France in 1931 (Armenguad, 1973a, p. 36). The ongoing Industrial "Revolution" had not diminished the fundamentally rural character of European society. "The Industrial Revolution had not yet been able to abolish the old rural supremacy. However great the progress made by capitalism in Great Britain, the balance between landed interest and moneyed interests had not been finally upset in favor of the latter" (Droz, 1967, p. 22). The symbol of this new era of capitalist production (and heavy industry) was the railroad, which combined coal and iron, thereby increasing the demand for raw materials. At the same time, the expansion of canal and road networks commenced at a feverish pitch across Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. On the continent the years were marked by a parallel development: in Austria roads were built radiating around Vienna while in Italy the French and Austrian roads were carried on over the Alps towards Brindisi. The Prussian government, in particular, expended vast efforts and great expense to link Berlin with the Westphalian network. . . . The canals were being developed as rapidly as the roads. Every river in Europe in 1830 carried those famous tow-barges which seem so strange to us now. (Moraze, 1968, pp. 266, 267) National incomes rose in this period as the cotton industry continued to flourish, and the age of railroads (iron and coal) began. The European consumption of raw cotton, meanwhile, continued to increase. By the end of the 1840s, cotton manufacture on the Continent was dispersed with large regional differences in productivity and skill. British industry remained ahead of that of the Continent, while the factory system and industrialization continued to spread to the Continent on an expanded scale. There was little concentration or rationalization of production processes, and the Continent remained technologically "a generation behind Britain" (Landes, 1969, p. 169). Whereas the Industrial Revolution had its basis in the textile industry in Britain, on the Continent the Industrial Revolution began with a greater emphasis on heavy industry. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution had been built on the cotton manufacture, which grew more rapidly than other branches of industry before 1800 and drew them with it. On the Continent, it was heavy industry—coal and iron—that was the leading sector. This reversal, it should be emphasized, was essentially the consequence of the timing of growth—not of some structural law of economic development. (Landes, 1969, p. 174) Britain, France and the German states (along with Belgium) represented the most industrially advanced European states of this period. Most striking of these three states going into the mid-19th century was the modest development of industrial factory labor, with the exception of the British countryside. The

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putting-out system still dominated the textile and light industries. Capitalist-style agriculture, which had developed in Britain far beyond anywhere else in Europe, became predominant in these other states as well. For Britain, 1817-1848 was a period when geographic specialization was just beginning. Hydraulic power was still the predominant energy source. The factory system was of significance only in Wales, northern England and Scotland. By 1850 there were a modest 7,000 miles of railroad throughout all of Britain. A class of small-scale, smallholding agricultural producers still dominated the French economy. Droz characterized France in the first half of the 19th century as "a democracy of small farmers, living poor lives in a closed economy" (Droz, 1967, p. 29). French industrialization remained technologically behind British industry. France continued its use of smelting in charcoal furnaces as opposed to the more advanced British method of blast furnaces fired by coke. Horizontal concentration had only just begun in the cotton industry with almost no horizontal organization in the woolen or metallurgical industries. Vertical integration had barely begun. French industry remained a "family affair" (Droz, 1967, p. 29). French railroad construction was also late in developing. France's 1,200 miles in 1848 were surpassed by both Britain and Prussia. Hence, by the close of 1848, wage-labor could not be said to be the dominant labor form even in the most advanced capitalist societies of Europe. The Tightening Capitalist World Order (1848-1870) It is rare for so brief a period—22 years—to have so profound an impact on world history as the years 1848-1870. At the period's end, parliamentary assemblies had become the rule, not the exception, throughout Europe, the age of nationalism had begun, and Germany and the United States were eclipsing Britain and France as industrial powers. At the same time, Continental Europe remained overwhelmingly rural, and the vagaries of weather (not the invisible hand of market forces) remained the most important influence on standards of living. Whereas the 1830s and 1840s had been an era of crises, the 1850s and 1860s were a time of growth and advance for unprecedented capitalist development on a world scale. Post-1848 Economic Impact The post-1848 period was one of tremendous economic expansion and transformation. The tentacles of capitalist development expanded around the world via the instruments of trade, production and finance. In turn, massive changes reorganized the labor process and the social forms of the working class. Slavery and serfdom were abolished. Though still a minority, an increasing portion of Western European labor was thrown into urban industry. In this sense, it was an accelerated period of transition from agrarian to urban/industrial society within Europe and globally.

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The rapid economic expansion of the 1850s had many measures. The growth of British cotton goods doubled from 1850 to I860.4 The export of iron from Belgium doubled. World grain production grew from 30 million metric tons in 1850 to 50 million metric tons in 1872 (Bergier, 1973a, p. 479). With the notable exception of Britain, however, the import of food never reached significant portions in most of Europe. Belgium consumed nearly no imported food until 1870. Germany's 19th-century high point for food imports was 10% in 1890 (Bergier, 1973a, p. 477). The tremendous industrial growth of the first half of the 19th century had been accompanied by the seeming anomaly of limited market expansion. After 1848, the railroad, steamship and telegraph facilitated capitalist production's geographic expansion.5 In fact, the decade of 1847-1857 was a peak period of capitalist expansion and integration geographically, comparable—in Hobsbawm's view—to the Age of Discovery. Looking back from almost half a century later, H. M. Hyndman, both a Victorian businessman and a Marxist (though untypical in both these roles), quiterightlycompared the ten years from 1847-1857 with the era of the great geographical discoveries and conquests of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Cortez, and Pizarro. Though no dramatic new discoveries were made, for practical purposes an entirely new economic world was added to the old and integrated into it. (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 32) It is important to bear in mind throughout this consideration of economic growth that for all its dynamic expansion, industry's generation of a mass consumer society, with a sophisticated internal market, was slow to develop throughout Europe. Britain's export of cotton goods was up three times from 1850 to 1875, while Britain's consumption of cotton goods rose by only two-thirds (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 32). The creation of a world of workers linked to one another by interlocking market relations, as imagined by Smith and others, was slow in forming. Extramarket forces were still the dominant influences that shaped the daily lives of workers. This is not to suggest that this was not a period of vastly expanding market structures. However, world trade was a far better measure of economic expansion in this period than the emergence of strong domestic market structures. The volume of world trade had doubled between 1800 and 1840. From 1850 to 1870 it skyrocketed 260%. By 1875, £1,000 million were invested overseas.6 Three-fourths of that had been invested after 1850. In this regard, the 1848-1870 period (especially the 1850s) stands out as an important era for free trade and economic liberalism. Across Europe, guilds were dissolved, usury laws enforced and joint-stock company laws enacted. Sixty-seven joint-stock companies worth 45 million thalers were created in Prussia from 1825 to 1850. Seven years later, in 1857, there were 115 joint-stock companies worth 114.5 million thalers. The number of large companies in the Ruhr was 300 in 1858. By 1870 the number had shrunk to 200 (Moraze, 1968, p. 317). The general cry for free trade was gaining popularity. The general expansion of world commerce, which was really quite spectacular compared to the period before the 1840's, benefited (everyone), even if it benefited the British

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disproportionately. Both a large and unimpeded export trade and a large and unimpeded supply of foodstuffs and raw materials, where necessary by imports, were evidently desirable. If specialized interests might be adversely affected, there were others whom liberalization suited. (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 38) In line with the call for expanded economic liberalism, the international monetary system was simplified. Associations and customs unions were formed. In addition to the zollverein and the Austrian customs union, the Latin Monetary Union was formed in 1865 (including France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy). The Austrian florin was made uniform in 1858; the Prussian thaler, in 1857. A series of strategic trade treaties—in which Prussia in particular took the lead— were negotiated between 1860 and 1866.7 Access to strategic water passages was secured through the lifting of restrictions on international waterways.8 This tremendous expansion in capitalist production, finance and trade of 1848-1870 acted as important catalysts in unifying global production processes. In this period, comments Hobsbawm, history became "world history." "In this era industrial capitalism became a genuine world economy and the globe was therefore transformed from a geographical expression into a constant operational reality. History from now on became world history" (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 47). The statistical comparisons are telling. In 1840, 1.4 million tons of coal were traded globally. By 1870, 31 million tons were traded. In 1840 2 million tons of grain were traded globally. By 1870 11.2 million tons were traded. In 1840, a total quantity of 20 million tons of goods was exchanged annually between nations. By 1870, 88 million tons were exchanged. Railroads stretched across Europe (and by 1869 across the United States) representing a vast network of connected production points.9 Prior to 1850, 15,000 miles had been put down in Europe. To this, 50,000 new miles were added between 1850 and 1870. Steamships developed more slowly than railroads. They did not fully replace sailing ships until the 1870s and 1880s. However, those steamships that were employed soon proved their superiority. Between 1850 and 1880 British steamship tonnage increased 1,600%. The rest of the world's steamship tonnage increased 440%. The electric telegraph further unified global production. The first successful North Atlantic telegraph line was laid in 1865. Beyond economics, the 1850s/1860s represented, in general, a period of standardization in areas of culture, politics, communications and science. All this reflected the growing international interdependence of regional economies. However, as yet, this did not signal the predominance of wage-labor or the supplanting of extramarket forces as primary social influences. Post-1848 Social Impact Such advances and developments in the economic arena were accompanied by significant social change. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution had begun, the capacity of new capitalist economic development to expand employment caught up with the capacity to expand production. This was to have

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a profound social impact. At no time previously were people so free to move from the countryside (or from the actual country). Still, Europe remained a profoundly agrarian society. Britain, France, Belgium, Prussia and Saxony were the only European states with at least 1 out of every 10 persons living in a city of 10,000 or more people in 1848. In this era, agrarian production underwent a massive transformation. Agricultural production was dominated by competition between producers for the market and subsistence producers. Small and middle-sized agricultural producers held their own. The small and middle-sized agricultural producers in the Rhineland and Westphalia in 1858 held one-third of the land. By 1878, they held one-half of the land. The Belgium smallholding agricultural producers increased their share of land by 60% from 1846 to 1870 (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 195). The relationship of land tenure to the putting-out system and early industrialization operated fairly similarly in Britain and in East Elbian Prussia. Whereas the 18th-century British enclosure acts had promoted the process of large estates' swallowing smaller ones and the development of commercial agriculture, the abolition of serfdom in East Elbian Prussia created similar results. West of the Elbe, however, small and middle-sized independent proprietors—with partible inheritance—further fragmented landholdings to the point where many on the smaller plots were forced to enter into part-time wage-labor. As a result, the "proletarianization" of smallholding agricultural producers West of the Elbe, following the abolition of serfdom, was a more gradual, drawn-out process. Accompanying these changes there was a tremendous extension of the actual area under cultivation. The total land under cultivation globally from 1840 to 1880 increased from 500 to 750 million acres.10 The new lands were generally worked with few technological innovations. Within the expanding capitalist economy, agriculture became the supplier of food and raw materials, while providing a reservoir of labor for urban industry and furnishing the capital for urban/industrial development. The obstacle to agricultural development was the smallholding agricultural producers—or more specifically, the traditional smallholding agricultural producers' "preindustrial" agrarian traditions and institutions. For capitalism, land was simply a factor of production. It was, however, immobile and limited in quantity. For the smallholding agricultural producer, of course, land represented a way of life. Three economic structures dominated global agriculture in 1848: the serf manor, the slave plantation and the traditional subsistence smallholding agricultural producer's economy. Though long anticipated, the end of slavery and serfdom occurred rather suddenly. "In 1847 German agriculture was in fact still enslaved, whereas by 1870 it was (formally) free practically everywhere" (Moraze, 1968, p. 315). By 1868 serfdom had been legally abolished. By the late 1880s slavery had been abolished from the final plantations of Cuba and Brazil. The traditional subsistence smallholding agricultural producer's economy remained. While the development of a home market and export market (in grain) had done much to undermine serfdom, its abolition followed a combination of

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smallholding agricultural producer's unrest and urban political challenges to central authority. This central authority soon learned the benefit of aligning itself with free, small-scale smallholding agricultural producer against the urban bourgeoisie. While smallholding agricultural producers enjoyed a good deal of freedom vis-a-vis the previous feudal structures, this did not necessarily entail the larger embrace of modern democratic social institutions. "The peasants, once freed, showed little concern for constitutional or bourgeois ideas; and peasant emancipation in fact strengthened the forces of political counter-revolution" (Palmer, 1950, p. 493). The simultaneous abolitions of serfdom and slavery created alienable land, while "freeing" slaves and serfs to find income-producing occupations separate from the manor or plantation.11 Landes remarks that the resulting basic industrial structure of Europe in 1870 has changed little since. "By 1870 the industrial map of Europe was substantially what it is today" (Landes, 1969, p. 228). Accompanying these social changes was the largest wave of migration then known to Europe. Migration patterns included movement from the countryside to the city, between regions and across oceans. Between 1846-1875, 9 million Europeans departed Europe. For the entire period 1800-1846, less than 1.5 million left. Before the 1880s European migration patterns were dominated by the British, Irish and Germans. While most migration went to the United States, a sizable portion went to Latin America and to Australia. From 1855 to 1874, 250,000 left for Brazil, and 800,000 for Argentina and Uruguay. The impact of emigration on countries losing segments of their populations was negligible (with the exception of Ireland). The total European population actually increased by 30 million from 1850 to 187012 (Grenville, 1976, p. 14). The labor force continued to grow. In Britain (and Ireland) alone, the labor force grew from 5.8 million in 1800 to 18.3 million in 191013 (Armenguad, 1973a, p. 73). Industrial towns were generally inhabited by people from surrounding countrysides.14 Migration to cities proceeded swiftly after the 1850s.15 By the mid-1870s there were four European cities of 1 million people (Paris, London, Berlin and Vienna), six cities of 500,000, 25 cities of 200,000 and 49 cities of 100,000 (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 231). Urban culture was evolving in the 1860s and 1870s, generating such working-class diversions as taverns, music halls and theaters. A factory of 300 workers was still considered large in Europe through the 1850s. The average British cotton factory employed 185 people in 1871. The average machine manufacturer employed 85 people (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 233). Company towns, rather than discrete industrial regions, were developing in heavy industry. In this manner, a single, central authority—in the form of a local industrial leader backed by an array of legal and political powers—came to dominate the lives and fortunes of the workers who were concentrated in these emerging company towns (along with their families). The primary factor (or innovation) reshaping the production process in this period was not technological advance but a range of extramarket forces that were reorganizing the labor process itself to meet the emerging needs of capital. Production up to 1870 remained based on technology from the period of

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1760-1840. The steam engine, though of remarkably enhanced power and application, was effectively the same 18th-century steam engine of James Watt. "Though it made possible the revolutionary technology of the future, the new 'heavy industry' was not particularly revolutionary except perhaps in scale. Globally speaking, the Industrial Revolution up to the 1870's still ran on the impetus generated by the technical innovations of 1760-1840" (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 41). Two of industry's most important inventions were, in fact, based upon old technologies. Both the Bessemer Converter in 1856 and the Seismens-Martin open hearth furnace in 1864—which opened the path to the large-scale production of steel—required little in the way of new technology. "Not one of the scientific ideas used by Bessemer, Seismens, or Thomas dates from later than 1790" (Lilley, 1973a, p. 238). The coming technologies based on chemistry and electricity were yet to significantly impact European society. Electric light and power, steel, the telephone and photograph, turbines and internal combustion engines all had their impacts on society only after the 1870s. A general insecurity for labor developed in this era that was distinct from the traditional worries of the smallholding agricultural producer. Factory labor's insecurity was based on boom/bust cycles of capitalist production as opposed to the vagaries of the weather. Such insecurity, however, was largely offset by the economic expansion of the 1850s and 1860s. Thus, to the extent that one could speak of an evolving working-class culture or lifestyle on through 1870, this was the reflection of a growing body of laborers increasingly dependent on wage-labor and thus increasingly separated socially from both the bourgeoisie and the poor. The origin of those workers was fairly diverse: former skilled craftsmen, former petty bourgeois entrepreneurs, former smallholding agricultural producers, and so on. Even the most cursory examination of the British Blue Books, however, makes it clear that somehow missing from the popular imagery of working-class culture that emerged from this period was any reference to the sea of children and women employed in the mines and factories. The greatest advances toward dependence on market forces (and the predominance of wage-labor) were made in Britain at this time. The role of "pure" market forces as a factor shaping workers' lives was steadily replacing extramarket coercion. British capitalism in the 1860's abandoned non-economic compulsion of labor (such as the Master and Servant Acts which punished breaches of contract by workers with jail), long-term hiring contracts, (such as "annual bond" of the northern coal miners), and truck payments, while the average length of hiring was shortened, the average period of payment gradually reduced to a week, or even a day or an hour, thus making the market bargain more sensitive and flexible. (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 240) The concentration of large numbers of workers in factories was just beginning on the Continent in the 1850s. Westphalia, for example, in 1858 had 19 of its 49 spinning mills, 49 of its 57 blast furnaces and 158 of its 167 steel mills still in the countryside (Landes, 1969, p. 188).

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Importantly, European domination beyond its borders grew as an important corollary to the preceding developments. Whereas European powers had controlled 35% of the world's land surface in 1800, by 1878 they had taken effective control of 67% (Magdoff, 1978, p. 29). Up to the 1880s, 19th-century colonial policy momentarily turned European guns from each other to focus on their colonized subjects.16 "An outstanding development in colonial and empire affairs during the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the 1870s was an evident lessening in conflict between European powers. Instead of wars among powers, the period witnessed wars against colonized peoples and their societies" (Magdoff, 1978, p. 28). Europe stood poised by the 1870s, for its ambitious colonial expansion both east and west. The 1840-1842 Opium War had merely whetted Europe's appetite for Asia, as the late 19th century/early 20th century were about to witness. African slaves were "freed" just as African empires were enslaved. Following "independence," the new American republics were flooded with European capital, as new forms of economic dominance and dependence emerged from European financial power. During the decade of the 1850s, marked by tremendous economic expansion alongside formidable post-1848 political repression, Marx, tucked away in the London Library, began his deliberations on political economy and capitalist production. MARX'S CONTRIBUTION Following two or three decades of neo-Ricardian theorists, providing little or no edification beyond their mentor and culminating in J. S. Mill's Principles—purported by the author's own preface to be the "final word" in political economy—the ground had been sufficiently prepared for an aging, Left-Hegelian to happen upon the scene. There is always some difficulty in presenting the work of Marx in the context of Smith and Ricardo. In some sense, Marx can be said to be an extension of their works. However, Marx's primary contribution was his critique of their work. Within this critique there emerged a peculiar paradox, highlighting both Marx's fixation on wage-labor as a labor form and his pointed focus on extramarket forces. By way of framing Marx's contribution, it is useful to first consider the positivist tradition of 18th-century Enlightenment thought, which informed classical political economy and with which Marx was explicitly taking issue. As will be seen, the manner by which Marx rejected this tradition bears a direct relation to Marx's use of the concept of wage-labor. Methodological Considerations and the Discovery of Wage-Labor At the heart of Marx's critique of political economy was an investigation of its epistemological claims and methodological implications, as manifest in its depiction of capitalist production.17 Marx argued that classical political economy had taken observed structures of capitalist production and created abstract categories whose claims of universality were, in fact, unfounded. To borrow his

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language, they were fetishized and ahistorical. Structures of capitalist production are "fetishized" by political economy in that they treat the manifestations of an object as the object itself. This identification of an object's manifestations with the object itself results in: (1) the inability to distinguish the presumed nature of an object from the nature of the subject's relation to the object (the very basis by which meaning is conferred upon the object) and, consequently, (2) the generation of "false" categories (categories that reflect the nature of the relationship of the subject to the object, not the object itself).18 The structures of capitalist production are ahistorical in that political economy posits them to have always existed (for the purposes of explanation). They are without origin. The nonassociation of a category with a process of coming-into-being (1) makes all claims purely accidental (without cause), a random arrangement whose structural laws may be observed but not inferred, and (2) makes all categories fixed and universal—without the means to account for change, except by degree. The association of a category with a process of coming-into-being would (1) make all claims nonuniversal and conditional (historically contingent) and (2) confront one with the possibility of nonexistence (historical change). Political economy appropriates a set of social forms as it finds them and posits their existence as eternal. Thus vanishes the need to go outside a given social form to explain its existence, let alone its development. History ends. When the economists say that present-day relations—the relations of bourgeois production—are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer. (Marx, 1982, p. 121) Contrary to the theoretical premises of political economy, Marx's epistemological assumptions are threefold. (1) Objects are not immediately appropriatable; thus, we cannot "know" an object in-and-of-itself. (2) Objects exist (are given meaning) within a set of historical conditions (included among which is the relation of the subject to the object). (3) As follows from this second point, what is immediately observable are manifestations of an object's relation to a larger social context. Two methodological implications follow. (1) In considering the "nature" of any given phenomenon, it is necessary to move from abstract categories to concrete objects. (2) One can reach only thinner and thinner levels of abstraction (a process of sublimation, distinguishing between those aspects of an object that make it universal and those that make it historically specific) in considering the "nature" of a given phenomenon. Marx posits objects (concrete expressions of social structures) to be historical and to be alienated from the observer. Marx then delineates a strategy of "abstraction" to investigate, not the nature of the object per se but the specific conditions (social relations) constituting the bases for premising the object. The world presents itself as an infinite collection of phenomenal forms. Each form reflects (indicates the existence of) a complex set of social relations that give

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meaning to the phenomenal form. The empiricist (or political economist), treating the form as an object in-and-of-itself, collects and categorizes the forms. Marx, treating the form as an abstraction (a generalized representation of a concrete set of social relations), dissects those social relations that confer upon it its capacity for expression (making it possible for the empiricist to appropriate it). Marx's method of abstraction maintains its historical grounding by holding all abstract categories to be expressions of social relations that contain both universal and historically concrete traits. The existence of a more highly abstract category (e.g., abstract, general labor) precedes the positing of a less abstract category (e.g., wage-labor). Thus, a less abstract category (wage-labor) preserves the more abstract category (abstract, general labor) as a subordinate relation (a less concrete category). In other words, within a given category lurk two traits—that which makes it a universal, transhistorical category and that which gives it a historically specific form, marking it as the product of a particular time and place. Both elements are manifest in a variety of forms (expressed as social relations) that constitute a given social arrangement. "Money may exist, and did exist historically, before capital existed, before banks existed, before wage-labor existed, etc. Thus in this respect it may be said that the simpler category can express the dominant relations of a less developed whole" (Marx, 1973b, p. 102).19 Marx argues that Adam Smith's "discovery" of abstract labor represented the unveiling of an abstract category that was possible only in an advanced period of economic development. It came only after the evolution of a sophisticated combination of labor forms (or a generalized division of labor) had crystallized to the point where no single form could dominate—such as agricultural labor within Physiocratic thinking. This "simplest abstraction" achieved a "practical truth" only with modern society. "The simplest abstraction, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society" (Marx, 1973b, p. 105). When political economy moves between levels of abstraction, it is premised upon a model of society comprising immediately appropriatable objects. Hence, each level of abstraction is incapable of transcending a level of understanding beyond that of the object. Abstraction for political economy refers to consciously arranging and sorting the objects—to better understand the whole, not to better understand individual objects. Thus, logically speaking, for political economy an abstract category (abstract, general labor) is premised upon the a priori existence of a concrete object (wage-labor). Wage-labor is a naturally occurring labor form whose most pure element (abstract form)—as identified by Smith—is abstract general labor. The exposition of political economy, however, begins with an abstraction, that form of labor appropriate to all forms of production—abstract, general labor. Arriving at that labor form appropriate to capitalist production results in a narrowly construed concrete object (wage-labor). All other labor forms are

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thereby defined out of existence. This is a theoretical inversion of their implicit methodological approach of moving from the (immediately appropriatable) concrete to the abstract. Political economy rescues itself by means of a theoretical contrivance, the postulating of wage-labor (a concrete object) as ahistorical and universal (which then allows political economy to treat it as an abstract category). Were wage-labor an instance of an abstract category (abstract, general labor), then political economy would need to specify the historical conditions of its existence. To make an object historically contingent, however, is contrary to political economy's empirical methodology and would subvert their epistemological claim of being able to immediately appropriate an object. Wage-labor has always and will always exist because, were its premises stated otherwise, capitalist production (its laws, ideologies, political-civic structures, etc.) would be revealed to be historically contingent. For Marx, wage-labor is premised upon the existence of abstract, general labor. Wage-labor is a historically specific labor form whose most universal (abstract) form is abstract, general labor. That is, abstract, general labor remains a universal trait (the capacity to labor) common to all labor. Labor's specific forms are then historically determined. Political economy treats wage-labor as the most highly developed (and only) labor form appropriate for capitalist production. Marx treats wage-labor as the most highly developed labor form capable of providing capital with labor-power. It i;s not the only labor form capable of providing capital with labor-power. This follows from Marx's conceptualizing wage-labor as a theoretical expression of the capital-labor relation within capitalist production whose historical origin resides in the separation of labor from the means of production. Hence, wage-labor represents abstract, general labor in the historical context of capitalist production. Marx's movement from the abstract to the concrete is not a movement closer and closer to an object's true nature. Rather, it entails the strategic privileging of a particular object (or group of objects) so as to then generalize to other objects. Hence, Marx's analysis of capitalist production, at one level, provides greater and greater detail with respect to the role of wage-labor, while at another level, it acts to obscure the larger category of labor (the working class as a combination of varied labor forms). Marx's concern is the means by which capital appropriates labor. For the purpose of illustrating the nature of capitallabor relations making this possible, Marx strategically privileges wage-labor as providing the most easily measured case. Marx could have chosen slave-labor within capitalist production to illustrate the same principle. This point may be demonstrated by contrasting the distinction between productive and nonproductive labor and the distinction between wage-labor and slave-labor (within capitalist production).20 The distinction between productive and nonproductive labor is a reference to a given labor form's relation to the process of production. For instance, it is argued that a factory worker provides "productive" labor (the transfer of value to a product), while an opera singer provides nonproductive labor. The distinction between a wage-laborer and a

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slave-laborer is a reference to the form by which their productive labor is expropriated. Wage-laborers exchange their labor-power for a wage. Slaves have their labor-power directly appropriated. Hence, the wage-laborer's expropriation lends itself more easily to quantitative measures and is chosen instead of slave-labor, by Marx, to illustrate his case. In fact, it was precisely in his discussion of the extension/intensification of the workday that Marx invoked the example of slavery to illustrate the logic of capitalist production to maximize surplus labor time within the labor process. As soon as people whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labor are drawn into the whirlwind of an international market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery. Hence Negro labor [in the United States] preserved something of a patriarchal character so long as production was chiefly directed to the immediate local consumption. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to those states, the overworking of the Negro, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus-labor itself (emphasis added) (Marx, 1961, p. 236)21 Marx's Formal Critique of Political Economy Two aspects of Marx's critique of political economy, in particular, form the basis for his notion of wage-labor and the working class. The first is Marx's discussion of the origin of surplus value within capitalist production. Marx began his analysis in Capital with an extended description of the dual nature of a commodity's value-form. Examining the process of exchange, he arrived at the origin of money, before searching both within and outside the circulation process to discover the source of surplus value. Marx then probed the supposed identity between the labor process and the valorization process—as posited by political economy—to uproot previous obfuscations. This method of exposition illuminated well Marx's strategic (though not necessary) privileging of wage-labor as a means to reveal the underlying nature of capital-labor relations. The second aspect concerns the architecture of the labor process, picking up where Ricardo had left off with respect to the introduction of machinery. This theme of Marx's work, while ostensibly serving to introduce a discussion of the relation between endless accumulation and increased pauperization, additionally provided one of the rare descriptions of the actual work process. Marx's chapter "On the Working Day" provides telling evidence of capital's capacity to combine heterogeneous forms of labor under a variety of circumstances. Indeed, it remains a curiosity that 130 years after one of the most detailed descriptions of a heterogeneous working class, labor historians continue their search for the pure (wage-labor) working class.

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Surplus Value and the Labor Process A dilemma within capitalist production revolves around the difficulty of deriving a surplus from within a circulation process that is governed by the exchange of equivalents. The basis for the exchange of two commodities of distinct use-value rests in the fact that they possess qualitatively distinct properties. Two commodities of distinct use-value and equal exchange-value, however, cannot realize a surplus in a simple exchange (C-C). Thus, surplus value cannot arise within circulation, nor can it arise completely apart from circulation. Our friend Moneybags, who as yet is only an embryo capitalist must buy his commodities at their value, sell them at their value and yet at the end of the process must withdraw more value from circulation than he threw into it. His development into a full grown capitalist must take place both within the sphere of circulation and without it. These are the conditions of the problem. Hie Rhodus, hie saltal (Marx, 1961, p. 166) The capitalist must find a commodity whose consumption creates more value than that constituted by the original commodity. Marx identifies labor-power—the (commodified) form in which capital expropriates labor within the processes of capitalist production—as this commodity. Wage-labor is not the sole possessor of labor-power. However, as wage-labor is that labor form most reliant on a pure money relation with capital, it was chosen by Marx to illustrate the nature of the capital-labor relationship.22 Wage-labor is a specific manifestation of the general capital-labor relation, allowing one to penetrate most precisely the nature of the relationship. Just because the labor-power of a slave is openly stolen, as opposed to being partially compensated, does not make the slave any less a participant in the reproduction of expanded labor-power within capitalist production. Within capitalist production, the fact that a given labor form does not rely on a wage does not change the fact that all laborers necessarily transfer to capital a commodified form of their laboring capacity, that is, labor-power. Consideration of the labor process makes clear that capitalist production does not give rise to a working class comprising a single labor form. At the same time, the advantages of focusing on wage-labor to bring out the details of these processes also becomes evident. The labor process, considered independently of any specific social arrangement (such as capitalist production), may be thought of simply as any planned, purposeful act, mediating humans and nature. The manner by which objects are produced (along with the instruments of labor) distinguishes one economic epoch from another. "It is not the articles made but how they are made and by what instruments of labor that enables us to distinguish different economical epochs. Instruments of labor not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labor has attained but they are also indicators of the social conditions under that labor which is carried on" (Marx, 1961, p. 180). The labor process constitutes the continuous interaction of living and objectified (dead) labor. Living labor takes the form of the labor-power of a

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worker. Objectified labor takes the form of instruments of production or the raw materials upon which living labor works. "Bathed in the fire of labor, appropriated as part and parcel of labor's organism, and, as it were, made alive for the performance of their functions in the process [in which] they are in truth consumed" (Marx, 1961, p. 183). As a specific process wherein capital consumes labor-power, the labor process has two basic characteristics: (1) the process is under the control (and the means of production are owned by) the capitalist, and (2) the product of the process belongs to the capitalist. Because this theoretical description of labor's alienation from the labor process is so central a feature of Marx's work, it naturally follows that the cash nexus has become the primary focus of those interpreting his work. In a situation of complete alienation, workers' only access to subsistence would, after all, be to sell their labor-power for a wage. The use of pure market forces to subjugate and discipline workers in this manner, however, is only one of many weapons available in the arsenal of capital, historically speaking. In the European setting of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, for instance, extramarket forces were of far more consequence than market forces in shaping 18th/19th-century working-class formation. In addition, the contemporary working class of Smith, Ricardo and Marx was certainly better understood as a heterogeneous mix of labor forms than as a teeming sea of wage-labor. Working Class Heterogeneity Marx's consideration of the working class itself makes clear that, with respect to "capital's direct means of valorization," labor is consumed in a variety of forms. In capturing this reality, Marx developed a theoretical analysis that is obsessively focused on wage-labor, while simultaneously presenting a vivid historical picture of a working class that is distinctly heterogeneous. Marx's most detailed description of the working class emerged during his consideration of the 19th-century British factory system and the impact of mechanization. In particular, Marx was interested in the tendency for mechanization to further alienate labor from the production process, the unique manner by which mechanization freed capital to draw from a variety of labor forms and the extent to which, as Ricardo had observed, mechanization directly contributed to the greater impoverishment of the working class. The subject-object relation between labor and machines was fairly transparent. Modern machinery was not made to accommodate a given division of labor. Rather, labor itself was made subordinate to the needs of machinery.23 Tools, previously specific to specialized workers, were transformed into specialized tools of machinery. "In manufacturing the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him" (Marx, 1961, p. 422). The basis of the division of labor was inverted to adapt to the machine. The subjectobject relation of worker to tool is reversed, as the notion of labor as general, abstract labor becomes increasingly self-evident.

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The workman becomes adapted to the process, [whereas] the process was previously made suitable to the workman. This subjective principle of the division of labor no longer exists in production by machinery. Here the process as a whole is examined objectively, in itself, that is to say, without regard to the question of its execution by human hands, it is analyzed into its constituent phases; and the problem, how to execute each detailed process, and bind them all into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etc. (Marx, 1961, p. 380) The machinery transfers value to the product as any other instrument of labor does. Its capacity to act as "an industrial form of perpetual motion" results in the prolongation of the working day (for the labor process if not always for individual workers), the recruitment of women and children24 and thus a declining wage-rate. Wages are permitted to fall per worker, given that several members of an adult male's family are working, and so it is no longer necessary for the adult male to receive a "family wage." This, of course, subverts Smith's conditions for wage equilibrium set forth earlier. Mechanization allows capital to expand its creation of surplus value by hitherto unthinkable sums. It does so primarily by setting in motion a far larger number of workers and by cheapening the subsistence commodities of labor. As Marx noted, "The accumulation of capital is therefore, [the multiplication] of the proletariat" (Marx, 1961, p. 614). This both reduces the value of individual labor-power and simultaneously decreases the cost of reproducing labor-power. Machinery produces relative surplus value not only by directly depreciating the value of labor-power and by indirectly cheapening the same through cheapening the commodities that enter its reproduction, but also, when it is first introduced sporadically into an industry, by converting the labor employed by the owner of that machinery into labor of a higher degree and greater efficiency by raising the social value of the article produced above its individual value, and thus enabling the capitalist to replace the value of a day's labor-power by a smaller portion of the value of the day's product. (Marx, 1961, p. 406) To paraphrase Marx's absolute law of capitalist accumulation, the greater the social wealth, the greater is the absolute mass of workers. The greater their productivity, the greater is the reserve army in proportion to the active army (i.e., the greater is the mass of surplus population).25 Marx portrays political economy's dilemma in characteristically ironic fashion. "Since, according to Smith, a society is not happy, of which the greater part suffers—yet even the wealthiest state of society leads to this suffering of the majority and since the economic system (and in general a society based on private interests) leads to this wealthiest condition, it follows that the goal of the economic system is the unhappiness of this system" (Marx, 1973a, p. 69).26 There are several effects of expanded capitalist production based on machinery. There evolves an increasingly transient, semiemployed population, as factories experience a general flux in the hiring and firing of workers, based on changing needs. [The] qualitative change in mechanical industry continually discharges hands from factories, or shuts its doors against the fresh stream of recruits, while the purely

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quantitative extension of the factories absorbs not only the men thrown out of work but also fresh contingents. The workpeople are thus continually repelled and attracted, hustled from pillar to post, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the levies. (Marx, 1961, p. 454) The employed workforce emerges as distinctly heterogeneous in form. This is most fully detailed by Marx in his chapter "On the Working Day." The paucity of attention given to Marx's chapter "On the Working Day" is remarkable. Here, placed in the center of an arduously long theoretical/philosophical treatise is an extended and detailed treatment of the specific labor conditions found in 19th-century English factories. In fact, what one discovers sandwiched within an arguably wage-labor-centric work is a discussion of children and women working beside "mature wage-labor" (as Marx termed adult male wage-labor). For all the precision with which Marx deployed the category of wage-labor within capitalist production and for all the talk of England's representing the "classic" case, when one enters the actual factory, one finds a stunning combination of "semiproletarian" forms. The initial Factory Acts all addressed child labor. The 1844 Factory Act "placed [women] in every respect on the same footing as young persons" (Marx, 1961, p. 282). The 19th-century English working-class family that emerges from these pages is utterly indistinguishable from a contemporary Russian serf household or Cuban slave household with respect to workload per family member as a necessary means to obtaining subsistence.27 In fact, considering the development of "company towns" and the practice of factories providing temporary barracks for children and young women, the distinctions between factory, manor and plantation melt even further. Let us consider one case from the chapter "On the Working Day"—the death of Mary Anne Walkley. In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published a paragraph with the 'sensational' heading 'Death from simple over-work.' It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley 20 years of age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking establishment exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16 1/2 hours, during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst her failing 'labor-power' was revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or coffee.28 It was just now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in the twinkling of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball in honor of the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for 26 1/2 hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them. At night they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand. The doctor, Mr. Keys, called too late to the deathbed, duly bore witness before the coroner's jury that 'Mary Anne Walkley had died from long hours of work in an overcrowded workroom, and a too small and badly-ventilated bedroom.' In order to give the doctor a lesson in good manners, the coroner's jury thereupon brought in a verdict that 'the deceased had died of

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apoplexy, but there was reason to fear that her death had been accelerated by over-work in an overcrowded workroom.' (Marx, 1961, pp. 254-255) Now consider Marx's technical analysis of such a situation. We have seen that the laborer, during one portion of the labor-process, produces only the value of his labor-power, that is, the value of his means of subsistence. Now since his work forms part of a system, based on the social division of labor, he does not directly produce the actual necessaries which he himself, consumes; he produces instead a particular commodity, yam, for example, whose value is equal to the value of those necessaries or of the money with which they can be bought. The portion of his day's labor devoted to this purpose, will be greater or less, in proportion to the value of the necessaries that he daily requires on an average, or what amounts to the same thing, in proportion to the labor-time required on an average to produce them. If the value of those necessaries represents on an average the expenditure of six hours' labor, the workman must on an average work for six hours to produce that value. If instead of working for the capitalist, he worked independently on his own account, he would, other things being equal, still be obliged to labor for the same number of hours, in order to produce the value of his labor-power, and thereby to gain the means of subsistence necessary for his conservation or continued reproduction. But as we have seen, during that portion of his day's labor in which he produces the value of his labor-power, say three shillings, he produced only an equivalent for the value of his labor-power already advanced by the capitalist; the new value created only replaces the variable capital advanced. It is owing to this fact, that the production of the new value of three shillings takes the semblance of a mere reproduction. That portion of the working day, then, during which this reproduction takes place I call 'necessary' labor time and the labor expended during that time I call 'necessary' labor. . . . During the second period of the labor process, that in which his labor is no longer necessary labor, the workman, it is true, labors, expends labor-power; but his labor, being no longer necessary labor, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the day, I name surplus labor-time, and to the labor expended during that time, I give the name surplus-labor." (Marx, 1961, pp. 216-217) Here one may observe Marx engaged in two projects simultaneously—one historical, one theoretical. The former presents a detailed picture of a heterogeneous working class. The latter provides a sterile depiction of labor's relation to capital. The former is the basis for a rich and varied history of the working class. The latter is the basis for a narrow and dry history of wage-labor. Of course, the account of Mary Anne Walkley's death was itself an abstraction. It is not known who this person was, what circumstances brought her to this work, what factors compelled her to stay, and so on. In other words, the identity of Mary Anne Walkley is narrowly restricted to that of a generic factory worker. For Marx, the case (abstract as it is) represented a concrete instance of a general principle of capitalist production (the need to extend the working day—at times beyond human capacity). Marx, then, isolating her case from among thousands, presented it in order to elicit the nature of necessary/surplus labor-time. Rather than having the concrete instance extend the notion of the working class, the labor form was narrowed so as to represent wage-labor in general. As a result, we know much more about capitalist production and much less about its

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capacity to employ a variety of labor forms. Marx's project, of course, was the study of political economy's representation of capitalist production, not the writing of working-class history. For those relying on Marx's work to write labor history, however, the lack of attention to this distinction has too often resulted in a distortion of that history. Just as the coroner turned Mary Anne Walkley's death from overwork into apoplexy, many who followed Marx have turned the heterogeneous labor process under capitalist production into the search for the immediately quantifiable source of surplus value (wage-labor). As Smith argued earlier, the expansion/intensification of capitalist production within and across societies entails not simply an expanded division of labor but new patterns of consumption and branches of production as well. "[It is the] development of a constantly expanding and more comprehensive system of different kinds of labor, different kinds of production, to which a constantly expanding and constantly enriched system of needs corresponds" (Marx, 1973b, p. 409). Thus, the condition emerging at the end of expanded capitalist production is distinguishable from the subsumption of labor that occurs at the beginning of capitalist production. Both then continue to occur simultaneously as capitalist production expands and intensifies. Thus, the period of classical political economy came to a close. Marx had both turned the categories of political economy on their head and simultaneously reified many of them in his formal representation of capitalist production. The working class emerged from Marx's pages singularly identified with wage-labor. The entire post-Marx project of labor history became the explanation of labor's inevitable transition from "precapitalist" (non-wage-labor) forms to a capitalist (wage-labor) form. An alternative interpretation of Marx's work, it is argued here, was available. This interpretation would have drawn from both Marx's methodological critique of political economy as well as his general critique of political economy's representation of capitalist production. Based on this alternative interpretation, the process of writing the history of the working class would be to (1) isolate those conditions specific to capitalist relations of production (private property, separation of labor from the means of production, production for exchange) making the category of "working class" possible; (2) select those labor forms (wage-labor, slave-labor, indentured labor) that fit within the category of the working class and (3) describe the historical evolution of one (or more) of these labor forms (slave-labor) both as a member of a general category (a provider of labor-power) as well as a specific object (19th-century, African slave-labor in Brazil). This alternative interpretation is further explored when turning to Brazilian abolition. At the close of the 19th century, however, the idyllic paradigm of a seamless transition to pure wage-labor predominated. It will be helpful, therefore, before turning to Brazilian abolition, to see how this paradigm tended to distort historical narratives and to further contribute to the modern obsession with wage-labor within labor history. Among the first global arenas to be the subject of such an analysis was Central and Eastern Europe during the transition from serf-labor to "free" labor at the end of the 19th century. The works of

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Kautsky and Lenin set the terms for much of the 20th-century interpretation of Marx on this point of development and for the study of the transition from "precapitalist" agrarian societies to capitalist industrial societies in general. For this reason, the next chapter begins with a tour of Central and Eastern Europe in the throes of 1848, its dismantling of serfdom and the early 20th-century "agrarian question" literature growing out of this historical epoch. NOTES 1. The occupational distribution of labor for select countries for the years 18251891 reveals this well. Britain for the years 1801, 1841 and 1891 had its percentage of workers in agriculture drop from 32%, to 22%, to 6%, respectively. At the same time, its percentage of workers in industry grew from 23%, to 34%, to 40%, respectively. Its percentage of workers in the service sector grew from 45%, to 44%, to 54%. French agricultural workers represented 50%, 42% and 35% for the years 1825, 1872 and 1908. Industrial workers for the same years represented 25%, 30% and 37%. Service workers represented 25%, 28% and 28%. In 1860, 32% of German workers were in agriculture, 24% in industry and 44% in services. By 1905 those in agriculture represented 18%, in industry 39% and in services 43% (Minchinton, 1973a, p. 156). 2. In 1800 there were 23 towns with populations of 100,000 or more. By 1850 there were 47 such towns. London alone grew from 960,000 to 2 million. Paris grew from 550,000 to 1 million (Droz, 1967, p. 21). 3. The limited emigration of British artisans until 1825 and a ban on the export of major textile inventions and machinery from Britain until 1842 helped safeguard Britain's advantage. 4. The cotton goods industry had grown from 1820 to 1850 by 1,100 million yards. From 1850 to 1860 it grew by 1,300 million yards (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 28). 5. In 1831 there were 332 kilometers of railroad and 32,000 tons of carrying-capacity on steamships throughout Europe. In 1851 railroad length had increased to 38,022 kilometers, and steamship carrying-capacity had increased to 263,679 tons. By 1876 railroads reached 309,641 kilometers, and steamship carrying-capacity reached 3.2 million tons (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 345). 6. By the 1840s one-half of Britain's annual increase in wealth was through foreign investment (Palmer, 1950, p. 572). 7. In 1860 between France/Britain, 1861 Belgium/France, 1862 France/Prussia, 1863/1865 Prussia/Belgium, 1865 Prussia/Britain, 1865 Prussia/Italy, 1866 Fmncdzollverein territories. These were all reversed in the 1870s return to protectionism: Italy 1878, Germany 1879, France 1881, Switzerland 1884, Belgium 1887, Austria/Hungary and Prussia late 1880s. 8. The Danube 1857, Rhine 1861, Scheldt 1863, Lower Elbe 1861, Upper Elbe 1863, Danish Sound 1857. 9. At the same time, Britain turned its energies to railroad building in Cuba, Egypt, India and North America in the 1850s. 10. The United States increased three times, Australia four times, Canada 2.5 times, Sweden two times, Italy and Denmark by one-half, Russia, Germany and Hungary by one-third and Britain by less than 5% (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 195). 11. Economic "emancipation," of course, lagged slightly behind the legal "emancipation" of serfs. "The 1850s was the decade which saw the passing of one spectacular reform: the legal emancipation of the peasantry throughout central and eastern Europe. Without strong central authority this reform could scarcely have been

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pushed through effectively, but it should be noted that the economic emancipation of the peasantry was very much more gradual" (Grenville, 1976, p. 151). 12. France's population grew from 35.8 million to 36 million. Britain's population grew from 20.8 million to 26.1 million. Russia's population grew from 68.5 million to 84.5 million. Germany's population grew from 34 million to 40.8 million. Austria-Hungary's population grew from 32 million to 37 million. Italy's population grew from 24 million to 26 million. Ireland's population, meanwhile, declined from 6.6 million to 5.4 million (Grenville, 1976, p. 14). 13. France's labor force grew from 13 million to 20.7 million from 1800 to 1910, Italy's from 8.7 to 11.4 million, Belgium's from 1.45 to 3.23 million (Armenguad, 1973a, p. 73). 14. Germany provided an important exception to this in the 1850s when railroad development accompanying rural emigration allowed smallholding agricultural producers to migrate further distances (Moraze, 1968, p. 316). 15. At the same time the productivity of agriculture improved overall, such that fewer agricultural workers produced a larger agricultural yield. In 1840, 50,400,000 persons were employed to produce 1.5 billion British pounds worth of agricultural goods (or a ratio of 1:7.78). By 1887, 66,320,000 produced £2.8 billion worth (or a ratio of 1:1.89) (Hobsbawm, 1975, p. 347). 16. The list of wars/attacks include the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the Taiping Rebellion, the Kaffir Wars, the Maori Wars, along with the French in Algeria and Indochina and the Dutch in Indonesia. 17. John Stuart Mill provided one of the rare explicit treatments of methodology from the perspective of classical political economy in his essay "On the Definition of Political Economy: and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It," in Unsettled Questions. This essay was Mill's concerted effort to legitimate political economy, as a "moral science," vis-a-vis the physical sciences, by means of demonstrating the potential for appropriating the latter's positivist methods of inquiry for the purpose of investigating the former. Knowing therefore accurately the properties of the substances concerned, we may reason with as much certainty as in the most demonstrative parts of physics for any assumed set of circumstances. If the assumption is correct as far as it goes, and differs from the truth no otherwise than as a part differs from the whole, than the conclusions which are correctly deduced from the assumption constitute abstract truth; and when completed by adding or subtracting the effect of the non-calculated circumstances, they are true in the concrete, and may be applied to practice. (Mill, 1948, p. 149)

18. "The aim [of political economy] is to present production as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in abstract is founded" (Marx, 1973b, p. 87). 19. In this manner, Marx argues that "slavery is just as much a pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery" (Marx, 1982, p. 111). 20. Marx consistently distinguishes between "Negro slavery—a purely industrial slavery—[that] presupposes wage-labor" and previous slave societies (Marx, 1973b, p. 224). 21. The fact that Marx here assumes slave-labor to be an external condition that capitalist production encounters and subsumes rather than evolving from within capitalist production itself, along with his rather pained notion of "patriarchal slavery," does not diminish the basic insight here.

