This important book should be on the reading list of anyone planning to write or teach about the history of Brazilian agriculture, landholding, or slavery. Containing research on the economy and society of the Brazilian province of São Paulo prior to the development of its famous coffee economy, it might well have been entitled São Paulo before Coffee. It demonstrates that between 1750 and 1850, farmers in São Paulo produced food crops and sugar for local and regional consumption on large, small, and medium-sized properties using family and slave labor. It shows that the vast majority of these farmers owned no slaves, and that 90 percent of those who did owned fewer than five. This was far from the famous plantation society economy of the second half of the nineteenth century that made São Paulo the largest producer of coffee in the world. In fact, Luna and Klein argue...
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