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22. Marx, in fact, frequently remarked on the more transparent nature of labor-power in non-wage-labor forms. "In slave labor, even that part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which, therefore, he works for himself alone, appears as labor for his master. All the slave's labor appears as unpaid labor. In wage-labor, on the contrary, even surplus labor or unpaid labor appears as paid" (Marx, 1961, pp. 539-540). 23. Marx makes a significant distinction related to this point between manufacturing's "subsumption of the labor process as it finds it" (formal subsumption) and large-scale industry's "revolutionizing" the labor process (real subsumption). "This change [the advent of manufacturing] does not in itself imply a fundamental modification in the real nature of the labor process. On the contrary, the fact is that capital subsumes the labor process as it finds it. This stands in striking contrast to the development of a specifically capitalist mode of production (large-scale industry). The latter not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionizes their actual mode of labor and the real nature of the labor process as a whole" (Marx, 1977, p. 1021). 24. "Insofar as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing laborers of slight muscular strength and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labor of women and children was therefore the first sought for by capitalists who used machines" (Marx, 1961, p. 394). This is a somewhat disingenuous claim of Marx's given the central role of such labor in the production of raw materials preceding—though even more greatly hastened by—the use of machinery. 25. The productivity of labor becomes the basis for its diminished value. The generation of wealth becomes the basis for poverty. Marx spares few metaphors in depicting the lot of the workers. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labor-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. . . . The law that always equilibrates relative surplus population to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutality, and mental degradation at the opposite pole. (Marx, 1961, pp. 644, 645)

26. "What was originally a necessary evil to overcome the backwardness of feudal relations—poverty—becomes a fixture of political economy as an apologia for modem industrial society. Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo have no other mission than that of showing how wealth is acquired in bourgeois production relations, of formulating these relations into categories, into laws, and of showing how superior these laws, these categories, are for the production of feudal society. Poverty is in their eyes merely the pang which accompanies every childbirth, in nature as in history." (Marx, 1982, p. 124) 27. Marx, in fact, ironically notes, "The same 'reformed' Parliament, which in its delicate consideration for the manufacturers condemned children under 13 to 72 hours of work per week in the Factory Hell, on the other hand, in the Emancipation Act, which also administered freedom drop by drop, forbade the planters to work any Negro slave more than 45 hours a week" (Marx, 1961, p. 280). 28. Notice the care with which Marx purges from his descriptions much of the theoretical terminology used elsewhere. Here, for example, Marx—quite purposely— qualifies the term "labor-power" through the use of quotation marks. Such a careful use

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of language makes emphatically clear that such categories, as Marx understood them, were theoretical constructs, not historical categories to be found throughout actually existing capitalist production.

Chapter 3

The Abolition of Servile Labor East and West The abolition of slavery in the Americas and the dissolution of the European manorial economy were central, overlapping moments in the global formation of a modern industrial working class. The significance of enormous populations of servile labor in both the Americas and Europe being uprooted and reorganized at precisely the same hour is difficult to overstate. During a relatively brief stretch of world historical time, the abolition of servile labor conditions was a common project across a broad number of peripheral societies. The slave and serf were forms of coerced labor that neither sprang from similar roots nor fulfilled comparable historical roles. Only at the moment of one another's ending did their historical paths merge. The timing, manner and outcome of their respective abolitions represent a defining moment for contemporary labor in the Americas and in Central and Eastern Europe—and across the globe. Comparing the role of extramarket forces in shaping these abolitions and the capitalist structures, as well as the heterogeneous labor forms that emerged from these global processes highlights well the limitations of historical explanations that narrowly focus on market forces and wage-labor. THE ABOLITION OF SERF-LABOR By the close of the 19th century, Europe's long-standing, rural social order had been thoroughly uprooted and transformed.1 The prevailing social relations, based in a structure of privileged estates, were rapidly being superseded by agrarian capitalist structures. Many have argued that Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century provides historians and social scientists with a period populated by a horde of hybrid creatures—the famed peasant-workers. The "peasant-worker" was a social category defying complete

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subjugation to either pure wage-laborer or pure "peasant."2 The analytical creation of such hybrid categories is a reflection of the persistent effort to maintain the ideological fiction of an immaculate transition to pure wage-labor—the legacy of Smith, Ricardo and Marx. The postabolition period itself is portrayed as a multilayered, continent-wide transition: from the seasonal rhythms of subsistence agriculture, to factory regimentation; from sharecropping, to wage-labor; from subservience to a landlord, to subservience to industrial capital—most generically—a movement from feudal to capitalist society. The basis for the "agrarian question," in this sense, is teleological conformity. It was an effort to grapple with the complexities of a specific historical epoch as constituting a "transition to," or "emancipation from," a future or previous era. The overriding logic uniting depictions of this period is that there are basic elements that, when distilled from the verity of cases, provide the historian with an outline of a (general or specific) process of capitalist development. These "basic elements" are the labor process (the emergence of wage-labor as the predominant labor form) and the alienation of land and property (the concentration of wealth, most particularly in the form of land).3 Whereas the reconfiguration of Europe's dominant social institutions (e.g., the family, the manor, the workplace) represents essential outcomes of this overall process, changes in the labor process and the alienation of property are often cited as the principal agents of social change and the actual measures of capitalist development. They mark, as it were, the "proletarianization" of labor and the "rationalization" of capital. It is thus most commonly premised that the 19th-century dissolution of the European, rural, social order brought about (1) a qualitative change in the labor process and (2) a radical restructuring of capital (and thus a significant restructuring of the social relations of production as a whole). Akin to classical political economy, histories of this period for the most part—in the Kautsky, Lenin, Chayanov tradition—are postfacto studies, taking as their starting point a finished product. In other words, their efforts go toward presenting history as a means of explaining an existing social order (20th-century capitalist relations of production). The elements of history they choose and how they deploy them are toward this specific end. Ironically, this was the essence of Marx's critique of political economy and the use of fetishized, ahistorical categories. In fact, what one found across Central and Eastern Europe following the abolition of serfdom was the emergence of a heterogeneous, agrarian working class notable for its varied combination of labor forms. Extramarket forces, not market forces, continued to be the primary factor shaping working-class formation, as pure wage-labor remained a distinct minority. While the cash nexus was, indeed, introduced into the peasant's world, the landlord's continued monopoly of land and the means of production along with their control of the state assured the landlord class that the emerging social order would be very much under their command.

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The Context of Abolition The rural social orders across Europe, of course, varied in their degrees of freedom and subservience. While not always holding strictly to the east of Elbe (grunherrshaft)!'west of Elbe (gutsherrshaft) paradigm, generally speaking, it was true that as one moved eastward—from the high number of mainmorte smallholders in France, to the Russian landlords whose wealth was measured by the number of "souls" in their possession—one encountered increasingly harsh conditions. "The degree of subservience, the extent of dependence, and the weight of obligations formed a spectrum from relatively light restrictions and impositions in western and parts of central Europe, to oppressive and time-consuming services demanded in eastern Europe" (Blum, 1978, p. 3). Such subservience was generally combined with respect for traditional rights tied to a surviving moral economy. Hence, the Russian expression "my vashi, a semlia nasha " (we are yours, but the land is ours) was applicable to a greater or lesser extent across all of Central and Eastern Europe. The structures of serfdom per se had eroded significantly in Western Europe by the close of the 18th century. Much of the East's draconian rule had been tempered in the West. Nonetheless, it was still the case that the life of smallholding agricultural producers continued to be framed by their relations to the seigniorial class.4 In the East, serfdom remained the dominant social institution. Again, there were gradations within Central and Eastern Europe with regard to the harshness of living conditions. Representing the extreme were examples of the sale of serfs without land—such as in Russia, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Silesia throughout the 17th/18th centuries. In any event, in all cases—East and West—smallholding agricultural producers obtained access to land (and had their social existence defined) solely by means of entering into relation with the nobility. Access to land carried with it a battery of obligations to the formal landowner, including labor services, quitrents, fees, duties and tithes. In addition, taxation of smallholding agricultural producers was the primary source of income for the state. Though the nature of the obligations and degree of freedom within such arrangements varied considerably, a general framework can be sketched. The basic distinction between landlords in the West and East was the former's greater direct involvement with agriculture. Having greatly reduced their dependence on income from their demesne, landlords in the West moved to commute the labor services of the smallholding agricultural producers occupying their land. Money payments and nonagricultural tasks (such as construction, repair, relaying messages) replaced labor services. Even in the East, labor services were frequently commuted to a quitrent. Thirty percent of Polish smallholding agricultural producers in 1790 paid a quitrent, as did 30% of the Russian smallholding agricultural producers by 1850 (Blum, 1978, p. 51). It was often from this group of smallholding agricultural producers paying quitrents that artisans, peddlers and factory workers first emerged, paying a portion of their income to their seignior.

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Beyond the obligation of labor services, the smallholding agricultural producers often owed the lords fees and duties (or tithes). Holding land dominium util required a yearly fee. The transfer of landholdings required a fee. Beyond labor obligations, quitrents, fees and tithes, smallholding agricultural producers were increasingly indebted to the state. Taxes and levies were the chief forms of fiscal income for the state. Labor services (road and bridge construction and maintenance) were required as well. An ever-increasing burden of obligations reached its peak in the last century of the old order. As matters worsened, the burden on smallholding agricultural producers forced many into dependent relations of debt peonage. Given the growing need for cash and cash-crop production, alongside an obsolete social order designed for subsistence and local-market production, the growing squeeze on smallholding agricultural producers was inevitable. Quoting an official report to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in 1809, Blum notes that "when all the payments demanded of the Pomeranian peasant were added up he turned out to be nothing more than a servant whose master allowed him a paltry allowance" (Blum, 1978, p. 79). The actual abolitions of serfdom took place in an era of broad social reforms across Central and Eastern Europe when law, fiscal and tax policies, the military and legislative governments were all undergoing renovation. Countries often appointed committees to oversee the "freeing" of serfs. At other times estates took the lead or rulers dictated change by edict. Thus, the actual abolition of serfdom occurred at different times and took different forms across Europe, from Charles Emmanuel's freeing of serfs in Savoy with light indemnification in 1762, to Russia's abolition of serfdom with a two-to-nine-year indemnification period in 1862. Many sovereigns offered large-scale reforms on their own demesne as inducement for landowners to follow their example. Others ordered the freeing of serfs by decree. The panorama of early attempts at reform by the so-called enlightened despots—though, for the most part, reversed in part or in whole—often acted as "precursors" to later change. These attempts at change, though they accomplished little, had much significance because they were the precursors of the acts that finally freed the peasants. They were imposed from above the will of authoritarian rulers, who thereby let their societies know that the existing social relations between lord and peasant were unacceptable to them. Their insistence upon change began, and, indeed, nearly everywhere was the principal moving force, in the process that led to emancipation. (Blum, 1978, p. 240) The post-Enlightenment critique of the old, rural order focused its attack on hierarchical structures, entrenched social inequality and the legal bondage of smallholding agricultural producers. Generally speaking, the moral condition of the smallholding agricultural producer was not criticized. Rather, criticism of servile labor obligations centered on its inefficiency and obstruction of innovation. Reforms sought to free smallholding agricultural producers from the onerous burden of obligatory labor without disrupting the seigniors' dominance over them. Indeed, the commutation of labor services did not alter the basic structure of the relation of the two, but merely shifted its obligation. "Since they

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were not shorn of their stake in the landed property, agriculture, and processing of primary products that dominated economic life down to 1914, the nobles retained their wealth and status" (Mayer, 1981, p. 8). The manner by which abolitions developed guaranteed that extramarket forces would take precedence over market forces in determining a former serfs options. Abolition legislation regarding the smallholding agricultural producers addressed a variety of personal and economic freedoms. Personal freedoms were frequently withheld for some smallholding agricultural producers while granted to others within the same jurisdiction. Importantly, the right to move was often not included.5 Economic freedom generally addressed the right to own land, trade in grain and appropriate livestock. Again, some social groups, such as farm servants, were excluded from such personal and economic freedom. Those freedoms that were granted often involved a lapse between the initial announcement of legislation and its actual implementation. "Once the enthusiasm that had accompanied the initial decrees of emancipation had waned, there was a lag in the continuation of the process of liberation from servility, and of the redemption of servile obligations and of land" (Blum, 1978, p. 386). Prussia provides an example of such a lag. Though the decree of October 9, 1807, was held to grant serfs their freedom, smallholding agricultural producers remained subject to seigniorial dues and services. Seigniorial privileges and monopolies persisted. Indeed, "most Prussian peasants continued in their servile status, albeit no longer serfs, until 1850" (Blum, 1978, p. 387). As new social relations came to be established, there was a consistent pattern of incorporating and reifying hierarchies within the new arrangements. The expropriated peasantry was reattached to the land in such a way that it gave particular tenacity to relations of domination and subordination on the estates. This development was itself related to the fact that capital had, in Eastern Europe, "taken over" a productive process in which the social relations specific to serfdom were well entrenched and had not undergone a lengthy process of disintegration involving the long-standing de facto liberation of the dependent population, as in the West. (Winson, 1982, p. 399) The most prescient issue shaping abolition was indemnification. For purposes of assigning indemnification levels, a distinction was drawn between payment for obligations related to access to land and payment for obligations related to the servile relation of the smallholding agricultural producer to the lord. Indemnity was generally granted for the former and not the latter—though given the origin of servility in one's lack of access to land, the distinction seems tenuous. The former included the loss of dues and services the smallholding agricultural producer had given the lord in exchange for access to land. An annual cash value was determined for these and paid by those smallholding agricultural producers receiving land. The government usually advanced the seignior a capital sum of the indemnification value, with government bonds of 4-6% to be repaid by the smallholding agricultural producers. Credit institutions throughout Central and Eastern Europe were created during this period for the purpose of organizing such loans.6 This provides a good example of how the

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cash nexus could be introduced while extramarket forces (a land monopoly) still predominated. Abolition itself was a fairly drawn-out process. Despite the protestations of Austria Field Marshall Prince Alfred Windischgratz in 1850 that "the most outstanding of Communists has not yet dared to demand that which your majesty's government has carried through," the nobility continued to provide the state with formidable obstacles to overcome (Blum, 1978, p. 402). As much upset over the arbitrary rule of the crown as by their economic loss, the nobility (especially in Prussia and Russia) were able to slow the process by wording abolition legislation so as to restrict redemption options and continue their monopolies. Referencing East German states, Winson comments: The transition to the modern estate economy of the 19th century was initiated by the Agrarian Reforms. This event involved the commutation of the labor services of the peasantry and the establishment of bourgeois propertyrightsover the land. These reforms took place, nonetheless, within a context in which the landlords were not only the absolute masters in their own house, but were by then the only real force in the political institutions of the East German states. Consequently, they had the influence, which they used very effectively, to ensure their own interests prevailed in the reform process which gave impetus to the enclosures of peasant lands, and the reorganization of agriculture along the lines of a modern estate economy. (Winson, 1982, p. 386) The lack of seigniorial cooperation aside, the sheer scale of abolition presented a daunting challenge. In the German-Slav provinces of the Austrian monarchy, 54,267 landowners stood to be indemnified by 2,625,512 smallholder households owing 38,587,940 days of labor services7 (Blum, 1978, p. 404). Beyond seigniorial stubbornness and the scale of the abolition project itself, however, the smallholding agricultural producers also presented problems. Initially, the redemption of servitude was voluntary. Smallholding agricultural producers had to initiate it themselves. The smallholding agricultural producers, however, were often hesitant to do so, preferring to pay rent in-kind or labor rather than cash. The seigniors themselves eventually objected to this arrangement and moved to make redemption compulsory. "[After abolition] landowners demanded that the peasants pay their rent in labor, or part labor, part cash. The peasants performed their labor rents with the same reluctance and inefficiency that had marked their labor services when they were unfree. As time went on the proprietors commuted the labor rent into cash" (Blum, 1978, p. 407). Abolition, after all, had much to offer the seigniors.8 It liberated seigniors from their traditional obligations to smallholding agricultural producers, created a large pool of ready labor and eliminated restrictions to their absorbing smallholding agricultural producers' holdings into their demesne. Commenting on the dual advantages afforded the seigniors and the simultaneous disadvantages befalling the former serfs in the Rumanian case, Mitrany notes: The agrarian system fell into a peculiar compound of serfdom and capitalism; from it landlords and their tenants secured all the advantages of both, while the peasants were

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saddled with all the burdens of both. From serfdom the landlords had all the facilities of servile labor without any of the feudal obligations towards it; while from capitalism they had the freedom to bargain with labor without the restraint of a free labor market. The peasants, however, were subjected to servile labor without its counterpart in land rights; and from capitalism they had all the trials of wage earners without being really able to trade their labors where they willed. (Mitrany, quoted in Berend and Ranki, 1974, p. 43) The abolition of serfdom without emancipation meant that the larger significance of abolition lay in its eradication of society's hierarchical arrangement of estates and structures of hereditary privilege. It was the close of one social order and the constitution of another based on a new and evolving set of social institutions. The result was the reorganization of the dominant, rural, social relations of production linked to the concentration of landownership and the splintering of smaller landholdings.9 Agrarian-based production remained the leading sector of the economy, land the principal form of wealth and the nobility the largest landholders.10 The nobility, while having been reduced to "mere landowners," continued their dominance by means of commandeering the reins of government. Furthermore, by the close of the 19th century much of the nobility had undergone a significant "bourgeoisification," taking up roles in commerce and industry.11 Abolition, along with a general European demographic expansion, occurred in tandem with an increase in plowland and an increase in the number of smallholdings.12 Prussia doubled its plowland from 1804 to 1864. Romania's grew by 120% (Lebovics, 1967, p. 35). As plowland increased, so did its further splintering into smaller and smaller holdings. Indeed, after 1840, as plowland increased, Europe's harvest worker/corn area ratio deteriorated significantly. Smallholding agricultural producers either bought land from the nobility outright or rented it. The number of smallholdings rose dramatically as a proportion of all holdings, even as the total acreage held by individuals was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands.L "The increased polarization of land ownership, especially the transfer of 11 % of the landed property of the country into the latifundia class (leaving this group—a mere 321 holders—in possession of 1/5 of the country), is certainly not an insignificant development" (Eddie, 1967, p. 309). Eddie's data on landownership provide ample evidence of such concentration across Central and Eastern Europe and the mounting pressures placed upon the smallholder.14 In 1895, 76.5% of German landholders owned holdings of less than 5 hectares, representing 15.1% of all land. One percent of landholders owned holdings of more than 500 hectares, representing 10.3% of all land. By comparison, in 1895, 51.5% of English landholders owned holdings of less than 5 hectares, representing 6.2% of all land. One-tenth of 1% of landholders owned holdings of more than 500 hectares, representing a mere 2.5% of all land (Eddie, 1967, p. 302).15 Ranki describes the condition of farmhands in Hungary in 1900 as comparable to that of serfs. "The 1900 census gave the figure of 504,000 farm hands living on the large estates, often in conditions that were no better than those of serfs in the heyday of feudalism; in addition, there were 1.3 million itinerant laborers dependent on seasonal labor on the large estates" (Ranki,

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1964, pp. 205-06).16 "While the great landowners may be able to depress the wages of the proletarian laborers to the minimum of living costs, the small-holders who are regularly forced to work on the latifundia can be paid even less—utilizing the 'iron law of wages'—because they are able to augment the earned income from the products of their dwarf holdings" (Szabo, 1978, p. 33).17 The two most telling themes throughout this period of abolition were, therefore, the predominance of extramarket forces and the ongoing separation of the peasantry from the land and the means of production. The landlords were able to effectively use their monopoly in land to control the former serfs' access to land. At the same time, they were able to use their control over the state to limit the former serfs' movement from the land. The former serfs were forced to continue working the land for their new capitalist landlords under conditions dictated not by any market forces but by the landlord class itself. The form of labor now appropriated by landlords in the postserfdom era varied. The case of postabolition Germany provides important insight into these themes. Abolition in Germany The German (and Russian) histories remain the most thoroughly examined with regard to the development of postabolition labor forms. In Germany, the so-called Insten system first replaced compulsory labor services as a "transitional" labor form. East Elbian estate owners continued to organize production as if producing for local markets following abolition, preserving as much of the former social order for as long as they could. The rural laborer remained a smallholding agricultural producer who was furnished with land in exchange for subordination to a landlord. Wages only slowly came to replace land as a form of compensation. "[The] estate economy remained a form of communal economy, patriarchially ruled and directed" (Weber, 1979, p. 179). More than a simple employer, the landlord was a "political autocrat." In this manner, "material and resilient bonds" continued to separate the rural worker and the commercial proletariat. The basis for social cohesion within the estate economy lay in the combination of a landlord class motivated by circumstances outside immediate market production and an "apathetic" laboring class. "The rural laborer was not generally exploited on a purely economic level: he found himself confronted not with an employer but with a small-scale territorial lord. The low level of commercial ambition among the estate owners was reinforced by the apathetic resignation of the laborer, and together these formed the psychological supports of the traditional form of enterprise and of the political rule of the landed aristocracy" (Weber, 1979, p. 180). Under the Insten system, the need for permanent fieldworkers was fulfilled by the instleute—a laborer replacing the serf who made payments, as shares of produce, in exchange for small plots on a Junker's estate. At the same time, temporary (seasonal) labor continued to be provided by migrants. In addition, the instleute was expected to provide two workers beyond himself—a wife and a hofganger (a hired hand). Money wages were unimportant in the Insten system.

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The entire cost of reproduction was borne by the family. This limited the formation of an internal market and the development of market-dependent consumers. More specific to Eastern Germany was the real limitation the structure of agriculture placed on the development of a market for consumption goods industries. Not only did the relations of the Inst type ensure that most of the consumption needs of an important section of the rural population would be produced on the estate, but the organization of permanent estate labor along these lines apparently exerted a strong downward pressure on off-farm wages also thereby limiting purchasing power to a minimum. (Winson, 1982, p. 397) The instleute was both an agrarian producer and an employer of labor.18 "The [Insten System] was, effectively a form of quasi-serfdom, with the worker being obligated to perform labor services on account of holding certain lands on his employer's estate: and often being effectively tied to the land by indebtedness to his employer" (Perkins, 1984, p. 9). At the same time, Weber argues that a commonality of economic interest between landlord and worker developed within the Insten system based on that fact that both derived incomes from a share of the same produce. "[There is a] dual nature of these laborers who both were supplied with and shared in the produce of the estate, part small cultivators, part shareholder in the lord's economy. It is characteristic of this relation that the complete subordination to the will of the landlord is combined with a common interest" (Weber, 1979, p. 187). By the 1870s, the instleute was replaced by the deputant (a confined laborer).19 Remuneration in the form of a set bundle of goods replaced a share of produce from the landlord's estate. Often contractual agreements were worked out whereby the income of the deputant was based on the produce of one's own land plus a bundle of goods from the landlord.20 "In other words, the transition from cottager to confined laborer involved a substantial reduction in the proportion of the worker's income that he obtained indirectly from the cultivation of the land under his control and, in its place, a primary dependence upon the bundle of commodities that was furnished by his employer" (Perkins, 1984, p. 12). The "bundle of goods" itself took many forms. Goods could either be fully processed (e.g., bread, salt or linen) or be in raw material form (e.g., unmilled grain). The form determined the extent to which the landlord stood in relation to the laborer's household as a household of consumers or as a household of producers. "The laborer's family becomes indispensable for the reproduction of the labor force, and the family community becomes in this way useful to the landlord not only as an association of consumers, but also as an association of producers" (Weber, 1979, p. 185). Those landlords providing primarily raw materials were in an enviable position since all they needed to provide were materials in unprocessed form, and "the production and processing of a satisfactory level of food and other goods are left to the laborer" (Weber, 1979, p. 186).

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Additionally, under the deputant system the landlord had a greater capacity to control the consumption of the smallholding agricultural producers. 21 Weber argues that in this regard the money-wage came to represent—in the minds of workers—their "personal emancipation." 22 Just as money rent appeared to the medieval peasant as the most important sign of his personal freedom, so does the money wage appear to today's worker. The rural workforce forsakes positions that are often more favorable, always more secure, in search for personal emancipation. This decisive psychological factor is quite unconscious, but all the more effective for it. This labor force, whose ambitions to climb into the position of the employer are normally as feeble as those of the industrial workers, conceives this transformation as the stage preparatory to class struggle. (Weber, 1979, p. 191) Before generalizing too broadly from the German situation to others, Perkins provides a useful caveat with his emphasis on the strong reliance on migrant labor in Germany. One-third of Germany's labor force was migrants. 23 This, Perkins argues, allowed for the more gradual "proletarianization" of the indigenous population. The extent to which German agriculture became dependent upon foreign migratory workers, who accounted for almost a third of all agricultural workers by the eve of the First World War, represents the really distinctive feature of the German transition from feudalism to capitalism in the countryside. It was the factor that permitted the proletarianization of the indigenous agricultural working class as a delayed and gradual phenomenon during the 19th century. (Perkins, 1984, p. 24) As is detailed later, while the Insten and Deputant systems have certain parallels with European migration experiences in the coffee region of Brazil, the Russian abolition experience offers interesting parallels with postabolition labor more generally in the Americas. Following abolition, there was a two-year period of obligation during which the old system remained until new rules of social governance could be designed. At the same time, there was a nine-year obligation for serfs to remain on plots (often reduced in size) and to continue providing the landlord labor obligations (obrok and barshchina). Even over time it was very difficult to leave the community due to the fact that the responsibility for taxes and labor obligations fell on the community as a whole. The story of the peasants' plight after emancipation needs no lengthy recounting. The peasants were freed with allotments that were in size and quality, insufficient for subsistence, or at least insufficient under existing agricultural practices to support them and allow them to cover redemption payments and general taxes. Agricultural improvements were made difficult, if not impossible, for most peasants because they remained tied to the communes and thus to the traditional communal practices. The results of this situation in the decades following 1861 were that many peasants defaulted on payments, and developed a compulsive land hunger that was accelerated by a booming population growth. (Emmons, 1969, pp. 69-70)

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The abolition of serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe therefore opened a new era of freedom (serfs were free to sell their labor, and landlords were free to acquire more land), equality (money relations dissolved traditional relations of privilege) and liberty (the condition of servile bondage was replaced by the condition of contractual obligation). Attempts to represent this postabolition period have generally resulted in efforts to outline a "transitional" historical stage between "precapitalist" and "capitalist" society. The postabolition serf, treated as a peculiar social outcast (theoretically), had to be characterized as moving toward (in the process of realizing) full proletarianization (wage-labor). In fact, the abolition of serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe represented nothing more than the replacement of one apparatus of coercion for another— the subjugation of labor based on traditional rights was replaced by subjugation of labor based on a monopoly of land and the means of production. The dependence of smallholding agricultural producers on the landlord class for access to land continued, while the weight of their "obligations" increased. The only qualitative change of this period was the relation of the nobles to the state—which the nobles quickly took over. Hence, the institution of serfdom was indeed abolished. Far from being emancipated, however, serfs remained in servile bondage—now directly to capital. In this sense, the abolition of serfdom may be spoken of as emancipatory only with respect to capital. The abolition of serfdom was in no sense a "transition" from obligation-based serf-labor to free wage-labor. Thus, just as it had failed to do in the time of Smith, Ricardo and Marx, the wage-labor form did not emerge as the historically dominant labor form in postabolition Central and Eastern Europe. Rather, as Polanyi has detailed elsewhere, in Europe, with the growth of a market economy there emerged a battery of extramarket structures and institutions that were created for the purpose of controlling market-based activities—in particular, this entailed imposing and administering new regimes of labor coercion. Social history in the 19th century was the result of a double movement: The extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. While on the one hand markets spread all over the face of the globe and the amount of goods involved grew to unbelievable proportions, on the other hand a network of measures and policies was integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money. (Polanyi, 1957, p. 76) THE ABOLITION OF SLAVE-LABOR Across the Atlantic, a system of servile labor that was similar in drudgery, yet distinct in form, was likewise undergoing transformation. While there is a strong temptation to find similarities between the two systems of servile labor, it is essential to recognize that slavery and serfdom arose from separate histories and distinct rationales. Sixteenth-century plantation slavery in the Americas was the world's first consciously planned, systematically organized effort to construct—from nothing—an environment conducive to a sustained process of

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global commodity production. With land stolen from Native Americans and labor kidnapped from Africa, European capital organized large-scale, export-commodity production across the Americas. Modern slave societies in the Americas exhibited four basic features all of which were distinct from serfdom: (1) the production of commodities for the world market, (2) the development of a disposable means of production, (3) the procurement of labor itself (the slave trade) as a profitable enterprise and (4) the racial categorization of a labor form (slavery). 1. Production processes were not randomly stitched together with haphazard or unclear ends in mind. Rather, slave societies were purposely designed for the production of commodities for exchange on the world (i.e., European-organized) market. Hence, the singular purpose in embarking on slave-based production in the Americas was the production of commodities (for the European market). Essential to an understanding of the historic import of slavery in the Americas is an appreciation for the central role of the slave-based economies in the process of "original accumulation" in Europe. African labor on Native American land arguably played as great a role as European labor in the core—and an even greater role than serf labor in Central and Eastern Europe—at this time in this regard.24 The "goal of colonization," in Caio Prado's classic phrase was to realize a surplus, or a profit in the last instance, which would be protected by the monopoly inherent in the Colonial Pact and would be transformed into an accumulation fund to fuel capitalist expansion in the metropolitan centers: "It was not enough to produce the products for which there was a growing demand on European markets; it was indispensable to produce them in such a way that commercialization would stimulate the original accumulation in the European economies." (Prado, quoted in Kowarick, 1987, pp. 10-11) 2. One of the more remarkable accomplishments of the new slave societies in the Americas was the development, for the first time in modern history, of a completely disposable means of production (with respect to both labor and the environment). Slavery was organized as an economic system capable of (1) constantly replacing its labor source and (2) constantly moving to new lands. The design of slave societies was predicated on having no need to reproduce a labor force. Instead, slave societies relied on the constant introduction of new slaves. Likewise, the care of land was of little concern so long as one could continuously move to the next acre. This contrasted with serfdom, which, while barbaric enough, drew upon an important legitimating sentiment from its protection of a basic moral economy. Plantation slavery represented a unique form of slash-and-burn capitalist production designed to promote accumulation in the capital-investing core countries, by means of a constantly migrating frontier of production. Until its death throes, slave-based production was constantly moving to new lands, be it from Barbados to Jamaica, St. Domingue to Cuba or Pernambuco to Minas Gerais. Here, centuries before Europe's first large-scale textile factories, were the iron-clad labor regime and total mastery of the environment so assiduously sought after by all aspiring capitalist classes—as celebrated in the works of

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Babbage and Ure. The continual flow of newly arriving labor, newly conquered land and newly invested capital created and re-created similar environments of work across (American) space and (European) time. An important consequence of this "disposability" was that the economic and social development of slave societies remained—like their Central and Eastern European counterparts—relatively stagnant vis-a-vis technological innovation or the emergence of market economies (let alone any sort of dynamic public sphere). With rare, but important, exception (such as Minas Gerais), few regions—established on the basis of slave plantation export commodity production—developed significant internal, national markets, integrating production processes nationally (or regionally) prior to their "independence" from the "Old World." 3. Related to this last point, slave societies in the Americas had also made the process of procuring coerced labor a profitable enterprise. What had traditionally been treated as a cost to the state—the recruiting and disciplining of labor—suddenly became the province of large mercantilist trading companies established for the very purpose of kidnapping and selling human beings at a profit. The Portuguese, French, Dutch, British, Danes, Swedes, Spaniards and Brandenburgs all played direct roles in the modern slave trade.25 Profit from the slave trade (the buying, selling and financing of which was carried out in Liverpool and Nantes) provided a significant motivation for slavery in and of itself. Liverpool, for the years 1783-1793 alone, received 878 ships accounting for 303,737 slaves at a value of £12,294,116 (or £1.7 million a year). Such profits were then absorbed back into the local metropole's economy, spurring further rewards. "The slave trade not only was profitable in itself, but gave rise to numerous industries in Great Britain and other countries to supply the goods needed in barter. It employed thousands of ship carpenters, joiners, ironmongers, painters, sail makers, braziers, boat builders, coopers, riggers, plumbers, glaziers, gunsmiths, bread-makers, carters, and laborers, and used a good deal of copper for ships' bottoms" (Tannenbaum, 1946, p. 19). 4. Lastly, these were obviously not just any human beings being traded. Rather, the establishment of slave societies in the Americas had accomplished what no previous slave society had: it had discovered a justification (or rationalization) for enslaving human beings based on a categorical, ascriptive trait—to have been born an African.26 Hence, modern slavery in the Americas explicitly interjected the notion of "race" into the general division of labor. A racial hierarchy of social privilege would emerge from this order whose lineage is discernible to this day in all previous slave societies of the Americas. Importantly, limiting slavery to Africans provided the institution its original ideological justification. This ideological justification played a central role in the history of slavery. Indeed, comforting as profitable trade may have been, the European conscience was truly tortured, and a proper (Christian) ideological foundation was necessary to sanction this—by all appearances—barbaric endeavor. The justification providing the greatest solace was that based on the notion of bringing civilization to the "uncivilized." This rationale, so replete throughout

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colonial history, was among the bourgeoisie's greatest gifts to the study of historical capitalist production—exposing the fundamental contradiction of the modern bourgeois ideology, which allows one simultaneously to appeal to one set of Enlightenment ideals (rationality and progress) for the purpose of subverting another set of Enlightenment ideals (freedom and liberty). This betrayed not merely a keen awareness of the non-universality of such ideals but also in fact, the historically specific, wantonly instrumental nature of their actual social application.27 One may well argue, of course, that the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, along with the British empire's rulers, were not the best spokespeople for the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. These gatekeepers of the capitalist social order, nonetheless, did not hesitate to conjure such ideals when in search of justification for their actions. That modern slave-labor was consciously created and designed by capital for the purpose of export-commodity production renders the compatibility of slave-labor and capitalist production self-evident. That the procurement of modern slave-labor was itself a profitable enterprise made slave-labor unique among coerced labor forms. The act of coercion was in and of itself a profitable endeavor, thereby securing a preference for slave-labor in the Americas. That modern slave labor was treated as if disposable meant a subsistence bundle of goods was unnecessary. Capital was limited by its rate of replacing labor-power, not its rate of reproducing labor-power. Thus a key feature of capitalist exploitation—unequal exchange between the product of labor and the bundle of goods reproducing labor—was reformulated. It followed that generations of neo-Ricardian Marxists, lacking the proper formula to verify the slave-laborers' actual exploitation, would therefore deem them a "precapitalist" form and wipe them from labor history—an oversight not duplicated by capital. That modern slave-labor was singularly identified with African labor bequeathed to the Americas a rigid, racial labor hierarchy. Slavery was abolished across the Americas in a brief 54-year period, 18341888, marked, as Sydney Mintz noted, by "the astonishing expansion of plantation production world-wide" and the "equally staggering international transfer of labor" (Mintz, 1985, p. 213). In the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, the so-called new era of imperialism oversaw the forced migrations of over 1 million Indians and 1.5 million Chinese, among others, to both the old plantation societies in the Americas and the newer plantation societies in Ceylon, Malaya, Fiji, Hawaii, the Philippines and Indonesia. This provided the context for the 19th-century abolition of slavery in the Americas and of serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe. Sugar, or rather the great commodity market which arose demanding it, has been one of the massive demographic forces in world history. Because of it, literally millions of enslaved Africans reached the New World. This migration was followed by those of East Indians, Javanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and many other peoples in the 19th century. It was sugar that sent East Indians to Natal. . . . Sugar that carried them to Mauritius and Fiji. Sugar brought a dozen different groups in staggering succession to Hawaii, and sugar still moves people about the Caribbean. (Mintz, 1985, p. 275)

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While individual histories varied, the abolition of slavery brought with it a fairly consistent set of planter demands. First and foremost was the subject of compensation. With few exceptions, slaveholders, like their seigniorial counterparts, received monetary compensation for the release of their human property. British planters were awarded £20,000,000 equaling 40% of the purchase price of their 668,000 slaves.28 The 6,086 Dutch planters owning 26,825 human beings in Dutch Guiana were awarded 9,867,780 guilders, equaling 50% of the market price of slaves at the time (Emmer, 1993, p. 89). As Engerman observed, such compensation levels were the norm throughout both the Americas and Central and Eastern Europe. "When both slavery and serfdom were ended it was most frequently with some compensation paid—in cash, securities, land, or labor time—to slave owners and serf owners" (Engerman, 1986, p. 330). Only planters in Haiti and the United States—the only slaveholders actually defeated in war—were denied monetary compensation. Of far greater concern (and value) to slaveholders on the eve of their respective abolitions, however, were the means by which the state would finance and organize labor coercion in a society of freed slaves. There were three basic strategies shaping labor coercion in the Americas following slavery (aspects of which could be found in Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century, as well). First, there were the efforts to force former slaves to continue laboring for their masters as "not exactly" slaves under various apprenticeship schemes. Second, there was the organization of shiploads of "indentured labor," primarily from India and China, in an effort to shift masses of laborers from the more densely peopled regions of colonial empires to the less densely peopled regions of colonial empires. Lastly, there was the panoply of legal restrictions and laws regarding property ownership, "vagrancy,"29 intraregional migration, forced prison labor and taxation. These ordinances were designed to generate a dependent class of landless, freed slaves required to trade their labor—on terms determined by the whim of planters—just to survive. Through these processes, new roles were forged by the planter classes for ex-slaves in postabolition societies, which, while qualifiably new, maintained the former slaves as a racially distinct category of coerced laborers based on the former planters' continued monopoly of land, capital resources and the state. As their actions indicate, fostering the transition from slave-labor to wage-labor following abolition in the Americas was far from a priority of the former slaveholding class. There were a number of reasons for this. First, it must be recalled that, throughout slavery, wage-labor was as popularly identified with white European labor in the Americas as slave-labor was identified with African labor. This racial association of specific labor forms did not end with abolition. Indeed, as will be seen, the categories of labor associated with different racial groups were expanded following slavery—especially in the heaviest period of immigration. Second, there was no immediate move to wage-labor because the former holding class well understood the advantages of maintaining a heterogeneous, racially segmented working class. In this manner, the former slaveholding class was free not only to play one racial group off against another but also to pick and choose among labor forms for maximum advantage. Lastly,

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a further consideration of the three essential strategies that were implemented by the former slaveholding class (apprenticeship, immigration and legal restrictions) will make abundantly clear that extramarket forces played a primary role in the construction of a postslavery social order. Apprenticeship Nearly all former slave societies in the Americas experimented briefly, just before or just after abolition, with various apprenticeship arrangements.30 The purported rationale for such programs was the need to prepare slaves for a life of "freedom," presumably accustoming them to a life of market-mediated social relations. This was, likewise, the practice in Central and Eastern Europe. Those few societies forgoing an apprenticeship period, however, Barbados and Antigua, for example, provide compelling evidence that coercion more than charity may have been the ethic weighing most heavily on the planters' minds. Both Barbados and Antigua (along with St. Kitts) had very low land-to-labor ratios, thus leaving former slaves little option but to continue their work on plantations. The fact that the majority of those areas excluded from apprenticeship schemes were populated such that work could be coerced with fewer extramarket measures per se would suggest that "forced labor"—not social reacculturation—was the principal motivation behind 19th-century apprenticeship schemes.31 Antigua is a case in point. Not only did the end of slavery result in, at best, marginal differences in the everyday lives of the former slaves, but the slaves' workloads were, in fact, frequently intensified (Furtado, 1963, p. 150). Prior to abolition, the British Parliament had introduced an apprenticeship system in the guise of creating a transitional mechanism for the end of slavery. Following abolition, the island's assembly immediately proceeded to release the former slaves from their obligations linked to the apprenticeship system. Simultaneously, Antigua's large-land holders moved swiftly to grant slaves their complete freedom, while establishing a bare subsistence wage. Thus, a direct result of the former slaves' newfound freedom was that, rather than working seven and a half hours a day to cover their subsistence costs (as had been called for under the apprenticeship system), they now had to work ten-hour days. Given the fact that there was no practical possibility of finding work off the plantations, the former slaves were forced to continue working the land. Similar in spirit to the various postserfdom labor regimes such as the Prussian Insten system, apprenticeship systems entailed the practice of tying the former slaves' continued access to customary homes and provisional grounds to their work. Obviously, the homes and provisional grounds occupied by slaves during slavery were technically the legal property of the slave owner. As in Central and Eastern Europe, with abolition, the landowners laid claim to their property, reduced the former slaves to landless, impoverished agricultural workers and allowed them access to their former homes and provisional grounds either through a wage/rent arrangement or, occasionally, through outright vassalage.

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Immediately following emancipation planters sought to bind their "apprentices" and, after 1838, their ex-slaves to continued labor on their estates in one of two ways; they either imposed high rents on houses and provision-grounds or they insisted that continued occupation would only be allowed if the occupants worked daily on the estate. The first was calculated to diminish the net earnings from sales of provisions in local markets, and so make the ex-slave more dependent on wages for his livelihood. The second, more commonly practiced where land off the estates was scarce and dear, was intended to force the laborers to work in order to continue having roofs over their heads. (Hall, 1976, p. 17) The new system—exploiting the fact that the former slaves had been forced to live in homes built on the slaveholder's land and use provision grounds situated likewise—combined in the former planter the roles of landlord and employer and in the former slave the roles of tenant and employee. "The ex-slaves, who during slavery had generally had access to personal provision grounds as well as to their family homes, often built by themselves, discovered that, as free men, they had a rental obligation for access to these traditionally gratuitous facilities" 32 (Bolland, 1981, p. 595). This led, on occasion, to unique claims by ex-slaves who made appeals strikingly similar to those of former serfs in relation to the notion of a moral economy. "'During our slavery,' a group of striking British Guiana plantation workers declared in 1842, 'we was clothed, ration and seported in all manner of respects (sic.) Now that we are free men, we are to work for nothing'" (Foner, 1983, p. 19). Across the British West Indies, the wage/rent system dominated the working and living arrangements of former slave societies, though taking a variety of forms. Thus, rent as a percentage of the "wage" averaged 20% in Barbados and Tobago, 33% in St. Vincent, 35% in Grenada and 48% in Jamaica (Bolland, 1981, p. 597). Meanwhile, in British Guiana and Trinidad the use of land and a home was initially free. Hall documented the conflicting expectations and social values between former planters and former slaves in the following selection from an 1842 Special Colonial Committee. Berkeley: "In British Guiana have you known a belief to exist among the Negroes, that when they were made free the Queen gave them their houses and land?" Barkly: "I believe that was a very general belief at first. I was told by Negroes on Highbury Estate that it was all nonsense that the Queen made them free without giving them a free house and land; and they called upon me to carry out that proposition, by giving up the houses and grounds. I attempted to explain the system of tenancy, but I could not make them comprehend it in the least; they had no idea of paying anything at all." (Hall, 1976, p. 18) The principal factor cited by historians as explaining the evolution of postabolition societies invariably focuses on landilabor ratios. The land:labor ratios for the Caribbean are presented in Table 3.1. In the British West Indies, the islands of Antigua, Barbados and St. Kitts represented regions where negligible access to land forced former slaves to continue working on plantations, and preabolition sugar production levels soon resumed. Trinidad and British Guiana followed an opposite pattern where large tracts of land were

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not under cultivation at the time of abolition. Former slaves quickly left the plantation, and East Asian indentured labor was brought in. Similarly, in the cases of Jamaica and Dutch Guiana where there was available land, sugar production saw a drop after abolition, and a modest smallholding class emerged.33 Table 3.1 Land/Labor Ratios in the Caribbean at the Time of Abolition Square Miles (Per 1,000 persons) Barbados St. Kitts Antigua Martinique Montserrat Puerto Rico Guadeloupe Grenada Tobago Jamaica Haiti Cuba Trinidad* British Guiana Dutch Guiana

1.7 2.9 3.1 3.3 4.6 4.7 5.1 6.3 8.8 12.2 20.6 26.2 47.7 832.4 1,000

Year That Pre-Abolition Sugar Production Level Regained 1834 1839 1834 1859 1866 1902 1870 Never Never 1934 Never 1886 1834 1861 1927

Source: Ward, 1985, p. 34. * Only one-fourth of Trinidad's private land was under cultivation as late as 1833 (Foner, 1983, p. 19).

Though rarely cited by historians of slavery in the Americas, one of the earliest formulations of this land:labor ratio thesis was explored by H. J. Nieboer in Slavery as an Industrial System. The thesis simply held that where resources were such that large amounts of land were free (instances of "open resources"), labor would take compulsory, "extramarket" forms and that where resources were such that little land was available (instances of "closed resources"), labor would work under conditions of "free" contract. This theory, seemingly having taken on the aura of oral tradition, has been passed down to present-day historians. Only occasionally will one find those, such as Ward, who wonder aloud why former slaves could not have simply made a two- or three-day voyage to less crowded islands. "Barbados, St. Kitts, and Antigua were within a few days' sailing distance of colonies where land was abundant, so why should their freedmen not have taken advantage of this opportunity? Some writers emphasize the legal restraints on mobility secured by planters anxious to protect their supplies of labor, but the British Colonial Office did not allow any outright prohibition of movement between colonies" (Ward, 1985, p. 33).34

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The dilemma raised by Ward helps to highlight the fact that slavery could be abolished without the slaves being emancipated. It was more a question of the extent to which different forms of coercion were required in areas of "closed resources" as opposed to whether more or less coercion was required. Related to this point, Mintz notes the difficulty in pinpointing the exact moment of slavery's demise. He argues that the end of slavery is more accurately conceived of as a change in degrees of labor control than a change in "status." "The transition was from one fixed status (slave) to another (free) only in ideal terms. In practice this involved a series of on-going adjustments intended to sustain the economic and political power of those who needed labor over those who provided it. For this reason it is even difficult in some cases to say exactly when slavery ended, since its demise was gradual and murky—a kind of grudging loosening of restraints" (Mintz in Fraginals, 1985, p. 275). A period of abolitions resulting in a collection of variously structured, forced-labor regimes could not generate much interest in intra-American migration (with the important exception of periodic 19th-century "escapes" to Haiti, where it was believed that African labor had broken from European domination). For most of the Americas, the most common postslavery labor regime was shaped by apprenticeship. There were at least two distinct apprenticeship schemes—that which developed in the British West Indies and that which developed in Cuba. The apprenticeship system in the British West Indies, originally slated to remain in place for six years, lasted from 1834 until its forced, premature demise in the wake of the extended protests of former slaves in 1838. Within the British West Indies itself, postslave society took on a fair degree of variation. Generally, at the end of the apprenticeship period, sugar and coffee plantation production declined, and small-scale production units emerged. However, there were areas, such as Barbados and Antigua, that retained large-scale plantation production with former slaves. Additionally, there were areas, such as Trinidad, that retained plantation production by means of massive, forced migration campaigns. By the 1870s, 70% of Trinidad's plantation labor force was contract laborers, while most former slaves had moved into "small-scale production"35 (Engerman, 1986, pp. 335, 336). The apprenticeship system in the British West Indies was never particularly appreciated by the "former" slaves who were supposedly being "accustomed to" life after slavery. Martial law was required in St. Kitts,36 while the militia was called out in Montserrat. All across the British West Indies, former slaves rose up against their, as yet not former, masters who required from them a minimum of 45 hours a week. Strikes, sometimes lasting as long as two or three weeks, occurred in most islands; many ex-slaves refused to surrender their provision grounds and some resisted violently and nearly all of them objected to the wage rates. Eventually, a fragile industrial peace was created on the basis of a few concessions—small wage increases, a shorter working week for women and guarantees of the right to grow crops in the event of eviction. (Marshall, quoted in Bolland, 1981, p. 591)

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The apprenticeship period, shortened as it may have been, still provided the planters the time to develop a vast array of strategies allaying the inconveniences of "free" labor. These included vagrancy laws, taxation, the formation of police/prison systems, labor laws and, above all, a global network of forced migration. With the apprenticeship system generally conceded to be an unqualified failure—as a means of transforming slaves into wage-earning plantation labor—throughout the British West Indies, most had already begun putting their energies into the procurement of (predominantly Asian) indentured labor by the middle of the 19th century.37 Abolition in Cuba (as in Puerto Rico) took on a distinct form from that of the British West Indies.38 Cuba's experiment with an apprenticeship system, patronato, began six years prior to the formal abolition of slavery. "Before slavery was abolished planters in Cuba had begun to experiment with alternative forms of labor, and in this they were quite distinctive. As Adamson puts it for the British West Indies, planters 'could no more conceive of growing sugar without slaves than they could of making it themselves'" (Ward, 1985, p. 28). The Cuban "experiment" occurred during a period of falling rural wages, rapid modernization of the sugar industry and large-scale, forced migration.39 Thus, the labor force on Cuban sugar estates in the 1870s just prior to abolition was a uniquely diversified lot. The most distinctive characteristic of the [Cuban] plantation workforce in the mid-1870's was its diversity. Plantation slaves, rented slaves, indentured Asians, and Black, white, and mulatto wage workers all labored on the estates. Plantation employers did not face a homogeneous supply of labor, but rather a segmented labor force, with different forms and quantities of payment due different types of worker. Wages were paid by the day, the task, the month, the trimester, or the year; the amount paid varied widely; workers sometimes did and sometimes did not receive maintenance; compensation occurred in coin, bills, credit, goods, or shares. (Scott, 1985, p. 90) This conglomerate of labor forms, in fact, produced 775,368 tons of sugar in 1879, the largest total ever for a slave-based economy (Iglesias, 1985, p. 62). This "complementarity" of slavery, free labor and indentured labor shaped the patronato system from 1880 to 1886. "Free labor and indentured labor were economically complementary to slavery;40 indentured Chinese workers often dealt with the centrifuges while slaves handled other tasks; white woodcutters on contract relieved the plantation of direct responsibility for providing fuel; the employment of free workers during the harvest diminished the problem of year-round maintenance of all workers" (Scott, 1985, p. 108). The patronato system was developed in a period of rapid technological and social change within the Cuban sugar industry as well as profound changes within global sugar production. Centralized, steam-powered mills (centrales) were replacing the older mills across Cuba.41 Cuba had 1,318 sugar mills in 1860 that were producing 515,000 metric tons of sugar. By 1895 Cuba had 250 centrales, producing 1 million metric tons of sugar. Figures for Puerto Rico were similar. In 1860 Puerto Rico had 550 sugar mills that were producing 100,000 tons, and by 1910, there were 15 centrales, producing 233,000 metric

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tons (Fraginals, 1985, p. 5). Industrial entrepreneurs, as opposed to earlier generations of sugar mill owners, dominated the operation of the new centrales. By 1895 only 17% of the owners of centrales had been slaveholding planters (Fraginals, 1985, p. 5). This is noteworthy in that, contrary to Genovese, it demonstrates the degree of compatibility between slave-labor and modern industry. Genovese emphasized the role of tradition and culture (quite correctly at one level) over economic rationale in the decision making of those (in the antebellum U.S. South) continuing to employ slave-labor in modern industry. Here, however, was a case of persons with no previous history of slaveholding making a rational choice to employ slave-labor (and quite profitably, one might add). The centrales were fed by sugarcane grown under the colono system. Laborers within the colono system were of various backgrounds and included former slaves and former planters working as tenants and as smallholders. The agricultural aspect of sugar production with colonos (planting, cultivating and harvesting) remained fairly traditional, as a significant division developed—into the 20th century—between the manufacturing of sugar and the supply of raw material for sugar production. "[There was] an administrative separation between the manufacture of sugar [the industrial sector] and the supply of raw material, cane [the agricultural sector]" (Fraginals, 1985, p. 5). This separation of cane growing and processing only accelerated after slavery's close. Thus, besides the rapid modernization of sugar production, the larger Cuban labor force was completely transformed. As late as 1877, the sugar industry's labor force remained 70% slaves. However, working beside these slaves, from the 1860s, was a varied combination of freed slaves, Mayan Native Americans from the Yucatan, Chinese indentured laborers and Europeans (Fraginals, 1985, p. 18).42 A further development in the structure of the sugar industry was the increasingly seasonal nature of agricultural work in the latter half of the 19th century. * It was not uncommon to have four months of seasonal full employment followed by eight months of unstable, part-time employment.44 "The amount of cane required by the modern industry made it necessary to employ hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers simultaneously in Cuba and Puerto Rico for a period of three to four months of the year. Thus there arose, in all its tragic dimensions, the problem of seasonal employment during four months of the year, which for the majority of the laborers meant seasonal unemployment for eight months of the year" (Fraginals, 1985, p. 6). This had obvious ramifications vis-a-vis workers' access to houses and provisional grounds now on their former master's property. This arrangement, therefore, led to new forms of dependence and financial debt, along with demands for access to land (on the plantation or the frontier). Less directly connected to the technical changes within the production processes and more related to the abolition process itself was the nearly wholesale removal of women from field work in postabolition societies. Women, who had represented the majority of fieldworkers on most slave plantations, were, with abolition, removed from the fields to take up domestic labor.45 The majority of indentured Indian labor sent to Jamaica replaced slave

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women in the cane fields (Twaddle, 1993, p. 9). Craton notes that the shift from labor forces—often 60% female—to 100% male and its larger social implications are a largely understudied subject. The shift from slavery to wage labor on the plantations was the trimming of the workforce towards the employers' desideratum of making it entirely male. For obvious and well-studied reasons, the field labor force of a slave plantation was at least 60% female; yet optimizing managers after slavery ended made it as far as possible 100% male. The degree to which they succeeded, and the reasons why they never were completely successful, along with the implications as to gender roles in post-slavery family, village, and economic life, remain open for much more study. (Craton, 1992, p. 60) In addition to the technical changes revolutionizing the production of sugar on a global scale, resulting, in fact, in a qualifiably new sugar product itself, there were important commercial and marketing innovations.47 As storage and shipping capacity developed, and beet sugar production increased, the potential market for American sugar found more and more competitors. Beginning in the 1860s, it became possible to store successive crops and thus accumulate sugar surpluses. The tonnage carried by steamships first surpassed that of sailing ships in 1871. Furthermore, as the cultivation of sugar in Asia expanded, freight rates from Europe to East Asian sugar colonies (India, Java, Mauritius the Philippines) fell by 63% from 1860 to 1880, while rates to the Americas fell, as well, though by only 25% (Fraginals, 1985, p. 9). Beet sugar production, a mere 352,000 tons in 1860, had swelled to 3.7 million tons (or 59% of the world sugar market) by 1890 (Fraginals, 1985, p. 9). Europe, in fact, by 1890 was a net exporter of sugar. Meanwhile, most beet sugar-producing countries enjoyed high levels of tariff protection, while most cane sugar was being produced in protected colonies. With the transformations in the technological, commercial and marketing aspects of sugar production, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic (along with the Philippines) found themselves competing for increasingly smaller shares of the world market.48 In the context of these emerging technological, social and global changes, Cuba's patronato system was conceived of as a vehicle for the "gradual" abolition of slavery for Cuba's 200,000 slaves. Gradual abolition was designed to meet [specific] needs. The Moret Law [the "free-womb" law] and the patronato prevented mass freeings and sudden changes in the number of available workers, while opening the way for immigration and the reorganization of the labor force. Moreover, by incorporating slaves into elaborate—if ad hoc—legal processes, the government attempted to give gradualism a kind of legitimacy in the eyes of slaves. . . . The gradual reincorporation of some freed patrocinados49 into the plantation labor force, the replacement of others by Chinese workers, convicts, demobilized Spanish soldiers, and colonos facilitated adaptation on plantations. (Scott, 1985, p. 279)

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The patronato system was established in 1880 with the express purpose of serving as an intermediary stage between slavery and freedom. The master's obligation was, in fact, greater under patronato than it had been under "pure" slavery. Along with a token wage in the form of a stipend, the master had to now see to the education of the new class of patrocinados. The token wage most frequently went toward a peculium and was thus an expense recouped by the master at the end of slavery. As originally designed, the patronato system was to remain in place until 1885, whereupon one-fourth of all patrocinados would be "freed." This was to continue for the next three years until 1888, each year freeing the oldest in the remaining population. The number of patrocinados freed, however, quickly outpaced this rate. In 1877 there were 200,000 slaves. In 1883 there were only 100,000 patrocinados. By 1885 the number of patrocinados had fallen to 53,000 (when it should have been 150,000)50 (Scott, 1983, p. 460). When the Spanish Parliament agreed to prematurely end the patronato system in 1886, 25,000 patrocinados remained (Scott, 1983, p. 460).51 Thus, whereas the apprenticeship system in the British West Indies had, in large part, been brought to an early close due to freed slave unrest, the early conclusion to Cuba's experiment had its origin in slavery's declining utility due to the availability of alternative, coerced labor forms— primarily through forced migration. Elsewhere in the Americas, apprenticeship schemes varied in success. The pressure of 174,000 and 22,000 freed slaves, respectively, on the French and Danish authorities resulted in the abandonment of apprenticeship programs, whereas the 1863 Dutch abolition of 26,825 slaves, along with the earlier Peruvian experiments in apprenticeship, proved more successful. Peru, in fact, similar to the case of Cuba, began the use of indentured Chinese labor prior (1849) to the abolition of slavery (1854). The more sparse slave populations of the (non-Portuguese) Latin American continent almost all went through relatively uneventful periods of apprenticeship (and partial compensation of slaveholders) following their respective abolitions after independence in the 1820s. "Most of the Spanish American republics initiated gradual emancipation at the time of their independence by passing so-called free-womb laws, which liberated the children of all slaves. But long-term apprenticeship periods under the old slave masters were required for these newly manumitted libertos or manumisos; and at the same time no slave born prior to the 1820's decrees was freed" (Klein, 1986, p. 250). Forced Global Migrations Whereas apprenticeship schemes were efforts to retain direct control over the labor of former slaves for the longest possible period while preparing for eventual "full emancipation," the massive, global campaigns of forced migration from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century was a wholly undisguised effort to (1) in the short term, make available to former slaveholders vast numbers of bonded labor and (2) in the long term, populate regions of the

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Americas such that competition in the labor market would, to put it crudely, create a structural bias favoring the buyer of labor-power over the seller. The trade in "coolies," the 19th century's replacement for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, could not have existed without the consolidation of the overseas empires of Britain and other European nations. . . . The trade did not, in fact, reach its peak until the 1880's and 1890's, long after it had succeeded in stabilizing the plantation economy, for planters valued it as a means of depressing the wage level for the entire society. As one British Guiana planter explained, "So long as an estate has a large Coolie gang, Creoles must give way in prices asked." (Foner, 1983, p. 22) To appreciate the calculated nature of postslavery immigration, it must be remembered that only after the mid-19th century did the Europeanization of the American populations truly begin in earnest. The first year that the number of Europeans surpassed the number of Africans arriving in the Americas was 1840. Until 1820, Africans had outnumbered Europeans by a ratio of 4.5:1 (Eltis, 1983, p. 255). See Table 3.2. With the abolition of slavery, the "influx of European peoples reached its zenith" (Eltis, 1983, p. 268). Table 3.2 Number of Africans versus European Immigrants to the Americas, 1820-1859 Years 1820-1829 1830-1839 1840-1849 1850-1859

Africans 602,500 563,400 445,100 151,200

Europeans 153,800 670,700 1,785,300 2,964,900

Source: Eltis, 1983, p. 256. While there were many sources of forced migration—including Mayan Native Americans from the Yucatan Peninsula, West Africans,52 various regions within the Caribbean itself, Southern Europe, Iberian Europe, Ireland and the Madeira53 and Canary Islands—the overwhelming mass of global labor forced to the Americas in the second half of the 19th century was from India and China. Though initially organized by private enterprises, very quickly the trade in indentured labor was taken up by the British, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and Brazilian governments. As with apprenticeship programs, there was a great deal of variation in the impact of forced migrations throughout the Americas. In the Caribbean alone, for the years 1830-1910, over 800,000 laborers reached principally Cuba, British Guiana and Trinidad.54 Close to two-thirds of these were from India, and another one-third from China and West Africa (Ward, 1985, p. 40). At its height, 1846-1850, forced migration to the Americas averaged 10,000 human arrivals a year (Engerman, 1986, p. 330).55 The yearly average for the entire slave period has been estimated at just over 22,000. The use of forced labor from India and China predated the mid-19th-century campaign. As early as 1806, some 200 Chinese laborers had been taken to Trinidad, while beginning in 1819 the

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French had been sending Indians to Mauritius. The first formal agreement to send Chinese labor en masse to the Americas came in 1847 upon requests from Cuba. Forced Indian migration to the Americas began in 1845, with shipments to British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica under five-year "industrial residency" contracts. The trade in Chinese labor was interrupted from 1848-1853, with labor from the Yucatan, Canary Islands and Iberian Europe filling the breach. Only two years after the resumption of trade in Chinese laborers, the enterprise's rather unseemly nature moved the British to end their sanction of the trade. From that period forward, the Portuguese in Macao enthusiastically continued the practice, sending over 200,000 persons to the Americas through 1874 (Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 70). There was a direct correlation between the abolition of slavery and the beginnings of the trade in Chinese and Indian labor. Cuba's figures, presented in Table 3.3, are indicative of this. Table 3.3 Number of Slaves/Chinese Laborers Sent to Cuba, 1853-1874 Year 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 Total for All Years

Number of Slaves 12,500 11,400 6,408 7,304 10,436 19,992 30,473 24,895 23,964 11,254 7,507 6,807 145 1,443 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Number of Chinese Laborers 4,307 1,711 2,985 4,968 8,547 13,385 7,204 6,193 6,973 344 952 2,153 6,400 12,391 14,263 7,368 5,660 1,227 1,448 8,160 5,093 2,490

174,528

124,242

Source: Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 71.

The terms of contracts varied within the Americas. British-held territories required five-year service, while Cuba and Peru required eight years. The

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conditions under which such indentured laborers were forced to live and work were predictably harsh. Kloosterboer, in documenting the less than sterling character of many who came to own the contracts to indentured labor, notes the attempt of many to pass legislation that would have forced laborers who missed "one-half a day or less" to forfeit the whole day. Those who missed 2 days in a row or 2 days in 14 would suffer a week's imprisonment at hard labor, with a maximum penalty of three months at hard labor. While the British overturned many such provisions, it remained the case that the maximum fine for planters in the British West Indies was five British pounds (Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 9).56 The vast majority of Chinese forced migration, referred to by contemporaries as "the buying and selling of pigs," landed in Cuba and Peru57(Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 9).58 As with its apprenticeship program, Cuba's importing of indentured labor antedated its abolition of slavery. The cost of procuring Chinese coolies averaged two-thirds that of slaves in the 1850s (Clarence-Smith, 1984, p. 29). A total of 125,000 Chinese reached Cuba between 1847 and 1874, along with several thousand Mayan Native Americans from the Yucatan Peninsula (Engerman, 1986, p. 328). Cuba's Chinese population grew by 35% in the 1860s and 1870s, while Cuba's overall population grew only slightly (Scott, 1985, p. 89). Once there, eight years of servitude were demanded at four pesos a month. Any lost days had to be made up at the end of eight years. Rules for the treatment of indentured laborers were distinct from those of slaves. For example, if 10 Chinese coolies were put in a work unit, they had to be provided a European overseer. European supervisors were forbidden to discipline Chinese coolies in front of a slave. In fact, in the official census, Chinese workers were categorized as "Europeans" (Hu-Dehart, 1993). At the same time, punishments meted out to Chinese coolies were not unlike those used against slaves. "The rules regarding corporal punishment (for Chinese coolies) were lifted almost verbatim from those designed to discipline and punish slaves" (Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 73). Upon arriving in Cuba, the Chinese laborers were forced to sign a document declaring: "I am in agreement with the stipulated salary, although I know that free workers and slaves make much more, because I feel that this difference has been compensated by other benefits which the patrono has given me, and which are spelled out in this contract" (Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 73). Those Chinese who arrived after 1860 were forced after eight years to either recontract with another master or to pay for their return to China. Returning to China under such conditions was a virtual impossibility. There were no repatriation clauses in their eight year contracts, and it was impossible to save enough money from the pitifully low token wages to pay a return passage. Those who survived eight years were thus promptly arrested for vagrancy at the end of their contracts and forced to sign another. Only a few were able to gain sufficient money to return, usually through gambling and drug dealing. Laborers were openly bought and sold under the legal fiction of "endorsing" contracts. (Clarence-Smith, 1984, pp. 29-30)

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Of the over 100,000 to arrive in Cuba and Peru between 1870 and 1874, only 1,887 had returned to China by 1885 (Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 77). Those Chinese who remained were generally forced into work gangs (or caudrillas). In this form, Chinese laborers were hired out to plantations as a group for a set time or specific piecework. By 1872, two years before the close of the Chinese trade, 14,064 had completed their first contract, 34,408 were still under contract, 7,036 were listed as runaways, 684 were in prison and 864 were awaiting recontracting (Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 78). The emergence of cuadrillas as a work unit presented both opportunities and difficulties for the contracting class vis-a-vis other labor groups. The planters welcomed the Chinese cuadrillas in 1870 as an innovative device to keep the Chinese working on their estates after their contracts expired. But they also realized that the presence of these chino libres posed a severe problem of control over slaves and especially coolies still under contract. An editorial in the Boletin de Colonizacion, an official organ of the colonial government that represented sugar interest, concerned about the high rate of marronismo, or runaways, charged that these cuadrillas were the principal cause of flight (by contracted Chinese labor). (Hu-Dehart, 1993, p. 78) The plight of Indian forced migrant labor proved no better than that of their Chinese counterparts. "Slavery produced both a system and an attitude of mind, in which the products determined everything, not the people. As part of a world demand for raw materials, the Indians voyaged across the seas of the world to labor upon the plantations" (Tinker, 1974, p. 19). British Guiana received 246 Indians in 1838 under five-year contracts (Erickson, 1934, p. 132). The trade ended in 1839, to be resumed in 1844 with shipments to British Guiana, Trinidad and Jamaica, backed by British-guaranteed loans of £500,000 to Jamaica and British Guiana and 250,000 British pounds to Trinidad to subsidize the venture. A total of 21,791 Indians were sent between 1844 and 1848,59 only 25% of whom were female60 (Erickson, 1934, p. 138). The trade was temporarily halted until 1850 for economic reasons.61 West Africans filled the void until 1850, when Indian forced migration continued, now under 10-year contracts. Beginning in 1860, the French West Indies along with Surinam received Indian indentured labor, as well. From 1851 to 1870, British Guiana received 67,616 Indians (25.7% of whom were female), Trinidad received 40,000 (26.1% of whom were female) and Jamaica received 10,554 Indians (27.1% of whom were female)62 (Erickson, 1934, p. 140). The trade continued as such, first being curtailed in 1917 before being definitively ended by forces in the Indian Nationalist Movement. At the same time, just as Winson warns against generalizing too broadly from the German historical example earlier, it is important to consider variation across the Americas. The use of apprenticeship schemes and mass forced migration, as described earlier, did not completely eliminate alternative postslave strategies on the part of former slaves. Given the development of abolition without emancipation, however, most such efforts proved difficult, if not futile. Attempts by former slaves at autonomous, commercial production resulted in marginalization and/or annihilation. European capital flooded the

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regions with migrant labor and denied collective enterprises access to credit and capital. British and Dutch Guiana were both relatively late-blossoming slave societies, whose postabolition societies took contrasting paths. Dutch Guiana experienced a mass plantation exodus leading to successful maroon societies, while British Guiana's freed slaves attempted to resurrect the plantation economy in the form of worker co-ops. Dutch Guiana (British-founded Surinam) and British Guiana were developed as sugar producers from the late 18th century, and both enjoyed a high level of prosperity following abolition. Surinam had a slave population of 75,000 in 1791, mostly dispersed on large plantations of sugar, coffee, cacao and cotton. Unlike the French and British, the Dutch islands were used principally as commercial entrepots, with little or no agricultural development. Surinam's slavery, similar to that of the French and British, maintained a high ratio of Africans to Europeans. Three years after the Dutch slave trade had ended in 1814, Surinam's slave population had dropped to 50,000, alongside 3,000 freed slaves and 2,000 Europeans. Unique to Surinam history were (1) the success of maroon societies to survive the Dutch authorities and (2) the success of Dutch authorities to survive after the 1863 abolition. Maroon communities had emerged in the 17th/18th centuries. Local rebellions often led to the escape of an entire plantation's workforce and the creation of self-governing communities in the interior of Surinam. By the early 18th century, over 6,000 slaves had escaped, setting up dozens of villages. Among the maroon communities there were three major groups with which the Dutch authorities were forced to negotiate: the Djukas, the Saramaacanes and the Matuaris. All three eventually signed treaties with the Dutch, which—in similar fashion to the 1839 Maroon Treaty of Jamaica—exchanged the government's leaving them alone for their guarantee to return future escaped slaves. Unlike the Jamaican maroon societies, however, which were eventually destroyed, the Surinam maroon societies survived and prospered. By the 1840s their numbers had grown to 8,000. The Djukas had 5,500 members spread through 15 villages—the largest being 600, and the smallest being 175 (Klein, 1986, p. 134). The government made attempts to integrate these maroon societies into the larger economy. At the time of abolition in 1863, there were 33,000 slaves. The Dutch government compensated planters for their slaves and further provided assistance for the importation of labor from Indonesia63 and India in the 1870s. This allowed Surinam's postabolition economy to survive, as by 1882 Dutch Guiana's import of 30,000 Indians had surpassed its number of freed slaves working on plantations (Emmer, 1993, p. 102). British Guiana's development pattern was similar to that of Surinam, but on a larger scale. Originally known by its three Dutch subdivisions—Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo—the Dutch had turned the area into one of the richest plantation areas in the Americas through a system of dikes and hydraulic works. By the 1790s, British Guiana was the leading cotton producer in the Americas and the leading coffee producer in the British empire, employing 120,000 slaves. In 1810 British Guiana was Britain's second largest colony in the Americas.

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Unable to compete with U.S. and Cuban cotton and coffee production in the 19th century, British Guiana switched to sugar. By 1830, British Guiana exported 60,000 tons of sugar. Following the 1808 cessation of the slave trade, the colony's slave population sank to 83,000 by 1830. After 1860 British Guiana proved a larger importer of indentured labor from Asia and Europe than Surinam.64 Additionally, groups of ex-slaves experimented in a variety of original economic activities. Many engaged in subsistence agriculture, while others took up limited commercial agricultural enterprises. A few thousand former slaves went so far as to purchase functioning sugar plantations. British Guiana was home to one of the most celebrated efforts of former slaves to take over and run commercial export plantations. The 1839 "village movement" was begun by 83 former slaves who purchased an abandoned cotton estate for the purpose of growing sugarcane. All drainage and irrigation facilities along with the sugar factory were shared communally. By 1842, 15,906 former slaves, or 20% of the pre-abolition slave population, had established similar villages on abandoned estates (Moohr, 1972, p. 597). While a lack of access to capital eventually doomed such efforts, such attempts nonetheless greatly expanded British Guiana's internal markets and resulted in the creation of large village populations.65 Thus, as exemplified by the British and Dutch Guianas, forced migrations from Asia, Africa and Europe were matched by equally disruptive intra-American migrations—either between regions within countries or between countries. All were summoned by the beck and call of capital, whose modern plantations began to take on more of the feel of tightly regimented factory production with its insatiable hunger for more flexible, disposable workforces. The modern plantation required, for its optimal running, the existence of an army of unemployed workers ideally located off the ingenio grounds but subjected to economic pressure that forced them to sell their services cheaply and with a minimum of social benefits, as cane cutters. These workers made up a migratory mass, and their migration could either be internal [from one part of the country to another] or external [from one country to another]. A mixture of both kinds became the normal pattern. (Fraginals, 1985, p. 6) Laws and Institutions To oversee and administer a society that had as its premise a complex web of weakly mediated social contradictions for the express purpose of generating vast wealth beside suffocating poverty, a formidable network of laws and institutions was needed to coerce compliance across the emerging social order.66 In this regard, as in Central and Eastern Europe at the close of serfdom, the end of slavery in the Americas brought with it a battery of legal and social institutions and laws designed to curtail "vagrancy" and force all available labor into "productive" activities. These included work passes, vagrancy laws, taxation, labor laws and expanded prison and policing systems.67 Prior to abolition, the French West Indies and Puerto Rico had experimented with the use of work passes to regulate and monitor freed slaves. The French system

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began after abolition, while the Puerto Rican libreta system actually ended when slavery ended and was replaced by extensive vagrancy laws. Puerto Rico was a case in point where vagrancy laws actually developed in lieu of massive forced migration campaigns.6 Elsewhere, vagrancy laws were generally deployed in combination with forced migration. "The Crown was not reluctant to assist the planters with special vagrancy laws and other mechanisms that cut down on the mobility of the rural laborers and limited their ability to respond to alternative opportunities" (Engerman in Fraginals, 1985, p. 263). Vagrancy laws, however, did not always have freed slaves as their principal target. In Cuba there was a hesitancy to employ vagrancy laws due to their potential impact on Europeans.69 In fact, though sparingly used, when applied, the largest number of those punished were first Europeans and, second, mulattoes. Examining the investigations of cases of vagrancy prosecuted in 1881-1882, one gets a picture of who the targets for repressive action were. First, the majority of those charged were white. Second, of the persons of color charged, most were mulatto rather than Black, thus less likely to have been field slaves. . . . Many of those prosecuted for vagrancy in the early 1880's were white, young, urban, single males, often with police records. Few seem to have been former field slaves who had migrated to the cities; few were laborers in the countryside who declined to work for wages. (Scott, 1985, pp. 221, 222-223) Again, as in much of Central and Eastern Europe, taxes on freed slaves were often used to subsidize the massive forced migrations to the Americas, literally forcing the former slaves to dig their own graves. "In Trinidad and British Guiana, public funds (were used) to subsidize the importation of contract laborers. In effect, the freedmen, through taxation, financed the bringing in of laborers whose purpose was to reduce their own standard of living" (Foner, 1983, p. 25). "The immigration programs entailed heavy transport costs, and were extensively subsidized from general taxation" (Ward, 1985, p. 40).70 Draft animals, smallholdings and imported foods were among the items upon which a tax was most frequently levied. In addition, licensing fees were collected for the local marketing of sugar and coffee. The use of labor laws effectively controlled the options of indentured labor, as well. Between 1875 and 1900, upward of 65,000 indentured laborers were convicted of breach of contract in British Guiana alone (Foner, 1983, p. 25). Lastly, expanded prison and police systems offered planters not only vital instruments of social control but further forms of coerced labor, as well.71 Prison labor was common throughout the Americas, with sentences of time at hard labor frequently imposed. Convicts in Cuba were hired out for 12 pesos a month—1 peso going to the convict and 11 to the state to further subsidize the coercive state apparatus (Iglesias, 1985, p. 73).

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Extramarket Forces and the Planter Class's Continued Access to Labor The abolition of slavery in the Americas provides ample evidence of just how the 19th-century global processes of working-class formation were largely shaped by extramarket forces. Four basic strategies ushered in postslave society. (1) All access to commercially viable land and resources was effectively restricted. In British Guiana, for example, all crown lands could be sold only in 100-acre blocks or larger. Former slaves had little chance of raising the capital for such large landholdings, as they were weighed down by the costs of a peculium for their freedom, taxes designed to subsidize immigration and mounting debts. (2) Apprenticeship schemes were developed both to control and to delay the "freeing" of slaves. The delay bought critical time for capital to erect an infrastructure of social control so as to further constrict the meaning of freedom for former slaves. (3) All potential "free" labor markets in strategic areas of production were flooded by labor from outside the region. Those areas lacking sufficient social and legal structures (e.g., a "distorted" labor market) to force former slaves to continue working under conditions dictated by capital purchased other forms of bonded labor, resulting in the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of contract laborers. (4) Guarding this tenuous social order was an indispensable fourth element, a vast array of social/legal institutions designed to allow maximum social control (e.g., prison and police systems, vagrancy laws, tax structures and work passes). In this manner, slave societies of the Americas were, in the brief span of 50 years, transformed from structures wholly reliant on forced African labor, to societies reliant on a carefully engineered social and economic marginalization of many former slaves and the strategic retention of a select (predominantly male) portion of former slaves for skilled tasks in factories and unskilled fieldwork in combination with Asian, African, American and European immigrants. At the center of this race-based division of labor was a combination of labor forms, assuring that wage-labor would not be predominant within the emerging heterogeneous working class. For 300 years Africans had been kidnapped and brought to the Americas by means of the Middle Passage (in which 10% of their compatriots had perished) to then be thrown among a collection of African peoples often of separate tongues, cultures and customs. Now, 300 years later, Africans were to continue laboring (with a vast portion of their compatriots sacrificed to marginality), again forced to struggle beside peoples of separate tongues, cultures and customs. This was, of course, no more a mere happenstance in the 19th century than it had been four centuries earlier. It was capital's continuing, consciously plar.ned, systematically organized effort to construct an environment conducive to a sustained process of global commodity production. Slave-labor could no more be "emancipated" at such an hour than the African Diaspora (as a historical category) could be dissolved into the generic social category of "citizen." These basic themes become ever clearer when considering the specific history of slavery and abolition in Brazil.

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NOTES 1. The years of formal abolition were 1831-1832 (Hanover, Electoral Hesse, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxony, Brunswick), 1845 (Schaumburg-Lippe), 1848 (Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen, Reuss, Austria, Saxe-Gotha, Anhalt-Dessau-Kothen), 1949 (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Oldenburg, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Anhalt-Bernburg, Lippe), 1850-1853 (Saxe-Meiningen, Reuss, Hungary), 1861 (Russia), 1864 (Romania) (Blum, 1978, p. 356). 2. It goes almost without saying that an economically "backward" country that is undergoing intensive industrialization will inevitably find an inordinate proportion of its labor force among the peasantry, and that for a temporary period this condition will have a significant influence on the life, habits, and attitudes of factory workers. . . . [Following emancipation] St. Petersburg was becoming more of a city of peasants than it had been earlier: peasant-artisans, peasant-tradesmen, peasant-coachmen, peasant-workers—over 30% of the population were "hyphenated" peasants with multiple ties to their native villages. (Zelnick, 1968, pp. 159, 187) 3. From these two, a variety of further processes flow, such as the reorganization of the family (McBride, 1977; Minge-Kalman, 1978; Habakkuk, 1955; Thomas, 1988; Humphries, 1990; Holmes and Quataert, 1986), microeconomic studies of the manor/farm as an economic unit (Kahan, 1974; Dovring, 1965; Rosdolfsky, 1951; North and Thomas, 1971; Kay, 1974; Rimlinger, 1961), the nature of agrarian labor (Zelnick, 1968; Esper, 1981; Briefs, 1937; Corrigan, 1977; Chambers, 1953; Evans, 1970; Perkins, 1984; Eley, 1984; Kriedte, 1986) and the development of migratory labor patterns (Gould, 1980a, 1980b). 4. "The fact was that peasants in the western lands were dependent upon seigniors and stood in a servile relationship to them. Surely it made no difference to the individual peasant whether that dependence was acquired by birth into the peasantry, or by virtue of occupation of a certain piece of land" (Blum, 1978, p. 34). 5. "In Eastern and Central Europe legal impediments to emigration were of course far more serious. Even the abolition of serfdom following 1848 or the Russian reforms of the 1860's did not guarantee freedom of movement, as in most places the peasant remained tied more or less tightly to his village community and still required a passport to depart legally" (Gould, 1980a, p. 617). 6. "Special credit institutions were created for this purpose. The Royal Credit Bank opened in Denmark in 1786, two years prior to emancipation. Similar banks were opened in Hesse and Saxony in 1832. The governments of Hanover and Bavaria followed suit with their own banks in 1841 and 1848, respectively. The Prussian government established lending institutions for this purpose in each of its provinces in March 1850" (Blum, 1878, p. 393). 7. In Prussia smallholding agricultural producers had to redeem 6.4 million days of labor services with animals and 23.6 million days without animals between 1807 and 1900. In Russia, 9.8 million serfs received 96.6 million acres of land. In Poland 694,747 smallholding agricultural producers received 12 million acres land (Blum, 1978, p. 404). 8. Mayer argues that post-abolition nobility swiftly recognized its class interests and acted accordingly. "[The nobility] learned to resort to lobbying and logrolling as well as pressure and partisan politics to protect and promote their interests. Increasingly, the landed estate assumed the attributes of class and class consciousness, and acted accordingly" (Mayer, 1981, p. 13).

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9. Weber's late 19th-century study of East Elbian agricultural workers provides a penetrating description of this protracted reorganization of the labor process. The study drew on data from three surveys (in 1849, 1873 and 1890) (Weber, 1979). 10. The proportion of those on land compared with those in towns/cities did decrease. Nonetheless, Austria's rural population grew by 61.5% 1850-1910, Denmark's by 113.9% 1849-1911, Hungary's by 43.4% 1847-1910, Poland's by 174% 1858-1913, Prussia's by 82.5% 1849-1905, Romania's by 82.8% 1860-1912 and Russia's by 116.9% 1858-1914 (Blum, 1978, p. 418). At the same time, the latter 19th century was a significant period of urbanization. In 1875, two-thirds of Germans lived in towns of 2,000 persons or less. By 1900 one-half of Germans lived in towns of 2,000 or less (Lebovics, 1967, p. 33). 11. "Bourgeoisified" nobles remained a minority of the nobility, though nobles of Central and Eastern Europe came to dominate brewing, distilling and beet sugar production (Blum, 1978, p. 423). 12. Interestingly enough, as the agricultural population in Germany fell from 42.5% in 1882, to 35.8% in 1895, the percentage of smallholdings remained the same (70.3%) (Lebovics, 1967, p. 35). 13. In Denmark (1901) 27.5% of all holdings were less than one-half hectare, Germany (1907) 32.7% and in Hungary (1898) 22%. In Romania (1905) 15.1% of all holdings were less than one hectare. In Austria (1902) 43.6% of all holdings were less than two hectares (Blum, 1978, p. 437). 14. In 1895, 72.8% of Hungarian landholders owned holdings of less than 5 hectares, representing 14.8% of all land; .15% of landholders owned holdings of over 500 hectares, representing 32.3% of all land. In 1903, 79% of Austrian landholders owned holdings of less than 5 hectares, representing 10.3% of all land; . 1 % of landholders owned holdings of over 500 hectares, representing 34.1% of all land. In 1904, 77.2% of Rumania landholders owned holdings of less than 5 hectares, representing 25.7% of all land; .2% of landholders owned holdings over 500 hectares, representing 38.3% of all land (Eddie, 1967, p. 302). 15. Many dwarf holdings belonged to people with primary occupations outside agriculture or farmworkers who hired themselves out. 16. The provision of small subsistence plots was often a means of subsidizing lower wages. 17. Szabo estimates that there were 2 million landless agrarian workers by 1900 in Hungary, while the number of independent farmers (from 1890 to 1900 alone) fell by 100,000, and the number of landless farmers rose 200,000 (Szabo, 1978, p. 33). 18. "In effect Hofganger tended over time to become the 'servants of the cottagers'" (Perkins, 1984, p. 8). 19. These same deputants later became supervisory personnel. Junker farming always retained a high ratio of supervisors to workers, further reflecting the continuing need for an apparatus of coercion following abolition. "Effectively, during the later 19th century the core of the confined labor force came to consist of supervisory personnel, craftsmen, and others engaged in areas that provided continuous employment throughout the year. . . Junker farming in Germany remained characterized, in comparison to large-scale farming in Britain and North America, by a high ratio of supervisory personnel to actual workers" (Perkins, 1984, pp. 15, 22). 20. As with money wages, the basis of the value of the bundle of goods was determined by historical precedent. "The work performed in the fields is not the standard for the payment of wages, but rather the minimum needs of the worker under a traditional style of life. This is as true for the Deputanten as for the pure wage-laborers—the levels of remuneration are from district to district quite diverse, and are based on historical,

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gradually developing levels of subsistence. It is this that determines the wage, and not vice versa" (Weber, 1979, p. 189). 21. "By ensuring a high degree of employer control over the worker's pattern of consumption, the confined laborer system offered Junkers a means of influencing the productivity and demeanor of workers by minimizing the income available for the purchase of beer, spirits and tobacco" (Perkins, 1984, p. 12). 22. Though proportionally small, the number of workers paid entirely in money increased from "hardly any" in 1800 to become the "fastest growing" category of laborers by 1849. Throughout the 19th century laborers paid in kind were in relative decline (Weber, 1979). 23. "The barracks of the migrant workers are the money-economy equivalents of the slave barracks of antiquity. The estate owner saves on workers' housing, since accommodation for the migrant costs little or nothing. He also has no need to allocate plots of land, but above all he is not regulated by laws governing conditions of work and pay" (Weber, 1979, p. 193). 24. "The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation" (Marx, 1977, p. 915). 25. Throughout the 17th century, most European powers established monopoly trading companies for the African slave trade to the Americas. The British established the Company of Royal Adventurers in 1663 (the Royal African Company after 1673). The French established the French West India Company in 1664 (the Senegal Company after 1673). The Dutch established the Dutch West India Company (1621), the Swedes established the Guinea Company (1647), the Danish established the Danish West India Company (1671) and the Brandenburgs established the Brandenburg African Company (1682). 26. In Foner's terms, slavery in the Americas represented "a mode of racial domination" (Foner, 1983, p. 1). 27. The early Spanish colonization of America "was justified on the grounds that working for the whites would bring the Indians into contact with Christianity. . . . [Thus] when the Indians were brought from the 'useless' islands—where there was no gold—to the islands where laborers were need in vast numbers, the argument was once again that they would thereby get the chance to live among Christians" (Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 200). A Brazilian official, addressing a U.S. audience on the eve of Brazilian abolition, proclaimed, "To this colossal America came the Black race and gave to the North cotton and to the South coffee; it arrived on our beaches barbarous, pagan, enslaved, and was the first instrument of wealth of the U.S. and Brazil. In exchange we taught it agriculture and the use of clothing; we instructed it in the arts, in letters, in the sciences; we gave it our God and our temples; now we are giving it freedom" (Conrad, 1972, p. 121). A "labor tax" imposed by the British on South African laborers was done to help the Bantu "to overcome his laziness, teach him the value of work, and give him the chance to do something in return for the wise rule of the Europeans" (Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 201). The Portuguese colonists took comfort in their claim that, "anyone working for the whites was in a position to come into contact with the higher culture of the Europeans, and was therefore in every sense better off (Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 201). 28. Additionally, planters in the British West Indies were extended a greater role in home rule with the advent of abolition.

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29. Kloosterboer argues that vagrancy laws amounted to little more than "forced labor." "Where slavery had been widespread, emancipation was followed by the imposition of drastic measures to retain a labor force. Apart from other stipulations there was almost in all cases a decree against vagrancy which in effect always amounted to compulsory labor when strictly applied" (Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 191). 30. The terminology for this arrangement varied regionally from "apprenticeship" in the British West Indies, to (ipatronato " in Cuba, to "state supervision" in Dutch Guiana. 31. Both Barbados and Antigua actually had out-migrations following slavery. 32. Such an explanation, while technically correct, ignores that fact that provisional grounds and homes during slavery were not simply "gratuitous" gifts but necessary concessions to slaves as a means of maintaining social order in slave society. As there are numerous accounts across the Americas of slave protest vis-a-vis policy toward provision grounds during slavery, it seems more accurate to say that planters were attempting to take away rights previously fought for and won by slaves. 33. Martinique and Guadeloupe combined elements of different cases, having less of a reliance on indentured labor than Trinidad and British Guiana and returning to preabolition sugar production levels sooner than Jamaica and Dutch Guiana. 34. Adding further intrigue to this situation was the fact that, as Moohr has noted, at least 157 freed slaves were known to have actually made their way to British Guiana in 1834 from Barbados and St. Kitts (Moohr, 1972, p. 602). Thus, the opportunity for such travel was demonstrably available to former slaves. 35. Eltis argues that across the Americas, most former slave attempts at small-scale "family farming" for export failed. Thus, former slaves, for the most part, formed a class of smallholders producing either for subsistence or for the domestic/local markets. Many post-emancipation societies were characterized by dual economies where a plantation sector employing indentured Asian labor and oriented to the international market functioned side by side with a village economy supplying domestic markets. In many cases, the former slaves attempted to produce for the international market in much the same way as the farmer of the Midwest, but, with relatively minor exceptions, the tropical regions could generate no crop with the sort of small-scale production techniques used on the family farms of North America. (Eltis, 1983, p. 267) 36. To reiterate, St. Kitts was a classic case of a "closed resource" region that should have required little coercion according to landilabor ratio theories. 37. Ten years after abolition, even on the British West Indies' three most densely populated islands, Barbados, St. Kitts and Antigua, the planters had been able to retain only 25%, 30% and 40%, respectively, of their former plantation slave populations (Bolland, 1981, p. 598). 38. Puerto Rico had a brief, three-year apprenticeship period, 1873-1876. However, by 1872, slaves accounted for a mere 2% of the total labor force. Cuba's slave population, at the same time, accounted for 25% of the labor force (Knight, 1970, p. 181). 39. Real wages for rural workers declined in the period 1870-1902 (Scott in Cross andHeuman, 1988, p. 81). 40. While this, of course, is somewhat strained language, it illustrates the extent to which even historians recognizing the varied combinations of labor forms found it difficult to reconcile this finding with a preconceived notion of capitalist production (presumably singularly identified with wage-labor). Note how "slavery" is depicted here as a "precapitalist" social system. 41. This analysis focuses on the Cuban sugar industry, as most slaves on tobacco farms had been replaced by Europeans and freed slaves by the 1850s. 42. Chinese coolies began arriving in Cuba in 1847. The diversity of the labor force aside, by 1899 the vast majority of colonos were Europeans—4,021 out of 4,541 (Scott,

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1985, p. 241). Former slaves owned or rented 4.5% of all farms for the same year (Scott, 1985, p. 241). 43. "In the same way that there had been distinctions under slavery between indentured and free Chinese, and between owned and rented slaves, a distinction was now made between the categories of permanent and temporary worker" (Scott, 1985, p. 233). 44. Hence, seasonal labor had its decided advantages for planters. "The more marked seasonality that characterized the employment of free labor also operated to planters' advantage, relieving them of direct maintenance costs of their workers during the dead season" (Scott, 1985, p. 280). 45. Of course, domestic work was not precisely new to women. It had always been their responsibility even while shouldering over 50% of the fieldwork. "The majority of women remained in the fields in harsh conditions and unlike the men, they had the dual burden of child care and housework on top of their agricultural work. As Levy points out in Barbados slave women in the fields 'toiled as strenuously as the men, carried baskets of manure weighing as much as 70 pounds, and when they returned to their cottages at night faced additional family duties.'" (Momsen in Cross and Heuman, 1988, p. 144). 46. While Indian males outnumbered females on an order of four to one, the use of women in the general division of labor apparently mirrored that of the earlier arrangement under slavery. "In general, indentured laborers of both sexes were treated as severely as slaves had been since many estate managers wished to extract the maximum returns from their investment in labor during the period of the contract. There was little gender division of labor and women were expected to perform a wide range of tasks on the plantation." (Momsen in Cross and Heuman, 1988, p. 147). 47. "Starting about 1860 the centuries-old structure of the sugar industry was shattered to be replaced by completely new forms of production and even by a new form of the final product itself, a sugar produced to different standards and shipped in different packaging" (Fraginals, 1985, p. 3). 48. The 1871 U.S. Sugar Act forced virtually all sugar from the Caribbean sold in the United States to be transported on U.S. vessels and sold at prices determined by monopolistic structures within the New York Produce Exchange. 49. All slaves assumed the title patrocinado after 1880, and all slave owners that of patrono. 50. The British West Indies experienced a similar—though not as dramatic—drop in its number of slaves following the end of the slave trade. From 1808 until just before the abolition of slavery, 1830, the slave population of the British West Indies fell from 800,000 to 650,000 (Tinker, 1974, p. 1). The fact that slave societies in the British West Indies of this period did not experience any great transformation suggests the limited meaning of such "freedom" and of emancipation in general. 51. There was a marked disproportionality in the distribution of these patrocinados. While the sugar region of Matanzas held 26.7% of all slaves in 1861, Matanzas held 36.5% of all patrocinados by 1886 (Scott, 1983, p. 473). This mirrors the pattern of manumissions in Brazil in the 1850-1888 period, with the majority of freed slaves originating in areas of minimal slave activity. 52. After 1838, tens of thousands of African contract laborers were forced to the Caribbean (Engerman, 1986, p. 329). 53. The recruiting of Madeiran labor was, in fact, attacked as a "white slave trade" (Clarence-Smith, 1984, p. 31). 54. Jamaica, though hesitant at first to participate, eventually took in a large number as well, as did Guadeloupe, Martinique and Surinam. Barbados, however, took none.

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55. Through the mid-1890s, the British West Indies averaged an annual migration of 7,000 to 9,000 persons (Engerman, 1986, p. 332). 56. The policing of colonial planters by the home countries varied. In Dutch Guiana, in the last decade of slavery one-fifth of all planters had been issued fines (Emmer, 1993, p. 8). 57. Over 100,000 Chinese coolies were forced to Peru between 1850 and 1874 (Foner, 1983, p. 23). 58. The nature of contract labor from the Canary Islands in Cuba operated in much the same way as that of Chinese labor. The Company to Import Free Laborers was formed in order to bring immigrants from the Canary Islands. The immigrants were brought under conditions similar to those under which the Chinese had been brought. They had to sign a contract obliging them to work until they had paid the expenses of their trip, which had been advanced by the contracting intermediary. In order to repay him, the immigrant had to subtract one percent from the monthly wage of eight pesos stipulated by the contract. (Iglesias, 1985, p. 65) 59. This was distributed as follows: 11,888 to British Guiana, 5,403 to Trinidad and 4,500 to Jamaica (Erickson, 1934, p. 138). 60. This figure, similar to the Chinese percentage of women, points to an odd lacuna in general slave historiographies of the Americas. For whatever reason, there is virtually no notion of Chinese or Indian "sexuality." This absence stands out in the context of the extensive treatment of African sexuality vis-a-vis Europeans and Native Americans throughout the literature on slavery in the Americas, which is (1) a constantly recurring theme following the work of Freyre and Tannenbaum and (2) reflected in most Latin American/Caribbean cultures where there still exists a plethora of terms for the children of mixed unions. 61. "When the imperial government launched upon its free-trade policy in 1846, the price of sugar fell, wages decreased, the marginal planters were forced into bankruptcy, economic depression overtook the sugar islands, and general panic reigned among the planter class. The result was that the planters refused to renew labor engagements with the coolies at the old wage rates and that the coolies became wandering vagrants in an effort to find employment" (Erickson, 1934, p. 140). 62. Jamaica's numbers remained comparatively low in part due to organized opposition within Jamaica to increased competition. "Opposition to the coolie emigration [in Jamaica] was growing. A powerful element of the population under missionary influence strongly resented the introduction of outside laborers of any kind who would compete with the Blacks" (Erickson, 1934, p. 137). 63. The Dutch began the large-scale colonization of Indonesia in the 1870s. 64. British Guiana planters imported 28,000 free slaves from the West Indies (along with indentured West African laborers), 200,000 East Indians, 16,000 Chinese coolies and 8,000 Portuguese agricultural laborers (Kloosterboer, 1960, p. 8). 65. British Guiana's village populations rose from 15,906 in 1842, to 29,000 in 1847, and 46,368 by 1851 (Moohr, 1972, p. 602). 66. Importantly, social relations had almost no credibility or social legitimacy among the general population. This was unlike, for example, in much of Europe, where one could more readily appeal to national/religious traditions and/or cultural icons to impose social order in emerging capitalist societies. 67. Obviously, restrictions on freed slave political practices were resolutely enforced, as Foner's suffrage data from the British West Indies indicate. Jamaica had an 1860 population of 500,000 and an electorate of 3,000. British Guiana had a 1990 population of 270,000 and an electorate of 2,046. Barbados had an 1850 population of

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150,000 and an electorate of 147. Grenada had an 1850 population of 32,600 and an electorate of 191. St. Vincent had an 1850 population of 32,600 and an electorate of 273 (Foner, 1983, p. 23). 68. Only a few coolies ever went to Puerto Rico, while a handful of migrants from other parts of the West Indies made their way to plantations in Ponce, Humacao, Loiza and Carolina. 69. "Prior to the final abolition of slavery, there had been several inhibitions to the enactment of laws specifically suppressing vagrancy. First, there seemed a danger that such laws would reduce white workers to something very like the status of slaves. While employers might not have minded that, the tactic could inhibit immigration, vitiating one of the hoped-for consequences of the move toward abolition, an increased supply of white labor" (Scott, 1985, p. 218). 70. In addition to this, it is good to recall the financial contributions of the European working classes. "Through a regressive tax system the British working classes paid the bill for abolition" (Foner, 1983, p. 14). 71. "Under slavery according to one contemporary, there had been 'no magistrates, and no police;' crime was dealt with by individual planters. Now the judiciary became a major means of disciplining the Black labor force" (Foner, 1983, p. 24).

Chapter 4

The Legacy of Brazilian Slavery Having explored the historical and theoretical origin of wage-labor within 18th/19th-century political economy and having delineated the role of extramarket forces in shaping the abolitions of serfdom and slavery, it is necessary now to turn to the specific history of Brazilian abolition so as to further develop the principal themes of this work. This consideration of Brazilian abolition will help to establish, on one hand, that for former slaves in Brazil the development of a postslave society did not result in (nor was it intended to result in) a transition from slave-labor to wage-labor. Rather, Brazilian rulers oversaw the creation of a distinctly heterogeneous working class comprising a myriad of race-based labor forms. Paramount in the effort to construct this working class was the role of extramarket forces. Indeed, as Polanyi has emphasized in the case of Europe, painstaking efforts were made to assure that, with respect to land and labor, market forces were held in strict abeyance throughout this period. BRAZILIAN SLAVERY IN CONTEXT As noted in the introductory chapter, three dominant themes influenced Brazilian development as a slave-based society: (1) Brazil's degree of participation in slave-based production, (2) Brazil's tradition of manumission prior to abolition and (3) the extent of diversification within Brazil's slave-based society. Before concentrating on events shaping Brazilian slave history in particular, therefore, it will be helpful to place Brazilian slavery in the context of other regions in the slaveholding Americas with respect to these three factors. In regard to the degree of participation in slave-based production, there are three important measures: (1) Brazil's participation in terms of absolute volume, (2) its duration and (3) the significant lapse in time between the closing of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery. While there is much dispute regarding

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the absolute numbers involved in the slave trade, it is generally agreed that between 10 to 15 million Africans were kidnapped over the course of four centuries.1 Of these, approximately 1.5 to 2 million Africans perished in the Middle Passage. The majority of slaves brought to the Americas arrived in the 18th century and first half of the 19th century—four-fifths of the total slave trade occurred in this period. Prior to 1700, 2.2 million Africans had been kidnapped. Spanish America and Brazil combined accounted for two-thirds of all slaves in the Americas.2 From 1600 to 1650, Brazil averaged 4,000 slaves annually. From 1650 to 1700, Brazil averaged 7,000. By the 1820s, Brazil was averaging 32,000 slaves a year. Cuba and Puerto Rico each averaged 12,000 annually for this period. Brazil's peak came in the 1840s at 34,000.3 By the time Brazil's slave trade was shut down, over 3.6 million Africans had been forced to its shore. This was one-half of the total (7 million) going to all of the Americas (excluding the British West Indies and North America). Spanish America accounted for 1.5 million, while the French Antilles received 1.2 million slaves.4 Hence, Brazil's participation in the African slave trade (both its duration and its intensity) remained proportionately far ahead of that of any other slave society for over nearly four centuries. There was considerable variation across slave societies with respect to the length of the lapse between the end of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery as a legal labor form. Table 4.1 provides the years for these across the Americas. This period of "transition" was the time used by slave societies to refashion labor arrangements in preparation for a postslave social order. Brazil was not only one of the last to cut off the slave trade but was also one of only two slave societies that had inordinately long delays from the time of abolition of the slave trade to the abolition of slavery (38 years).5 The other was the United States with a 57-year delay.6 The significance of this delay for Brazil lay in the opportunity it afforded Brazilians to solicit European labor and pursue other legal arrangements in preparation for the eventual creation of a large "free" African laboring class.7 While Brazil's level of participation in slave production was unrivaled in absolute numbers, the slave population of Brazil as a proportion of the overall population was well below rates in the British and French West Indies.8 At its height in 1841, Cuba's 436,495 slaves represented 43% of the total population, which was comparable with Brazil in this regard. A number of slave societies had far fewer slaves as a proportion of their populations.9 The difference between Brazil and other slave-based societies reflected, in large part, the more diversified economic activity across Brazil that emerged as corollary activities to the principal plantation-based export crop. Whereas the British and French islands relied heavily on imports from the colonizer, along with the subsistence production of the slave population, Brazil's development of cattle ranching, shipping industries, lumber and hide production—while all reliant on slave labor—all acted to expand economic activities beyond export-commodity production. Most importantly, contributing to this process—and indeed making

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it possible—were the comparatively high rates of manumission and thus the growth of a freed slave population in Brazil. Table 4.1 Years of Ending Slave Trade/Abolition across the Americas Country

End of Slave Trade

Haiti Denmark Britain United States Dominican Republic Holland France Puerto Rico Brazil Cuba Peru Bolivia Uruguay Chile Mexico Argentina Venezuela Colombia Ecuador

1791 1802 1808 1808* 1822*** 1826 1831 1840's 1850 1864

__.. _.._ ____ _.__ ____ ._._ __.. __..

Abolition of Slavery (Free-Womb Laws) 1791 1848/1863 1834 1865 (varied)** 1822 1863 1848 1873 1888(1871) 1886(1870) 1854(1821) 1851(1831) 1842(1825) 1823 1830 1853(1813) 1854(1821) 1851 (1821) 1851 (1821)

* While the U.S. slave trade was ended in 1808, the decision to end the slave trade had actually been made 20 years earlier as part of a constitutional debate resulting in the "Great Compromise." The United States' internal slave trade, meanwhile, persisted up to the Civil War. ** Slavery remained a legal labor form in many northern states into the mid-19th century. Pennsylvania passed a free-womb law in 1780, and slavery continued until 1840. Similar dates for Rhode Island were 1784 and 1842, for Connecticut 1784 and 1848, for New York 1799 and 1827, and New Jersey 1804 and 1846. *** A Haitian invasion freed Dominican slaves in 1822.

In the 18th century, freed slaves represented less than 10% of the 380,000 slaves in the British West Indies and less than 6% of the 660,000 slaves in the French West Indies. By the late 18th century, the British West Indies had 13,000 freed slaves, 467,000 slaves and 53,000 Europeans. St. Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe had 30,000 freed slaves, 575,000 slaves and 52,000 Europeans. Klein estimates that in 1800, for the Americas as a whole, there were approximately 1.8 million freed slaves living beside 3 million slaves (Klein, 1986, p. 224). For the same year, Brazil had 1.2 million slaves and 500,000 freed slaves. The majority of these freed slaves in the Americas tended to be squatters, engaged in truck farming. "[The freed slave population] was a major element of the truck-farming industry and formed the bulk of the subsistence

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farming population in most areas where slavery was the dominant institution" (Klein, 1986, p. 237). Spanish America exhibited a distinct pattern. By the end of the 18th century, the number of freed slaves had surpassed the slave population.10 Cuba and Puerto Rico were the exceptions. In Cuba the freed slave population— growing from 54,000 in 1792 to 232,000 just before abolition in 1864—could not outpace the growth of the slave population from 85,000 to 371,000 for those same years. Brazil, possessing the fastest-growing freed slave population for the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, moved from 406,000 freed slaves and 1 million slaves in 1780 to 4.2 million freed slaves and 1.5 million slaves by 1872.11 Curiously enough, the long experience with a large freed slave population and the extensive development of corollary economic activities besides primary plantation production did not curtail the application of Brazil's slave-labor to almost every conceivable task inside and outside the plantation. Slaves could be found employed in every facet of Brazilian society. This was generally not the case outside Brazil. Most slave societies in the Americas did not develop any significant slave-based economic activities outside of export-based agriculture. Only Cuba could compare with Brazil's diverse use of slave-labor throughout the economy.12 Humble Beginnings and British Subjugation For the sake of convenient, schematic exposition, most, if not all, (economic) histories of Brazil depict its development as following the trajectory of continuously unfolding boom/bust export cycles.13 This depiction of Brazilian economic development from the 16th century may aid historians in highlighting certain long-term, large-scale changes such as regional integration and the impact of global markets. However, it is not necessarily the most apt approach for constructing a more elaborate understanding of the historical evolution of Brazil's social, economic and political institutions and processes. At the same time that sugar, gold, coffee and rubber were rising and falling over a four-century period, supplanting one another in national importance, a host of further changes was transforming Brazil. Politically, Brazil went from formal colony, to kingdom, to empire, to republic. Socially, Brazilian society was transformed by a rapidly growing freed slave population and the ongoing kidnapping of Africans to Brazil, migration of Europeans to Brazil and movement of slaves, freed slaves and Europeans intraregionally. Economically, Brazilian society underwent increased regional specialization and integration (consequently diminishing the hegemonic impact of sugar, gold and coffee over time) and a gradual shift from an emphasis on British markets to U.S. markets.14 Rural land tenure patterns were established based on the relationship between constantly migrating, large-scale plantation production and subsistence truck farming by freed slaves and Europeans. Urban populations, meanwhile, continued to swell under successive waves of European immigrants and freed slaves.

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The Portuguese crown wasted little time in establishing a settler colony following Pedro Alvares Cabral's celebrated 1500 landing on the coast of present-day Brazil. For the next 300 years, Brazil developed first as a colony of (and then home to) the Braganza Court (1807-1822) under Portuguese dominion, while—in the words of Manchester—Portugal itself remained "practically an English commercial vassal" from 1642 to 1825 (Manchester, 1972, p. 1). Initial efforts to establish a brazilwood trade did not precisely "take off." From 1500 to 1532 the Portuguese could muster only an average of three to five ships a year. Dom Joao III, following the Portuguese practice in the Atlantic Islands, established a string of captaincies in 1534. Fifteen years later, in 1549, Tome de Souza was installed as the governor-general, and a government was established in Sao Salvador. The Brazilian coast was divided into 15 captaincies extending inland to a line earlier established by the ambitious Treaty of Tordesillas. Grantees were given the right by the crown to use 20% of the land for personal use and to retain 50% of the value of products extracted from the land. Limited civil and commercial jurisdiction was granted to each captaincy, while all trade with Portugal was free, and all trade with others carried a 15% tariff. At first, no hereditary land rights were issued. Along with being unable to sell or pass on holdings, land not used for six years had to be returned to the crown. (This edict making land noninheritable was soon overturned, as the crown found few interested in the investment otherwise.)15 With Portugal's break from the 60-year grip of the Spanish crown in 1640, it entered nearly immediately into the so-called Triple Treaties of 1642, 1654 and 1661 with the British. The original 1642 treaty, in large measure, established the basic pattern for the next 200 years. The treaty granted Britain most-favored-nation status (along with important extraterritorial jurisdiction), provided immunity from Portuguese law and secured religious tolerance for British subjects in Portugal. In return, the British extended to Portugal official recognition of its independence from the Spanish crown. The 1654 treaty expanded the conditions obtained by the British in Portugal to Brazil and Western Africa. The 1661 treaty added, importantly, a secret agreement to defend Portugal. By means of the Methuen Treaty of 1703, some 42 years later, the British gained crucial British access to Portuguese and Brazilian markets. By opening the Portuguese markets to woolen goods and British markets to Portuguese wine, the Portuguese had unwittingly set in motion a substantial transfer of wealth (in the form of Brazilian gold) from their colonial holding to the British, a not too inconsiderable event in the subsequent rise of the British empire itself.16 It was a relationship which had enabled them to absorb the vast riches which had come after the discovery of gold and diamonds in Brazil, and Carvalho e Melio (Marquis do Pombal) believed that the great amount of capital produced in the mines had passed almost completely to Britain. . . . The Portuguese market was a guaranteed and lucrative outlet for British manufactured goods. Portugal had in fact allowed her ownrichesto be used against herself, so that the wealth of the mines was an illusion. "The Negroes that

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work the mines of Brazil must be clothed by England," Carvalho e Mello observed, "thus the value of their produce becomes relative to the price of cloth." (Maxwell, 1968, p. 610) The Triple Treaties of 1642, 1654 and 1661, along with the Methuen Treaty, would have a lasting impact on the development of Brazil both internally and within the global economy. A stream of woolens was to flow from England to Portuguese possessions through the gateway of Lisbon and Oporto, where trade was admitted. In time, Brazil came to absorb the greater part of the stream.17 The return came to England largely in the shape of wines from Portugal and gold from Brazil. By the treaties of 1642-'54-'61 England secured its privileged position in Portuguese commerce; by the Methuen Treaty Portugal tied England to its side and an economic basis for commercial exchange favorable to both contracting parties was worked out. (Manchester, 1972, p. 25) Thus, this was the formal international arrangement within which Brazilian society evolved—a unique historical circumstance in which Portugal, submerged within a protectorate status vis-a-vis England, operated as a formal caretaker for 322 years, repelling the Dutch in Pernambuco, promoting growth through mercantile monopoly companies under Marquis do Pombal, subsidizing expanded colonization of the interior and—in large part—directly and indirectly profiting British industry. The Origins of a Race-Based Division of Labor Embarking upon the development of sugar plantations in the northeast in the mid-16th century, a decision had first to be made as to who exactly was going to work these plantations. The Portuguese had their previous experience of using Africans to draw upon from the Atlantic Islands. At the same time, it is estimated that upon Portugal's "settlement" of Brazil there were at least 1.5 million Native Americans dispersed throughout the colony. Notwithstanding the presence of 1.5 million "savages" living beside them, the Portuguese cried out— and legions of historians would subsequently echo their call—that there was a labor shortage. When one considers that at its height—and this for only two or three decades in the mid-19th century—the Brazilian slave population barely rose above 1.5 million and that for at least 90% of the time the number of slaves was far below this level, it seems clear that Brazil, in 1534, did not have a labor shortage. Rather, Brazil had a slave shortage—which is, indeed, quite another matter.18 In other words, it lacked not labor in the abstract but servile (slave-) labor in particular. This is hardly to argue that Native Americans were treated as equals by Europeans or, for that matter, that they were treated better than Africans. It is simply to say that they were treated (and conceptualized) differently than Africans.19 Indeed, from the European's beginnings in Brazil, Native Americans were captured and enslaved.20 At the same time, however, from the European's

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beginnings in Brazil there were no less than six categorical pronouncements against the enslavement of Native Americans. The fact that there were six such pronouncements and that they were spread over a 300-year period demonstrates (1) the extent to which Native Americans continued to be enslaved and (2) the extent to which the treatment of Native Americans was distinct from that of Africans (at least de jure). The six pronouncements included Pope Paul III in 1537, King Sebastao I in 1570 (except when captured in war), Spain's Phillip II in 1595, Marquis do Pombal in 1755, a new ban in 1775 and outright the abolition of Native American slavery in 1831. This final ban came a mere 57 years prior to that for Africans. This date of abolition is significant, additionally, as it came at a time when the African slave trade was being choked off, thus emphasizing the distinction between African and Native American slaves even at the time of a much feared slave-labor shortage. In this sense, Brazil's race-based division of labor clearly predates the abolition of slavery. The distinct treatment of African and Native American labor further highlights the extent to which European notions of race shaped the division of labor in the Americas from the initial days of colonization. The "categorical" nature of legal slavery in Brazil was exemplified by the frequent practice of captured fugitive slaves to appeal to their physical features as evidence of their having been "wrongly" enslaved. Russell-Wood provides a telling example of such from the 18th century. [In one case, a] 14-year old male canarim, a native of Goa, who was induced to take a Lisbon-bound Indiaman, left the ship in Salvador, and accompanied one Domingos Vaz who was taking a consignment of slaves to Minas Gerais. On the way they were attacked by a group of runaway slaves and Vaz was killed. Sold as a slave to settle the estate of the deceased, the Goan endured beatings administered by a succession of owners. In his mid-fifties, he finally brought his plight to the attention of the governor of Minas Gerais. At issue was whether the luckless Asiatic could have legitimately been enslaved. In 1765, by "visual inspection" the governor ruled that he should not have been enslaved. The basis for this decision lay neither in pigmentation nor physiognomy, but solely on the straightness of his hair. (Russell-Wood, 1982, p. 24) It is important to bear in mind that European migration through 1700 was heavily male, contributing to the high rates of rape of African and Native American women and other forms of miscegenation. The social categorization of their offspring remained conscious of the patriarchal lineage. Indeed, certain terms such as "mameluco" (the offspring of a European male and Native American female) explicitly identified the ethnicity of the father. In keeping with the 13th-century Spanish Justinian Code, most Spanish and Portuguese slave societies observed Las Siete Partidas, which, among other provisions, held that the child's status followed that of the mother. "Whiteness" was itself legally defined by "degrees of whiteness." "Public office in the service of the Crown was closed to any Black or 'mulatto within the four degrees to which mulattism constitutes an impediment'" (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 111).

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The rationale for the exclusive use of Africans as slaves had its roots in both racial ideology as well as economic profit. In fact, Furtado argues that it was not until sugar proved a profitable enterprise that Africans were kidnapped in significant numbers from across the Atlantic. "The profitability of the sugar business was well ensured by the time African slaves began to arrive in the necessary numbers as the basis for a more efficient production system with a higher degree of capitalization" (Furtado in Genovese, 1973b, p. 11). At the same time, of even greater importance in the economic rationale of transporting millions of Africans across thousands of miles of ocean was the profitability of the slave trade itself. The use of slave-labor on American soil aside, the actual trade by Europeans in African peoples was, as remarked upon earlier, a critical consideration in the historical evolution of, and ultimate conclusion to, the kidnapping of 10-15 million Africans over four centuries. Kowarick (and others) has argued that, in fact, much of the rationale behind slavery lay in the profitable nature of the slave trade and that the slave trade itself came to justify the practice of slavery rather than the practice of slavery justifying the slave trade. Regardless of whether one accepts the full implications of this notion, Kowarick's observations, nonetheless, highlight the unique capacity of slavery to turn the very procurement of labor into a profitable enterprise. The practice of slavery in the Americas was premised not only on the slave as a distinct form of coerced labor but on the slave as a distinct racial type. In this way, limiting the category of "slave" to kidnapped Africans turned the slave trade itself into a profitable business that directly contributed to capital accumulation in Europe. King Sugar From the mid-16th century through the late 17th century, Brazilian growth was synonymous with sugar production in the northeastern captaincies of Pernambuco and Bahia. Indeed, for the first two centuries, the northeast—fed by the two ports of Recife and Salvador (Bahia)—represented vibrant economic and social centers. As early as 1570, there were 60 sugar mills in operation with populations of 17,000 Europeans and 13,000 slaves (which included both Native Americans and Africans). From 1570 the kidnapping of Africans picked up so that by 1600 there were 20,000 African slaves in Brazil. Engenhos represented the basic production unit for the sugar industry.21 Such engenhos consisted of a sugar mill and its associated land and equipment. These units were self-sufficient and capable of producing all the basic items of consumption. "Most necessities, such as food, housing, and crude cloth for slaves' clothing were produced on the engenho" (Taylor, 1978, p. 26). There were four basic social classes involved in the production process on engenhos. First there were the slaves, whose labor was applied intensively throughout the sugar production process. The slaves performed many kinds of tasks. They were the hoers, cutters, porters, loaders, and carters of the sugar cane. In the manufacturing process, the slaves ground the cane,

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crystallized the liquid, and removed the waste; they boiled, refined and packed the sugar. All the activities on the sugar estate—in the fields and in the mill—were carried on by the slaves. Thus the basis of land use on the Brazilian plantation was slave labor; the basis of slave labor was the hoe. (Prado, 1976, p. 106) At the same time, there was a large nonslave population associated with the plantation, including freed slaves and Europeans. Despite the essential truth of Antonil's dictum22 that "the slaves are the hands and feet of the sugar-mill owner," nevertheless, there was a place, albeit small, for free colored labor on sugar plantations. . . . The free Black or free mulatto willing to renounce part of his independence could find employment as an overseer in agriculture, cattle-raising, or mining. In fact this could be the first step towards social integration in the free world. (Russell-Wood, 1982, p. 61) The nonslave population consisted of moradores (or agregados), lavradores and donatarios (or plantation owners). Like slaves, moradores provided for their own subsistence. 23 The moradores, as a social class, had their numbers first rise precipitously in the 18th century. Moradores were "free" agricultural workers living subsistence lives while being tied to a specific plantation. They were given a plot of land for either a flat fee or a percentage of their yields. Lavradores had existed prior to moradores. Lavradores either owned their own plot of land or were given a plot to cultivate by the donatario. The lavradores would then turn over a portion of their yield based on a predetermined arrangement. Whereas the moradore did not necessarily grow sugar, lavradores were expected to produce cane specifically for the sugar mill. A strict racial hierarchy ran through this division of labor. Lavradores were invariably European, while moradores included mulattoes, freed slaves and caboclos (the offspring of Europeans and Native Americans). 24 At the same time, it is not precisely accurate to portray the engenho as "self-sufficient," as Furtado has pointed out. Brazilian sugar plantations provided a market for a variety of products, including sources of power (firewood, draft animals) as well as lumber for construction. Through the 18th century, beef was the only article of consumption produced in Brazil. Indeed, while cattle breeding had emerged in the northeast in conjunction with the expansion of sugar production, such activity proved relatively unprofitable. Estimates are that the initial incomes attributed to the cattle economy in the northeast did not exceed 5% of the value of sugar imports. (Furtado, 1963, p. 63). Cattle breeding in the northeast, in fact, tended over the centuries of sugar's decline to contract and expand in rhythmic pattern with sugar's ups and downs. The northeast's cattle sector operated as a satellite economy of the dominant sugar industry. The cattle producers tended not to rely on significant amounts of capital investment, and whenever the sugar economy faltered, the cattle producers would simply return to a subsistence living. This flexible expansion/contraction was a hallmark of much of Brazil's economy at the time

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and describes well the nature of the relationship between the dominant sugar industry and those sectors that emerged on its periphery. The scale of sugar's rise and fall was impressive. At its height, in the 1650s, Brazil's sugar exports amounted to £3 million, a sum greater than all of British exports for the same period (Kowarick, 1987, p. 14). As detailed earlier, by the close of the 17th century, sugar's climb was ending. Meanwhile, the Dutch, who had been expelled from Pernambuco in 1654, provided the impetus for the sugar industry's development in the Caribbean that subsequently reshaped the world market.25 Nonetheless, it is important to recognize, in putting the cyclical boom/bust interpretation of Brazilian economic history in perspective, that sugar retained an important economic role in the Brazilian economy well after its initial decline. In 1760, 70 years after the discovery of gold in Minas Gerais, sugar exports continued to outpace the value of mining exports. Nineteenth-century sugar exports were 500% above the value of sugar exports in their 17th-century apogee. Consistent with this, even at mining's peak, only 20% of Brazilian slaves were sent to mining regions, while over 40% continued in agriculture. "Although declining in quantity and value, [sugar] continued to head Brazilian export lists in every year throughout the rest of the 17th century and most of the 18th, except during the peak years of the Brazilian gold boom in the mid- 1700s" (Huggins, 1985, pp. 5-6). Table 4.2 traces the value of individual export commodities as a percentage of all exports over a 400-year period (1500-1910), making it clear that the importance of sugar, as an export commodity, never waned through Brazil's first three and a half centuries. "Brazil had lost its near monopoly of the world's sugar supply in the middle of the 17th century, but sugar remained Brazil's major cash crop throughout the colonial period" (Bethell in Bethell, 1989, p. 46). Table 4.2 Value of Selected Export Products as a Percentage of All Exports* Years

Sugar

1500-1822 1821-1830 1831-1840 1841-1850 1851-1860 1861-1870 1871-1880 1881-1890 1891-1900 1900-1900

56% 30.1% 24% 26.7% 21.2% 12.3% 11.8% 9.9% 6% 1.2%

Gold/ Diamond 31.7% 20.6% 10.8% 7.5% 7.5% 18.3% 9.5% 4.2% 2.4% 2.1%

Cotton

Coffee

Tobacco

Cacao

Hides

2.2% 18.4% 43.8% 41.4% 48.8% 45.4% 56.6% 61.5% 64.5% 51.3%

.7% 2.5% 1.9% 1.8% 2.6% 3% 3.4% 8% 15.8% 27.9%

2.2% 1.3% .3% .4% 2.3% 3.1% 5.5% 3.2% 1.5% 2.8%

2.8% 13.6% 7.9% 1% 1% 6% 1.2% __._ — _...

— ____ — 8.5% 7.2% 5.6% — „ _ _

Source: Eisenberg, 1974, p. 5. * Rubber, as a percentage of all exports, was negligible with the exception of the 1861-1870 period when it accounted for .9% of all exports.

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It should be remembered as well that, despite concentrating its resources on the sugar region and its contiguous northern cattle-breeding zone, Brazil continued to steal land from the Native American population throughout the 17th century. Ceara was established in 1612. Maranhao was taken from the French in 1615, and a campaign to colonize Parana got under way in 1648. Hence, the sugar era was marked by periods of expansion and contraction, the creation of complementary economic activities (cattle breeding) and a set of social relations of production that was dominated by a hegemonic former donatario class, with a vast social layer of slaves and landless agricultural workers separated from the former donatarios by a sizable lavradore class. At the same time, it remained the case throughout the sugar era that those economic enterprises that sprang up in combination with (or feeding off) the primary export production were aimed principally at subsistence, not at the development of a domestic economy. Willems has demonstrated the resiliency of such subsistence communities in the Sao Paulo region, many of which survived into the mid-20th century. Spinning and weaving of locally grown cotton was, as all censuses clearly indicate, so common that the purchase of commercially available textiles must have been considered a luxury rather than a necessity. Salt and locally manufactured iron tools could probably be bartered for agricultural produce or labor. Actually this type of subsistence economy remained virtually unchanged until the third decade of the present century, and in some of the areas covered by the censuses under scrutiny significant sectors of the system were still intact in the middle forties. (Willems, 1970, p. 33)26 The Ascent of Mining and the Growing Freed Slave Population While the 18th century was marked economically by a sizable shift of resources to mining, of equal, if not greater, (long-term) impact were the Methuen Treaty of 1703 (effectively transferring the bounty of Brazil's mines to Britain), the Navigation Act of 1751 (excluding Dutch ships from colonial trade), the Portuguese policies of protectionism (impeding Brazilian manufacturing and establishing monopoly trading companies for further colonization) and the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759. Socially, the 18th century was a period of enormous increase in the number of imported slaves (along with the number of freed slaves), the beginnings of vagrancy laws to force the "free" population to work for wages (not unlike the French and British ruling class' reliance on La Chapelier and Speenhamland) and a wave of unsettling slave rebellions centered in Bahia. In addition, an increasing regional specialization was emerging across Brazil, and this was reflected in the cargo passing through shipping ports. Recife concentrated on sugar and lumber, while Bahia (Salvador) expanded its exports of gold, silver, diamonds (from the mines in Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso and Goias),27 cocoa and cotton.28 Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, handled gold, silver and hides. British domination of Portugal continued to cast its long shadow over Brazilian development. Two factors in particular—the British "free trade" policy vis-a-vis Portugal and the concomitant Portuguese mercantile policy vis-a-vis

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Brazil—framed Brazil's options throughout its 18th-century mining era. As discussed earlier, though the Methuen Treaty was written ostensibly to open Portuguese markets to British woolen goods and British markets to Portuguese wines, it had the unintended consequence of transferring vast volumes of wealth to the British. In no small way this transfer of Brazilian gold directly contributed to England's capacity for early manufacturing, enhanced England's import capacity and served as an accumulation of reserves that made the Bank of England the world's principal financial source. For an appreciation of the scale of riches taken from Brazil's mines it must be recalled that the total value of all the gold taken from Brazil's mines from 1600 to 1828 tipped the scales at £130 million. From 1700 to 1770 Brazilian gold equaled the total value of all the gold mined in all the rest of the Americas from 1492 to 1850 (or almost one-half as much as the entire Eastern Hemisphere for the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries).29 In light of this appreciable drain of wealth, the Portuguese crown, in the person of the Marquis do Pombal, spearheaded a series of protectionist measures designed to promote a rerouting of Brazil's wealth to the Portuguese empire from the mid-18th century. The formation of the Companhia Grao-Para e Maranhao in 1755 and the Companhia Gera de Pernambuco e Paraiba in 1759 had the intention of breaking the foreign credit monopoly of the British so as to expand commerce.30 In addition, the Portuguese expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759 facilitated the exploitation of Native Americans in the Para and Amazonas region (along with the area's natural resources), expanding the national export economy.31 For the first half of the 18th century the Jesuit-dominated region of Para had been exporting forest products: cocoa, vanilla, cinnamon and cloves. The Jesuits had developed a reputation for enlisting Native American labor while causing minimal disruption to their lives. The explicit strategy of the Jesuits was to leave the Native Americans within their own communities and to, thereby, secure their voluntary cooperation. Following the expulsion of the Jesuits, there was an active campaign to transform the Native American population into smallholders producing for local and domestic markets. In 1759 [Marquis do Pombal] expelled the Jesuits and placed their former Indian wards within a system of civilian control designed to turn them into productive subjects of the crown and possible defenders of the northern and western frontiers of the colony—in other words to change the Indians from tribesmen to peasants by drawing them into the cash economy and the wage-labor market. (Schwartz in Russell-Wood, 1975, p. 139) At the same time that British and Portuguese policies were reshaping the organization of the Brazilian national economy, the 18th century witnessed a considerable leap in the number of slave kidnappings. This development led to both an expansion of the number of African ethnic groups being stolen as well as an increase in the freed slave population, thus heightening the potential for African rebellion. At the same time, though the increase in slave trading was, indeed, appreciable, caution must be exercised when linking this increase to the 18th-century, mining-dominated economy. As mentioned earlier, only 20% of all slaves kidnapped and brought to Brazil in the 18th century were sent to the

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mining regions. Still, the numbers were remarkable. For the years 1500-1700, Brazil had averaged 2,750 slaves a year. Again, the entire Atlantic slave trade from 1500-1850 averaged just over 22,000 slaves a year. In the 18th century, Brazil averaged 27,272 slaves a year. The entire Atlantic slave trade averaged 61,000 slaves a year throughout the 18th century. Important distinctions in the ethnic/linguistic backgrounds of the Africans who were captured and brought to the Americas were, in large part, lost, or its social and political impact was greatly diminished, by the European practice of combining and dispersing homogeneous ethnic groups. Jose Honorio Rodrigues' seminal 1962 essay yielded important insights vis-a-vis Brazilian culture, slave culture and slave rebellion and the extent to which all of these had important implications for the organization of postslave communities (Rodrigues, 1962). The Africans brought to Brazil were principally West Africans from the Congo and Angola, along with East African Bantu-speaking peoples from Mozambique. The West Africans went primarily to Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro, while those from Mozambique were generally 19th-century arrivals who ended up in Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. The 18th-century discoveries of gold expanded the African region from which slaves were taken beyond the Congo and Angola to include the Costa da Mina (the present-day Gulf of Guinea). The ethnic groups drawn from these regions included Yoruba from Nigeria, Ewe and Aja from the Gold Coast (Ghana), Dahomey and Togo (of the Ashanti peoples) from the Gold Coast, the Hausa32 and Madinka from the Sudan and the Bantu-speaking peoples from Mozambique. Rodrigues is able to identify only three somewhat imprecise phases of the Brazilian slave trade. The Guinea slave trade coincided with the early granting of donatarios in the 16th century. The Angolan slave trade marked the 1600-1666 period, and from 1700 forward slaves were taken from all of the preceding locales. A factor not to be lost—revisited later—was the pattern in Brazil of generating a constant influx of new slaves combined with a comparatively high rate of manumission. Thus, second- and third-generation slaves were less common than elsewhere in the Americas, and the size of the freed slave population remained high throughout four centuries of Brazilian slavery. This had important implications for social unrest. It was the participation of such freed slaves in the 1798 Tailor's Revolt in Bahia that so worried colonial officials. The revolt itself was fairly short-lived, and—as a sign of the suspicion with which slave and freed slave communities often viewed one another—it had been foiled when revealed to officials by a slave coconspirator. The revolt, largely inspired by the French Revolution, called for the overthrow of the established republic, the opening of all official posts to all persons, the abolition of slavery and the opening of ports to free trade. The revolt was significant in the eyes of colonial officials, as it had been led by a freed slave population essentially seeking access to a closed civil society, as well as the fact that it came only eight years after the Haitian Revolution. 'The problem of slavery could not be resolved in their minds. A number of authors have pointed out the far more radical nature of the Bahian revolt of 1798, staged by artisans, many of whom were free Blacks and mulattos. Their program was simple—liberty,

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equality, fraternity and the total abolition of slavery" (Schwartz in Russell-Wood, 1975, p. 144). While many slaves were freed by "acts of benevolence" on the part of their owner, the most common route to manumission—and thus the creation of a freed slave population—was through one's purchase of freedom. Those most frequently in a position to purchase their own freedom were invariably those slaves employed in tasks independent from immediate supervision, performing piecework, as it were, and thus in a position to either (1) interact with market structures and a money economy culture or (2) be given the responsibility to oversee objects of value—such as the protection, transport or procurement of a given valued commodity. In this latter respect, slaves employed in mining were particularly well placed to accumulate a peculium. Hence, the 18th century saw an appreciable rise in the number of freed slaves throughout Brazil, and this was particularly concentrated in the mining regions. Minas Gerais' slave population rose swiftly from 50,000 to 96,000 from 1723 to 1735. However, with the decline in mining output by the 1780s, the three principal mining captaincies (Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso and Goias) experienced a slowdown and a retreat of European colonization. A large population of Africans and Native Americans was left behind. Life for the freed slave population in Brazil was not a great deal improved over their lot as slaves. The extent to which few legal and/or social distinctions were drawn between slaves and freed slaves has been remarked upon by many historians. Official discrimination and widespread social distrust did much to limit the role played by free Blacks and the free mulatto in colonial Brazil. Neither fish nor fowl, master nor slave, the free colored stood uneasily between the "Black world" of the slaves and the "white world." With the exception of the militia companies and the brotherhoods, themselves not entirely free of internal racial divisions, the free colored population was characterized by its lack of over-all solidarity or cohesion. As a class, it failed to find a place in the social structure of colonial Brazil. (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 130) Legally, many steps were taken to restrict the life of freed slaves. Attempts were made to prevent freed slaves from owning slaves. "An exhaustive analysis of 400 persons identified as landed growers or sharecroppers in the Bahian Reconcavo between 1680 and 1725 revealed only one pardo,33 who was the owner of 17 slaves and afazenda in Tararipe" (Russell-Wood, 1982, p. 58). At the same time, the 18th century marked the era of the first vagrancy laws in Brazil. Antivagrancy laws of 1704, 1729 and 1740 authorized the deportation of "gypsies, vagrants, and those with no address." A shift in the treatment of vagrants came in 1766, when laws were designed to force vagrants to move to towns. The occupations opened to the freed slave population generally fell into three categories. One could enter commercial or agricultural enterprises as agricultural workers, peddlers, miners or cattle ranchers, one could reenter

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slave-dominated production as overseers or technical workers, or one could join the ranks of casual unemployment. Russell-Wood surmises that for every successful freed slave 100 were struggling to survive (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 101). Within agriculture, freed slaves generally worked as moradores or as cattle ranchers. A significant number of freed slaves, however, worked smallholdings (without slaves) in the burgeoning tobacco and manioc industry in the Bahian Reconcavo region from the late 17th century. Additionally, it seems that from the late 18th century, freed slaves were dominating the shipping industry in Bahia. "In 1775 the governor of Bahia reported to Portugal that, of the 1,267 fishermen in the port, fewer than 100 were whites, the rest being mulattos and Negroes. By 1861 the free colored seem to have gained control of the local seafaring trades of Bahia and to have been important as well in maintaining deep-sea transatlantic ships' (Klein in Cohen and Greene, 1972, pp. 323-324). Former skilled artisan slaves did not fare too well. As freed slaves, to become an artisan one needed to be licensed by a town council. Very few succeeded. Those who did were invariably carpenters, tailors or shoemakers. The mechanical trades were dominated by Europeans.34 The professions of wet nurse, midwife and barber were treated differently. Wet nurses and midwives were, with rare exception, almost always freed slaves. Barbers were invariably slaves or freed slaves. For the years 1741-1749 and 1810-1822, there were 38 and 33 examinations given for barbers, respectively, in the city of Salvador. In the 1741-1749 period all those given an exam were Africans—17 slaves and 21 freed slaves. For the latter period, again, all were Africans—21 slaves and 13 freed slaves (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 103). Advertisements for wet nurses reflect the extent to which female slaves could be transformed by custom into simple machines. Whoever wants to buy a Creole slave, still a young girl with good milk and in great quantity, who gave birth 20 days ago, should go to Rua das Marrecas, facing toward the public plaza. . . . In the street behind Rua do Hospicio No. 27, we have for sale or for rent a Black woman of the Mina Nation with a six-day-old child, with very good milk and health. She is without vices or bad habits, since she is new in the country and does not even know how to get about in the streets. (Conrad, 1983, p. 134) Finally, the extensive use of escravos de ganho, slaves who were hired out by their owner, makes clear that, given the prominence of such slaves in all occupations, highly skilled to unskilled, the freed slave's predicament could derive only from rigid, systematic discrimination. Such discrimination could not be rationalized on the basis of racial superiority since (enslaved) Africans were already performing such skilled tasks. Thus, it could be based only on a conscious effort on the part of one social class (racially demarcated) to maintain its privileged economic and political position vis-a-vis another. "There was no occupation which could not count its Negroes de ganho [sic] ranging from navigators and sailors to coachmen, footmen, and an infinite variety of skills and semi-skills" (Russell-Wood, 1982, p. 35).35 As of 1780 Brazil's total population stood at 3 million—of these, 1 million were slaves and 406,000 were freed

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slaves. At the close of the 18th century, the total Brazilian population stood at 3.25 million—1.2 million slaves, 500,000 freed slaves and 1.1 million Europeans. The mining economy, already in decline by 1775, had never been characterized by large, slave-operated mines. In fact, with the European population increasing tenfold in the mining region, slaves were never even a majority of the population.36 Mining's high point was 1760, when its £2.5 million of gold and diamonds accounted for one-half of Brazil's £5 million of exports. This value dropped to £1 million by 1780. The mining region had developed in such a way as to concentrate a large number of freed slaves and Europeans in sprawling population centers in urban and semiurban settings across the mining region, supported by a growing market of common consumption goods. A southern cattle-breeding industry developed to feed the population, just as had occurred a century earlier in the north.37 The mining economy, however, represented an even greater opportunity for the cattle market than had been the case with respect to the sugar economy in the north, and the two came to be far more integrated than their counterparts to the north. While sugar's output declined and was sustained at a new, lower level, as discussed earlier, gold's production fell off completely. The result was the creation of a vast region of subsistence. Within only a few decades the entire mining industry had collapsed. As a result, the region's population found themselves dispersed across a vast zone of subsistence with poor communication and tremendous isolation. As a result of the size and scale of this enormous displaced population, they later emerged as a prominent community in Brazil (Furtado, 1963, p. 94). Hence, Brazil's 18th-century economy, as depicted by Furtado, was a collection of individual communities, some effectively connected and others isolated (Furtado, 1963, p. 96). There were two main nuclei—the sugar economy to the north and the mining economy to the south. Each was, in turn, connected to a northeastern and southern cattle economy. The two cattle economies were themselves connected by way of the Sao Francisco River. Additionally, to the north there were two "autonomous" centers—Maranhao and Para. Maranhao was actually linked to the sugar economy through cattle breeding on its periphery, while Para served primarily as a region of forest extraction.38 Heading into the 19th century, Brazil had not as yet developed a fully integrated, national economy. THE CENTURY OF TRANSFORMATION The 19th century ushered in a host of spectacular political, economic and social transformations whose influences can be seen up to this day. In the space of a single century, Brazil went from a crown colony (1534-1807), to a kingdom (1807-1822), to an empire (1822-1889), to a republic (1889). For the first time in over 300 years, Brazil was able—with independence—to break the British stranglehold over commercial policy. Less than a decade after erecting its first protective tariffs, the Alves Branco Tariffs of 1844, the United States surpassed

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Britain as the primary importer of Brazilian goods. With independence, a native Brazilian ruling class was first able to emerge. Nineteenth-century Brazilian elites were dominated by three factions: large landholding export planters, a growing class of merchants and managers associated with coffee and former Portuguese and British commercial agents. Expanding trade opportunities sparked Brazil's nascent industrialization, as evidenced by the spread of railroads, increasing urbanization and the development of a textile industry beside a budding consumer goods industry beginning in the 1850s.39 Indeed, vibrant economic activity spread extensively and intensively throughout Brazil, as coffee and rubber production replaced sugar and mining, and the slave trade catapulted from an 18th-century yearly average of 27,272 kidnappings to a 19th-century yearly average of 47,142. The social transformations across 19th-century Brazil were epic. Brazil went from a slave population of 1.2 million in 1800 to a slave population of zero in 1900, from a freed slave population of 500,000 in 1800 to a freed/former slave population of 6 million in 1900 and from a total population of 3.25 million in 1800 to a population of 12 million in 1900 (made up largely of fresh European immigrants brought in to undercut the freed slaves' opportunities in the labor market). Protectionism, Coffee and Railroads Nineteenth-century Brazilian commercial policies are of particular interest because they highlight a confusing paradox with respect to the influence of market forces. While 19th-century, global market forces had a profound impact on commodity production in Brazil (as they did throughout Brazilian history), the determining factor with respect to how those commodities were actually produced (the labor process) was, in fact, extramarket forces (racism, forced migration, vagrancy laws, etc.). Indeed, at one level, there was a tremendous struggle over commercial policy that was fought out between competing native Brazilian elite interests (for instance, large-land holders who favored liberal trade policies versus merchants favoring the adoption of protectionist measures to promote domestic industry). At another level, there was a collective effort on the part of elites to create state-sponsored, extramarket structures to control labor. For the first time, the 19th century witnessed both the emergence of a commercial policy free of foreign domination as well as the ascendancy of, at times, a divided native ruling class who were taking over the reins of state power. The transfer of the Braganza Court to Brazil in 1807 brought about immediate commercial changes. With Portugal no longer serving as a monopoly entrepot, Brazilian ports were open to trade directly with other nations. This lowered the prices for imported goods in relative terms and thereby expanded the demand for foreign goods, facilitating the acquisition of a greater abundance of supplies and putting Brazil in a more advantageous position for accessing credit. At the same time, the commercial treaties with Britain of 1810 and 1827 (following independence) extended extraterritorial rights and preferential tariffs to the British, effectively curtailing industrialization for the time by limiting the

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extent to which Brazil could engage in protectionist policies and by restricting the transfer of industrial technology.40 Later, incomes derived from protectionist policies proved, in fact, to be a key to the growth of Brazil's domestic economy. The textile industry, for instance, sheltered from foreign competition beginning in the 1850s, grew at an annual rate of 10% through 1914. A cornerstone of British domination was the restriction of technology transfers to Brazil via foreign trade. In 1835 less than 6% of British imports to Brazil consisted of capital goods (hardware, iron). This figure increased modestly to 16% in 1860, 25% in 1870, 28% in 1880 and 38% in 1890 (Leff, 1972, p. 494).41 "The British government took every precaution to prevent the new machinery, or a practical knowledge of it, from leaving the country, and British agents even shipped back to England such machines as they could acquire in the U.S." (Clark, 1916, pp. 22-23). Relief from such restrictions on Brazil's commercial policy did not come until 1844, when the final treaty with the British ran out, and the Alves Branco Tariffs were established. Such protectionist policies soon hastened the growth of Brazil's domestic industry. "Conditions in the export activities made for a high foreign-trade multiplier; and after the 1840's the country implemented a protective tariff policy which stimulated domestic manufacturing and led to the formation of strong linkages between export growth and industrialization" (Leff, 1972, p. 489). The long history of privileging foreign companies had the further consequence of impeding the development of a native, merchant exporting class in Brazil. With major trade a monopoly of Europeans, no native merchant class was allowed to develop and prosper. Thus, the Brazilian ruling class was dominated, in large part, by large-land holders.42 As a result, in the first half of the 19th century the emerging native Brazilian ruling class was divided between three competing interest groups. First, there were the large landholding agricultural exporters, who were principally located in the northeast. These large-land holders included old sugar interests as well as some of the original coffee planters. Their primary interest was the pursuit of free trade, given the importance of the export markets for their goods. They fought an ongoing battle with protectionists who sought to shelter Brazilian industry from a flood of cheaper imports. With the ascendancy of Dom Pedro II to emperor in 1831, the large landholding exporters came to increasingly dominate Brazilian commercial policy. The growing merchant and managerial class associated with the rise of coffee represented the second major faction.43 This new managerial class had evolved with the commercial success of coffee in the 19th century. Their activities turned Rio de Janeiro into a major market for consumption goods. Not unlike 18th-century France, the managerial class' interests were often at odds with those of the large landholding agricultural exporters. The new merchant and managerial class pursued a range of policies, including the freer acquisition of land, the recruitment of labor, the development of an internal transportation infrastructure, the extension of marketing at ports and the pursuit of financial and economic measures to protect home markets. Importantly, what distinguished them most from large-land holders was, in Furtado's eyes, echoing

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Smith's depiction of 17th-century Scottish merchants vis-a-vis landlords, "a clear concept of their own interests" (Furtado, 1963, p. 126). The third faction within the emerging Brazilian ruling class was made up of former Portuguese and British commercial agents. The continuing influence of the former Portuguese and British agents lay in their earlier domination of commercial activity within the sugar industry. These agents occupied strategic positions between Brazilian planters and European markets. This third faction was the least cohesive, and the nature of their past dominance tended to mitigate against their effectively working in concert.44 The production and commercial phases of sugar industry had historically been controlled by separate groups. Because almost all fundamental decisions regarding the sugar industry were made by those who controlled the commercial aspect of the sugar industry (Europeans), those controlling production (Brazilian elites) often failed to develop a broader understanding of the sugar economy as a whole. Due to this isolation within the sugar industry, those controlling production were later illequipped to develop a strategic concept of their particular interests. Beginning with the close of Portuguese rule, the struggle for control over the emerging state apparatus began in earnest. Emerging political factions mirrored the competing commercial interests of the large-land holders, the merchants and the former colonial agents. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, a period of unrest reflecting these divisions ensued. Almost no arena of Brazilian society could escape from the protracted civil strife in this period, as a continuous series of rebellions and civil war sporadically broke out. Para, Maranhao, Ceara, Pernambuco, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo, Mato Grosso and Rio Grande do Sul all experienced considerable internal strife. The period of unrest lasted for years in Para, Ceara and Pernambuco, while in Rio Grande do Sul the civil war continued for decades. It is important that the consideration of internal factions among Brazilian ruling elites not obscure the central features of capital-labor relations in 19th-century Brazil. Quarreling over commercial policies, in fact, did not leave Brazil's ruling elites blind to their most guarded, common cause throughout the century. Indeed, as seen in the next two chapters, Brazilian elites remained ever unified in their ongoing quest to maintain unquestioned control over the labor process. A range of strategies was explored. However, they all went toward one end—maintaining a heterogeneous Brazilian working class that was distinguished by a race-based division of labor that combined a variety of labor forms. The success of the post-1844 commercial policy was reflected in the 240% net increase in exports between 1840 and 1890, with the average price of exports increasing 46% and the average price of imports falling 8%.45 Such success was due, in large part, to the blossoming coffee and rubber industries, with Brazilian coffee representing three-fourths of the world's supply throughout the 19th century. Coffee had been grown from the early 18th century; however, it achieved commercial success only with the economic destruction of Haiti. Despite constant (and even at times falling) prices, coffee exports increased five times between 1821 and 1830 and again between 1841 and 1850.46

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Coffee eventually closed the 19th century in economic crisis. Prices fell from a fairly steady £4.09 per bag in 1893 to £2.91 per bag in 1896 and £1.48 per bag by 1899. Rubber exports, meanwhile, were just taking off. Brazilian rubber exports had risen precipitously through the latter 19th century. From an average of 460 tons of export rubber in the 1840s to an average of 3,700 tons in the 1860s, 11,000 tons in the 1880s and 21,000 tons in the 1890s, Brazil opened the 20th century averaging 35,000 tons of rubber exports annually. This relative decline of coffee and boom in rubber fed an important population shift. The Para and Amazonas region, with a population of 329,000 in 1872, ended the 19th century with a population of 695,000. Furtado, in fact, remarks that 19th-century Brazil experienced two great migrations (beyond the slave trade)—that of Europeans to Brazil and that of nordestinos (persons from the northeast) to the Amazon region.47 The social impact of these migrations were significant and are dealt with later. Alongside the expanding roles of coffee and rubber production, the major story of late 19th-century Brazil was the quickening pace of industrialization. Few developments signaled the process of modern industrialization like that of the railroad. The need for a reliable transportation system was especially acute in the case of Brazil. Save for the Sao Francisco River, there were no navigable waterways in Brazil. "Although rivers and coastal shipping were used for transportation, Brazil's large hinterland did not have an extensive network of internal navigable waterways in the habitable areas comparable to the Mississippi and Great Lakes systems in the United States. Man-made transportation facilities were also noticeably lacking" (Leff, 1972, p. 490). The principal means of transportation was by mule over a treacherous, undeveloped road system. The first railroad line, a 14-kilometer stretch between Rio de Janeiro and Petropolis that served no economic purpose, was not built until 1854. Forty-six years later, in 1900, Brazil's 9,500 miles of rail lines equaled just 1/20 the length of those in the United States. The utilitarian nature of Brazil's railroad construction made it a direct adjunct to the principal economic activity of the day. Through the 1890s, the rail lines stopped at the frontier and closely followed the geography of coffee cultivation. In this sense, coffee production largely drove the pattern of industrialization in Brazil. "Most of the early railway construction was limited to the areas of export agriculture and did not serve the more distant areas of the domestic agricultural sector. The great increase in railway construction reaching beyond the export agriculture areas began only in the 1890s, and the largest absolute rise in railway track occurred as late as the twenty years before 1914" (Leff, 1972, p. 500). By means of Law 641 in 1850, the Brazilian government granted special guarantees of up to 7% on capital invested in railroad construction. Additionally, the government granted exclusive rights to provide rail service in an area that covered 30 kilometers on each side of a railroad's main track line. A total of six companies over a 17-year period eventually took advantage of these incentives. The first was the Sao Paulo (or Inglesa) Railway, which started up in 1860. Its first line, Santo-Sao Paulo, was completed in 1866. Eleven years later, in 1871,

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the sixth and final company, Estrada de Ferro do Norte, was organized. Its first line, Sao Paulo-Cachoeira, was completed in 1877.48 All of these initial lines assiduously wormed their way through Brazil's coffee region.

THE LEGACY OF BRAZILIAN SLAVERY That slavery left a lasting legacy across the Brazilian social landscape is a simple truism. In this regard, certain central features of Brazilian slave society, in particular, came to leave a deep imprint on the era of abolition. The seeds for change that first set the stage for abolition and then helped shape modern Brazil were sown during the nearly four centuries of slavery. The blueprint for a race-based division of labor emerged from the earliest days of colonial Brazil. Formal decrees distinguished between the treatment of Native American, African and European labor from the beginning of Brazil's 16th-century development. The engenho, the basic production unit within the sugar industry, for instance, institutionalized this racial segmentation of the labor process early on. Moradores, lavradores and large-land holders were each identified both with specific roles as well as with specific racial groups. Law, custom and informal practice defined and reinforced Brazil's rigid, race-based division of labor that relegated Africans to slave-labor, Native Americans to tribute-based labor and Europeans to indentured labor. A major factor in the development of a race-based division of labor was the role of freed slaves within Brazilian society. From the mid-17th century forward, the freed slave population continued to grow and soon became a substantial segment of Brazilian society. In this regard, the network of legal restrictions and discriminatory practices facing the freed slave population largely shaped the bulwark of social and legal impediments that would later face the former slaves following the abolition of slavery. Throughout nearly four centuries of slavery, a battery of restrictions was placed on freed slaves, including laws regarding employment, land-ownership and the right to own slaves. Freed slaves, for instance, were barred from certain occupations and skilled trades that were systematically set aside for European labor. This racist policy was enforced despite the fact that many slaves, in particular, escravos de ganho who were hired out by slaveholders in urban settings, were asked to carry out many tasks that were identical to those associated with occupations or skilled trades that were off-limits to freed slaves. The position of Brazil within the global economy and the 19th-century role of native elites were further important factors regarding the impact of the legacy of slavery on the process of abolition. Brazilian slave society developed as a peculiar adjunct to the British empire. Due to Portugal's formal subjugation, England reaped a great deal of the rewards from Brazil's vibrant export commodity production. A steady stream of revenue from sugar, gold and then coffee fed the British coffers throughout the nearly four centuries of slavery in Brazil. In fact, the end of British dominion coincided, in part, with the end of slavery. The resulting competition among Brazil's native elites over commercial policy played an important role in building postslavery Brazilian society. As

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discussed earlier, the emerging 19th-century Brazilian ruling elites may have been divided over the proper role of protectionism; however, they remained unified in their commitment to establish a system of rigid control over labor in a postslavery society. With the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the abolition of slavery in 1888, Brazil stood at the precipice of a new social order. Drawing inspiration from modernization theories that were based on both romanticized notions of working-class formation in Europe as well as an uncritical appropriation of development schemata handed down from Smith, Ricardo and Marx, generations of historians and social scientists have commonly portrayed late 19th-century Brazil as a society caught up in the throes of market forces that were guiding the Brazilian working class through an inevitable transition from slave-labor to wage-labor. To use the popular vernacular, borrowed from the French Revolution, this was a period of transition from slave-labor to "free" labor. In fact, it is true that the Brazilian working class was about to enter a new era of working-class formation. However, upon further inspection, the notion of a market-led transition to "free" labor would seem, arguably, somewhat dubious. Rather than any insidious and invisible market forces, the primary mover of events throughout the period of abolition in Brazil remained the newly forming native, ruling class, whose handiwork resulted in a battery of extramarket structures. Indeed, as explored in the preceding chapters, the primary "transition" at this time was not from slave-labor to wage-labor but from one race-based system of coerced labor to a new race-based system of coerced labor. The abolition of slavery did not emancipate Africans in Brazil from the lowest social rung of a race-based division of labor. Nor did it replace coercion with free markets as the primary organizing principle of the labor process. The abolition of slavery in Brazil was a violent, wrenching ordeal. This, however, was not a reflection of the random vicissitudes of benign market forces. Rather, this followed from the fact that it was a process whose purpose and guiding ethic were the codification of elite social privilege and racial subjugation. NOTES 1. Curtin's original estimate was 9.5 million for the period of 1451-1870. This was distributed as follows: 367,000 (or 3.1%) 1451-1600, 1.9 million (or 16%) 1601-1700, 6.1 million (or 52.4%) 1701-1800 and 3.3 million (or 28.5%) 1801-1870. There was an estimated 10% fatality rate during the Middle Passage overall (Lovejoy, 1982, p. 478). 2. By 1800, 80% of all slaves in Spanish America were in Cuba, Peru, Venezuela and Colombia. 3. In fact, Morner argues that for the period 1700-1850, the number of slaves to Brazil rose rather evenly (Morner, 1993). 4. Mintz, using Curtin's data, estimates that such figures break down into the following: 790,000 slaves to St. Domingue over a 90-year span, 662,000 slaves to Jamaica in a 109-year span and 3.6 million slaves to Brazil over a three-century span. 5. While there were others of considerable duration, such as the Danes with a notable 46-year lapse, there were none of a comparable size to Brazil such as Cuba or the British and French West Indies with such delays.

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6. At the time of both Brazil's and the United States' respective cessation of the Atlantic slave trade, both had approximately 1.5 million slaves. By the time of each nation's respective abolition, however, the number of slaves in Brazil had dropped to around 800,000, while the number of slaves in the United States had soared to over 4 million. 7. Important halfway steps were undertaken in the interim, such as the "free-womb" law of 1871 (freeing those born of slaves after that year) and the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 (freeing those over 60). Similar "free-womb" laws were passed in other American societies (see Table 4.1), each coinciding with the decline of slavery and the need to integrate slaves into "free" labor arrangements. 8. As Eric Williams' data demonstrate, there was a strong trend to raise the percentage of slaves in the population as the export economy expanded. Barbados moved from a 1:3 slave-to-"free"-population ratio in 1645 to an 18:1 ratio by 1698. Similarly, Jamaica moved from a 1:3 ratio in 1658 to a 6:1 ratio by 1698. Martinique moved from a 2:1 ratio in 1664 to a 3:1 ratio in 1701 (Williams, 1984, pp. 136, 137). 9. Costa Rica had 89 slaves in 1824, Chile 4,000 in 1823, Peru 40,000 in 1790, New Granada 7,000 in 1782 and Bolivia 1,000 in 1852. Mexico's slave population never rose above 2%, Puerto Rico's 14%, Venezuela's 15%, Paraguay's 3.5% and Ecuador's 7% (Klein, 1986, pp. 222-225). 10. By 1810 Mexico's freed slave population outnumbered the slave population 60,000 to 10,000, in Peru 1792 41,000 to 40,000, in Panama 1778 33,000 to 3,500 and in New Granada 1789 420,000 to 80,000. The Puerto Rican and Santo Dominican freed slave populations outnumbered the slave population by the late 18th century (Klein, 1986, p. 222). 11. Brazil's 4.2 million freed slaves represented an astounding 43% of Brazil's overall population. 12. Twenty-five percent of Cuba's 262,000 slaves were employed in sugar production in 1820, and only 100,000 were involved in the sugar and coffee industries combined. 13. Most post World War II slave historiographers of Brazil (by Brazilians) have been deeply influenced by the 1960s "modes of production" debate. In many respects this represented an advance, of sorts, from the Freyre-dominated earlier study of Brazilian slavery. However, from the meta-Althusserian writings of Gorender to the plain economic histories of Prado, Furtado and Cardoso, much of the discussion has centered on the "feudal" versus "capitalist" nature of Brazilian society. The working assumption of this theoretical work is that there was some need to explain the compatibility of slave-labor and capitalist production. This again, has the result of reducing the application of political economy to instances of wage-labor alone. While many such studies yielded quite interesting insights into the historical relations between laborers and capitalists, few efforts to redefine capital-labor relations went (could go) beyond structural-functionalism given the basic project's goal of making a labor form—assumed to be aberrant—"fit" within a structure of capitalist production. Again, this was a project the complete opposite of 18th/19th-century political economy, which was an effort— consciously or unconsciously—to isolate a particular labor form (wage-labor) to examine a system. Here, the modes of production debate began with an assumed system and attempted to interject a specific labor form. (The historical context of the modes of production debate is important to take into account. Its origin was among peripherally based scholars after World War II. Its principal theses, in this sense, reflected contemporary efforts to examine the periphery's "lack of development." Hence, there was a focus on "backwardness," feudal versus capitalist social structures, etc.)

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Beginning in the 1960s, a series of regional slave studies began to be compiled that—while often still constricted by the language of the "modes of production" debate— resulted in a number of useful regional social histories (Viotti da Costa, 1985; Cardoso, 1979, 1987; Gebara, 1986; Beiguelman, 1981; Mattos, 1987; Filho, 1988; Ianni, 1988; Libby, 1984, 1988b; Kowarick, 1987; Quieros, 1986, 1988; Soares, 1979). Histories of Brazilian slavery by non-Brazilians have typically focused on national development along either political (Bethell, 1989; Conrad, 1972, 1986; Toplin, 1972) or economic (Schwartz, 1975, 1988; Eisenberg, 1974, 1977; Taylor, 1978; Holloway, 1980) lines. These studies make little effort to engage critically their categories of analysis and generally simply apply a given analysis—derived elsewhere—to their subject matter to see how well Brazilian developments fit within a given model rather than how well the given model fits anywhere. Huggins is the rare case of a historian whose working model emerges from the engaging of Brazilian history (Huggins, 1985). 14. The United States became Brazil's principal export market from 1850. Over one-half of all imports, however, through the 1850s continued to originate from Britain. U.S. goods, in second place, accounted for only 1/10 of all Brazil's imports. In fact, French imports briefly surpassed U.S. imports in 1875. 15. In similar legislation, a royal cedula allowing the outright ownership of lands held usufruct and another allowing land to be sold, sublet or subdivided, was not issued by the Spanish crown until 1800 and 1815, respectively. 16. The Methuen Treaty was signed at a time when the scale of riches to be recovered from Brazilian mines had yet to be realized. The transfer of wealth occasioned by this 1703 treaty was, in no small part, merely coincidental to the end of Dutch predominance in 1730. "It is now safe to assume that the practical monopoly of European transport and commerce which the Dutch established in the early 17th century by reason of their geographical position, their superior commercial organization and technique, and the economic backwardness of their neighbors, stood intact until about 1730" (Wilson, 1954, p. 254). 17. Brazil was the largest single market for British cotton goods from 1800 to 1850. 18. Again, for the entire period 1500-1850 there was a total of 3.5 million Africans who were kidnapped and sent to Brazil. 19. Marquis do Pombal's 1755 abolition of Native Americans from slavery explicitly excluded the offspring of African-Native American unions. This points to an interesting sociological debate in Brazil. Many, beginning with Freyre, depict the construction of racial identities as the opposite of such constructions in the United States. As Freyre argued, quoting Sir Richard Burton, "[In Imperial Brazil] all men, especially free men, who are not Black, are white; and often a man is officially white, but naturally almost a Negro. This is directly opposed to the system in the United States where all who are not unmixed white are Black" (Freyre, 1959, pp. 119-120). In fact, however, as was consistently legislated, all offspring of Africans and Native Americans or Africans and Europeans were legally considered slaves. 20. Taylor actually argues that one of the effects of the enslavement of Native Americans was to concentrate large populations in agricultural regions (Taylor, 1978, p. 19). This point only makes more evident the conscious choice of Europeans not to exploit this available resource in lieu of engaging in the African slave trade. 21. Usinas, large, steam-powered, central mills, did not first appear until the 1880s in Pernambuco. 22. Andre Joao Antonil was a Portuguese Jesuit who lived in Brazil from 1681 to 1716 and published Cultura e Opulencia do Brasil por Suas Drogas e Minas in 1711. This was a scathing attack on the horrors of slavery, which was subsequently suppressed by the Portuguese authorities.

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23. Russell-Wood maintains that the time afforded slaves in rural settings to tend subsistence plots was frequently not granted. The law often required that slaves be given one day a week (in addition to Sunday) to cultivate their own plots of land. In fact, slaves were frequently denied this opportunity (Russell-Wood, 1982, p. 37). Reflecting this was the frequent request of runaway slaves, when negotiating their return, for more time on their private plot. 24. Freed slaves played a role in the technical production on engenhos, as well. "Whereas the slave produced the raw material—that is, the cane—the free Black or mulatto was often responsible for the various technical processes that yielded the finished product. The most important task held by the free colored was that of 'the master of the sugar,' who was contracted for the entire crop or was paid according to the amount of sugar produced" (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 106). 25. World prices fell for the period 1650-1675 to one-half their former level, remaining at this new level until 1800 and Haiti's collapse in production. 26. At the same time, it is important to make note of the explicit ties between the subsistence plots (rogas) and larger economic structures. Subsistence communities were thinly dispersed throughout Brazil. The roca represented a basic subsistence unit that was linked to larger economic activities (generally, cattle breeding). Thus, each roca was connected, by various means, to larger productive industries. In this way, those living subsistence lives, by and large, did not derive their entire livelihood from an individual roqa. Rather, they combined their subsistence income with the performance of assorted tasks within the predominant local industry (Furtado, 1963, p. 130). 27. The strategic Sao Francisco River ran through the heart of Minas Gerais north through the Bahian captaincy out to its port. 28. Cotton and rice were late 18th-century commodities of Maranhao. 29. For the same years, 1700-1770, the cost of importing slaves was 50% of the value of all gold exports. 30. The timing of these reforms, not completely coincidentally, came immediately after the massive 1755 earthquake, which leveled Lisbon and required large amounts of revenue for rebuilding. 31. Furthermore, Portugal passed a decree in 1785 banning manufacturing, again for the purpose of concentrating resources in primary export production. 32. Hausa-led rebellions in Bahia occurred continuously, with risings in 1720, 1806, 1809, 1814, 1822, 1827, 1835 and 1838. 33 Literally meaning "brown." 34. "When Herbert Klein asserted that, 'as freedmen, Negroes and mulattos dominated almost all the skilled trades' [Klein, 1969, p. 47] he was presumably referring to a numerical domination by colored artisan apprentices; archival registers leave no doubt that the skilled, qualified, professional artisan in the colonial period was invariably white" (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 103). However, Russell-Wood's selection is not wholly revealing of Klein's contention. While, in fact, Klein does make such a statement, this is not the complete statement. Klein bases his claim not solely on archival data but on anecdotal sources as well, which is important for drawing a more complete picture of the contemporary perception of the situation and thus race relations. As freedmen, Negroes and mulattos dominated almost all the skilled trades. This dominance by colored freedmen extended even to trades that by law were specifically prohibited to them. Thus the juiz defora [the Crown judge] of Pernambuco wrote to the Crown on April 25, 1732, complaining of the "excessive number of artisan goldsmiths and silversmiths who exist in Olinda, Recife and other places, the majority of them being mulattos and Negroes, and even some being slaves." (Klein, 1969, p. 47)

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35. This is a curious terminological inversion on the part of either Russell-Wood himself—who otherwise consistently uses the term "escravo de ganho "—or on the part of an English traveler whose observations Russell-Wood is chronicling in this passage. From the text it is unclear who is responsible for the inversion; nonetheless, it illustrates well the liberty with which persons often conflated the concept of the Negro (or African) and the concept of a slave. 36. Brazil's 1760 exports were valued at £5 million. By 1775 this fell to £3 million. 37. In the South, however, the cattle industry predated the mining boom as a source of leather goods. 38. "The three main economic centers—the sugar strip, the mining region, and Maranhao—were interconnected, although in a fluid and indefinite manner, through the extensive cattle breeding hinterland" (Furtado, 1963, p. 97). 39. Early urbanization in Minas Gerais had been largely at the behest of political and economic expediency. The isolation of gold mining, in spite of its clear political content, had been a strategic factor in the integration of the emerging national economy in its commodity-production phase. This had occurred through the import of products consumed in the mining camps and their surroundings, including agricultural products from several parts of the country, mules from the South and cattle from the Northeast. Out of sheer economic necessity, the gold mining complex had generated the first forms of urban civilization in the country by concentrating its labor force. By the same token, through its transactions with other sub-regions of Brazil it had helped to create the first movement towards an economy fully national in scale. (Schmidt, 1982, p. 257) From the late-18th century, Brazil's urban population grew appreciably. "Granted the unreliability of statistics" for that era, Morse estimates that from the late 18th century to the late 19th century the populations of the eight largest cities represented about 7.5% of the population (Morse, 1975, pp. 172, 173). 40. Just as Portugal had originally entered into partnership with the British to protect itself from Spanish aggression, the threat of Napoleon pushed the Portuguese further into the arms of Britain. "In 1810, as payment for English protection from Napoleon, Joao VI signed a trade treaty giving the English preferential tariffs and extraterritorial rights in Brazil. Thus for strategic reasons Portugal preserved Brazil's dependence upon a single European market, the same market that had supplied the colony, through the Portuguese middleman, since 1703" (Eisenberg, 1974, p. 8). 41. The first serious effort on the part of the Brazilian government to subsidize mechanization within the declining sugar industry did not come until 1875, when Parliament authorized the imperial government to guarantee interest (up to £3 million) on foreign capital invested in the sugar industry. Over the next decade, 50 sugar mills were introduced with modern equipment, almost all of which were financed via this legislation (Furtado, 1963, p. 512). 42. At the same time, Furtado notes that Brazil's ruling class interest stood in conflict with the Portuguese ruling-class interest, the opposite of the British West Indies' ruling-class interests. As a kind of huge plantation for tropical products, Brazil was closely integrated with European economies, on which the colony was dependent. The country was not an autonomous system, but rather a mere appendage of other major systems. If integration were to be complete—as had happened in the British West Indies—the identity of the ruling classes in both the main and subsidiary economies must also be complete. Such an ideological communion could not exist between Brazil and Portugal, for the latter was only an entrepot with conflicting interests vis-a-vis the colony. (Furtado, 1963, p. 102)

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43. The 1872 population distribution reflected coffee's rise in national import. According to the 1872 national census, 35% of the population was in the northeast sugar region, 13% was in Bahia, 9% was in the south, 40% was in the central coffee region and 3% was in the Amazonas. 44. At the same time, British control of imports guaranteed the supply of slave needs from British sources. 45. These export figures are based on an index of prices for coffee, sugar, rubber, cocoa, mate, tobacco, cotton and hides, which represented 88.2% of all Brazilian exports for the period (Furtado, 1963, p. 191). 46. Coffee exports represented over 50% of all exports from 1871 to 1910. 47. A protracted drought had devastated the northeast, particularly Ceara (1877— 1880) wiping out the cattle and starving to death over 200,000 persons. 48. The other railway companies established in this period were the Companhia Paulista de Estradas de Ferro (incorporated 1868; first line: Jundiai-Campinas 1872), the Companhia Ituana (incorporated 1870; first line: Jundiai-Itu 1873), the Companhia Mogiani (incorporated 1870; first line: Campinas-Mogi Mirim 1875), the Companhia Sorocabana (incorporated 1870; first line: Sao Paulo-Sorocabana 1875).

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Chapter 5

Brazilian Abolition: The Preparation For Brazil's African population, slave and freed slave, the 19th century was an extended period of upheaval, "liberation" and eventual forced submission to new forms of coercive labor regimes. Centuries-old social roles were uprooted, and Africans were placed under punitive constraints and restrictions while being outfitted for their new roles in a modern capitalist society. The central, defining feature of this new world was the replacement of an unenlightened, retrograde system of slave-labor with that of an enlightened, progressive system of purportedly "free" labor. The principal outcome of the Brazilian abolition of slavery was, in fact, not the emancipation of slaves but the emergence of new forms of extramarket labor extraction (migration, vagrancy laws, monopolies in landholding, prison, fear) designed to continue the practice of relying on coerced African labor. As such, the 38-year period from the close of the Brazilian slave trade (1850) through the final abolition of slavery (1888) was a transformative epoch in the formation of modern Brazil. In this fertile time span the core social and economic institutions were prepared for (and designed to absorb) the inevitable "freeing" of Brazil's African slave population. The legacy of this period's enthusiastic embrace of racial subjugation is reflected today in Brazil's race-based division of labor, which finds its moorings not in legal writ but in the firmament of a social ideological reality of 500 years' construction. To reveal the strength of these centuries-old sinews of racial domination, it is useful to turn to that period when the challenges to racial domination were the greatest—the historical moment of "liberation" in Brazil. Indeed, for the slaves in Brazil, a careful examination of the period in question will make evident that the immediate consequence of their "liberation" was either (1) their effective marginalization from profitable roles within capitalist production or (2) their reincorporation into new regimes of coerced labor. Furthermore, it will be observed that these "new regimes of coerced labor" retained and reified three distinct features of modern slave-labor: a strict racial

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hierarchy, extramarket methods of labor extraction and the previous capitalist class' monopoly of land, capital resources and the state. For these reasons, it is argued that Brazil's abolition cannot be shown to have resulted in the "emancipation" of slaves in any meaningful sense with respect to their ability to live free, independent, self-directed lives. Nonetheless, this moment of "emancipation" has been taken as the starting point for most contemporary discussions of race and class in Brazil (T. de Azevedo, 1966; C. M. Azevedo, 1987; Dzidzienyo, 1971; Fernandes, 1978; Hasenbalg, 1979; Silva, 1980; Skidmore, 1985; Winant, 1992). It is argued here that consideration of those processes surrounding the abolition of slavery (18501888) will reveal that the distinguishing feature of this period was, in fact, continuity, not change. As such, race emerged as the most salient factor in the development of Brazil's present class structure, not vice versa. Again, the ghosts of Smith, Ricardo and Marx weigh heavily on modern interpretations of social development. Brazilian working-class formation is often idealized as a storied transition from slave-labor to wage-labor. In such a schema, the role of race is thought to be of increasingly less importance, as the modern industrial working class emerges with the dissolution of such "unessential" human differences. THE BACKDROP The abolition of slavery in Brazil was characterized, above all, by its drawn-out, patently calculated nature. Little was left to chance. In this regard, there were four events punctuating the formation of postslavery Brazil: (1) the end of the slave trade (and a growing freed slave population), (2) the institution of new forms of race-based, coerced labor (3) the formal abolition of slavery and (4) a large-scale (race-based) immigration policy with the explicit purpose of marginalizing freed slaves. The closing of the Atlantic slave trade signaled the start of the Brazilian ruling class' active preparation for a postslave labor force. Like the abolition of slavery, the slave trade's demise was by no means an overnight affair. Rather, it took several decades before the trade was completely halted. No sooner had the external slave traded ended, than an active internal slave trade soon emerged. The internal slave trade lasted over 30 years and was primarily a vehicle for moving slaves from regions of less active, slave-based production to more active regions. The end of the external slave trade (in combination with manumission policies) contributed to elite concerns over how best to contend with the demands of a growing freed slave population. The Brazilian ruling class response was swift. An avalanche of legislation and social policy followed that placed severe restrictions on the freed slave population. These punitive social measures later provided the bases for new forms of race-based, coercive labor forms for the entire African population following abolition. The legislation and social policy restricting freed slaves were focused on three primary areas. First there was a series of labor laws that, beginning in the 1830s, redefined capitallabor relations in terms that were distinctly favorable to capital. Second, there was the Land Law of 1850, which redefined property relations and stifled access

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to land for a growing class of dispossessed, landless agricultural workers. Third, there were the specific laws passed with respect to abolition (1871, 1885 and 1888), which defined the conditions under which the "former" slaves would confront their "former" masters. This thick morass of legal and social restrictions, in combination with the post-1850 internal slave trade, was designed to assure the appropriate distribution of freed slaves (and slaves) across Brazilian industry. Finally, European immigration represented an essential anchor for the establishment of a postslavery social order that guaranteed the continued subjugation of Brazil's African population. The concerted campaign of large-scale immigration effectively flooded the Brazilian labor market and guarded against any advantages accruing to former slaves who may have wished to sell their labor on the "free" market. The result of this distorted labor market was to keep wages down and to force former slaves to choose between starving or submitting to the demands of the new labor regime. The exclusive recruitment of European immigrants solidified the racial composition of Brazil's workforce and provided a convenient basis to continue Brazil's race-based division of labor long after the abolition of formal slavery. Before turning to the issues of social legislation and immigration, the "legal" status of Africans in post-1850 Brazil must be briefly considered. There were, in essence, four categories of Africans recognized by Brazilian authorities at this time. These included slaves, freed slaves who had been born freed slaves, libertos (freed slaves who had been born slaves) and emancipados (freed slaves who had been taken from slave ships). With the exception of the heightened restrictions noted earlier, the social condition of slaves and freed slaves (a subject of the previous chapter) and their "legal" status per se did not change appreciably during this 38-year period. It is important, however, to distinguish libertos and emancipados—both from each other as well as from slaves and freed slaves. Libertos were freed slaves who had been born slaves before being manumitted. There were a number of means by which slaves could be manumitted in this period, including unconditional release by the slaveholder, conditional release by the slaveholder, self-purchase, purchase through "emancipation" funds or third-party altruistic purchase. The condition of one's manumission determined one's legal status. Conditional manumission by a slaveholder, for example, was a common practice by the 1870s, in which the slave would remain in the employ of their slaveholder until the slaveholder's death. The security of such manumission could be rather tenuous. "The possibility of revocation of freedom was quite real. The law allowed it until 1871, and the cartas sometimes included the threat of it, 'should the said (freed slave) turn ungrateful and scornful of this proof of esteem, by failing to provide services (to the former master), or behaving himself in such a way as to be unworthy of this grace' (then such freedom will be revoked)" (Dean, 1976, p. 72). In such a case, libertos were little distinguishable from outright slaves; however, legally, they would have been viewed differently—as no doubt

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libertos would have viewed themselves differently than slaves might view themselves. The difficulty at times in distinguishing between a liberto and a slave points to the fact that the term "slave" did not simply refer to an economic category but a racial one as well. Changing one's formal status (from slave to liberto or, following the abolition of slavery, from slave to former slaver) may have altered one's economic category, but it could not change the fact that the former slave remained a member of a larger class of racially defined workers. With the abolition of slavery, this reality became a defining feature of postslavery Brazilian society. An important subcategory of libertos was known as ingenuos. The term ingenuo referred specifically to those who were libertos by virtue of having been born to a slave mother after the 1871 free-womb law had passed. Emancipados were Africans in Brazil whose slave ships had been intercepted by British patrols before reaching Brazilian waters. Such persons began arriving in the 1830s. The approximately 10,000 "technically free" Africans were kept in de facto servitude up until 1888. Upon reaching Brazil, they were hired out to private citizens or to the government under contracts that were renewable (by the renter) for up to 14 years. In practice many were kept beyond the 14 years. Convicted slave traders, on the other hand, were sent to Mozambique for five years with no labor obligations. Emancipados received nothing for their labor beyond subsistence. A British report described this "legal purgatory between slavery and freedom" as, in fact, worse than slavery. A long time British resident of Rio described their condition as "a thousand times worse" than if they had not been given their special status. The slave traders, he wrote, "would have sold them to persons who, generally speaking, would take care of them upon the same principle that domestic animals are cared for". . . . As free Africans, however, they were "unwholesomely crouched together, till their numbers are reduced by sickness, and the remainder are apprenticed for 14 years, which ends in perpetual slavery." (Conrad, 1973, p. 60) The treatment of emancipados spoke volumes for the importance of slavery as a racial (rather than simply economic) system of labor extraction. Here was a random assortment of able-bodied laborers who had simply washed upon the shore—an instance of Smithian abstract labor in its purest form. The single factor determining their economic role and specific labor form was their African ancestry. The Brazilian ruling class imagination simply could not fathom a form of labor for a nominally free group of African workers that was not categorically subservient to white labor. This practice of designating race-based labor forms (of which slavery was but the harshest expression) became the guiding principle behind Brazil's conscious construction of a postslavery society. Labor and Land Laws Paula Beiguelman described the underlying rationale of 19th-century Brazilian labor policy as the thinly veiled aspiration that "workers should seek out proprietors, proprietors should not seek out workers" (Beiguelman, 1981, p.

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32). This sentiment was well exemplified by Brazilian efforts, through 19th-century labor (and land) laws, to restrict the options of non-slave-labor while maintaining a sizable slave labor force. Three labor laws helped define capital-labor relations in the post-1850 period. The first two were passed in the 1830s and the third in 1879. The principal foci of the three laws were the conditions and forms of contract labor. The 1830 law, for the first time, authorized Brazilian planters to contract foreigners for agricultural labor of unspecified duration.1 Workers under such contracts could break the agreement only by compensating the planter for one-half of the income they would have earned had they remained. Punishment for the uncompensated breaking of a contract (by the worker) was imprisonment and penal servitude. Freed slaves were written into the 1830 labor law in a manner so that they could be treated as though they were foreigners.2 Importantly, this semantic shift (freed slaves being equated with European foreigners) did not open freed slaves to any of the occupations or skilled trades that were restricted to European labor. At the same time, the 1830 labor law provided important safeguards for slaveholders. Planters were expressly forbidden to hire Africans in this manner, unless they were of Brazilian origin— that is, planters could not treat a slave in the described manner, thereby threatening the slave supply. The 1837 labor law extended the provisions of the 1830 law to all Brazilians (with the exception of slaves). In other words, the European population that was already in Brazil could be treated the same as the European population still in Europe, with respect to contract labor arrangements. This represented an important step in labor control. In effect, any Brazilian laborer hired by someone was obligated to remain in this employ, unless able to compensate the employer in the manner noted earlier. All who abandoned their obligation were subject to imprisonment and penal servitude. Such penal servitude, after 1837, was to be for a duration that was either sufficient to repay (1) twice the amount of their debt or (2) twice the duration of their original contract. Additionally, the 1837 law enumerated various infractions for which one could be fired, after which one would remain liable for pending earnings. Given such conditions, there was not exactly a groundswell of exuberant Europeans heading off for penal servitude. From 1820 to 1829, a total of 9,555 Europeans immigrated to Brazil—an annual average of 955 immigrants. After the passage of the first labor laws, from 1830 to 1849, 15,089 Europeans immigrated to Brazil—an annual average of 754. The chief European complaint, predictably enough, was the extent to which Brazilian labor laws appeared to turn all African laborers into slaves and all European laborers into serfs. "Alfredo Tauney, the noted [Brazilian] writer and abolitionist, told the Chamber of Deputies that the accusations so often heard in Europe that Brazil was trying to transform Europeans into serfs, was based largely upon the contract-labor laws of 1830, 1837, and 1879 all of which contained penal sections that gravely affected human liberty" (Conrad, 1972, p. 38). The 1879 labor law established a system of sharecropping based on long-term contracts in an overt effort to attract European immigrants. The 1879

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law, in fact, as Gebara has argued, was a return to the 1830 law under modified conditions more favorable to labor, with the objective of making Brazil more attractive to Europeans. "The first problem [for Brazilian planters] was the necessity to attract immigrants, in this case Europeans, while competing with other countries of the Americas. It is evident that the laws of 1837 and 1879 were elaborated with this concern in mind. . . . The objective of the law of 1879 was to create more attractive living conditions for the immigrant" (Gebara, 1986, pp. 82, 88). Save for "a significant number of new measures to protect labor" and the elimination of prison sentences, the 1879 law "was not substantially different from the law of 1837" (Gebara, 1986, p. 88). In this regard, the 1879 law can be seen more as a reduction in the general punitive nature of Brazilian labor laws than as an extension of opportunities for immigrant laborers in Brazil. The only significant 19th-century land reform legislation, Law 601, was passed in 1850.3 This was an effort, in the very year of the final slave ship's arrival, to promote foreign (European) immigration and to prepare the setting for the eventual flood of landless, agricultural workers escaping slave plantations.4 Its principal effect, however, was the strengthening (and expansion) of large landholdings. Law 601 called for regularizing property through land surveys and establishing standardized procedures for legitimating possession claims. It required the government to sell, not give away, land. In effect, Law 601 led to the appropriation of smallholdings by larger holdings and the wholesale displacement of squatters from productive land. The re-shaping of agrarian structures after the disintegration of the colonial slavery mode of production was far from being a linear or uniform process. There were several variants deserving of extensive analysis. A bill passed in 1850, probably in anticipation of a different management of the labor force following the end of slavery, favored increased concentration of land ownership to reflect new dependency links between rural workers and landowners. Small or medium-sized family farms were extremely rare, which perhaps explains why there was no mass flight of slaves from the large estates on which they lived. (Vasconcelos and Cury, 1992, pp. 478-79) In this sense, the 1850 Land Law was an attempt to codify property relations and to, thereby, deny squatters' claims while affirming planters' rights.5 The government's efforts to survey and determine landownership across Brazil tended to be more effective for establishing (legalizing) planters' claims to already occupied lands than it was in obstructing access to marginal lands on the frontier for subsistence purposes.6 In this regard, it is important to distinguish between the access former slaves enjoyed to marginalized land of poor quality and their exclusion from productive land (capital resources). The Land Law was designed to assure the latter, while the labor laws were designed to compensate for the former. Thus, the legacy of the Land Law was the establishment of a precedent and legal structure for determining private property claims and removing squatters from planter-claimed (occupied) lands. At the same time, it was less effective in forcing squatters to work such lands, as a vibrant frontier remained available.

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The 1850 land law was intended to provide for the revalidation of all claims based on the colonial sesmaria, and the registration and legitimization of all posse (squatter) claims. Under the law the public domain was to be surveyed and mapped, and could only be subsequently alienated by sale. Future squatting was forbidden. The 1850 land law was a nearly unmitigated failure. Few sesmarias were ever revalidated or posses legitimized as the law required. The government abandoned the survey of public lands in 1878 after accomplishing very little. (Holloway, 1980, p. 113) Assessing landownership patterns in many regions was made all the more difficult by a hodgepodge of informal landholding arrangements that characterized 19th-century Brazil. "The first cadastral survey of Sao Paulo was not begun until 1916, and the state government soon gave it up as an impossible task in the face of opposition from small-scale squatters and large-land holders with dubious titles" (Holloway, 1977, p. 318). Whatever their actual degree of success, in combination with the labor laws, such legislative attempts to provide a basis for challenging informal landholding arrangements on the eve of the collapse of slavery did not require a high degree of intelligence (or even cynicism) to decipher. The Gradualist Process of Abolition The gradual nature of the abolition process in Brazil was a calculated attempt on the part of Brazilian ruling elites to control the conditions of full "freedom" for Brazil's slaves. Toward this end, gradual abolition consisted of a range of strategies designed to guard the emerging social order and protect the planters' interests in postslavery society. These strategies included a series of measures to slow and then stop the slave trade, a thriving internal slave trade, a series of abolition laws that slowly released selected groups of slaves over time, heightened restrictions on the freed slave population and the construction of a sophisticated array of punitive social institutions. At the heart of this campaign was the development of programs and instruments that served the dual purpose of paying lip service to the abolitionists while establishing social conditions that assured labor's subservience to capital. The free-womb law was a case in point. "The 'free-womb' law of 1871, was the decisive component for the organization and disciplining of the free labor market in Brazil; this law formulated a basic strategy, as much as it defined the manner in which slaves would be given their freedom and laid the groundwork for the transition to a system of free labor, essentially configuring the market of free labor" (Gebara, 1986, p. 11). Prior to the abolition of slavery itself, of course, came the abolition of the slave trade. The slave trade remained a major source of contention between the Brazilians (and the Portuguese) and the British (who ended their participation in the slave trade in 1807) throughout the first half of the century. The British attempted to write provisions outlawing the slave trade into most of their 19th-century international treaties7—complete with enforcement measures on the high seas though these treaties were, in fact, rarely enforced in any systematic or rigorous fashion.8 The Brazilian slave trade was gradually reduced

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to zero, as opposed to being abruptly cut off. This offered the Brazilian ruling class a significant degree of flexibility in devising a strategy to replace the slaves as a labor source. The first curtailment came in 1810, when the British insisted that the Brazilian slave trade be restricted to Portuguese-held Africa. In 1815 there was an agreement not to engage in slave trading north of the equator. Then in 1837 the Palmerston Bill authorized the seizure of Portuguese ships that were either actually transporting slaves or equipped to do so. The Aberdeen Bill of 1845 extended this to Brazilian ships. From 1830, the slave trade was de jure illegal. However, with virtually no enforcement, the slave trade was allowed to continue unabated until the 1850 Quieros Law outlawed the slave trade to Brazil and specified the means for enforcing the law.9 An estimated 660,000 slaves "snuck-in" between 1830 and 1850. Beginning in 1850, a vast network was established to facilitate an internal slave trade. This internal slave trade primarily sent slaves from the impoverished northeast region to the booming central/southern coffee region. The history of Brazilian slavery was, in large part, the history of forced internal migration— from sugar to mining, from sugar to cotton, from mining to coffee, from mining to cattle/charquea. Regional variations were shaped and reshaped by such movements of people over nearly four centuries. Among the most massive of these sojourns was that of the post-1850 period, when the floundering sugar region sent hundreds of thousands of slaves to a flourishing coffee region. Between 1850 and 1881 an estimated 209,000 slaves were traded internally. Just as slaves had earlier been concentrated in the northeast to support a booming sugar economy or in Minas Gerais to haul gold and diamonds, by the 1870s the slave population was largely concentrated in the coffee region covering Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo. In effect, the northeast (Maranhao, Ceara, Pernambuco, Bahia, Sergipe, Paraiba—along with Rio Grande do Sul in the south) became a reservoir of slave-labor for these three provinces.10 The close of the African slave trade in 1850 raised the price of slaves. Northerners, seeking to "cash in," sold off their slaves. Coffee growers, enjoying the benefits of a booming market, had greater access to credit to purchase slaves and thereby saw the value of their holdings grow even as the price of slaves continued to climb. Coffee's national importance grew, and, as reflected in Table 5.1, average earnings on coffee production soon eclipsed sugar production in the second half of the 19th century. There was a series of unsuccessful legislative attempts to stem the flow of slaves from the north. Export taxes were imposed by northern provinces in 1852 and 1859. This led to illegal smuggling over land. Finally, in 1881, the internal slave trade was outlawed. However, a significant demographic shift had already taken place. The northeast had provided the coffee region alone with 90,000 slaves between 1850 and 1880—an average of 3,000 a year. By 1881 less than one-half of all provinces had slave populations that represented 10% or more of the overall population. One-fourth of all provinces had slave populations that represented 5% or less of the overall population. Table 5.2 tracks the number of slaves in each province for the years 1864, 1874, 1884 and 1887. In addition,

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Table 5.2 provides the percentage of slaves in the coffee region for these same years, growing from 43% in 1864, to 67% in 1887. i Table 5.1 Brazilian Coffee/Sugar Earnings, 1841-1900 (Measured in 1,000s of British Pounds) Years 1841-1845 1846-1850 1851-1855 1856-1860 1861-1865 1866-1870 1871-1875 1876-1880 1881-1885 1886-1890 1891-1895 1896-1900

Average Sugar Earnings 1,265 1,651 1,882 2,445 1,944 1,718 2,353 2,355 2,646 1,537 2,182 1,289

Average Coffee Earnings 2,058 2,473 4,113 5,635 6,863 6,737 10,488 12,103 11,359 14,387 20,914 16,669

Source: Eisenberg, 1977, p. 352.

Thus, in 1850, having stolen over 3.5 million Africans for going on four centuries, the final slave ship made its way out of port to be replaced by Europe-bound ships in search of more enlighteningly coerced labor. Meanwhile slavery continued for another 38 years. Only the United States had a longer period of "transition" (58 years) between the close of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery. There were two emancipatory acts passed prior to the 1888 Golden Law. In 1871 the Rio Branco Law (or "Free-Womb" law) freed all children who were born to slave women after its passage. In 1885 the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law (or "Sexagenarian Law") freed all slaves 65 years of age or older. Finally, in 1888 the Golden Law freed the remaining 720,000 slaves. A defining characteristic of the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and the emergence of a thriving internal slave trade was the relatively weak, ineffectual nature of those forces in Brazil that were attempting to end slavery. Most of the pressure was international. Considering that Brazil had, by far, the largest freed slave population in the Americas (prior to abolition), this is especially curious and points (1) to the extremely circumscribed social and political role of the freed slave population in general (and within the higher echelons of decision making in particular) and (2) to the ongoing struggle of the freed slave population to retain a sense of community and coherent social space. Russell-Wood argued: With the exception of the militia companies and the brotherhoods, themselves not entirely free of internal racial divisions, the free colored population was characterized by its lack of over-all solidarity or cohesion. As a class, it failed to find a place in the social

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structure of colonial Brazil. Those few individuals who did achieve prominence or notoriety did so as individuals and in the face of convention. They did not exercise mass influence over the colored population. At no time were they epic figures, representatives of a collective social ideal (Russell-Wood in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 130).11 Table 5.2 Regional Slave Populations/Percentage in Coffee Regions, 1864-1887* Province

1864

1874

1884

Amazonas Para Maranhao Piaui Ceara Rio Grande do Norte Paraiba Pernambuco Alagoas Sergipe Bahia Mato Grosso Goias Parana Santa Catarina Rio Grande Do Sul Minas Gerais Espirito Santo Rio de Janeiro Sao Paulo

1,000 30,000 70,000 20,000 36,000 23,000 30,000 260,000 50,000 55,000 300,000 5,000 15,000 20,000 15,000 40,000 250,000 15,000 300,000 80,000

1,545 31,537 74,598 23,434 31,975 13,634 25,817 106,236 36,124 33,064 165,403 7,054 8,800 11,249 15,250 98,450 311,304 22,297 301,352 174,622

____ 20,849 49,545 16,780 108 7,209 19,165 72,709 26,911 25,874 132,822 5,782 7,710 7,768 8,371 60,136 301,125 20,216 258,238 167,493

3,167 9,448 41,122 15,269 16,875 76,838 3,233 4,955 3,513 4,927 8,442 191,952 13,381 162,421 107,329

Coffee Region %

43%

56%

63%

67%

1887

10,535 33,446 8,970

Source: Conrad, 1972, p. 285. * These numbers do not simply reflect the outcome of the internal slave trade but other factors as well, such as manumission rates, cholera epidemics, the 1877-1879 northeastern drought, and soon.

Regardless of their inactivity around ending the slave trade, the freed slave population did eventually take an active role in the struggle to end slavery itself. A strong Brazilian abolitionist movement emerged somewhat belatedly in the second half of the 19th century. Joaquim Nabuco did not published his antislavery classic, O Abolicionismo, until 1883. However late, the activities of the abolitionists throughout the 1880s—establishing antislave societies and an antislavery press, passing restrictions on the internal slave trade, championing provincial liberations, creating an underground railroad and safe havens (such as Santos) for runaway slaves—should not be underestimated for the impact they

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had on the eventual abolition of slavery. Of equal, if not greater, importance were the revolts of the slaves themselves. From the more celebrated examples of Salvador in 1835 to the less-heralded (or organized) efforts throughout the centuries of slavery, slave resistance in Brazil had a compelling effect upon the organization of slavery itself and the manner by which slaves were freed and the manner by which new forms of labor coercion, following slavery, were designed. From the mid-1880s, years before the final 1888 decree, thousands of slaves had already abandoned plantations. Reflecting the overwhelming number of runaway slaves, by 1887 the Brazilian army was requesting relief from the task of capturing and returning them.12 Slaveholders on Sao Paulo plantations were forced to free their remaining slaves by 1886 due to the exodus. These efforts were greatly facilitated by the direct actions of the freed slave population. A wave of strikes shut down Santos in 1886, forcing the municipality to be declared a free city. "By the last half of [the 1880's] large numbers of free Black workers on the docks and in the railroads, refused to transport slaves and assisted runaways" (Klein, 1986, p. 255). "[Santos], isolated from the interior by the coastal palisade, a smaller-scale version of the intensely mercantile Rio de Janeiro, full of freedmen and men of color working at the kinds of jobs that were later to be the first to be unionized—docking, warehousing, railroads, and even a few factories—was the scene of repeated violent demonstrations against police who tried to kidnap runaways" (Dean, 1976, p. 142). While this work purposely focuses on strategies of the planter class and not on slave resistance per se such resistance remained an important factor—in particular, the manner by which the planter class responded to this resistance. There would have been little need to bother with a drawn-out, long-term strategy to devise punitive, postslavery working conditions had there not been a hostile, potentially violent mass of workers who stood in opposition to these plans. Thus, while contending forces within the planter class developed a gradualist abolition strategy, a parallel struggle from below was being waged by slaves in the form of disruption and open rebellion. "With the emergence of pressures through the abolitionist movement, and with the development of forms of slave protest and rebellion, the final process of transition was marked by turbulence and fear, especially given the generalized attitudes of resistance and rebellion and slaves willing to risk everything" (Gebara, 1986, p. 99). Using local newspaper sources, Ronaldo Marcos cites over 15 planned or actual uprisings throughout Sao Paulo alone in the post-1850 period (Marcos, 1980, pp. 40, 44). Sabotage was a frequent strategy of slaves. One of the reasons cited by planters in the northeast sugar industry for preferring immigration over slave-labor was the propensity of slaves to destroy machinery. "The masters refused to invest in the slaves' education to enable them to operate machinery, for they feared to trust slaves with such expensive equipment since sabotage was a common form of slave resistance" (Eisenberg, 1977, p. 356). In this regard, it was clearly slave resistance13 to (and not simply the planter class' retreat from) the condition of slavery that drove abolition. "Abolition resulted principally from the pressure of slaves, who, instigated by abolitionists, abandoned

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plantations, caused disorder within labor, and created an unsustainable environment in the countryside. The revolta das senzalas brought a definitive end to the system of slavery" (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 457).14 "The slave population, not the planters, at last brought ruin to the system of forced labor by refusing to participate in it to the degree that repression became unendurably expensive" (Dean, 1976, p. 195). Thus, by the time of the Golden Law, the rebellion and flight of slaves had made Brazilian slavery an institution crumbling from within and the emancipatory law itself a virtual afterthought. With the cessation of an external slave trade in 1850, the traditionally high manumission rates in Brazil led to a steady rise in the number of the freed slaves. Freed slaves represented 50% of the Brazilian population in 1850. By 1888, on the eve of abolition, this had grown to 75%.15 The physical distribution of slave and freed slave populations prior to abolition reflects an important element of the advance preparation for a postslavery, race-based division of labor. A distinct pattern emerges from the census data of 1872 (Table 5.3) regarding the distribution of slave and freed slave populations. Across Brazil, there was a concentration of slave-based activities without a concentration of African populations. In 1872, 4 provinces accounted for two-thirds of the entire slave population. At the same time, the overall African population (represented by freed slaves) was far from concentrated and could be found across all parts of Brazil (see Table 5.3). Freed slaves outnumbered Europeans nationally by nearly half a million (468,139). Freed slaves outnumbered slaves nationally by over 2.7 million. Importantly, these ratios were consistent across regions. Freed slaves outnumbered Europeans in 13 out of the 20 provinces, and freed slaves outnumbered slaves in all but one province (Rio de Janeiro). Even in these 7 provinces where Europeans outnumbered freed slaves, there was a strong freed slave presence. Three of the 7 provinces had freed slave populations in excess of 200,000. Therefore, even if slave-based production were not spread evenly across Brazil, due to the wide distribution of freed slaves, Africans still had a strong presence across all of Brazilian society. In this manner, the ground was laid for the extension of the race-based division of labor long beyond the life of slavery as a formal institution. While the level of slave activity in a particular region was one of the primary determinants of manumission rates, three other factors also played important roles: slave mulatto status, their age and their gender. Mulattoes made up the vast majority (two-thirds) of the freed slave populations. Nationally, in 1872, there was a total of 3,801,782 mulattoes. Of these, 12.6% were slaves, and 87.4% were freed slaves. At the same time there was a total of 1,954,452 nonmulatto Africans (i.e., the offspring of an African mother and an African father). Of these, 52.9% were slaves, and 47.1% were freed slaves (Klein in Cohen and Greene, 1972, p. 320). As Table 5.4 indicates, in 1872, 78% of all freed slaves and 32% of all slaves were mulatto. Looking at available regional data, one finds that mulattoes represented a high of 92% of all freed slaves in

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Table 5.3 Regional Slave Populations as Percentages of the African Population/ Total Population (1872) Region or Province

Number of Freed Slaves

Number of Slaves

Number of Europeans

Brazil North Amazonas Para Northeast Maranhao Piaui Ceara Rio Grande do Norte Paraiba Pernambuco Alagoas East Sergipe Bahia Espirito Santo Rio de Janeiro Minas Gerais South Sao Paulo Parana Santa Catarina Rio Grande do Sul West/Central Goias Mato Grosso

4,255,428

1,510,810

8,592 110,556

3,787,289

Percentage of African Population Enslaved 26.3%

Percentage of Total Population Enslaved 15.8%

979 27,458

11,211 92,634

10.3% 9.9%

4.7% 12%

169,645 121,527 368,100 107,455

74,939 23,795 31,913 13,020

103,513 43,447 268,836 102,465

30.7% 16.4% 8.1% 10.9%

21.5% 12.6% 4.8% 5.8%

200,412 449,547 217,106

21,526 89,028 35,741

144,721 291,159 88,798

9.3% 16.6% 14.2%

5.9% 10.7% 10.5%

100,755 830,431 27,367 252,271 805,967

22,623 167,824 22,659 341,576 370,459

49,778 331,479 26,582 455,074 830,987

18.4% 16.9% 45.3% 57.5% 31.5%

13.1% 12.6% 30.1% 33.1% 18.5%

207,845 37,377 15,984

156,612 10,560 14,984

433,432 69,698 125,942

43.1% 22.1% 48.4%

19.6% 9.1% 9.5%

82,938

67,791

258,367

45.1%

16.6%

103,564

10,652

41,929

9.4%

6.8%

27,989

6,667

17,237

19.3%

12.8%

Source: Klein, 1972, pp. 313-314.

Parana in 1836 and a low of 6% of slaves in Rio de Janeiro in 1840. As the data in Table 5.4 further suggest, mulattoes constituted a smaller percentage of the slave workforce prior to the end of the slave trade in 1850 than they did afterward.16 There was also significant regional variation with respect to whether freed slaves had been freed at birth or after. In 1828, 44% of freed slaves in the province of Santa Catarina had been freed after birth. In Goias in 1824, 8% had been freed after birth. Quieros' data from Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, however, seem to illustrate a strong bias, evident throughout Brazil, in favor of

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manumission for adults over children. For the years 1819-1888, 86.7% of those manumitted were adults, and 13.3% were children. Likewise, in Rio de Janeiro, for the years 1807-1831, 87% were adults, and 13% were children (Quieros, 1986, p. 165). Table 5.4 Percentage of Freed Slaves and Slaves Who Were Mulatto (Nationally and for Select Provinces) Year Brazil Mato Grosso Goias Parana Sao Paulo Rio de Janeiro

1872 1828 1832 1836 1836 1840

Percentage of freed slaves who were Mulatto 78% 79% 79% 92% 89% 79%

Percentage of slaves who were Mulatto 32% 16% 13% 26% 16% 6%

Source: Klein, 1972, p. 320. Lastly, manumitted female slaves consistently outnumbered manumitted male slaves. This pattern, however, appears to have skewed the slave population less so than the other considerations of mulatto status, age, and degree of slave activity in one's area of residence. In 1872 females still accounted for 47% of the slave population. The figures were roughly comparable for freed mulattoes (50%) and for freed, nonmulatto Africans (49%). n Hence, prior to abolition, freed slaves were disproportionately mulatto adults residing throughout the country. Conversely, it follows that after the 1888 abolition, one is dealing with a former slave population that was disproportionately young, nonmulatto and concentrated in former regions of high slave activity. To better appreciate the calculated nature of abolition in Brazil (and the construction of a postslavery social order), it is important to review the specific stipulations associated with the two gradualist (1871, 1885) and final (1888) abolition laws of Brazil. The 1871 "free-womb" law freed all children born to slave women after its passage. Slaveholders were held responsible for the care, education and religious training of all such children until the age of 8. After this age, slave-holders were either financially compensated for the loss of the slave or given the opportunity to continue "hiring" the child until age 21. The "free-womb" law stipulated that "emancipation funds" be established in each province so as to compensate slave-holders for their "loss." As with all abolition laws, the impact of the "free-womb" law differed regionally. Stein argues, for example, that the 1871 statute had very little impact on the daily lives of children born to slaves in the Paraiba Valley coffee region. "'Nursed on slave milk, living in the midst of slaves,' no child was born a slave after 1871 but, as one author outspokenly declared, 'all the children of slave mothers continued to be raised as slaves and exactly in the same conditions in which they would be if the law of 1871 did not exist'" (Stein, 1953, p. 346).18

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In general, while, in fact, bettering the lives of children born to slaves in only modest ways, the "free-womb" law did grant "slaves for the first time in their history [the] legal right to guard and use economic resources for consumption or inheritance" (Camargo, 1989, p. 81). In this sense the "free-womb" law marked a distinct moment both for the former slave's sense of self (and the relation of slaves to their own work) and in the slave-holder's growing awareness of the need to replace the master-slave relation with new forms of coerced labor. The "free-womb" law was one of the principal mechanisms contributing to the growth of a population of libertos in post-1850 Brazil. In this regard, the legal and social restrictions on libertos telegraphed important elements of the labor strategy in the postslavery era. The systematic formation of a (largely private) rural police force had its origins in this period and frequently rendered libertos "prisoners to the land" (Correia, 1987, p. 27). Reflecting the weak penetration of state structures into many rural areas, landowners privately hired landless rural workers to oversee the newly freed slaves. In this respect, as Scott notes, the devastated Northeastern sugar region represented "the locus classicus of continued dependency on the part of former slaves [libertos]" (Scott in Scott, 1988, p. 17). The 1885 Sexagenarian Law, releasing all slaves 65 or older,19 and the 1888 Golden Law, releasing all remaining slaves (at the time about 720,000), were further measures constituting an overall Brazilian strategy for a gradual, orchestrated end to slavery. The strategy formulated in 1871 for the ending of slavery was not altered in 1885. A gradualist approach to the end of slavery had been adopted so as to control the process of abolition. The perspective was always to provide planters with adequate time to acquire alternative labor. It was necessary not only to guarantee a supply of laborers but also to "adapt" the existing laborers to the new conditions created by this transition. No changes were taken without considering their affect on the productive system. (Gebara, 1986, p. 99) At the same time that abolition slowly evolved, the litany of legal and social prohibitions for slaves was being expanded and more rigorously enforced. Such restrictions included prohibitions against gambling, dancing,20 the buying and selling of "items of value"21 or being poorly dressed in public.22 In the process of heightening the regimentation of life on the plantation, racial identities began to supersede master-slave identities. The use of the generic term "preto? used to distinguish a free African from a slave, was evidence of the fact that the gradualist program of abolition was generating new [social] problems. To be a "preto " implied explicitly, that one was a citizen yet remained distinct from white citizens. The term suggested difficulties in distinguishing precisely between freed slaves (pretos) and slaves (escravos). (Gebara, 1986, p. 117)

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The emergence of an elaborate state apparatus of coercion (national and state prison systems, police networks and vagrancy laws) first emerged in this post-1850 period.23 Beginning in the 1850s with the close of the external slave trade, the Brazilian government made extensive studies of the European and U.S. prison systems. In this spirit, the construction of Recife's House of Detention was begun in 1850. As a testament to the prescient nature of Brazilian social planning, over the next few decades (between 1860 and 1885) day laborers came to represent the largest population of inmates held in the Recife institution. Additionally, agricultural schools, beggar's asylums and state orphanages were created, beginning in the 1870s. Only three years following the passage of the "free-womb" law, the first escolas dos orfaos (orphanage "schools") were created. Such orphanage schools, in fact, were little more than a means of housing concentrated numbers of libertos to supply child labor to industry, as Huggins' example from the sugar industry illustrates. "The state had converted an ophan's colony, Colonia Isabel, into a disciplinary industrial school. The orphans school had become a complement to the sugar industry, for in 1887 the provincial president reported that the school had an engenho with the capacity to turn out five thousand kilograms a year of 'excellent quality' sugar, as well as machinery to make rum." (Huggins, 1985, p. 75). The range of tools at the disposal of Brazilian elites to control and discipline labor in this era was ever growing. Provisions were passed allowing planters to turn plantations into penal colonies (Law 370 in 1899). Planters continued to maintain private police forces (capangas), which they had relied upon throughout slavery. By the end of slavery, manumission itself could be used against the former slave. The widespread practice of granting conditional manumission became an effective means of securing control over the actions of former slaves. "Manumission certificates left open the possibility of re-enslavement. In some cases, specific clauses referred to particular infractions [providing just cause for re-enslavement]" (Ayoub, 1990, p. 128). However, the most cherished of the Brazilian ruling class' many social weapons were, without doubt, the vagrancy ordinances. Indeed, vagrancy laws represented an essential tool of social control, labor discipline and general repression throughout Brazil (and throughout the Americas and Central and Eastern Europe) in the postslavery (and postserfdom) era.24 "[Sao Paulo] Senator Godoy considered a vagrancy clause a necessity because of 'the lack of ambition in the national proletariat, from which results its lack of motivation for work.' Civilized nations, he asserted, all had such laws, and in Brazil it would keep the freedmen from swelling the mass of disturbers of the public order and calm'" (Dean, 1976, p. 151). A draconian body of vagrancy laws (little disguised in their intent) was the broom with which the state was able to literally sweep up all of those idle laborers for whom labor laws, land laws (and other informal means of persuasion) proved insufficient motivators. By 1890 the definition of vagrancy was broadened to rein in yet larger numbers of workers. The legal category of vagrant now included all persons who were judged not to be "dedicating themselves" to their work as well as all persons who were not actively seeking work.25

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The final Golden Law was unique among final abolition decrees in the Americas with respect to how it treated both slaveholders as well as slaves. Interestingly, reflecting the shifting power dynamics within the Brazilian ruling class, the Golden Law prescribed no compensation for slave-holders. At the same time, it offered no welfare provisions for former slaves or held out any pretense of attempting to organize any "transitional" social institutions—such as the patronato system in Cuba or the apprenticeship schemes in the British West Indies. As Foner notes—quoting the incisive words of a U.S. Confederate general with respect to freed slaves in the United States—the former slaves were literally offered "nothing but freedom" (Foner, 1983, p. 13). "From this perspective, the legal process of abolition may be explained as the political unfolding of a dilemma of finding the solution to a fundamental economic problem—supplying labor to the fields—while retaining, unaltered, the social forms tied to relations of domination" (Martins, 1976, p. 333). The lack of attention that was given by the Golden Law for either the "loss" of the slaveholder or the future welfare of the former slave is indicative of the extent to which the gradualist abolition measures—spread over a 38-year period from the close of the slave trade through the final abolition decree—were able to largely prepare Brazilian society for a postslavery social order. This new social order was grounded in a strict, race-based division of labor and a battery of extramarket structures to discipline and limit the options for labor. At the heart of this gradualist strategy to create a well-regimented, postslavery social order emerged a massive immigration campaign that was both unprecedented in scale and unambiguous in racial preference. European Immigration Thus, Brazilian elites recognized the inevitable early on and began the task of readjusting society to accommodate a class of nonslave African labor long in advance of 1888. Brazilian thought first turned to a consideration of how the work previously done by slaves could continue to be carried on. As in much of the Americas, immigrant labor was the favored source. It was not a foregone conclusion, however, that immigrants would originate exclusively from Europe. In fact, a lively debate ensued with respect to the use of Chinese immigrant labor. The consideration of Chinese labor went back to 1807. "As early as 1807 a Bahian economist suggested that Brazilians import Chinese and East Indian workers, and soon afterward the Portuguese Foreign Minister at Rio considered the importation of 2 million Chinese into Brazil. No really serious efforts were made however to ship Chinese workers to Brazil as long as the traditional source of field hands remained" (Conrad, 1973, p. 33). Plans for a massive Chinese immigration campaign were eventually rejected. This was, in large part, due to the negative connotations attached to the appearance of attempting to maintain de facto slavery through the use of "Asian semi-slavery."26 With respect to Brazil's postslavery, race-based division of labor, there are two particularly significant aspects to the Chinese immigration debate. First, the debate hinged on explicit assumptions about the link between a

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person's race and a person's capacity to work. Second, in what was a rarity for such discussions, sexuality and "the Asian" became a dominant theme, and many of Brazil's elites voiced the fear of a "Mongolization" of Brazilian society. As Viotti da Costa documents, Chinese coolies were rejected as laborers because they were considered to be "worse than Africans" in their work habits. The attempt to introduce coolies was never concretized. There was a frustrated attempt in 1855-56 and in the following years the idea came up again various times. Pamphlets supporting and attacking Chinese immigration appeared. For one side it was an abominable prospective. The Chinese, "worse than the Negro", were characterized by their backward intellect, lax work attitude, small stature, and greed, preferring to return to their country to live out their lives than to remain where they had migrated. For others they were the salvation for the coffee region. (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 124) Viotti da Costa's study of the Chinese immigration debate goes on to trace the fear among Brazilian planters of the potential for race mixing with Chinese and thereby, it is suggested, the contamination of Brazilian society. "There was no lack of protests and insinuations [within the Brazilian debate] against the dangers of 'mongolization'" (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 127). It remains a fascinating line of inquiry to further explore why a society of uniquely open relations between Africans, Europeans and Native Americans, with a plethora of racial terms denoting such mixed communions and demonstrating a strong consciousness of this social pattern, would so greatly fear "race mixing" with Asians. In the end, Europeans were chosen over Asians. The principal rationale for this selection was the work habits that Brazilian planters associated with Europeans as a race.28 Once it had been decided that Europe would provide the reservoir for immigrant labor, Brazilian planters next had to decide in what form to recruit that labor. Brazil had historically recruited immigrants in two forms: as settlers and as agricultural workers. "The peasantry—itself a European social category—was transformed in the Brazilian context and acquired a double form: the colono—the constitutive element of government—sponsored colonization and the immigrant-groups of workers on large plantations" (Martins, 1976, p. 350). While the emphasis (and the attraction to Europeans) had earlier been the former, by the era of abolition, agricultural laborers were more in demand to replace and/or augment slave-labor.29 At the same time, Brazilian planters did not want an influx of single males, attempting to make a stake in the Americas, out roaming the countryside. So, after race, the second stipulation of the Brazilian planter's immigration policy was to emphasize agricultural workers over settlers, with the demand that all arrive in family units. The actual eligibility requirements to be considered for immigration were that one be either (1) a married couple with no children (only if both were under 45), (2) a married couple with children with at least one working-age male (age 12-45) or (3) a widow or widower with children meeting the same conditions of "2." Those dependents eligible for subsidization included parents, grandparents, single brothers-in-law and orphaned nephews/nieces. Married women could join their husbands if they were already in Brazil.

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The family unit served two purposes in the minds of the planters. The first was social stability, that is, avoiding the development of a mass of underemployed single males and stimulating the creation of a more pliant workforce that would be less resistant to planter demands.30 The second purpose was profit—specifically, profit through the additional work to be squeezed out of women and children within the immigrant family. Immigrant families offered a cheap source of labor that could be supplemented (at harvest or other times) by a vast supply of women and child labor. "The introduction of immigrant families allowed the planter to supplement their labor force with a cheap reserve of laborers supplied by the women and children within families" (Beiguelman, 1981, p. 10).31 A final stipulation, with respect to appropriate candidates for immigration, had to do with political ideology. Exclusion on the basis of ideology was, of course, a policy going back to the slave trade. Slave traders had always tried to avoid enslaving African peoples from particular regions who were identified with political organizing (generally along religious lines), such as the Hausa and Madinka peoples from the Sudan. With the advent of European socialist/anarchist labor movements (especially in Italy) in the latter 19th century, the planters' concerns turned toward excluding such troublemakers once again. In one instance, Dean describes a major planter whose recruiting agents in Hamburg and Zurich were instructed by Brazilian authorities to avoid "[recruiting] socialists, or young-Germany veterans who may have belonged to the free-corps; none of those officers who talked politics, or discoursed on the forms of government" (Dean, 1976, p. 89). Holloway describes another time that police officials in Santos learned that a group of "anarchists" were thought to be aboard a Fiorita and Company ship under contract to the Sociedade Promotora. Brazilian officials took the suspected anarchists into custody upon arrival, and three of the immigrants were investigated and eventually deported (Holloway, 1980, p. 48). Thus, beginning in the 1850s, soon after the external slave trade's closure, an ambitious campaign to channel European labor to Brazil was under way. With governmental subsidies, immigrants partially paid their transportation costs and landed in Brazil as "indentured" laborers. The initial trickle of immigrants did not build to a more substantial flood of newcomers until the requisite labor laws, referred to earlier, were amended. Generally, the European laborers were paid an annual monetary wage—which was supplemented by further wages during harvest time—and given a plot of land on which to grow sustenance. Sao Paulo, the heart of the coffee industry, was the largest recipient of European immigrants. Between 1875 and 1900 over 803,000 immigrants reached the province.32 Their numbers grew from 13,000 in the 1870s and 184,000 in the 1880s to 609,000 by the 1890s. See Table 5.5 for the total number of immigrants arriving in Brazil between 1820 and 1929 broken down by decade. The high-water mark was the last decade of the 19th century, when over 1.1 million immigrants were sent from Europe.

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Table 5.5 Total Number of Immigrants to Brazil by Decade, 1820-1930 Years 1820-1829 1830-1839 1840-1849 1850-1859 1860-1869 1870-1879 1880-1889 1890-1899 1900-1909 1910-1919 1920-1929

Number of Immigrants 9,105 2,569 4,992 108,045 108,098 193,931 448,622 1,198,327 622,407 815,453 846,647

Source: Oliveira, 1973, p. 63.

The treatment of the European immigrant differed not only from that of African slaves and freed slaves, but also from that of Europeans native to Brazil. Contrasting the "two great movements of people," Europeans to Brazil and nordestinos (European Brazilians) to the Amazon, Furtado accentuates the differences. Europeans arrived in Brazil, largely at government expense, with a job, housing and a plot of land. Nordestinos were forced to pay all their expenses, living, at best, a precarious existence.33 The European immigrant—of a demanding nature and aided by his own government— arrived on the coffee plantation with all expenses paid and with housing and sustenance costs paid until the first crop. At the year's end he would be looking for another farm where greater advantages could be obtained on the job. He would always have an available plot on which to plant food crops essential to his family sustenance, which protected him against unscrupulous merchants insofar as his main expenditures were concerned. The situation of the nordestino in the Amazon was quite different: he started work already heavily in debt, because as a rule he was compelled to reimburse the whole or a part of his traveling expenses as well as the costs of working tools and installation. (Furtado, 1963, p. 146) As Correia correctly notes, the fact that Brazil's immigration policy coincided with the end of slavery could not be attributed to any general labor shortage. Rather, it was based on an "escassez da mao-de-obra escrave" (a shortage of slave-labor) (Correia, 1987, p. 23).34 The purpose of European immigration was simply to drive down wages and to force former slaves to work under terms dictated by planters in a wholly manufactured environment of "resource scarcity."35 It was absurd to consider Brazil to be in the throes of a labor shortage at the close of slavery, when there were literally "millions who were idle." There was no shortage of workers on Brazilian soil, but, to labor-hungry planters, putting the native Brazilian to work on a permanent basis under prevailing conditions seemed to

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present obstacles greater than those involved in acquiring new slaves from other parts of Brazil who were reputedly more ambitious than marginal Brazilians. Millions were idle, reported a planter delegation to the Agricultural Congress of 1878. . . . The countryside was infested with vagabonds—idle not because they were lazy, but because, as Joaquim Nabuco put it, "they did not find about them the incentive which awakens in the poor man a vision of well-being acquired through labor." (Conrad, 1973, pp. 38-39) The fact that increasing wages—as a means to attract free labor—was never taken up seriously as an alternative to embarking upon a costly campaign of European migration is as good an indication as any that Brazil's former slaves were not to be "freed" in any conventional sense. In the mid-19th century, the creation of a free labor market of former slaves was about the furthest thing from consideration. In fact, all Brazilian strategies and policies in this era went explicitly toward the cultivation of a workforce of former slaves whose options were as limited as possible and who would, therefore, have little capacity to resist the new social order. Whenever proposals were discussed for replacing slave-labor in Brazil, it was usually in terms of importing indentured workers from Europe or the Orient. . . . As pressures for the end of slavery increased and the percentage of slaves in the Brazilian labor force declined, large-scale European immigration to Brazil began. This immigration was attracted not by rising wages in Brazil but by the Brazilian government's payment of the immigrants' transportation costs. (Leff, 1972, p. 492) The success of this strategy is readily apparent in the fact that, for the years 1870-1930, wages in the coffee industry did not rise. 36 The success planters had holding down wages, along with a liberalizing of the conditions of immigrant labor in Brazil to make the offer more attractive, resulted in a fair degree of fluidity. There was, in fact, a high turnover rate, as immigrants were relatively free to move from planter to planter. Thus, the rate of newly arriving immigrants remained high. 37 The flux of immigrants was kept as high as possible up to the first world war. This was necessary because the immigrants tended to withdraw to other employments after a few harvests or to re-migrate to their homelands. There was also a clear intent to keep wages low. (Dean, 1989, p. 237) The rapid injection of a mass of laborers, predisposed to a market rationale, put pressure upon the native laborers prior to their having had time to adjust to the economically-motivated mindset. Thus simultaneously the new agricultural laborers could take up those tasks rejected by native laborers while forcing the latter into a condition of dependency. This created a culture wherein there was a guaranteed abundant and cheap source of labor. (Beiguelman, 1981, p. 44) As a result, European immigrants, in effect, stole jobs from former slaves. "All indications were that when abolition was proclaimed there would be a large migratory movement toward the fast expanding new regions which could pay substantially higher wages. Nevertheless, precisely at that time there began the

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great European migratory current" (Furtado, 1963, p. 153). Thus, slaves entered an intentionally bleached labor pool with virtually no resources (beyond their own labor-power) and no experience negotiating a (purportedly) market-driven, racially divided society. "Beginning in 1884, the state, instead of coercing laborers directly, sought to achieve the same objective—cheap and obedient labor for the plantations—by flooding the labor market with subsidized immigrants" (Stolcke and Hall, 1983, p. 182). Therefore, while the option of subsistence farming remained available to freed slaves, the "great mass" of former slaves remained outside the larger economy on into the 20th century. "Throughout the first half of the 20th century the great mass of the descendants of the former slaves were to go on living within a limited system of 'necessities' and playing a purely passive role in the economic transformations of Brazil" (Furtado, 1963, p. 154). In this sense, it is argued that the abolition of slavery was nothing less than the profound reorganization of Brazilian society, abolishing the slave while simultaneously failing to emancipate the African. Brazilian planters did little, in their correspondence or in their practice, to conceal their efforts both to drive down postabolition wages through immigration and to force freed slaves to work under terms that were dictated by them. The former slaves, however, presented two obstacles to achieving the goals of their transparent immigration policies. First, there was the phenomenon, witnessed almost uniformly across the Americas, of slaves retracting women and children from the fields. Second, there was the slaves' refusal to perform tasks that they associated with a "slave status." The pulling of women and children from the fields was common throughout slave communities. Holloway discerns that this potential for withdrawing from fieldwork proved so attractive to European women that a fair number would marry former slaves so as to avoid the drudgery of work. One possible incentive for some immigrant women to marry Blacks was the two groups' different attitudes toward women. An Italian journalist reported in 1891 that when he visited plantation living quarters he saw "the women of the Blacks sitting in their doorways with their hands on their laps." The houses of the Italian workers, in contrast, were "hermetically sealed." The immigrant colonos of both sexes above ten years of age were in the fields hoeing coffee. Native camaradas (day laborers) looked down on colonos for putting their wives to work in the coffee fields whenever possible. Immigrants, on the other hand, considered the native workers' practice of keeping wives at home to be a waste of labor power. Thus a European woman who married a Black man may have been ostracized from her own ethnic group, but she stood to gain in status vis-a-vis her husband and leisure time. (Holloway, 1980, p. 106)38 The rejection of work that was popularly associated with slave status was equally troubling to the planter class and stood in stark contrast to the immigrant who appeared "more receptive" to the harsh labor conditions. While undeniably important, wages appear to have been almost a secondary consideration [for former slaves in Sao Paulo], and one pushed aside by the more

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pressing issue of working conditions. The libertos' overriding concern was to place as much distance as possible between themselves and their former status as slaves. For most freedmen and women, this meant not accepting employment on plantations where they had been slaves. . . . While some migrated to cities, most remained in the countryside and sought plantation work, though under conditions which they insisted be quite different from those which had characterized slavery. (Andrews, 1988, p. 108) Of particular interest was the fact that both the former slave and former master viewed the refusal of former slaves to perform certain tasks in strictly racial terms. For the former master, the freed slave was "lazy," and the European immigrant, "industrious." For the former slave, however, the freed slave was "dignified," the European immigrant "undignified." These conflicting values were well captured in the journal entry of a 19th-century French diplomat who was traveling in Brazil in the postabolition period. The diplomat reports overhearing a former domestic slave who, in voicing her refusal to perform a certain menial task, asked rhetorically, "What do you take me for, an Italian?" (Holloway, 1980, p. 105). The significance of the massive European immigration campaign for the labor process itself in postslavery Brazilian society is detailed in Chapter 6. Of importance here are the social conditions shaping the campaign and the calculated nature by which the Brazilian ruling class went about pursuing their interests. Europeans were chosen over non-Europeans so as to maintain a race-based division of labor that forced Africans to the lowest rung. Agricultural laborers were selected over colonos in an effort to ensure the availability of a class of dependent laborers for the growing coffee industry. Family units were chosen over single males to promote social stability, and the political ideology of immigrants was screened to avoid potential agitators. Importantly, at the time of organizing immigration there was, by no means, any kind of labor shortage to contend with. However, when it came to labor recruitment, the Brazilian ruling class opted to incur the high costs of a massive program of transAtlantic immigration (which itself later became a profitable venture) rather than take their chances with generalized wage-labor and the volatility of free market forces. THE RESULTS As early as the 1830s, the Brazilian ruling class began deploying a number of gradualist abolition strategies for the purpose of preparing Brazilian society for a postslavery social order. At the core of these strategies was a host of extramarket laws and policies that reshaped labor-capital relations, race-based labor forms, patterns of land-ownership and European immigration in an effort to limit the freedom of former slaves. This was neither a road map for a transition to pure wage-labor nor an effort to unleash the curative powers of Smithian market forces—quite the opposite. On this point, there was little confusion on the part of Brazil's ruling elite. The Brazilian slave population was re-constituted in the form of a freed slave population that was comprised of

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racially distinct noncitizens whose access to land and skilled trades was kept in check. By 1850 the African population in Brazil had been legally and socially segmented into four categories: slaves, freed slaves, libertos and emancipados. Each had a distinct relation to capital. The freed slave population was by far the largest segment of the African population, and the myriad of social restrictions placed on them (regarding skilled trades, property, movement) served as a precursor for the future development of restrictions on former slaves following abolition. In fact, it was, in part, the broad distribution of Africans across Brazil, even at a time when slaves were increasingly concentrated, that allowed for the general suppression of former slaves throughout the postslavery era. (This is especially important to keep in mind when considering developments in the three slave regions discussed in Chapter 6.) A series of calculated legislative acts (labor laws, the Land Law of 1850, abolition decrees) effectively closed the options of former slaves and shaped the pattern of European immigration. For any Africans who may have slipped through the juridical cracks of social control, there emerged an army of punitive social institutions that specifically targeted vagrancy, petty crime and indolence. Contrary to most accounts of abolition in the Americas, which view the end of slavery as a series of steps linked to the gradual transition from slave-labor to "free" wage-labor and subservience to market forces, it is argued here that the abolition of slavery in Brazil had its basis in the nonemergence of wage-labor and the active stifling of market forces. The abolition of slavery in Brazil was, in fact, premised upon the creation of social conditions that assured the former slave population's uninterrupted servitude, guaranteed by the heavy hand of extramarket structures and institutions. Former slaves were neither "free" (in the sense of participating in a competitive national labor market) nor in transition to wage-labor. Rather, they were integral members of a complex and heterogeneous, postslavery working class that was characterized, above all, by a race-based division of labor that relied on extramarket measures to harness and discipline the labor force. NOTES 1. As is detailed later, there were two primary forms of immigration to Brazil. On the one hand, there were colonos. These were immigrants who established settler colonies. Upon arrival they were given basic startup resources for the economic development of areas (land, slaves, draft animals). Much 19th-century immigration to Brazil (prior to 1850) was directed to Rio Grande do Sul, for example, where it was hoped Brazil would expand its settlements. On the other hand, other immigrants came to Brazil as simple laborers, with little or no resources. To quote Gebara, "The proletarianization of the immigrant began initially by the necessity of attracting it" (Gebara, 1986, p. 83). The labor laws considered here were drafted in an effort to attract immigrants who were destined to become simple laborers. 2. As alluded to in earlier chapters, the legal, civic status of freed slaves was often left ambiguous. Surviving judicial/police records reflect this. An 1835 Bahian document, for example, quotes the Salvador chief of police, who distinguished libertos both from

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"citizens" as well as from "foreigners." "The chief of police of Salvador stated in 1835 that emancipated Africans were 'undesirable ones' and added that 'none of them enjoy the rights of a citizen or the rights of a foreigner'" (Quieros, 1988b, p. 83). 3. Primogeniture was abolished in 1830. However, Dean notes, "Equal inheritance, it seems, dismembered only subsistence holdings, not the estates of those with adequate liquid capital" (Dean, 1971, p. 609). 4. "The relative scarcity of land and labor and the degree to which, despite abolition, the planter class retained political authority shaped the transition [across the Americas] from slavery to freedom" (Foner, 1983, p. 10). 5. Toward this end, the acquisition of reappropriated crown land was limited to persons able to formally purchase the land. 6. Of course, the establishment of land laws (throughout the Americas) was a postabolition issue of less concern in Central and Eastern Europe, where land claims and private property customs generally went back centuries. The design of such laws revealed the subtle distinction between laws developed to coerce and laws developed to punish. Such laws were clearly seen by most as pertaining more to the latter and hence did not effectively accomplish the former. Brazilian 19th-century labor laws were largely counterproductive with respect to procuring labor. 7. The British had, in fact, by means of an 1817 treaty with Spain, attempted to pay the Spanish to cease their participation in the slave trade. "The 1817 agreement, whereby the Spanish agreed to stop the [slave] trade to their colonies after 1820, was forced by the English upon a war-weakened Spain. Of course as an incentive to do so the English government had paid the Spanish Crown 400,000 British pounds as 'compensation'" (Knight, 1970, p. 23). 8. One is cautioned against viewing such actions as in anyway reflecting a charitable disposition toward Africans themselves. After all, it was not infrequent for Africans on slave ships captured by the British to be sent to the British West Indies as "free" Africans in order to help defray labor shortages on Caribbean plantations. Others, such as the emancipados, were forced to continue on to Brazil. 9. Efforts to thwart the slave trade prior to 1850 did, however, shift Brazil's reliance on Western Africa to Mozambique as a source of slaves. While representing a mere 3% of all Africans kidnapped between 1790 and 1811, Mozambique provided 75% of all slaves in the 19th century. 10. Within the coffee region itself, slaves were further concentrated. By 1872 the coffee region had 500,000 working coffee and 30,000 in "manual or mechanical trades" (Conrad, 1983, p. 351). Minas Gerais alone in 1872 had 278,767 slaves in agriculture. All other provinces outside the coffee region had a combined total of 284,757 slaves in agriculture. 11. Machado de Assis, for example, the celebrated mulatto novelist, though nationally acclaimed, reflected "little consciousness of his class or background in his writings" (Klein, 1986, p. 235). 12. True to the time-honored European tradition of turning African against African, as had begun with the process of paying off one group of Africans to capture another group, the Brazilians granted freedom in 1866 to government-owned slaves who agreed to serve in the army, in large part, to capture runaway slaves. 13. Stein's description of the measures taken in Vassouras to limit slave fraternization (such as staggering days off) provides evidence of the extent of planter cognizance of slave resistance. "It was common for planters to 'give permission' on days other than Sundays to stagger the weekly day off and prevent slaves from meeting with friends from nearby plantations" (Stein in Pescatello, 1975, p. 184). Dean notes the same

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practice in Rio Claro. "To avert this danger, the planters forbade drums, and staggered the day of rest, so that the slaves would not be idle at once" (Dean, 1976, p. 86). 14. Viotti da Costa's work, stands out in many ways from standard histories of Brazilian abolition. Viotti da Costa presents one of the few efforts to analyze Brazilian abolition in the context of other abolitions in the West as well as in the context of a transition from a colonial to a post-colonial social order. Abolition represented a stage in the process of liquidating the colonial system in the country, involving ample revisions of modes of life and the values of society. [The "free-womb" law] was an important culmination of this process tied as it was, on the one hand, to the end of slavery throughout the world, and on the other hand, its role in modifying the structure of Brazilian economic structures and society. . . . The senhorial class directly tied to the traditional mode of production was profoundly affected. A new, dynamic class [tied to emerging industries] was formed to replace the old. (Viotti da Costa, 1982, pp. 449, 459) 15. Percentages in Cuba and the United States at similar times relative to their abolitions were, respectively, 35% and 11%. Jamaica and Barbados in 1834 were, respectively, 10% and 6%, while St. Domingue in 1789 was 5%, and Martinique in 1848 was 30%. 16. Indeed, in 1872, only 9.1% of slaves in Brazil had been born in Africa (Klein, 1972, p. 319). Thus, even with a manumission rate far ahead of that of most other slave societies in the Americas, near the end of slavery in Brazil, 90.9% of the slave population remained second- or third-generation Africans! 17. The 1872 figure for Europeans was 48%. 18. Stein is here quoting F. Belisario, a 19th-century Brazilian abolitionist writer. 19. The law, in fact, freed a mere 18,946 slaves. 20. "The control of music, dance, and other cultural activities was representative of the more general politics of abolition, such that the process of abolition should not be confused with democratization" (Gebara, 1986, p. 117). 21. "Items of value" included arms, munitions, gold, silver, coffee, sugar, cotton, livestock, copper, leather, tea, beverages, molasses, poison and cane. 22. As a means to establish and maintain order, prohibitions were put on slave owners as well. The abandonment of sick slaves, for example, was forbidden. 23. "One of the primary state agencies involved in furthering planter interests after the 1850's was Pernambuco's nascent criminal justice system. In essence, this repressive apparatus of the state became the primary instrument of labor recruitment and 'socialization'" (Huggins, 1985, p. 43). 24. "The imperial vagrancy statute provided an ad hoc mechanism for extracting labor from unwilling workers. According to the Brazilian criminal code, a vagrant was a person lacking a fixed residence, either without an occupation or with one that was offensive to public morals or custom" (Huggins, 1985, p. 71). 25. "Changing definitions of the problem population can be seen in the targets of the agricultural colony proposed in 1890. It would house, in addition to vagrants, two new categories of deviants: people not dedicating themselves to work and those not looking for it. Thus in 1890 the able-bodied who could work but chose not to had joined the traditional vagrants as part of the problem population" (Huggins, 1985, p. 73). 26. "The importation of Orientals—Chinese, East Indians—engaged in by the British and Dutch in the Guianas and Caribbean, was defended by Brazilian capitalists who hoped to substitute African slavery with a regime of Asian semi-slavery. This idea, however, was strongly opposed in Parliament, above all by abolitionist deputies" (Correia, 1987, pp. 24-25).

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27. Recalling 16th/17th-century debates concerning the "fitness" of European laborers for tropical climates, the modified nature of the debate still ran along racial lines ("hardworking" Europeans versus "not-so-hardworking" Asians). The Chinese immigration debate highlights the extent to which there was an effort to isolate specific racial characteristics as a basis for cultural inclusion/exclusion. 28. A trickle of Chinese laborers must have, nonetheless, made their way to Brazil, as Ayoub documents that at least 40 Chinese laborers were sent to explore mines in the Maranhao municipio (county) of Maracacume (Ayoub, 1990, p. 99). 29. "The interest [of Brazilian planters] now was to import workers to plant, care for, and harvest coffee trees" (Correia, 1987, p. 24). 30. "The initial stages of industrialization in Sao Paulo were based on immigrant labor rather than Black, and on labor carried out by every member of the immigrant family" (Andrew in Scott, 1988, p. 112). 31. A preference for families did not eliminate a bias for males, however. Males made up the majority of family members between 1876 and 1908. Only 25% of all Italian immigrants were female. This was roughly the same ratio of male to female for Indians and Chinese sent to other parts of the Americas. 32. Of this total, 577,000 arrived from Italy. 33. When word of living conditions in parts of Brazil reached Prussian officials in 1859, they temporarily prohibited emigration to Brazil due to the "primitive ways of living" that persons were forced to live under. 34. The planter class was fairly explicit on this point. Conrad quotes a document from the municipal chamber of Sao Paulo in 1885. There is no lack of workers in this country; they are superabundant in the cities, towns, and villages. How to attract these armies of idle people to agricultural labor is what must be considered because such efforts will tend to put the native Brazilian to work... . The substitution of the slave worker by the free is a question of vital concern to the nation. Abolitionism does not solve this problem, but seeks merely to unleash upon the literate and hardworking classes the mindless mass of a million ignorant and often bloodthirsty slaves. (Conrad, 1983, p. 461) 35. "Ever since the first discussions of subsidized immigration, the goal had been clear: to flood the labor market with workers, thus keeping the cost of labor low. The sponsor of the 1870 proposal to subsidize European immigration argued the desirability of 'creating a market situation in which workers must search for landowners rather than landowners search for workers'" (Andrews in Scott, 1988, p. 88). 36. As will be explored later, the destination of immigrants was predominantly the coffee region (and within the coffee region, primarily western Sao Paulo). This became an important consideration with respect to the organization of immigration policy. 37. In Sao Paulo it is estimated that in the latter 19th century and early 20th century, 40-60% of immigrants left their planter's employ each year (Stolcke and Hall, 1983, p. 185). 38. "On the slave level, women were far more independent economically. They performed the work of men—weeding, hoeing, and harvesting—on the coffee slopes. They raised foodstuffs on their patches of land for sale; in this fashion, a few, sometimes aided by outsiders, purchased their freedom. For the latter, many were seamstresses. In many respects Negro women, both before and after emancipation, enjoyed an independence denied their upper-class sisters" (Stein, 1970, p. 151).

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Chapter 6

Brazilian Abolition: The Process Brazil's slow and measured retreat from slavery assured that the final 1888 decree would be anything but sudden. However, the resulting social disruption could be dampened only so much. In fact, the social changes wrought by the formal end of slavery were definitive and harsh. The hour of abolition left Brazil's former slave population strategically displaced and thoroughly dispossessed. While specific conditions varied by region, the one common trait across postslavery Brazil was that in no case did former slaves enter a general labor market. In no case did former slaves openly "compete" with European labor. To begin to understand this process one must recognize that slavery, far from having simply been a distinct labor form, had also been based on the creation of a racially defined category of human being. The slave had been defined as much by dominant cultural/ideological norms as by their economic role. Thus, after 1888, slavery may have been technically abolished, but the cultural conditions upon which slavery was premised remained. Certain basic features of abolition were evident across all of Brazil, though the specific manifestation of these features varied by region. Throughout all of Brazil there emerged a race-based division of labor, a range of coercive labor forms and a variety of extramarket structures. In the northeast sugar region, moradores represented the predominant labor form for former slaves in the postslavery era. In the Paraiba Valley (in eastern Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) the end of slavery coincided with the dissolution of the local coffee industry. As a result, former slaves were left destitute, stranded on the margins of society. In the northeast sugar region it was critical to control access to land. The planters, therefore, relied upon the extramarket influence of labor and land laws in combination with punitive state measures (such as vagrancy ordinances). Western Sao Paulo, on the other hand, turned to the extramarket pressure of European immigration.

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As discussed earlier, the years 1850 to 1888 marked an era of heightened activity on the part of Brazil's ruling class in their efforts to shepherd in the postslavery social order. The year 1850 was the last year of the external slave trade. The external slave trade had been slowly closing for the previous 40 years, and toward this end, the Brazilian ruling class had been making provisions for the ending of the slave trade for several decades. However, with the official close in 1850, efforts began in earnest to secure a viable workforce not only in the absence of a slave trade but also with an eye toward the growing movement to end the practice of slavery itself. Like the demise of the slave trade, the inevitability of abolition was recognized by the Brazilian planter class long in advance of the final decree in 1888. Extensive efforts had been made over the previous decades to assure as seamless and uneventful a transition as possible to a postslavery social order. Such endeavors achieved varying levels of success. This chapter details the events shaping the postslavery Brazilian social order and the distinct regional patterns that emerged in the post-1850 period. For the purpose of comparing and contrasting these patterns, this chapter examines the development of a postslavery social order in two distinct regions of 19th-century Brazil—the northeast sugar region and the coffee region. In the postabolition northeast sugar region, former slaves were either cut off from the formal economy and marginalized from social institutions in general or reabsorbed as moradores—a unique sharecropping arrangement that relied on the use of lavradores (a class of European smallholders situated between large-land holders and the former slaves). The coffee region consisted of two broad geographic zones: the Paraiba Valley and western Sao Paulo. In the postabolition Paraiba Valley, former slaves were either marginalized from productive activities or reabsorbed as camaradas (day laborers) after the valley was purposely flooded with privileged, European immigrant labor. In postabolition western Sao Paulo, planters engaged in a protracted immigration campaign to draw European laborers to the area. This forced the area's former slaves either to retreat to subsistence production on the margins of society or to adopt a rootless, uncertain existence as traveling camaradas. Both of these regions developed key satellite provinces: Maranhao in the case of the Northeast sugar region and Rio Grande do Sul in the case of the coffee region. These provinces provided important consumption goods and, in this manner, served as vital sources for the reproduction of the labor force in each region. For this reason, examining the abolition of slavery in these provinces (in the context of abolition in their linked region) can provide further insight into the regional nature of abolition in Brazil and the establishment of a postslavery social order. The entire social structure of Maranhao developed as a direct by-product of sugar production in the northeast. In postabolition Maranhao, former slaves were systematically barred from their previous, slave-era roles in the cattle industry and replaced by Europeans before most were forced to move on. Postabolition Maranhao made little effort to reabsorb the former slaves. Rio Grande do Sul emerged in the early 19th century as a province whose productive activities (wheat and cattle) were inextricably linked

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to the consumption needs of the coffee region. With the abolition of slavery, the former slaves of Rio Grande do Sul were swiftly replaced by European immigrants who began flowing in from the neighboring Sao Paulo. Former slaves were left to eke out a desperate subsistence existence, primarily finding work as camaradas. THE NORTHEAST SUGAR REGION For nearly four centuries king sugar had ruled the northeast. The region itself was quite large. It ran from Rio Grande do Norte to Bahia and crossed three distinct geographic zones. The zona da mata was a strip of land that stretched 60 km inland in the north and almost 130 km inland in the south. Most of Brazil's sugar production was concentrated here.1 Beyond the zona de mata were the agreste and the sertao. The agreste was a strip of land reaching about 200 km inland. A variety of crops was grown in this sector over the years, though cotton and rice generally enjoyed the most success. The sertao was a vast sea of land that led out to the hinterland. This area was primarily set aside for cattle. Within the northeast sugar region, the post-1850 period was characterized by a rapid conversion from slave-labor to "free" labor forms and an accelerating pattern of out-migration. Beyond abolition itself, driving this process were major changes in global sugar production. World cane and beet sugar production was expanding rapidly. By 1900 beet sugar had captured 44% of the world markets (see Table 6.1). About the same time, 70% of Brazil's sugar production was going toward domestic consumption. By 1872 non-slave-laborers outnumbered slaves in almost every occupational category in the Northeast. In Pernambuco, non-slave labor outnumbered slaves among skilled laborers 14:1 and among agricultural workers 5:1. Only among domestic laborers did slaves continue to outnumber non-slave-laborers (10:3). Far from sounding the death knell for sugar, however, the events of the post-1850 period marked the high-water mark for Brazilian sugar production. For example, while the number of slaves in sugar fell by 70% from 1840 to 1880 in Pernambuco, the province's production of sugar more than doubled for this same period. Pernambuco's final harvest with slaves (in 1888) brought in a record amount. While the two subsequent harvests declined by 40%, production soon returned to the 1888 level and set a new record by 1894. Brazil's northeastern sugar region ultimately managed to retain its former slaves— employed under new terms but performing the same tasks—and not merely sustain, but actually expand, production levels. Parallel to the ongoing gradual abolition of slavery and the evolving global sugar industry, planters were swiftly replacing the older engenhos with the newer, more productive usinas (or central mills). To hasten their development, the imperial government initially guaranteed a 7% return on all investments in

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usinas. Aside from contributing to a greater concentration of mill ownership— by the late 19th century 41 usinas had absorbed over 400 engenhos—the introduction of usinas did little to alter the monocultural focus or the basic landholding patterns of the northeast sugar region. "The new industrial system brought no change in the economy's perennial features of monoculture and latifundia landholding. Indeed the second of these was reinforced thanks to the gradual process of land acquisition undertaken by the usinas" (Reis, 1977, p. 371). Table 6.1 World Sugar Production/Brazilian Amounts, 1846-1905 (in Metric Tons) Years 1846-1850 1851-1855 1856-1860 1861-1865 1866-1870 1871-1875 1876-1880 1881-1885 1886-1890 1891-1895 1896-1900 1901-1905

Beet Sugar 94,723 166,243 339,520 479,680 721,222 1,251,053 1,532,536 2,102,084 2,863,370 3,796,155 5,009,931 5,907,654

Cane Sugar 455,675 952,074 1,016,098 1,160,049 1,306,812 1,525,817 1,616,202 1,781,304 1,987,707 2,745,391 2,445,469 3,738,137

Brazilian Cane 118,287 123,409 106,243 126,763 105,939 170,543 175,599 228,302 155,993 153,333 113,908 78,284

Source: Eisenberg, 1974, pp. 237-240.

Essentially, the planter class' monopoly of the most productive lands, along with the gradual nature of abolition, permitted the planter class to retain its social power throughout the sugar region in the post-1850 period.2 Two factors confronted former slaves seeking to break from planter domination—a monopoly of landownership and a large class of "free" European laborers. "It is completely absurd to think of the national [European] free labor as marginalized by the transition from slave to free labor. On the contrary, the solidification of client relations inherited from the colonial structure provided the basis for the transition" (Mattos, 1987, p. 27).3 In this regard, for the northeast sugar region, the post-1850 period was more a time of continuity than of any radical change. In Pernambuco, for example, the political and economic supremacy of sugar planters was carried long into the 20th century. Most planters had converted the majority of their workforce to "free" labor by 1872, with slaves turned into squatters. Eisenberg has documented how, by 1872, planters had already replaced their predominantly slave workforce with a predominantly "free" workforce. The first general census in imperial Brazil, in fact, found that the majority of agricultural workers in all 10 of Pernambuco's sugar municipios were categorized as "free" laborers. At the same time, while most former slaves did remain in the sugar region after their

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release, only 10% of Pernambuco's former slaves became wage-laborers between 1850 and 1880 (Eisenberg, 1977, p. 356). The abolition of slavery in the northeast sugar region primarily consisted of throwing former slaves into a labor market that was favorable to planters. This resulted in a variety of subservient labor forms and a constant downward pressure on wages. "After 1850 the social value of slavery fast receded into the background, and the planters replaced slaves with client populations of squatters, wage workers, and sharecroppers, groups which were nearly as subservient" (Eisenberg, 1977, pp. 357-358). Under such conditions foreign immigration was little needed to coerce labor. A variety of circumstances reduced the number of slaves available in the northeast in this period. As noted in earlier chapters, there was a steady decrease in the number of slaves due to manumission and out-migration (as well as deaths from recurrent cholera epidemics).4 In addition, between 1864 and 1870, over 200,000 slaves were granted their freedom (across all of Brazil) for their participation in the Paraguayan War. The out-migration of slaves from the northeast could be attributed to the internal slave trade, a booming rubber economy in the Amazon5 and cacao economy in southern Bahia, as well as the 1877-1879 drought (which devastated the sertao in particular).6 In Paraiba, the drought accelerated the sale of slaves to the south and the adoption of non-slave-labor forms, along with stimulating the establishment of agricultural colonies (using national—as opposed to foreign—labor). The internal slave trade cost Bahia and Pernambuco almost 1,000 slaves a year throughout the 1870s (Galloway, 1971, p. 590). At the same time, as Huggins notes, planters did not go about trading slaves haphazardly. Rather, they made careful calculations and retained a sufficient number of slaves so as to maintain profitable production. Hence, the post-1850 period provided the northeast with a reservoir of labor, and, consequently, a foreign immigration policy was never seriously pursued by northeast planters.7 Instead, utilizing former slaves, planters attempted to integrate libertos into an existing class of agricultural laborers. The answer to the threat presented by the abolition of slavery came not through the introduction of wage labor or immigration, but through a change in the nature of the long-existent tenant class on the plantations—the moradores. The moradores were now required to work in their landlords' fields in return for the use of a plot of land. . . . The employment of the morador on the plantation in effect represented an exchange of the use of land for labor. (Galloway, 1971, p. 601) As evidenced by data from Paraiba, those slaves who remained on plantations through 1888 were increasingly concentrated in sugar. Paraiba's slaves were distributed among sugar, cotton and cattle. In 1852, 24.8% of Paraiba's 28,566 slaves were in sugar. By 1886, 36.2% of Parafba's 18,785 slaves were in sugar (Soares, 1979, p. 39). The percentage of Parafba's slaves in

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cattle, on the other hand, remained little changed: 33.5% in 1852 and 34.5% in 1886. "Up to the abolition of slavery in 1888, the slaves participated in different sectors of the Paraiba economy. However, slave labor was used more in certain key activities, such as sugar, than in others such as cotton and coffee" (Soares, 1979, p. 66). The case of Paraiba highlights the extent to which, outside the Reconcavo sector of Bahia and the southern coast of Pernambuco, sugar production was generally dominated by smallholders (lavradores who were linked to engenhos). Parafba's most productive sugar municipio, Mamaguape, averaged 11 slaves and 14 non-slave-laborers per engenho in the post-1850 period. The northeastern provinces of Alagoas and Sergipe averaged 6 and 19 slaves, respectively, per engenho. Pernambuco, meanwhile, averaged two to three lavradores per plantation, with each of them owning 6 or 7 slaves (Eisenberg, 1977, p. 591). A lavradofs wealth was largely measured by the size of that person's slaveholdings. Therefore, lavradores were the slaveholding class that stood the most to lose (both financially and with respect to social status) with abolition. Slaves must have represented a very high proportion of the wealth of lavradores. In the case of the tenant lavradores their slaves may well have been almost their entire wealth; certainly the lavradores' major asset in the plantation society of the zona da mata was their ownership of slave labor. . . . The law of 1888 [abolition] legislated one class out of existence; its elimination destroyed the major asset of a second, the lavradores, whose position had depended to a large extent on their ability to provide labor through the ownership of slaves. (Galloway, 1971, pp. 595, 604) Interestingly, the labor system that emerged in the wake of abolition bore many similarities to the Insten system described by Weber in postserfdom Germany. Like their former serf counterparts, most former slaves became quasi sharecroppers who were supported by bands of seasonal migratory laborers from the countryside. As in Eastern and Central Europe, landownership patterns greatly limited the former slaves' options, and the regional ruling class thereby retained their power. The one class that had no true equivalent in postserfdom Germany, the lavradores were also able to survive abolition. Indeed, the survival of the lavradores was evidence not only of the minimal social disruption brought by abolition but also of the stringent, race-based division of labor, as a factor in working-class formation, that was absent in Eastern and Central Europe. Ethnic-based discrimination was, of course, an important element of postserfdom Eastern and Central Europe. However, it could not compare with systematic use of racial discrimination in the Americas as an instrument of social control. Following slavery, the vast majority of former slaves remained in the northeast sugar region. For these former slaves virtually their only option was to join the growing class of agricultural laborers referred to as moradores. Eisenberg has estimated that moradores represented as much as 95% of the "free" labor in Pernambuco's zona de mata in the post-1850 period (Eisenberg, 1974, p. 183). Moradores evolved into a hybrid labor form that was typical of this period. Subsistence remained the principal form of survival for the morador,

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who was given a seco (a daily wage without the provision of clothes, meals or medical attention). Reis has estimated that the per capita cost of a morador was 10,000 milreis in the 1870s, while the equivalent cost for a slave was 50,000 milreis (Reis, 1977, p. 387). 8 Hence, moradores were preferred to "full" wage laborers by the planters, who actively sought to exploit an emerging relation of dependence. Moradores were not only landless; they were virtually destitute in every other way as well. With the consent of a senhor de engenho, they could build a hut, raise subsistence crops, and hunt and fish on his estate. The morador had no rights of occupancy whatsoever and could be evicted at a moment's notice but he was also free to move, and he frequently did so, to the point of his being commonly described as nomadic and rootless. (Reis, 1977, p. 372) Abolition increased the number of moradores while at the same time increasing their workload. As the workload increased, other marginalized labor forms emerged alongside moradores in the fields. Working beside moradores for part of the year were backland migrant workers, or corumbds. Polish migrants served a similar role in postserfdom Germany. This use of migrant, seasonal agricultural workers who regularly participate in, and then retreat from, the formal economy illustrates capital's ongoing reliance upon a heterogeneous working class that combines labor forms and stops short of promoting wage-labor as a single, universal labor form. In the northeast sugar region, corumbds were groups of workers from the dry backlands who migrated annually to work four months in the sugar region. Corumbds could represent as much as 45% of the workforce in these months (Eisenberg, 1973, p. 589). The sertao acted not only as a barrier to outward migration but also as an additional source of labor, since it supplied every year a stream of migrants who traveled down to the coast for a few months to serve on the plantations. It was an entirely spontaneous phenomenon induced by the extreme penury prevalent in the sertao, which encouraged these so-called corumbds to seek elsewhere a supplement to their meager incomes. (Reis, 1977, p. 375) The lavrador class weathered abolition remarkably well. Following abolition, the number of lavradores "remained fairly constant" (Reis, 1977, p. 378). Just prior to abolition, their numbers had risen by virtue of a general expansion within the sugar economy. Within the northeast's rural social structure, lavradores represented an essential stabilizing force. They were national Europeans who occupied the social rung just below the wealthier European planter class and just above the large impoverished mass of African former slaves. Their survival, therefore, was essential for the perpetuation of both the region's system of racial domination as well as the general social and economic order. Observing the amazing staying power of the lavrador class,

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Reis concludes that there was, in fact, little that changed within the structure of the rural working class in the post-1850 period. Between 1850 and 1920 there was little change wrought in the pattern of life of the rural working class, with the exception of insignificantly small sections of it.9 There were none of the dislocations commonly associated with the development of commercial agriculture, and it is interesting that the establishment of modern forms of production coincided with the period of greatest stability in this respect, from 1890 to 1920. (Reis, 1977, p. 380) The previous race-based division of labor—under a modified class structure and the transformation of slaves into moradores—survived and prospered following slavery's formal demise. Relying on its monopolistic hold on the key social and political institutions, the northeastern planter class born of colonial Brazil was able to effectively steer the development of a postabolition social order so as to strengthen its inherited, privileged position. A great many slaves had been traded out of the region prior to abolition. The remaining former slaves were either pushed off to marginal lands and forced to endure a bare, subsistence living or retained within the region as members of a growing, race-specific class of moradores. From the standpoint of the region's social relations of production, there were two important facets to the emerging class of moradores. First, the morador was a race-specific labor form that was denied access to property (and/or the means of production). Second, it was a race-specific labor form that was denied the opportunity to participate in a general labor market. In fact, the survival of a slave-dependent, nonsubsistence, smallholder class (lavadores) is evidence of the slave and morador's similar social roles before and after abolition. Thus, the events in the northeast sugar region associated with the gradual abolition of slavery from 1850 to 1888 cannot be said to represent any kind of a "transition" to general wage-labor, nor were they the consequence of blind market forces. Rather, these events were a necessary prelude to the creation of a racially segregated, heterogeneous working class via the direct intervention of extramarket forces. Maranhao The regional nature of the postslavery social order often extended beyond an area's geographic boundaries. Satellite provinces, areas that interacted with, but were not formally integrated into, a region's social and economic processes, were an important phenomenon throughout the history of pre-abolition Brazil. Examining the development of postslavery labor systems in such areas can provide important insight into the emerging regional differences of this era. Maranhao had been a satellite of the northeastern sugar region from the mid-18th century. The province concentrated on the production of cattle, cotton and rice. Cotton cultivation, which had been marginal until the 1780s, sparked Maranhao's initial demand for slave-labor.

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By 1850 the use of slave-labor was thoroughly integrated throughout Maranhao society. "Besides plantation work, slaves could be found in transportation, construction, road repair, and the production of subsistence. Within urban settings, Maranhao slaves were used as domestics, escravos de ganho, along with various specialized tasks" (Ayoub, 1990, p. 58).10 In short, like most of Brazil, slave-labor was occupied across a wide range of tasks from menial to highly skilled. The agricultural technology that was available for the cultivation of cotton and rice, however, remained badly underdeveloped and highly labor-intensive.11 Slave-labor was, therefore, of particular value to this sector. Notably, this was equally true of Maranhao's cattle industry. "Contrary to some studies, cattle raising had its share of slave labor. The importance of slavery to cattle raising can be seen in developments after slavery declined. In the middle of the 19th century, with the decline of slave-based industries in Maranhao, cattle was no exception" (Ayoub, 1990, p. 54). The 19th-century, slave-based cattle industry was the foundation for Maranhao's development. The cattle industry was, in fact, the sector that most closely linked Maranhao with the northeast. "The Maranhao cattle industry, besides being an important employment source, became, as well, an important element for Maranhao's integration into the constellation of economic systems that marked Colonial Brazil" (Ayoub, 1990, p. 53). Slaves interacted with the money economy in Maranhao to a greater degree than slaves in almost any other province in the northeast sugar region. In fact, a remarkable 47% of all manumissions in Maranhao between 1850 and 1888 were by means of self-purchase (Ayoub, 1990, p. 113). At the same time, in line with the northeast sugar region in general, Maranhao's overall social structure underwent little change in the post-1850 period. Stability and perseverance were the hallmarks of abolition. "The economic structure of Maranhao did not suffer profound changes in the course of the second half of the 19th century. Its primary characteristic was the permanent state of crisis, alleviated by brief moments of euphoria, where modernization attempts generally failed" (Ayoub, 1990, p. 78). Maranhao's reliance on slave-labor notwithstanding, the province began actively exporting slaves to the coffee region as early as 1846. Though the trade south was interrupted briefly in the 1860s by the lure of a world cotton market that was opened up by the U.S. Civil War, Maranhao's conversion from slave-labor to "free" labor was well under way and proved to be an irreversible trend. From 1847 to 1885, Maranhao sent 15,201 slaves to the coffee region. Slaves represented 66.6% of the Maranhao population in 1820. This had fallen to 21.8% by 1872 (Ayoub, 1990, p. 156). However, while diminished in number, slaves remained a strategic and essential part of the Maranhao workforce. "The slave continued to provide the principle labor force for agrarian and urban economic activities, and the production system itself was not much changed from that of the colonial period." (Ayoub, 1990, p. 157.) Thus, as seen throughout the Northeast sugar region, the strategic importance of slave-labor

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increased as the proportional (and absolute) number of slaves decreased. The remaining slaves were increasingly concentrated in critical industries in the post-1850 period. For those former slaves who remained in Maranhao, their options proved to be similar to those of the former slaves across the northeast sugar region. Nearly all of them were reabsorbed as subsistence moradores. They continued to work the cattle ranches or cotton and rice fields as they had in the days of slavery. However, they were now given a small seco and perhaps a tiny parcel of land to grow subsistence crops. At busy times, the work of the moradores could be supplemented with seasonal labor (corumbds) from the hinterland—though there was less of a need for such labor in the cattle industry. While this postslavery labor system generally met the needs of the former Maranhao slaveholding class, there were some early efforts to attract European immigrant labor. Without a class of lavradores to provide a strategic buffer between a small, wealthy class of ranchers and planters and the impoverished former slaves, the ruling elites sought the protection of an expanded European labor pool to better balance the racial composition of the workforce. The presence of European labor would also allow ranchers and planters to draw from a working class that offered a variety of labor forms. The high point for immigration in Maranhao was between 1853 and 1856. In this brief period the Maranhao government experimented with a colonization campaign that brought a total of 887 foreign colonos at a cost of 69 million milreis. Portugal alone supplied over 95% of the immigrants at this time. The province's colonization campaign continued through the 1880s and, before ending, such efforts resulted in the establishment of six colonos. Two of the colonos assisted with the construction of public works. The other four were designed to colonize new areas. Landholders gave out undeveloped portions of their land in return for work services. Nonetheless, by the time of the colonization campaign's official close, the government's efforts to expand the province's active area of cultivation were generally deemed a failure. The immigration campaign had been only slightly more successful in the goal of increasing the overall number of European smallholding landowners and restructuring the racial composition of the province's working class. What was most remarkable about the abolition process in Maranhao is the extent to which developments in the province mimicked developments in the northeast sugar region despite the fact that the Maranhao social order was organized around the cattle industry, while the dominant social order of the northeast grew out of sugar production. Just as in the northeast, Maranhao elites were able to hold on to their power and privilege well beyond abolition. Freed slaves were either forced by extramarket measures to submit to a new, race-based division of labor or left to a subsistence existence, marginalized from productive activities. Lacking a stabilizing class of smallholding Europeans, such as lavradores in the northeast, Maranhao elites briefly experimented with a period of European immigration. The results were less than overwhelming, and, instead, the Maranhao ruling class eventually came to rely on their monopolies in land, capital and the state to enforce the new race-based, coercive labor forms.

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THE COFFEE REGION By 1850 coffee represented over 50% of the value of Brazil's exports and accounted for nearly 50% of the entire world's coffee production.12 The history of 19th-century Brazilian coffee production, however, did not follow a single, linear path. Coffee enjoyed two boom periods, and each was associated with a distinct geographic region. The first coffee boom, from the 1830s to the 1880s, took place in the Paraiba Valley. This was an area that snaked its way along the eastern edge of central Brazil, tracing the Parafba River through eastern Sao Paulo, southern Minas Gerais and on into Rio de Janeiro. The second coffee boom, from the 1880s through the first decades of the 20th century, emerged in western Sao Paulo. Beyond their separate places and times, the actual organization of production marked a critical distinction between the coffee industry of the Paraiba Valley and that of western Sao Paulo, as well. Parafba Valley coffee production relied on slave-labor on large plantations (fazendas) that were reminiscent in scale to the sugar region's latifundia. Western Sao Paulo coffee production was based on small and medium-sized landholdings that relied on a combination of labor forms. Western Sao Paulo was the first region in Brazil to begin extensively experimenting with postabolition labor forms. While the postslavery Paraiba Valley was largely left to wither and decay, western Sao Paulo gave birth to a nonhereditary planter class of coffee barons who eventually replaced the sugar aristocracy of the northeast and managed to grab the lion's share of powerful positions among Brazil's elite. This was what Viotti da Costa refers to as Brazil's "transition from a senhorial society to an empresarial society" (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 460). Viotti da Costa argues that the new coffee-based ruling class was the first modern Brazilian capitalist class to pursue profit-maximization through the rational introduction of innovative production techniques and machinery. The Paraiba Valley The Paraiba Valley coffee region was characterized by large landholdings with many slaves, not unlike the classic sugar latifundia of the northeast. Coffee plantations across the region averaged between 80 and 100 slaves. Importantly, the lucrative advantages of large landholdings with many slaves extended beyond coffee production per se. Because slave prices continued to climb in anticipation of the eventual closure of the Atlantic slave trade, possessing slaves in this period was an effective means of securing capital and credit.13 Thus, just as the slave trade itself could yield a profit before a single slave was put to work, simply owning a slave could generate a source of income beyond the actual productivity of the slave's labor.

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Prior to coffee's rise, the Parafba Valley was not simply an area of vacant land waiting to be seized. As coffee production first took root in the 1820s, the region's planter class actively moved to evict the numerous squatters who were living on the land. To do so, they turned to a traditional extramarket measure— the fictitious establishment and violent enforcement of private property claims. By the 1830s the presence of squatters menaced the development of coffee cultivation on the large fazendas to the point where those who had consolidated large holdings through numerous purchases or through possession of 18th-century grants resolved to establish unquestionable legal title to their domain. This they could accomplish through supervised measurement, description, and demarcation of the sesmarias. (Stein, 1970, pp. 13-14) By the 1850s, with the commercial success of coffee, the Paraiba Valley was enjoying a "golden age" of coffee production across a relatively homogeneous plantation society. 14 Mimicking their size and structure, the coffee industry evolved in similar fashion to sugar plantations in the northeast. The first coffee fazendas were organized in the traditional mold [of sugar in the northeast] and the coffee economy's structure led to an intensification of the slave trade. Fazendas repeated the Northeast's picture of an ordered slave economy: the use of the land, the system of transport, the deployment of labor, and the relations between different components of society were approximately the same. The coffee fazenda of the Paraiba Valley had a great deal in common with sugar engenhos of the northeast. (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 450) Fazenda production techniques remained crude and rudimentary. Coffee grown in the Paraiba Valley employed "age-old techniques based on the ax, fire, and the hoe, wielded by forced labor" (Stein, 1953, p. 334). At the same time, coffee cultivation in the Parafba Valley was migratory. That is, unlike sugar engenhos, there was a constant movement to fresh land. This migrating frontier, their similar plantation structures notwithstanding, distinguished coffee cultivation from that of sugar and contributed to important social differences, as well. For instance, the constant need for virgin land limited the amount of land set aside for foodstuffs. With the advent of abolition, simply securing one's basic subsistence could be a challenge with the price of food tripling between 1852 and 1859 (Stein, 1970, p. 48). Constant reinvestment in new land and resources was the rule in the Paraiba Valley in an effort to avoid economic ruin. One result of this predicament was the emergence of a fledgling infrastructure that was designed to accommodate the continuous movement of people and resources. The pattern of a hollow frontier developed, gradually moving westward and leaving behind land fit only for pasturage. Contrast this pattern with sugar cultivation, which enabled the landowners to remain on the same property for generations without any need to improve the land or the agricultural technique. The coffee planter was obliged to reinvest in new estates if he did not want to see his real worth decline. But to develop lands beyond the settled areas required railroads, urbanization, sawmills and successive waves of woodsmen, wage laborers, and merchants. (Dean, 1969, p. 45)

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Following the 1850 cessation of the slave trade, the slave-based industry— even with constant arrivals from the northeast—saw its labor force aging rapidly. In the 1840s, Africans between the ages of 15 and 40 years of age accounted for 60% of Paraiba Valley slaves. By the 1860s, this percentage had dropped to 40% (Stein, 1970, p. 228). Throughout the 1850s, the best indicator of a Paraiba Valley planter's wealth was the number, age, health and current market price of the planter's slaves.15 The boom period's eventual end was largely hastened by this elimination of virgin lands and the aging of the Paraiba Valley's slaves. "It was at the close of the prosperous decade that there appeared a recognition of the approaching end of virgin forest. For the first time land evaluations began to discriminate between virgin forest, secondary growth, and pasture. The disappearance of virgin forest was by no means restricted to the small or the medium-sized fazendeiros" (Stein, 1970, p. 45). Unlike the sugar region, by the end of the 1850s, the preceding processes effectively eliminated smallholders and squatters from the Paraiba Valley. As a consequence, immigrant labor was never a major factor in the Paraiba Valley.16 Those few immigrants who did reach the Paraiba Valley were primarily put to work as parcerias (sharecroppers) and never evolved into any significant smallholder class that would have been akin to lavradores in the northeast. For instance, in Rio de Janeiro immigrant labor "became synonymous with sharecropper and never with smallholder" (Stein, 1970, p. 59). Therefore, unlike developments in the northeast sugar region, prior to the abolition of slavery the "free" population played only a marginal role within the Parafba Valley coffee industry. In fact, the vast majority of "freemen" led seminomadic lives that kept them dependent upon the large coffee plantations. "As soon as the interests of the big estate so required, all of them—from agregados to camaradas, posseiros, or sitiantes—were expropriated or driven off the plots where, however marginal, they carried on their subsistence agriculture. The free members of the population were extremely mobile, and moved about constantly as they did occasional jobs for the big estates" (Kowarick, 1987, pp. 20-21).17 Coffee's demise in the Paraiba Valley began in the 1860s., Rather than sparking innovation, however, planters simply intensified their use of slaves on less and less bountiful soils.18 By the eve of abolition, slaves represented 80 to 90% of the Paraiba Valley planters' capital. By contrast, in western Sao Paulo slaves represented 40 to 60% of the planters' capital (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 216). As a result, Paraiba Valley planters were little prepared to continue coffee production in the postslavery era. The combination of overworking the land and endlessly expanding the workload of slaves led to the exhaustion of fertile land and a rapid decline of the slave population. The postslavery social order was characterized by a patchwork of race-based labor forms designed to squeeze the final profits from a dying coffee industry, while barely eking out a subsistence living.

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The postslavery social order mixed the labor camaradas, gang labor and European parcerias on land that was controlled by a decaying planter class. Virtually all former slaves worked either as camaradas (landless day laborers) or as members of gang labor. The first postabolition coffee harvests relied on a combination of camaradas and gang labor. Gang labor was organized by a class of empreiteiros, who gathered former slaves and contracted them out to planters. Empreiteiros were responsible for arranging food and lodging and negotiating either a seco or a molhado (a wage with food). This was similar in fashion to the organization of Chinese labor in Cuba. Labor gangs averaged 50 members in the Paraiba Valley and would ordinarily work one plantation for some time before moving on, as a unit, to another plantation. Given the degree of control exercised by empreiteiros over gang labor, it was clear that this was only a slightly modified form of slavery. For empreiteiros it was a source of income as well as a reminder of their superior race-based social position. For planters it was a convenient method to avoid any reliance on market forces to attract labor. For former slaves it was evidence of their continuing race-based oppression absent the transparent cloak of formal slavery. European laborers were primarily employed as parcerias throughout the Paraiba Valley in the postslavery era. They would work the land of large-land holders as sharecroppers, and they would be supplemented by African camaradas or gang labor from time to time throughout the year. Notably, whereas slaves had been held to a 14- to 18-hour daily work regiment, Europeans worked all of 4 to 5 hours and were able to care for only one-third the number of trees that had been previously tended by slaves (Stein, 1970, p. 262). The narrow strip of the Paraiba Valley running through Rio de Janeiro presented a classic example of a labor arrangement based on the use of parcerias. By the 1890s sharecropping was the most common European labor form for agricultural workers in Rio de Janeiro. European laborers were granted access to plots of land to grow coffee, while the planter class was responsible for marketing the produce. African gang labor (organized by a loose band of empreiteiros) and camaradas were then brought in to assist sharecroppers during harvests. Beyond those reabsorbed in the productive activities of the region as camaradas, gang labor or parcerias, there also emerged a largely marginalized segment of the postslavery social order (both African and European19). As could be expected in a region dominated by large landholdings, a sizable landless population emerged in the postslavery era. Whereas former slaves in the northeastern sugar region had frequently found land to at least live subsistently, former slaves in the Paraiba Valley, landless and now destitute of work opportunities, were forced to "freely" move on to other regions. Stein captured the stark desperation of former slaves in the municipio of Vassouras, where planters simply exhausted the once-fertile land and left it to grass and weeds. The freedmen and their families were made superfluous by ever-dwindling coffee groves which in turn required less labor, and by the transformation of the abandoned groves into pasture for cattle-raising, which also could employ only a minimum of the available labor

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supply. As the last planter descendant of several generations of Vassouras fazendeiros had to write in a 1913 municipal report: ". . . the excess population must seek employment in other regions, and jobs are readily found because of the nearness of our municipio to the Federal capital and to the state of Sao Paulo which is still developing a prosperous coffee agriculture." (Stein, 1970, pp. 287-88) The abolition of slavery in the Parafba Valley coincided with the collapse of the region's coffee plantation economy. As cattle ranchers moved in to pick up the pieces, planters from the dying Paraiba Valley either left agriculture altogether or moved on to western Sao Paulo, where the next great boom in coffee production was already in full swing. Thus, it was less a matter of the abolition of slavery than it was the gradual disintegration of the region's staple, slave-based industry. Postslavery labor arrangements were not strategically planned as in the northeast sugar region. African slaves were, in fact, treated quite literally as a form of disposable fixed capital. Slaves were either sold off as a planter's business failed or left idle with little thought to preparing the former slave for any future social role. Thus, informal, temporary labor arrangements— drawing from a ready supply of camaradas and gang labor—emerged in the Paraiba Valley rather than more stable social forms such as moradores in the northeast. Non-wage-labor forms were preferred by the ruling class for both Africans as well as Europeans. Consistent with the race-based division of labor, Africans were primarily recast as camaradas or gang labor, while Europeans' labor primarily took the form of parcerias. At the same time, there was a growing mass of impoverished landless workers (of both Africans and Europeans) that was emerging on the margins of postslavery society in the Paraiba Valley. The use of extramarket measures was less of a concern in the Paraiba Valley than elsewhere in postslavery Brazil due to the lack of well-defined planter interests. In light of the region's crumbling coffee industry, most planters simply abandoned the infertile soil and moved on. The resulting vacuum of capital and productive resources left large pockets of former slaves to fend for themselves, raking their subsistence from poor, marginalized lands. Western Sao Paulo The coffee region of western Sao Paulo became Brazil's most dynamic and innovative region with respect to the development of a postslavery social order based on a racially divided, heterogeneous working class. The basis for the new social order and the growing combination of labor forms was the massive influx of European labor that was used to drive down wages and force former slaves to "freely" submit to a new regime of labor coercion. Given the fact that immigrant labor played so central a role in much of Brazil in the late 19th century, in western Sao Paulo in particular, most histories of western Sao Paulo have

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understandably placed most of their emphasis on the role of immigrant labor. Too heavy an emphasis, however, can be misleading. Slave-labor, in fact, remained the predominant labor form in western Sao Paulo up until at least 1886.20 In fact, the coffee economy of western Sao Paulo had its origins in, and was for almost 40 years primarily based on, slave-labor. "Not until the 1880s did the flow of immigrants provide a work force sufficiently large to allow the planters to dispense with their slaves" (Dean, 1976, p. 115). Coffee production in western Sao Paulo began in earnest in the 1840s. The rise of the western Sao Paulo coffee industry and its eventual eclipsing of the Paraiba Valley were epitomized by the port of Santos' replacement of Rio de Janeiro as Brazil's principal coffee exporter in 1891. Indeed, by the early 1900s, 50% of the world's entire coffee produce passed through the docks and warehouses of Santos. What most distinguished western Sao Paulo from the Paraiba Valley were the two regions' distinct organizations of production. While both had their origins in slave-based production, western Sao Paulo paid far greater heed to the gathering historical winds and soon recognized slavery's bleak future. This led to an extensive, consciously planned effort to promote a "transition" from slave- to non-slave-labor forms in western Sao Paulo. Such efforts, in fact, were initiated well in advance of the eventual conclusion of abolition in 1888. [Western Sao Paulo's] increasing free population, its process of urbanization, improved transportation systems and means of communication all favored a modernizing internal market. Equally important was the substitution of wind-power with steam power and the accompanying increase in tonnage transported. The economy was made more complex and diverse. . . . The planters of western Sao Paulo resolved their labor problems through the substitution of slaves, who with each improvement seemed less adequate, with Italian colonos. The immigration movement, however, only intensified beginning in 1886, with the increasing crisis of the slave system. (Viotti da Costa, 1982, p. 455) It is important to consider the circumstances under which immigrant labor was first introduced to western Sao Paulo as well as the evolving metamorphosis of its many applications. Slave-labor was prominent both in the coffee industry of the Paraiba Valley as well as in western Sao Paulo. In other words, prior to immigration, slave-labor had proved itself to be an efficient basis for a profitable coffee industry. The use of immigrant labor became an issue only in anticipation of slavery's abolition. At the same time, it is evident from the myriad of quasi-wage-labor experimental arrangements in this period that the modern use of labor forms that were specifically linked to market incentives did not go unrecognized by the western Sao Paulo ruling class. However, these new market-based labor forms were systematically reserved for Europeans. This practice helped to reinforce the bias, originating in classical political economy, of associating wage-labor with European labor. Importantly, however, it would be a mistake to suggest that western Sao Paulo planters were prepared to place their full faith in market forces with respect to their labor supply. As is detailed later, the ruling class took elaborate, extramarket measures to control the reign

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of unregulated market forces vis-a-vis the emergence of a genuine labor market in Brazil. One of the earliest experiments with immigrant labor was carried out by Nicolau Vergueiro, a wealthy planter (and influential senator), in the Rio Claro area of western Sao Paulo.21 Vergueiro developed a sharecropping system for which he imported 364 immigrant families in 1847. The initial immigrants were primarily Swiss and German. The immigrant family arrived indebted to the planter for the cost of the journey and was given a home to live and land to work. Land use was limited to the cultivation of coffee trees and the development of subsistence food plots (rogas). One-half of the yield from both the coffee plot as well as the roqa was turned over to the planter and went toward the repayment of the immigrant's debt. For this purpose, one-half of the yield was calculated as one-half of the market value. Thus, the immigrants' income was based on not only the productivity of the trees under their care but the fluctuating coffee market as well. Losses were borne by both the immigrant and the planter. The principal difference between this system of parceria and traditional European sharecropping was that the planter was responsible for all the marketing. Such an arrangement left the immigrant susceptible to fraud, which, in turn, created a significant degree of mistrust. In addition to being at the mercy of nature and the coffee market, the worker was open to fraud after the crop was turned over to the landowner. Vergueiro's son reported that sharecropping had failed largely because of the workers' mistrust. The sharecroppers were always suspicious, and thus convinced that the landowner wanted to cheat in operations such as weighing, shipping, selling, etc. (Holloway, 1977, p. 307) The contracts between planters and immigrants were of no set duration and remained in effect until full "repayment" had been made. Beginning in the early 1850s, all members of an immigrant family were held responsible for debts—an additional benefit to importing entire families beyond their simply providing a "cheap labor reserve." By 1855 many western Sao Paulo planters had joined Vergueiro in their own immigration schemes, and there were over 3,500 immigrant laborers working western Sao Paulo coffee plantations beside 180,000 slaves. "In most cases free labor existed side by side with slavery, although planters early on established a certain technical division of labor. All tasks beyond coffee cultivation and harvesting, and which were said to require constant supervision, or were inappropriate for sharecropping, continued to be executed by slaves" (Stolcke and Hall, 1983, p. 172). The terms of contracts and the conditions of work proved to be far too demanding for immigrants, and there were uprisings and protests as early as 1857. The immigration campaign fell off appreciably for a time, as the Swiss and Prussian governments actively dissuaded further emigration. Due to such

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pressures, there were two modifications to the parceria system in the 1860s. First, a fixed piece-rate replaced the payment of 50% of the market value as the immigrant's yearly contribution to the planter. This was designed to buffer the immigrant from the vicissitudes of the market and provide a guaranteed income. Second, the planter no longer took any portion of the subsistence produce from an immigrant's roqa. This further reduced the immigrant's participation in the money economy, insofar as the need to purchase food was reduced. Still, such measures could not have improved matters too greatly. Kowarick quotes a German inspector, who by the late 1860s likened the working conditions of parceria to slavery. In practice [parceria] was no more than a disguised system of slavery. "The contract of metayage" said Haupt, "reduced the immigrants to a condition which was almost equivalent to slavery. The money advanced by the planter to the colonist, which the colonist was incapable of repaying was equivalent to the purchase-price of a slave. Instead of buying a slave, the planter went to the expense of bringing a colonist from Europe. . . . Sometimes the whole family was responsible for the debts contracted by the father; in such cases, the son remained tied to the fazenda as long as his father still owed money. The son is mortgaged in advance. Not merely an individual, but the whole family is devoted to servitude from one generation to another." (Kowarick, 1987, p. 60) By 1870 the number of immigrants working western Sao Paulo fazendas had fallen from an 1860 high of 3,500 to just over 3,000. The number of large-land holders experimenting with immigrant labor remained fairly small and concentrated throughout this period, falling from 29 in 1860, to 13 by 1870. There had been 60 such landholders in 1857, before the uprisings (Dean, 1976, p. 93). In the wake of these early poor results, planters quickly returned to slave-labor. "[After an early effort to use immigrants failed] the planters showed little interest in reviving the importation of free labor and they all began buying slaves once again" (Dean, 1976, p. 97). Thus, despite the flurry of activity around the use of immigrant labor for which western Sao Paulo is well noted, slave-labor continued to drive the engine of the coffee industry late into the 19th century. In this regard, the western Sao Paulo coffee industry differed little from that of the Paraiba Valley. At the same time, the western Sao Paulo landholding pattern stood in stark contrast to that of both the Paraiba Valley as well as the northeast sugar region. Small- and medium-sized-land holders remained a significant presence in western Sao Paulo all the way into the 20th century. During the region's critical take off years for coffee production there was only a slight concentration in landholdings. Smallholders represented 53.6% of all holdings in 1822. This fell to 47.9% by 1857 (Dean, 1976, p. 18). Like the lavradores in the northeast sugar region, European small- and medium-sized-European land holders occupied a critical social rung in the postslavery, race-based division of labor. This would have important consequences for defining and limiting the new social roles for former slaves in the postslavery social order. A scaled-back version of the parceria system remained in place for several decades. By the 1880s, however, the new colono system became the standard

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method for employing immigrant agricultural labor in western Sao Paulo and, in fact, survived into the 1930s. The colono system evolved into a unique labor form. While it shared many of the traits of a traditional sharecropping arrangement, the colono system also differed from traditional sharecropping in many essential features. The colono system should not be confused with tenant farming, renting, or sharecropping. Moreover it was not a wage system, in the sense of a unit of pay per unit of time worked. It was a unique combination of annual wage, piece-work, harvest payments, daily wages, and the non-money perquisites of housing and usufruct of plantation land for food crops and domestic animals adapted to the Sao Paulo coffee industry. (Holloway, 1977, p. 312) Similar to the parceria system that preceded it, immigrant families, rather than individuals, were contracted. Each immigrant family contracted with a planter to care for a set number of coffee trees over a one-year period. The wages for this work varied and "were calculated in proportion to other forms of income," such as the size of one's food plot (Holloway, 1977, p. 309). The wage remained a fixed amount; however, that was based on a set rate per 1,000 trees—regardless of the actual harvest or the prevailing market conditions. All wages were paid in tratos (periodic installments) over the course of a year. The principal innovation of the colono system was the separation of the payment for cultivation from the payment for harvesting. In other words, the wage for the care of trees was not tied to the harvested yield. Planters were interested in creating incentives and a payment structure that would encourage immigrants to continue caring for trees during nonharvest periods rather than retreat to subsistence activities or seek out other opportunities. In addition, by linking an immigrant's income to the number of trees tended rather than actual yield, planters hoped to increase their absolute yield as a consequence of immigrants' tending more trees. By paying a separate stipulated rate for weedings, it could be expected that workers would not neglect the coffee groves outside the harvest season. In addition, since part of the laborers' remuneration under the new contract depended directly on the number of trees tended and no longer on their yields, it could be assumed that they would feel encouraged to cultivate a larger number of trees. By maintaining the piece rate system for the harvest, however, labor costs could still be adapted to annual fluctuations in yields. (Stolcke and Hall, 1983, p. 179) Thus, along with the subsistence produce from their roqa, cultivation wages represented one portion of the immigrant family's income, and harvest wages represented the other portion. Unlike the cultivation wage, the harvest wage could fluctuate considerably based on the size of the yield and the current market price. By the 1880s the state had begun heavily subsidizing the

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immigration program, and immigrants were no longer reaching Brazil indebted for transportation costs. Colonos were given a home, roqa and pastureland for draft animals. These accoutrements were treated separately from—and in addition to—cultivation and harvest wages. At the same time, they generally helped to keep wages lower. "By using his land in this way the landowner could offer these incentives to the workers and keep his monetary wage bill lower than it otherwise might have been" (Holloway, 1977, p. 310). "Food plots acted as an incentive for the laborers, at the same time reducing the cost of the reproduction of labor. Moreover since food crops were grown during the coffee cultivation season when labor demands were comparatively lower, the planters could make full use of the immigrants' family labor throughout the whole year" (Stolcke and Hall, 1983, p. 184). Though this new arrangement partially shielded colonos from the dangers of a fluctuating coffee market, the colonos' income came to depend on the maximum use of family labor during cultivation and harvest time. Importantly, by the 1880s improved communication and the railroad's expansion to western Sao Paulo had sharply reduced the planters' own market-based risks. The tendency for colonos under this system to rely on the entire family for carrying out physically arduous labor greatly contributed to the stereotype of European immigrants (among former slaves) as shameless workhorses who lacked the dignity to decline menial, degrading tasks. In the eyes of the colono, on the other hand, unlike the former slave, who was forced to eke out a merely marginal existence, they enjoyed both important protections from market forces as well as continued access to a "basic means of subsistence." The so-called contratos do formaqao system developed as an important complement to the work of colonos. Contratos do formaqao were integral to coffee production throughout western Sao Paulo. They were first created to open new lands for coffee production by combining a range of labor forms. Migrant gangs of native European laborers (akin to corumbds in the northeast) were hired to fell trees, burn vegetation and clear land. The land was then put in the care of an immigrant family (formadores). Formadores planted and cared for trees for four to six years. Up until the fourth year, the formador was given a set wage that was based on the number of trees in each's care and a small roqa to survive on. Formadores frequently supplemented this income by working on other fazendas during the harvest season. In the fourth to sixth years, formadores were able to keep the proceeds from the sale of all coffee harvested—thereby, it was hoped, enhancing the formador's diligence. After six years, the trees were contracted out to colonos. In the latter 19th century, the western Sao Paulo coffee industry developed into a sophisticated, horizontally integrated production process that extended across a combination of labor forms throughout the many stages of coffee cultivation. One category of workers, corumbds, was responsible for clearing the land and brush. A second category of workers, formadores, planted and cared for young trees. Finally, a third category of workers, colonos, tended the mature coffee trees. Throughout the various stages of coffee production, there were

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groups of marginalized workers living subsistence lives in the countryside (such as former slaves) who were called in from time to time to assist with harvests. The three categories of fazenda-based workers comprised European immigrants (as well as European natives), and all three categories introduced some element of wage-labor. In this latter regard, Brazilian planters attempted to institute—to widely varying degrees—a link between workers' income and their productivity (as well as to the market conditions for the sale of coffee). Importantly, this complex division of labor within the coffee industry (and the concomitant nascent cash nexus) entailed a range of tasks and activities that had long been performed by slave-labor under the incentive of physical deprivation and torture in both western Sao Paulo and the Paraiba Valley. These developments were, therefore, as much about how to replace and marginalize former slaves in a postslavery social order as they were about how to improve coffee production or facilitate a "transition" to wage-labor. Beginning in the 1880s, the immigration floodgates were thrown open. The government took over the expenses for recruiting, transporting and assigning immigrant families to particular fields. The actual administration of these activities, of course, remained under the direct control of the planter class. A tax was placed on slaves used in agriculture that was twice the rate levied on urban slaves. This served the purpose of both subsidizing European immigration as well as discouraging the use of slaves in tasks set aside for immigrants.23 As it turned out, the $37 million that the government spent on immigration represented barely 1/10th of the revenue brought in by coffee export taxes (Holloway, 1980, p. 45). Immigration to western Sao Paulo grew slowly over the 19th century before its dramatic crescendo leading up to the 20th century. In the first 56 years of an organized immigration campaign (1820 to 1876), a total of 350,000 immigrants passed through Brazil's busy entrepots. Between 1886 and 1934, this number swelled to 4.1 million immigrants—56% of whom found their way to western Sao Paulo. In fact, between 1886 and 1930, there was a total of 2.75 million immigrant arrivals in western Sao Paulo. The bulk of these (73%) arrived in the brief 13-year span between 1887 and 1900. The social impact was dramatic. The provincial population of Sao Paulo grew from 837,000 in 1872, to 2.3 million in 1900, and 4 million by 1914. Italians accounted for the largest source of immigrants (over 1 million), while Spanish and Portuguese immigrants combined to make up 500,000 of the newcomers (Holloway, 1977, p. 302).24 The others originated from a variety of nations, including France, Germany, Turkey, Armenia, Poland, Syria, Lebanon, Lithuania, Romania and Japan. By the early 20th century, 65% of the rural workforce in all of Sao Paulo was foreign-born workers. By the same time, 90% of the workforce in western Sao Paulo coffee municipios was foreign-born workers. One of the primary factors contributing to the large numbers of immigrant families continuing to enter Brazil after the 1880s was the use of one-year

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contractual obligations, which resulted in a high degree of mobility for colonos who frequently moved from fazenda to fazenda each year. This remarkable mobility forced planters to constantly seek new workers. The outstanding characteristic of the coffee colono was movement. . . . There was migration from plantation to plantation in the coffee zone, towards the coffee frontier in the west, to regional urban centers, and to the state's capital city; and many immigrants eventually returned to their homelands. . . . [There was] a considerable degree of geographical mobility of the rural labor force in the western coffee zone, as newly arrived immigrants moved in to take the place of workers moving out. (Holloway, 1977, pp. 303, 304) Coffee production, meanwhile, continued its stellar rise. Western Sao Paulo coffee production increased five fold between 1890 and 1907. The number of trees under cultivation grew from 221 million in 1882, to 685 million by 1902. The Parafba Valley, which in 1886 still produced 21% of Brazil's total coffee yield, saw its share of Brazil's yield fall to 5% by 1905 (Holloway, 1980, p. 18). Tied to the expansion of coffee production was the campaign of the Sao Paulo provincial government to establish more municipios in a continuing effort to further penetrate and settle the hinterland. In 1850 there were 46 municipios in the province of Sao Paulo. By 1886 there were 121, and by 1920 there were 206 (Holloway, 1980, p. 15). Despite this growth, the underutilization of land remained an issue in Sao Paulo. Of all available land, 49% was privately owned. Of this land, 12% was under cultivation. In other words, barely 6% of Sao Paulo's total land was under active, commercial cultivation in 1905.25 Obviously, it was no mere coincidence that 1887, a year before abolition, was the first year that immigration to Sao Paulo topped 100,000. While the role of slaves in coffee production was proportionally diminished by the close of Brazil's slave era, slave-labor was certainly never marginalized. It remained an essential component of western Sao Paulo coffee production up to the very eve of abolition. Slaves were present on every estate [in the western Sao Paulo municipio of Rio Claro]; they engaged in every stage of cultivation, from the clearing of forests to the operation of the processing machinery. Until final abolition there were no free plantations in the county. All depended heavily and constantly on forced labor to maintain production. . . . The number of slaves in Rio Claro continued to increase almost to the year of abolition. Paradoxically, the Paulista West, where free wage labor found its best rewards and the planters were least committed to slavery as a social system, was also the area that could afford to buy the slaves of less prosperous regions. (Dean, 1976, p. 50) Nonetheless, the ruling class' plans for the former slave population following abolition in western Sao Paulo were fairly evident from the 1880s forward. Indeed, by 1888 almost everything was in place for the completion of Brazil's gradual abolition. The land and property laws were in place to block former slaves from completely withdrawing to a subsistence existence. Immigrant labor had conveniently flooded the labor market, turning any market advantages of "free" labor in favor of the planter class.26 A strict, race-based

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division of labor had placed Europeans at strategic production points to safeguard the coffee industry, while a labyrinth of national labor laws and vagrancy ordinances dictated the terms of labor contracts under the protection of a new network of police and prison systems. A harbinger of the former slaves' subservient role in the looming, postslavery social order was the frequent tendency of authorities to replace the term "slave" with "preto" (or occasionally "outsider") (Gebara, 1986, p. 117). Most former slaves were compelled by such circumstances to remain in the western Sao Paulo coffee region. Immigrants replaced slaves on most skilled tasks, relegating former slaves to lower-paying, seasonal work as camaradas, while living off their subsistence roqas. Women were generally forced into domestic service in urban areas. This left them alone to care for the children while the men roamed the countryside in search of work. [With the arrival of European immigrants] planters easily dispensed with [former slaves] for tending the groves. In towns too they lost most of the positions they had held in craft occupations and were relegated to day labor. The planters did not entirely eliminate them, however. Indeed their continued presence was essential to the viability of the plantation, because they took on the seasonal, precarious jobs that were not sufficiently well paid to be attractive to immigrants. They became camaradas, general laborers, who were paid by the month. . . . Precarious jobs led to a nearly nomadic existence for most males. Women were usually trapped in domestic employment which rooted them in the towns but left them with sole responsibility for raising the children. (Dean, 1976, p. 152) European immigrants, at the same time, could hardly be said to have enjoyed anything resembling a luxurious life in the Americas. However, among postslavery labor forms, they clearly sat atop a carefully manufactured, hierarchical, race-based division of labor. "Compared to the chattel slavery of earlier times, the indentured laborer of the postabolition Caribbean, the debt peon of Mexico or Guatemala, or the semi-serf of the Andean highlands or central Chile, the Sao Paulo coffee colono had an enviable existence" (Holloway, 1980, p. 169). As European agricultural laborers, the immigrants served two purposes. They were given passage to Brazil to work the fields, and they were offered race-based privileges to guard the fragile postslavery social order (and its racist foundation). It would be difficult to say which of these was of greater importance. Western Sao Paulo planters carried out a consciously organized effort to retain slavery just long enough to drain from slaves their final ounce of work. Delaying in this manner allowed them time to prepare conditions to dump the former slaves in favor of European colonos, while maintaining former slaves in a desperate condition of perpetual hunger and dependence. This further enabled the planter class to call upon the former slaves' services as needed for seasonal needs. All this was accomplished without upsetting—indeed while

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quintupling—coffee production in one of the single most successful manipulations of the "abolition question" anywhere in the Americas. The "success" of the western Sao Paulo's ruling class was directly attributable to their calculated use of extramarket measures and their exploitation of racial divisions to manufacture a heterogeneous working class that combined a range of labor forms. The use of a large-scale immigration program as an extramarket strategy contrasted with developments in both the Paraiba Valley and the northeast sugar region. In these latter regions, either the collapse of the local industry (as in the Paraiba Valley) or the application of harsh labor and land laws (as in the northeast sugar region) allowed the ruling elites to forgo immigration as a strategy for disciplining and marginalizing the former slave population. In western Sao Paulo, however, coffee planters attempted to maintain coffee production in the postslavery era by simply replacing one racial category of worker (slaves) with another racial category of worker (European immigrants). Former slaves—barred from productive lands and banned from categories of labor that were set aside for Europeans—were reduced to the role of camaradas, living subsistently in the countryside and returning occasionally to assist at harvest time. The role of moradores was not open to former slaves in western Sao Paulo as it was in the northeast sugar region. While there was no precise equivalent to the moradore in western Sao Paulo, it was perhaps most akin to the role of the colono—a role from which former slaves were racially excluded. Former slaves in western Sao Paulo followed more the path of those in the Paraiba Valley, eventually emerging as marginalized camaradas. Notably, the actual tasks and activities associated with coffee cultivation in western Sao Paulo did not change with the abolition of slavery. The coffee industry raced forward, barely missing a beat, with a new, heterogeneous, race-based division of labor supplanting the earlier slave-based production. Rio Grande Do Sul Beginning in the late 18th century, Rio Grande Do Sul developed into an important satellite of the coffee region (in particular, the provinces of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro). The province specialized in the production of wheat, cattle and charque (a processed meat that was a staple in slave diets). Though best known for its cattle industry, wheat production actually first sparked the establishment of Rio Grande Do Sul's cattle production and, subsequently, its charque industry. The further development of these industries then provided the basis for the formal integration of Rio Grande Do Sul with the bordering coffee region. Like the sugar and coffee industries that preceded it, the wheat industry of Rio Grande Do Sul was based on slave-labor from the earliest beginnings. At the same time, contrary to the experience in the northeast and the Paraiba Valley, the underlying structure of wheat production did not result in the concentration of wealth. Amassing large landholdings was, therefore, not a prerequisite for wheat production. Wheat was grown on relatively modest plots that employed a

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small number of slaves. The original impetus for the province's slave-based wheat industry lay entirely in the consumption needs of the coffee region. "The slave became an essential element of production in Rio Grande Do Sul the moment that, thanks to the productivity of wheat, the region was articulated with other regions" (Cardoso, 1962, p. 79). At its height in the 19th century, slaves represented one-third of the Rio Grande Do Sul population. Importantly, while the number of slaves in Rio Grande Do Sul may not have been overwhelming— as a proportion of the total population—slaves occupied critical roles within the province's key production processes.27 "While the proportion of slaves [and freed slaves] was never predominant in Rio Grande Do Sul, the number of slaves in the key industries was always considerable and the economic activity dependent upon slave labor was always significant" (Cardoso, 1962, p. 80). Though there was a constant out-migration of slaves from Rio Grande Do Sul to the coffee region, the total number of slaves between 1858 and 1872 remained at around 70,000. Importantly, the province's total population for these same years almost doubled, signaling the strategic introduction of European immigrant labor. There was a precipitous fall in the number of slaves after 1872, dropping to 60,000 in 1884, 22,709 in 1885 and 8,500 by 1887 (Cardoso, 1962, p. 81). This drop in the number of slaves, combined with the growing European immigrant population, led to the even harsher application of the limited slave-labor. This intensification of slavery was fueled by the heightened competition between the wheat, cattle and charque industries for slave-labor. While cattle combined African slave-labor and Native American labor, the charque industry was entirely reliant on slave-labor.28 At the same time, the use of urban slave-labor was widespread across Rio Grande Do Sul. The province's difficulties in this era were cushioned by the fact that, by the second half of the 19th century, Rio Grande Do Sul had begun incorporating non-slave-labor forms across its industries. "Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, besides the charque and cattle industry, there was a progressive diversification of the regional economy, based more on free labor and attending to the necessity of providing the coffee zone with basic raw materials. This permitted the formation of sectors of the regional economy independent of industries tied into slave labor" (Bakos, 1988, p. 72). Tapping into its links to the coffee region, Rio Grande Do Sul embarked on a campaign to attract immigrants to settle as free smallholders across the province's hinterland. As a result, the province's dominant industries were slowly overtaken by the growing presence of foreign-born, European smallholders. This was part of an explicit strategy on the part of Rio Grande Do Sul elites to settle new areas (in light of the continuing border confrontations with Uruguay) and to foster social conditions that contributed to the marginalization of former slaves throughout the post-1850 period. "From the end of the decade of the 1850's, the economically prosperous agricultural economy was organized on a base of small, free holders. The expansion of

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coffee to the north accelerated this process. Slaves, who had been previously concentrated in the production of cereals and subsistence goods, became more and more concentrated in export commodity production" (Cardoso, 1962, p. 219). By 1884 Rio Grande Do Sul had essentially achieved a transition to non-slave-labor, whereby the primary production processes were no longer "dependent upon slave-labor" (Cardoso, 1962, p. 233). The new charque industry that emerged at this time soon dominated Rio Grande Do Sul.29 No longer dominated by the old charque entrepreneurial class, smallholding immigrants completely controlled the province's key industry. "The transition in Rio Grande Do Sul from slave labor to free labor brought with it a new layer of entrepreneurs who had no ties to the previous slave-based economy. The new entrepreneurs were drawn largely from immigrants concentrated in the production of cereals and semi-industrial cattle production" (Cardoso, 1962, p. 233). The changes wrought by abolition directly benefited—and brought to social prominence—a new class that had not been tied to the previous slave order. Along with well-placed urban merchants, the new class of smallholding European immigrants represented the province's postabolition elites. Former slaves, meanwhile, cast aside as camaradas, found themselves becoming increasingly dispensable before they were ultimately consumed by the emerging postslavery social forces. "The process of re-integrating [former slaves] into a social order [after abolition] occurred in a society with a class structure in flux. Ex-slaves were not given an opportunity to fully assume the status of 'citizen' after abolition, nor could they confront the position whites forced them into within the emerging class structure" (Cardoso, 1962, p. 312). Thus, as a satellite of the coffee region, Rio Grande Do Sul was able to tap into Sao Paulo's steady stream of immigrants to reshape its own key industries. Without an entrenched planter class, as in the northeast, or a dynamic, creditworthy entrepreneurial class, as in the coffee region, the immigrants who flooded into Rio Grande Do Sul's vacant hinterland soon came to dominate the region's strategic industries and displace the slave-era elites. Former slaves were forced into marginal, subsistence production that left them dependent on the postabolition social order and its race-based division of labor. Rio Grande Do Sul's elites held that the mass of slaves were socially and culturally unprepared for participating fully as "citizens". Whites sought to redefine their relation with Africans in a manner such that they could rationalize the further exploitation of freed Africans. Social inequalities were expressed in the form of natural inequalities. This took the ideological/social form of the "ideal de branqueamento" [the ideal of whitening]. Within the African community there was a continuing struggle against this "ideologia de negritude" and the general effort to re-constitute society along racial divisions. (Cardoso, 1962, pp. 315-16) Rio Grande Do Sul was one of the few areas of postabolition Brazil where new elites emerged to replace the slave-era elites. At the same time, the province relied on many of the same processes that characterized the coffee region during the establishment of a postslavery social order. The use of extramarket

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measures, such as foreign immigration, paved the way for the subjugation of former slaves, while the new race-based division of labor—buttressed by a large class of smallholding European immigrants—guaranteed that former slaves would be left with few options outside submitting to the needs of capital. Preabolition, slave-based society in Rio Grande Do Sul had been based on a class of smallholders producing goods (wheat, cattle and charque) that were consumed by other regions. In this regard, the province differed considerably from those in both the coffee and sugar region. At the same time, there are striking parallels between the conditions facing the former slaves in postslavery Rio Grande Do Sul and those facing former slaves in the sugar and coffee regions. This points to the fact that—regardless of differing preabolition social orders—race, controlled access to land and capital and the restricted use of wage-labor were the most salient factors shaping the lives of former slaves throughout postslavery Brazil. These were not the hallmarks of a seamless transition to a race-neutral working class of wage-laborers under the aegis of an unregulated free market. Rather, these were the core features of a thoroughly planned strategy that relied on extramarket forces to manufacture a reliable and predictable postslavery, race-based division of labor. BY WAY OF CONCLUSION The 19th-century Brazilian social order represented a combination of regional variants, each tracing its origins to slave-labor, though each developing unique regional traits. Both the similarities and the differences were stark. Distinct industries often resulted in similar social patterns of development. The northeast sugar, Maranhao cattle and Parafba Valley coffee industries were all based on large landholdings with enormous numbers of slaves. At the same time, the very same industry could emerge in two locales with contrasting social patterns of development. Contrary to the Paraiba Valley, Western Sao Paulo coffee (along with the bordering wheat industry in Rio Grande Do Sul) was dominated by smallholders who owned modest numbers of slaves. Such differences point to the central role of the local social conditions and of the planters' direct actions—as opposed to the supposedly immutable forces of "economic determinism"—in sculpting the dominant social order. In the postabolition period, it was again the visible hand of Brazilian ruling elites that largely determined the structure of the emerging social order. Former slaves found themselves marginalized from the same productive activities that, a decade earlier, could not have lasted a single day without them. However, planter strategies, not blind market forces, were the primary determinants of the former slave's marginalization. Though regional slave-era social orders may have differed significantly (large landholdings versus smallholdings, production for domestic consumption versus production for

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export), and regions may have pursued distinct postslavery labor strategies (European immigration versus relying on a coercive body of labor and land laws), the outcome of abolition across Brazil was universal and uncompromising. Postslavery Brazilian society was characterized by a race-based division of labor, a reliance on extramarket forces to discipline the former slave population and a combination of labor forms (with restricted wage-labor). The result was a remarkably heterogeneous, postslavery Brazilian working class. The narrative of events shaping Brazilian abolition reviewed earlier is a familiar one. This narrative, however, remains the appendage of a European historical narrative. Brazilian slavery itself was the brainchild of the European continent. Therefore, its subjugation to the broader story of European history is understandable and necessary. There is, however, a parallel narrative to be considered—that of capital, specifically, capital's relation to labor. Labor stands in relation to capital as the history of Brazilian slavery stands in relation to the history of Europe. The former is defined by the latter. It cannot exist apart from the latter. If one is telling the story of Brazilian slavery, it is impossible not to evoke European expansion. If one is telling the story of labor, it is impossible not to evoke the historical role of capital. At the same time, the narrative of European history and the narrative of capital, while overlapping, are not identical. Thus, attempting to tell the story of Brazilian abolition by means of relating both the narrative of European history as well as the narrative of capital can at times result in the unraveling of confused or contradictory tales. The abolition of slavery in Brazil must be placed in the context of contemporary, large-scale global processes (such as the abolition of serfdom) that constituted modern industrial working-class formation on a world scale. In this regard, the resulting social architecture of the Brazilian working class (and the race-based division of labor) appears to have been shaped both by the specificities of historical slavery as well as by the evolving needs of global capitalist production. This observation helps to mark the intersection between the abolition of slavery in Brazil and the earlier discussion of classical political economy—in particular, the works of Smith, Ricardo and Marx and their descriptions of processes associated with working-class formation. In large measure, their narrow conceptualizations of this process (their singular focus on the wage-labor form) has resulted in the fable of a single, homogeneous history of global working-class formation. Contrary to this interpretation, it is argued here that slavery in the Americas, serfdom in Central and Eastern Europe and the proletarianization of artisans and craftsmen in the West all must be understood to be unique aspects of a single, heterogeneous historical process. It is suggested here that a first and necessary step in this direction concerns the reconstitution (and reconceptualization) of the modern industrial working class such that it may incorporate the full breadth and scope of a multifaceted collection of labor forms that has included slave, serf, indentured servant, wage-labor and a number of other forms directly employed by capital. The effort here to reconstruct the category of the modern slave as a specific manifestation of a heterogeneous working class rather than a pre-wage-labor

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form has, therefore, been a first step in capturing the complexities of capitalist production as a dynamic social system. Only in this manner is it possible to properly historicize the Brazilian slave as a member of the modern industrial working class. Likewise, only through this maneuver may one transform the category of the working class from a population of laborers comprising solely wage-laborers (or persons in transition to becoming wage-laborers) into a workforce comprising multiple labor forms. As alluded to previously, the work of Anfbal Quijano provides a useful framework for reconceptualizing global working-class formation (along with broader issues of modernity) in the context of colonial and postcolonial America. Quijano expresses the nature of capitalist production and its combined labor forms through the concept of "structural heterogeneity." "The idea of pre-capitalism and capitalism, and of a linear movement toward homogenization was always false. The proof is clear: After 500 years, the same social structures persist, not only in Latin America but in all the world. This process, this phenomenon, this reality is what I call structural heterogeneity" (Quijano, 1992b, p. 54). Quijano portrays the contemporary manifestations of such a social milieu with an imagery that is wholly antithetical to a world moving ceaselessly toward any type of homogeneous, wage-labor, industrial working class. [With respect to current tendencies within the structure of labor] there is an increasing segment of the labor force whose labor can be neither bought nor sold. This is not merely a problem of under-employment or unemployment, but pertains to a period in which there is beginning to emerge a limit to the increase in the commercialization of the labor force. This is a serious problem given that the labor force can only exist in the world of capital if it can be bought and sold. What will happen, then, to a labor force which cannot be bought or sold? Are they to commit mass suicide? Are they to transfer to another planet? Are they to submit, for the sake of survival, to other labor forms such as slavery? (Quijano, 1992b, p. 53) Nineteenth-century industrial working-class formation represented the global process of articulating dispersed labor processes within the realm of capitalist production for the purposes of expanded capital accumulation. The social order emerging from this process—whose lineages shaped the contemporary global working class—reflects the 19th-century social reality. Hence, a variety of historical circumstances and structures (race-based divisions of labor, extramarket coercion, distorted labor markets, structures of coloniality) were, and continue to be, the chief determinants of the global, industrial working class' basic physiognomy. For this reason, it is argued that—like the slave—the "modern industrial working class," properly understood, is not an economic category. Rather, it is a social and historical condition, and its continued social development remains tied not to formal schematic categories but to the expanding appetite of capitalist production. Therefore, the central challenge for contemporary and historical studies of the ongoing processes shaping global

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working-class formation today is (1) to reconsider the category of the industrial working class itself so as to more fully capture the multiple labor forms it encompasses and (2) to redeploy and historicize such new concepts as may evolve from this reconsideration so as to more fully represent the working-class as a dynamic social class within capitalist society in opposition to, and in struggle with, capital. NOTES 1. In the 1850s and 1860s the zona de mata amassed 3,000 to 4,000 engenhos (one-third of which were in Pernambuco, one-third in Bahia and one-third in Alagoas, Paraiba, Sergipe and Rio Grande do Sul). The engenhos varied in size from 10 to 200 slaves. The fertile Reconcavo district near Salvador averaged 80 slaves per engenho (Galloway, 1971, pp. 591-93). 2. "In Pernambuco the planters' monopoly of land in the sugar zone, together with sugar's continued comparative advantage within the province, gave the planters economic and political supremacy. This power enabled them to convert from slave to free labor with a minimum of inconvenience and thereby to pass much of the cost of export crises to the free workers, who had virtually no bargaining power at all" (Eisenberg, 1977, p. 354). 3. Mattos' study of free European laborers in the Northeast reveals "innumerous gradients and variants within the rural world of free laborers [which] were unified by work and by a logic of survival" (Mattos, 1987, p. 108). 4. Cholera outbreaks throughout the 1850s devastated the slave population. Alagoas lost 4,000 (or 10%) of its slave population in the 1850s (Galloway, 1971, p. 589). Pernambuco lost 3,300 between 1855 and 1856 (Eisenberg, 1973, p. 587). Parafba lost 2,982 (or 10.4%) of its slave population in 1852 (Soares, 1979, p. 139). 5. The Amazon rubber industry, in particular, attracted hundreds of thousands from the northeast from 1872 to 1918. 6. "The drought led to the removal of large numbers of slaves and contributed to the disorganization of servile labor within the sertao', they were the most hurt by the calamity. Slaves pressured by hunger deserted plantations and became highwaymen and bandits" (Soares, 1979, p. 122). 7. "The presidents of the northeastern states did not respond enthusiastically to the idea of immigration. They invested little time, money, or energy in the cause, and hardly surprisingly, the results were minimal. Asians did not come to work in the cane fields, and only a few hundred Europeans decided to risk their lot in the northeast" (Galloway, 1971, p. 599). Paraiba planters provided a slight deviation from this pattern, experimenting relatively successfully with colonization using native labor. Landowners gave over land to be used as a colony in exchange for the colonizers' providing work services to the landowner on a weekly basis. Eventually 31 such colonies were founded, with 1,882 colono families comprising 8,920 persons (Soares, 1979, p. 131). 8. The use of slaves in large numbers must have remained more economical, however. "Slavery continued to be more economical for planters than recruiting, transporting, and paying immigrants" (Holloway, 1977, p. 307). 9. The only rural class of workers who disappeared in this period were the almocreves (packhorse drivers), who, numbering 20,000 in 1878, had completely vanished by 1908 (Reis, 1977, p. 379). 10. To date, Ayoub's monograph provides one of the only substantive chronologies of events in Maranhao in this era.

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11. Maranhao had a mere 78 km of railroad by 1890. Brazil, as a whole, had 9,937 km at the time. "By 1850, the agriculture of Maranhao remained a prisoner of rudimentary processes of production" (Ayoub, 1990, p. 66). 12. In 1820 Brazilian coffee production accounted for 20% of world production. Coffee was a mere 18% of the value of Brazil's total exports—sugar was 30%. By the 1890s, coffee represented 65% of the value of Brazil's total exports, and sugar 6%. 13. "After 1850, the release of capital hitherto employed in the African slave-trade flooded the investment market and planters found their resources expanded almost overnight as their slave property's value doubled" (Stein, 1953, p. 354). 14. "[There was a] general uniformity in plantation layouts and house plans" (Stein, 1970, p. 40). 15. "In post-1850 Brazilian society, the age, health, number, and price of African and Brazilian-born slaves functioned as the most sensitive barometer of economic prosperity. The value of slave property accounted for more than 50% of total fazenda capital over a 30-year period. Indeed, slave property rose to an all-time high of 73% of plantation wealth in 1857-58, far out-valuing the combined value of land, coffee groves, dwelling quarters, and other construction as well as machinery" (Stein, 1970, pp. 225226). 16. "The Paraiba Valley never attracted a large number of immigrant workers. In 1905 less than 5% of the Paraiba Valley workforce was foreign. The system of parceria [sharecropping] was adopted there after the abolition of slavery, which proved far less attractive to immigrants than the colono system developed in [western Sao Paulo]" (Holloway, 1972, p. 150). 17. In this passage, Kowarick—whose larger study focuses on western Sao Paulo— is specifically referring to "freemen" in the old coffee-producing regions, the "Vale do Paraiba in Rio and Sao Paulo" (Kowarick, 1987, p. 20). 18. While the demise of the Paraiba Valley's coffee production was rather rapid, it must be recalled that western Sao Paulo did not first match Paraiba Valley production levels until 1883 and did not surpass them until 1886. 19. The great majority of landless were former slaves; however, there was a handful of Europeans from Portugal, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and other parts of Brazil. 20. "Free workers did not take on a significant numerical importance in the coffee industry until the transition period from 1886 to 1888" (Holloway, 1977, p. 307). 21. The formal links between the planter class and the political processes were critical for crafting laws—such as the 1850 Land Law—that prevented immigrants from having access to unoccupied land. 22. "Sharecroppers were usually contracted in family units. Thus, sharecropping also allowed the landowner to benefit from the use of the sharecroppers' family labor. Planters had always opposed recruiting single men since it was argued that immigrant families were less prone to abandon the plantations. This may be so, but equally important was surely the fact that the immigrants' families constituted a cheap labor reserve" (Stolcke and Hall, 1983, p. 174). 23. In the northeast, taxes were used in a reverse fashion to discourage the use of slaves in urban occupations. "As early as the 1850's taxes were levied to discourage the use of slaves in urban occupations [in Bahia]. In 1852, for example, a tax was imposed on slaves working as artisans and mechanics in Recife" (Huggins, 1985, p. 60).

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24. The number of Italians going to Brazil through 1910 equaled the number going to the United States. The remittances of Italian immigrants back to Italy from Brazil, however, were 1/50 that of the remittances from the United States (Dean, 1976, p. 192). 25. By 1929, 56% of all Sao Paulo land was privately owned, and still only 8% of the total land was under active, commercial cultivation (Holloway, 1980, p. 112). 26. Over time, of course, former slaves came to represent a hedge against wages in the reverse, holding down European wages. Brazilian elites well understood that, given both far-reaching political powers as well as regional labor surpluses, "the labor force could be drastically exploited—and even, to a large extent, destroyed" (Kowarick, 1987, p. 5). 27. Advertisements posted in Rio Grande Do Sul attest to the common use of slaves in highly skilled occupations. Ads for the following skilled slaves appeared in the 19th-century Rio Grande Do Sul press: "For sale, skilled slave stoneworker"; "For sale, slaves with superior tailoring skills"; "For sale, one slave carpenter"; "For sale, one slave experienced lumberjack" (Maestri, 1984, p. 111). 28. The use of slaves in the Brazilian cattle industry was not limited to Rio Grande Do Sul. Slaves actually outnumbered Native Americans in Paraiba cattle production. "Contrary to [popular opinion] the majority of histories have affirmed that slaves were an important part of the cattle economy. The [African] and not the Native American dominated the Parafban backlands in the second half of the 19th century" (Soares, 1979, p. 102). 29. The 10-year Farrapos Uprising (1835-45) had destroyed a large proportion of the wealth in cattle and led to massive slave flight.

Appendix A: Example of a 19th-century Colono Contract (Summary of a Lease of Service Contract adopted in the colonia of Santo Antoini da Foraleza, in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, on the property of Dr. Joaquim Cornelio dos Santos in 1884) Article I: The colono (leaser) head of the family, in combination with their women, children and parents are obliged: 1. To care for, in the manner most appropriate, those coffee trees given to them and their family, in the ratio of two to three thousand pes of coffee for every male, one thousand pes of coffee for each female and in proportion to all members of the family in relation to their age, to weed at least four times each year (along with sweeping and preparing the ground soil prior to harvest). 2. To harvest the product of the above mentioned coffee trees, when ready, and deliver it to the colonia, at a place to be determined to be paid for at a rate of 400 reis for each alquiere (a measurement corresponding to one-half of 45 liters). 3. For those receiving new coffee areas requiring greater amounts of weeding, they will be paid 5,000 reis for each weeding of one thousand pes of coffee, and at the time of harvest (in the case of productive trees) they will be paid 200 reis for each alquiere of coffee harvested; additionally they will enjoy the advantage of planting cereals (such as maize and beans to be exclusively their own). 4. To begin the harvest on the day and in the manner indicated, delivering the coffee to the colonia in a place to be determined, free of soil, dust, foilage, or any other foreign bodies. 5. To pick the coffee product only by hand, from the first tree until the last under their charge, taking all necessary care so as to avoid any damage to the branches, buds and/or foilage of the trees.

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Appendix A

6. To not take any other employment during the harvest of the colonia, nor afterwards until they have completed the first weeding of all the trees in their charge. 7. To conserve in good condition the house in which they live, making repairs to the land/buildings, and, when they have animals, maintaining pastureland for animals with no less than two weedings by hoe each year. 8. To accept and fulfill, and see to it that all family members accept and fullfill, the present contract, conforming to those instructions given by the proprietor, or their agent, for the proper execution of this contract and all its clauses subject to decree No. 2,827 of March 1879 and the Internal Regulations and Policies of the colonia. 9. As responsibility for the contract will be that of a person in combination with their woman, children and parents, with whom they constitute a family, any debts will be assumed by the family as a whole. 10. To conduct themselves peacefully without disturbing the order, the inhabitants of the colonia, or their neighbors. Article II: The proprietor (leasee) is obliged: 1. To supply in money or goods all that are indispensable for subsistence for the colonos during the first months in which it is not possible to obtain resources from their own labor; these supplies shall consist of beans, rice, ground maize, salt, coffee, sugar, all at a price set by the nearest market, as well as medicine and medical care for any illnesses. 2. To supply free land (under the condition that it cannot be alienated in any form) for the period of the contract, only to be used for subsistence goods. 3. To supply a free house for a family and pastureland for animals that do not excede a cow and calf along with a horse or mule for each family; which may only be kept if the family can afford to maintain them 2/3 of the year in a stable and 1/3 in the pasture. 4. To give the family a number of trees corresponding to the number of persons in the family. 5. To supply, at an appropriate time, coffee trees (former or new) that will be necessary for replanting among the old coffee trees in their charge. 6. To pay those colonos receiving newer coffee areas requiring greater amounts of weeding (in addition to the 400 reis for each alqueire of coffee harvested) 5,000 reis for each weeding of one thousand pes of coffee, and at the time of harvest (in the case of productive trees) to pay them 200 reis for each alquiere of coffee harvested; additionally allowing them to plant cereals (such as maize and beans to be exclusively their own). 7. To grant to those families with newer trees (with less yield) the right to grow cereals which do not damage the coffee trees. 8. To adjust and verify each year the number of colonos by December 31.

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Article III: The term of each contract will be 5 years, at the end of which time it may be renewed, or, being free of debt and having fullfilled the clauses and conditions of the contract, the colonos may leave. Six months prior to the end of the 5 years, the colonos must declare in writing whether or not they wish to remain in the colonia. The lack of such a declaration signifies the renewal of their contract for five more years. Source: Viotti da Costa, 1982, pp. 205-208

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Index Aberdeen Bill (1845), 152 Aja, 129 Alagoas, 154, 157, 178,202 Alves Branco Tariffs (1844), 132, 134 Amazon, 128, 136, 143, 154, 157, 164, 202 Amazonas (See Amazon) Anglo-Turkish Convention, 51 Angola, 129 Antigua, 94, 95, 96, 97, 113 Antonil, Andre Joao, 125, 140 Argentina, 43, 62, 119 Armenia, 193 Ashanti, 129 Asia, 29, 51,64, 100, 107 asiento, 26 Auckland Island, 52 Australia, 45, 62, 75 Austria, 75, 84, 110, 111 Austrian customs union, 60 Babbage, Charles, 91 Bahia: abolition, 121, 123, 157, 161, 168; period of civil unrest, 135; slave rebellions, 127, 141, 155; slavebased production, 129, 130, 131, 143, 152, 175, 177, 202; sugar production, 19, 124, 178 Baltics, 43 Balzac, Honore de, 27 Bantu, 112

Barbados, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 113, 114, 115,139,170 Bavaria, 110 Belgium, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 75, 76 Belisario, F., 170 Berlin, 57, 62 Bessemer Converter, 63 Bohemia, 51 Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 46 Bolivia, 119, 139 Brandenburg African Company, 112 Brandenburgs, 81,91, 112 Brazil: 19th-century industrialization, 136-137, 143; 19th-century trade and commerce, 133-136, 138; abolition and Chinese labor debate, 161-162, 171; abolition and European immigration, 3, 21, 22, 147, 149-150, 162-168, 193, 203; abolition and labor laws (of 1830, 1837, 1879), 4, 21, 146, 148-150, 194; abolition and Land Law of 1850,4,21, 146, 150-151,203; abolition and restrictive social legislation, 146, 159-161, 168; abolition and vagrancy laws, 4, 160, 170, 173, 194; abolitionist legislation, 21, 139, 147, 151, 153, 158-159, 161, 168; abolitionist movements, 154-156; Atlantic slave trade, 17, 19, 118, 119, 128-129,

230

Index

133, 139, 140, 145, 146, 151, 152, 183, 185, 203; British dominance over, 20, 121-122, 128, 132, 133, 134, 137, 143; cattle industry, 19, 21, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132, 141, 142, 180, 196, 204; coffee production, 19, 20,22,88,126,135,136,143,152, 154, 163, 167, 169, 171, 174, 183, 194, 203; as a colony (1534-1807), 20, 132; cotton production, 19, 21, 126, 141, 180; development of home market, 19, 21, 120; diverse roles of slave-labor, 19,20,21, 125,141, 204; as an empire (1822-1889), 20, 132, 134; freed slave population, 4, 19, 21, 119, 120, 125, 127, 129-132, 137,139,141,147-148,149,154, 156-158, 168; free-womb law (1871) (or Rio Branco Law), 21, 139, 148, 151, 153, 158, 159, 160, 170; Golden Law (1888), 21, 153, 156, 159, 161; internal slave trade, 19, 21, 146, 152- 153, 154, 177; as a kingdom (1807-1822), 132; manumission, 19, 20, 114, 129, 130, 146, 147, 154, 156-158, 160, 170; mining industry, 19, 20, 126, 127, 133, 141, 142; modes of production debates, 139-140; mulatto population, 3, 21, 123, 125, 130, 131, 141, 156-158; native ruling class, 22, 133, 134-135, 137, 148, 161, 167, 170, 174, 183, 188, 199; original settlement, 121-124; Portuguese colonial rule, 20, 121, 122, 127, 128, 131, 141; Portuguese postcolonial role, 133; Quieros Law (1850), 152; race-based division of labor, 2-4, 7, 21, 117, 122-124, 125, 131,135,137,138,145,147,156, 161, 166, 168, 173,188,200; regional specialization, 19, 21, 118, 127, 132; as a republic (1889), 20, 22, 132; rice production, 21, 141, 180; role in world-economy, 19, 20; role of extramarket forces, 3, 4, 7, 17,21,55,117,133,138,145,151, 164,165,167,168,173,188,200; role of Native American labor, 122123, 124, 125, 128, 130, 137, 140, 204; role of the Jesuits, 127, 128,

140; rubber production, 126, 133, 136, 202; Sexagenarian Law (1885) (or Saraiva-Cotegipe Law), 21, 139, 153, 159; slave rebellions, 127, 155156; slave-based production, 18, 20, 21,23,61,74, 109,112, 117-120, 122, 137, 138; sugar production, 19, 21, 100, 124-127, 132, 133, 135, 137, 142, 175, 176; vagrancy laws (preabolition), 127, 130; workingclass formation, 17, 22, 55, 138, 146, 200 Britain: 18th-century industrialization, 35, 39; 18th-century trade and commerce, 16, 26, 27, 29; 19thcentury global hegemony, 43, 120; 19th-century industrialization, 30, 56,58,59,60,61,70,72,75,85, 111, 116; abolition and colonial rule, 96, 112; abolition and planter compensation, 93; abolition of slavery, 18; Anti-Combination Acts, 39, 45; Blue Books, 63; Company of Royal Adventurers (Royal African Company), 112; under Continental System, 42, 43; control of Portugal, 20; Elizabethan Poor Law, 45; Enclosure Acts, 30, 52, 61; Factory Acts, 30, 52, 72; Master and Servant Acts, 63; migration to the Americas, 62; role in Atlantic slave trade, 91, 119, 148, 151, 152, 169; role in Chinese coolie trade, 171; Speenhamland, 39, 45, 52, 127; Statute of the Artificers, 45 British Guiana: abolition, 109; abolition and indentured Indian labor, 95, 96, 102, 105, 106-107, 108, 113, 115, 170; abolition and land/labor ratios, 96 British West Indies: abolition, 115; abolition and apprenticeship, 94, 9798, 101, 103, 114, 161; abolition and land/labor ratios, 95, 113; slavebased production, 118, 119, 138, 169 Brunswick, 110 Biicher, Carl, on the social division of labor, 33-34 Campbell Islands, 52 Canary Islands, 102, 103, 115

Index Capitalist production: abolition of serfdom, 17, 18, 56, 58, 62, 75, 79, 85; abolition of slavery, 12, 17, 18, 20,56, 58,61,62, 79; global distribution of labor forms, 4, 8, 910, 18, 23, 28; Native American slavery, 6; non-wage-labor forms, 1, 2, 5, 7-13, 14, 15, 17, 25, 45, 55, 60, 74,79,89,109,113,200-202; putting-out system, 26, 58, 61; racebased division of labor, 2, 4, 5, 93, 178, 201; role of extramarket forces, 2, 3, 20, 25, 55, 59, 60, 62, 79, 92, 93, 109, 201; role of serf-labor, 5, 7, 11, 12, 18, 89; role of slave-labor, 2, 5-7, 11, 12, 18; role of wage-labor, 9, 17; smallholding agricultural producers, 12, 26, 61, 62, 89; surplus population, 10, 11; working-class formation, 2, 3, 5-7, 10-12, 14, 25, 200-202 Caribbean, 6, 20, 92, 95, 96, 102, 114, 115,126, 169,170, 195 Catherine the Great, 27, 31 Cavour, Camillo, 56 Ceara, 127, 135, 143, 152, 154, 157 Central and Eastern Europe: abolition and apprenticeship, 94; abolition and indemnification, 82, 83, 110; abolition of serfdom, 17, 18, 20, 74, 79-89, 93, 107, 108, 110, 169, 178, 200; non-wage-labor forms, 20, 51, 80, 90; role of extramarket forces, 80, 83, 160; smallholding agricultural producers, 81, 83, 85; structure of serfdom, 81-82 Ceylon, 52, 92 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 9, 10, 23 Chatham Island, 52 Chayanov, A. V., 80 Chile, 119, 139, 195 China, indentured labor migration, 20, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102105,113, 114,115,161,162,165, 170, 186 Classical political economy, 2, 7, 13, 15,16,26,28,46,64,74,76,80, 188,200 Colombia, 119, 138 Columbus, Christopher, 59 Congo, 129

231

Congress of Vienna, 52 Cortez, Hernan, 59 Costa da Mina (See Gulf of Guinea) Cuba: abolition and apprenticeship, 97, 98-99, 100, 101, 113, 161; abolition and land/labor ratios, 96; abolition and role of Chinese coolies, 103105, 113, 115, 186; abolition and vagrancy laws, 108, 116; development of home market, 120; freed slave population, 120; railroads, 75; slave-based production, 61, 72, 118, 119, 138, 170; sugar production, 100, 113 Dahomey, 129 Danish Sound, 75 Danube, 75 Denmark, 75, 101, 110, 111, 112, 119, 138 Dickens, Charles, 27 Diderot, Denis, 31 DomJoaoIII, 121 Dominican Republic, 100, 119 Dutch Guiana (Surinam): abolition, 93, 105,106-107,114, 115,170; abolition and land/labor ratios, 96; sugar production, 113 East Africa, 129 East Indies, 32 Ecuador, 119, 139 Egypt, 51,75 Emmanuel, Charles, 82 Espirito Santo, 154, 157 Ewe, 129 Farrapos Uprising (1835-1845), 204 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 12 Fiji, 92 Flanders, 51 Florence, 51 France: 1789 Revolution, 16, 27, 4041, 43, 45, 129, 138; 18th-century smallholding agricultural producers, 51; 18th-century trade and commerce, 26, 29, 134; 19th-century industrialization, 30, 56, 61, 58, 75; 19th-century trade and commerce, 60; abolition of slavery, 18; Battle of Plassey, 26; colonial rule, 41, 76,

232

Index

127; Continental System, 40, 42, 43; French West India Company (Senegal Company), 112; July Monarchy, 56; labor migration to the Americas, 193, 203; Le Chapelair Law, 39, 45; Napoleonic Codes, 41, 42, 44; Napoleonic Wars, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 56, 64; role in Atlantic slave trade, 91, 119 Frederick the Great, 27, 31 French West Indies: abolition and apprenticeship, 101; abolition and indentured Indian labor, 105; abolition and vagrancy laws, 107; French Revolution, 41; slave-based production, 118, 119, 138 Germany: 19th-century industrialization, 56, 57, 58, 59, 75; abolition of serfdom, 61, 85, 86-88, 179;EastofElbe,27,61,81,86, 111; French Revolution, 42; Junkers, 27, 31, 44, 86, 111; labor migration to the Americas, 62, 193, 203; nationalism, 27; post-abolition deputant system, 87-88, 111; postabolition Insten system, 86-87, 88, 94, 178; unification, 17, 42, 52 Ghana, 129 Goa, 123 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 27 Goias, 127, 130, 154, 157, 158 Gold Coast (See Ghana) Gough Island, 52 Greece, 56 Grenada, 95, 96, 116 Guadeloupe, 96, 113, 114, 119 Gulf of Guinea, 129 Haiti: 1791 Revolution, 23, 45, 93, 97, 119, 129, 135, 141; end of slavery and land/labor ratios, 96; French Revolution, 40; liberation of Dominican slaves, 119; slave-based production, 90, 119, 138, 170 Hamburg, 163 Hanover, 110 Hapsburgs, 31 Hardenberg, 44 Hausa, 163 Hawaii, 92

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 44 Hesse, 110 Hume, David, 28 Hungary, 75, 85, 110, 111 Iberia, 27, 43, 102, 103 India: indentured labor migration, 20, 92,93,96,99, 102, 105, 114, 115, 161, 165, 170; industrialization, 23, 75; Nationalist Movement, 105; sugar production, 100 Indian Mutiny (1857), 76 Indian Ocean, 51, 52 Indochina, 76 Indonesia, 76, 92, 115 ingenuos (See Brazil: freed slave population) Ionian Islands, 52 Ireland, 62, 76, 102 Italy: 19th-century industrialization, 75; 19th-century trade and commerce, 60; labor migration to the Americas, 166, 167, 171, 193, 203; unification, 17,42 Jamaica, 90, 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, 106, 114, 115, 138,139, 170 Japan, 56, 193 Java, 92 Jena, 44 JoaoVI, 142 Joseph II, 27, 31 Kautsky, Karl, 75, 80 King Sebastao I, 123 Laccadive Islands, 52 Las Siete Partidas (See Spanish Justinian Code) Latin America, 20, 43, 56, 62, 101, 115,201 Latin Monetary Union, 60 Lebanon, 193 Lenin, V. I., 75, 80 Leopold II, 27, 31 libertos (See Brazil: freed slave population) Lippe, 110 Lisbon, 122, 141 Lithuania, 193 Liverpool, 29, 30, 39, 91

Index London, 62, 64, 72, 75 Louis XVI, 27 Lower Elbe, 75 Luddites, 11 Lyons, 26 Machado de Assis, 169 Madinka, 129, 163 Malaya, 92 Maldive Islands, 52 Malta, 52 Malthus, Thomas, on surplus population, 10 Manchester, 29, 30, 52 Maori Wars, 76 Maranhao: abolition, 22, 174, 180-182; abolition and European immigrants, 182; abolition and role of Chinese coolies, 171; abolition and role of moradores, 182; cattle industry, 127, 132, 181, 199; cotton production, 19, 141, 180, 181; period of civil unrest, 135; rice production, 141; slavebased production, 142, 152, 199 Maroon Treaty (Jamaica), 106 Marquis do Pombal, 121, 122, 123, 128, 140 Martinique, 96, 113, 114, 139, 170 Marx, Karl: on alienation, 16; on colonialism, 23, 112; critique of positivism, 16, 64-67; on non-wagelabor forms, 74, 77, 92, 113; on origin of surplus value, 69, 70; on role of extramarket forces, 64; role within classical political economy, 3, 13,14, 17,52,64,80,89,138,146, 200; on slave-labor, 5, 67, 68, 77; on surplus population, 10, 71, 77; on wage-labor, 16, 66, 67, 72, 74, 92, 113; on working-class formation, 7, 25; on working-class heterogeneity, 68, 70-74 Matanzas, 114 MatoGrosso, 127, 130, 135, 154, 157, 158 Mauritius, 52, 92, 100, 103 Mercantilism, 32, 34, 91 Methuen Treaty (of 1703), 121, 122, 127, 128, 140 Mill, John Stuart, 64, 76

233

Minas Gerais: development of home market, 19, 91; mining industry, 19, 126, 127, 130; period of civil unrest, 135; slave-based production, 19, 90, 123, 127, 129, 130, 135, 141, 142, 152, 154, 157, 169, 183, 196 Mirabeau, Honors 32, 34 Mississippi River, 136 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, 31 Montserrat, 96, 97 MoretLaw, 100 Mozambique, 129, 148, 169 Nabuco, Jaoquim, 154, 165 Nantes, 39,91 Napoleon Bonaparte, 44, 52, 142 Napoleon III, 56 Natal, 92 Navigation Act (of 1751), 26, 127 Netherlands, 18, 26, 39, 76, 101, 102, 112, 119, 122,127, 140, New South Wales, 52 New Zealand, 52 Nigeria, 129 Northeast sugar region: abolition, 2, 21, 159, 174, 175-180, 182, 186, 196, 203; abolition and European immigration, 202; abolition and role of moradores, 177-180; cattle industry, 142; manumission, 22, 177; race-based division of labor, 180; slave-based production, 125, 143, 152, 196, 199; sugar production, 199 Northern Wars, 43 Olinda, 141 Opium War, 64 Oporto, 122 Ousmane, Sembene, 1 Palmerston Bill (1837), 152 Para, 128, 132, 135, 136, 154, 157 Paraguay, 177 Paraguayan War, 177 Parafba, 152, 154, 157, 177-178, 202, 204 Paraiba Valley: abolition, 22, 158, 173, 183-187, 196, 203; abolition and European immigration, 185, 203; abolition and role of camaradas,

234

Index

186-187; coffee production, 173, 174, 183-185, 187, 188, 190, 194, 199, 203; race-based division of labor, 187; role of extramarket forces, 187; slave-based production, 193, 196, 199 Parana, 127, 154, 157, 158 Paris, 40, 62, 75 patronato (See Cuba: abolition and apprenticeship) Penang, 52 Pernambuco: abolition, 170, 175, 176; period of civil unrest, 135; role of the Dutch, 122, 126; slave-based production, 129, 141, 152, 177, 178, 202; sugar production, 19, 124, 140, 175, 178 Peru, 101, 103, 105, 115, 119, 138, 139 Philippines, 92, 100 Phillip II, 123 Physiocrats, 28 Piaui, 154, 157 Pizarro, Francisco, 59 Poland, 43, 81, 110, 111, 179, 193 Pomerania, 81, 82 Pope Paul III, 123 Portugal: Braganza Court in Brazil, 121, 133; British control of, 20; labor migration to the Americas, 92, 182, 193, 203; role in Atlantic slave trade, 91,92, 112,151, 152; role in Chinese coolie trade, 103 Prussia: 19th-century industrialization, 56, 58, 61; 19th-century trade and commerce, 60; abolition of serfdom, 31,44,83,84,85, 110; French Revolution, 42; labor migration to Brazil, 171, 189; nationalism, 27 Puerto Rico: abolition, 99; abolition and apprenticeship, 113; abolition and land/labor ratios, 96; abolition and role of Chinese coolies, 116; abolition and vagrancy laws, 107— 108; slave-based production, 98, 118, 119, 120, 139; sugar production, 100 Quesnay, Francois, 31, 32 Quijano, Anfbal: on non-wage-labor forms and capitalist production, 1, 4, 5,201

Recife, 124, 127, 141,160,203 Rhine, 41, 75 Ricardo, David: on fixed versus circulating capital, 38, 46, 47; on living versus dead labor, 46, 47, 48; on non-wage-labor forms, 48, 51; role within classical political economy, 3, 14, 15, 17, 37, 39, 45, 55, 64, 70, 77, 80, 89, 146, 200; on social distribution of value, 15; on surplus population, 10, 15, 46, 47, 49-51; on wage-labor, 15, 47; on working-class formation, 25 Rio de Janeiro, 20, 127, 129, 134, 136, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 173, 183,185,186,188,196,205 Rio Grande do Norte, 154, 157, 175 Rio Grande do Sul: abolition, 174, 196-199, 204; abolition and European immigration, 168, 175, 197, 199; cattle industry, 19, 196; development of home market, 19; Native American labor, 197; period of civil unrest, 135; race-based division of labor, 198-199; role of extramarket forces, 198-199; slavebased production, 152, 199, 202; wheat production, 196, 199 Romania, 84, 85, 110, 111, 193 Rome, 39 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 31 Russia: 18th-century industrialization, 30; 18th-century trade and commerce, 12; 19th-century industrialization, 75; abolition of serfdom, 11, 31, 72, 82, 84, 88, 110; Bolshevik Revolution, 11; smallholding agricultural producers, 27,81 Salvador (See Bahia) Santa Catarina, 154, 157 Santos, 154, 155,163,188,205 Sao Francisco River, 132, 136, 141 Sao Paulo: 19th-century industrialization, 136, 151, 171, 192; abolition, 160, 166, 171, 175; abolition and European immigration, 163; coffee production, 19, 187; period of civil unrest, 135; slave

Index rebellions, 155; slave-based production, 129, 152, 183; sugar production, 127 Sao Salvador (See Bahia) Savoy, 82 Saxony, 26, 61, 110 Say,J.B.,51,52 Scheldt, 75 Scotland, 30, 36, 58, 135 Seismens-Martin (open hearth furnace), 63 Senegal, 1 Sergipe, 152, 154, 157, 178, 202 Seven Years' War, 26, 27 Seychelles, 52 Sierra Leone, 52 Silesia, 27, 81 Slave-based production: abolition and apprenticeship, 20, 93, 94-101, 113; abolition and indentured labor migrations, 20, 92, 93, 101-107; abolition and land/labor ratios, 113, 95-97; abolition and planter compensation, 93; abolition and restrictive social legislation, 93, 107108, 113; abolition and the role of extramarket forces, 94, 96; abolition and vagrancy laws, 108; Atlantic slave trade, 91, 109, 118, 124, 138, 153, 169; European justification for, 92, 112; freed slave population, 119, 120; as a system of capitalist production, 29, 89-94 Smith, Adam: on labor as the source of value, 15, 34-35, 47, 66; on nonwage-labor forms, 33, 34, 35-38, 51; on productive versus unproductive labor, 38-39, 48; role within classical political economy, 3, 13, 14, 15, 17, 28, 31, 46, 51, 52, 55, 59, 64, 70, 71, 74, 77, 80, 89, 146, 148, 167, 200; on the social distribution of value, 15, 35-38; on the social division of labor, 32-34; on wagelabor, 15, 32; on working-class formation, 25 Spain, 91, 92, 100, 101, 102, 112, 118, 120, 121, 123, 138, 140, 142, 169, 193 Spanish Justinian Code (and Las Siete Partidas), 123

235

St. Domingue (See Haiti) St. Helena, 52 St. Kitts, 94, 95, 96, 97, 113 St. Lucia, 52 St. Petersburg, 110 St. Vincent, 95, 116 Stein, Baron, 44, 52 Steuart, James, 51 Subaltern Studies, 10, 13, 23 Sudan, 129, 163 Surinam (See Dutch Guiana) Sweden, 43, 75, 91, 112 Switzerland, 56, 60, 75, 189 Syria, 193 Taiping Rebellion, 76 Tauney, Alfredo, 149 Theresa, Maria, 27, 31 Tobago, 52, 95, 96 Togo, 129 TomedeSouza, 121 Toqueville, Alexis de, 40 Treaty of Paris, 26 Treaty of Tordesillas, 121 Treaty of Utrecht, 26 Trieste, 42 Trinidad, 52, 95, 96, 97, 102, 105, 108, 113,115 Triple Treaties (of 1642, 1654, 1661), 20, 121, 122 Tristan da Cunha, 52 Turgot, A.R.J., 28, 31 Turkey, 51, 193 United States: 1871 Sugar Act, 114; 18th-century trade and commerce, 12; 19th-century industrialization, 56,58,60,75, 111, 136; 19thcentury trade and commerce, 120, 140; abolition, 99, 113, 139, 153, 161, 170; abolition and planter compensation, 93; Civil War, 11, 119, 181; European immigration, 62; Monroe Doctrine, 56; slave-based production, 19, 23, 68, 112, 118, 119, 140; slave-based production in Connecticut, 119; slave-based production in New Jersey, 119; slave-based production in New York, 119; slave-based production in

236

Index

Pennsylvania, 119; slave-based production in Rhode Island, 119 Upper Elbe, 75 Ure, Andrew, 91 Uruguay, 62, 119, 197 Vasco de Gama, 59 Venezuela, 119, 138, 139 Versailles, 39 Vienna, 17, 56, 57, 62 Voltaire, 31 Wales, 57, 58, 72 Wallerstein, Immanuel, on non-wage labor forms and capitalist production, 1,28,43, 52 Watt, James, 63 Weber, Max, on the abolition of serfdom in Germany, 86, 87, 88, 111,112, 178 West Africa, 20, 102, 105, 115, 121, 129, 169 Western Europe: 18th-century Enlightenment thought, 28, 30-31; 18th-century industrialization, 16, 26, 27-30, 44-46; 18th-century trade and commerce, 26, 28-29; 19thcentury nationalism, 58; early 19thcentury industrialization, 16, 26, 27,

30, 44, 46, 56-58; mid-19th-century global domination, 64; mid-19thcentury industrialization, 56, 62-64; mid-19th-century social changes, 16, 60-64; mid-19th-century trade and commerce, 16, 58-60; nationalism, 17; non-wage-labor forms, 30, 45 Western Sao Paulo: abolition, 2, 22, 173, 174, 187-196; abolition and European immigration, 22, 171, 174, 187, 188-196, 198; coffee production, 171, 174, 183, 188, 190, 192, 194, 199, 203; race-based division of labor, 195-196; role of the colono system, 190-192; role of extramarket forces, 195-196195; role of the parceria system, 189190; slave-based production, 193, 196, 199 Westphalia, 61,63 Williams, Eric, 6 Windischgratz, Prince Alfred, 84 World-Systems Analysis, 8 Yoruba, 129 Yucatan, 99, 102, 103, 104 Zurich, 163

About the Author DAVID BARONOV is Assistant Professor of Sociology at St. John Fisher College. His previous academic posts have included Visiting Research Fellow at the Centro Investigaciones Sociales at the University of Puerto Rico, Senior Research Associate with CILDES (Centro de Investigaciones Laborales, Documentacion, Educacion de Sindicatos) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Puerto Rico Department of Sociology. His publications include Bibliografia Sobre el Movimiento Obrero de Puerto Rico, 1873-1996.