The economy of São Paulo is generally regarded with admiration by foreign observers because it exhibits a very high degree of development—higher, perhaps, than any other regional economy of Latin America. The state’s per capita annual income is $575, equal to that of the Italian central and northeastern regions. Industry provides a third of the area’s output and is, furthermore, highly diversified and sophisticated, including motor vehicles, petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals.1 Although immigrants, foreign-branch factories, and state-owned enterprises have come to share in the ownership of this dynamic economy, the greater part of the wealth of São Paulo remains in the hands of its original owners: the coffee plantation aristocracy.
From several points of view this is a curious phenomenon. The culture of Latin America is often judged by observers to contain elements that inhibit entrepreneurship;2 yet here is a region that displays unconcern for such apprehensions. Is its culture in some regard different from that of other areas of Latin America? The Paulista, with his habitual self-confidence, declares that it is and evokes the bandeirante, that seventeenth-century slave and gold hunter, as a culture hero, who passed on something unique to his descendants.
Those who initiate one stage of economic growth often seem incapable of transferring their capital and efforts to more complex forms of production. Latin American landowners are considered to be particularly defective in this regard. Entrepreneurship, it has been theorized, is characteristic of groups that have suffered some withdrawal of status, or that have never enjoyed status.3 The planter elite, however, has survived the transition from subsistence farming to slave-driving to free labor plantation agriculture to import-substituting industry to finance capitalism. Do the Paulistas therefore possess an entrepreneurial ability superior to that of other landowning elites in Latin America? This theory finds support among the inhabitants of the state. Of all the Paulistas the members of the plantation elite are most prone to exalt their cultural uniqueness, and the word quatrocentão, referring to the Paulista descended from the founders of the colony, bears connotations and pretensions similar to “brahmin” in Boston.
It is not necessary to recount in detail all the entrepreneurial achievements of the planters, but a brief mention of their principal undertakings during the transitional period is apropos. Their first concern was to construct a railway network. Without cheap transportation the export trade would not have been feasible. The Santos-Jundiaí railway, the vital but technically nightmarish road that clambered up the coastal escarpment, may have been financed in London, but it was conceived in São Paulo, subsidized by the provincial legislature, and organized by a group of Paulistas led by the Baron Mauá. From this main line four trunks were built by different groups of planters to potential producing areas of the interior.4
More difficult to remedy was the scarcity of labor caused by the end of the slave trade. Slavery represented more than a mere technical or financial challenge; it was the social basis in Brazil of three hundred years of agricultural exploitation. Nevertheless, in contrast to the elites of other plantation systems, the Paulistas soon realized that they must actively foster the conversion to a free labor system if the export economy were to continue to grow. Not only did they form companies to transport Italian peasants, but they saw as well the necessity of abolishing slavery quickly in order to encourage the flow of free labor.5 The planters devised a system of short-term wage contracts that provided sufficient incentive to maintain yearly arrivals of immigrants, but at the same time they cannily preserved ownership of the land in their own hands.6
The financing of the coffee trade remained a local business to a remarkable extent. The trade was divided into two parts: the brokers (comissários), who provided credit for the planters, and the exporters, who dealt with the brokers.7 The brokers were usually planters who had turned to financing their neighbors’ crops. Some of them eventually founded exporting houses, obtained importing agencies, or went into banking.8 Foreign dealers captured most of the export side of the trade by 1910, but some of the larger planter-owned houses survived. Although foreign banks gained the major share of the commercial discount business by the outbreak of the First World War, the many local banks managed to outlast their rivals and in time eclipsed them.
It can be seen from these examples that, in order to valorize their holdings, the planters were led to engage in commercial and other activities on a large scale. The railroads and the banks were all joint-stock companies. The brokerage and import houses were partnerships of several plantation families. The spirit of association existed therefore, though often these combinations were reinforced by dynastic marriage or by political affiliations.9
The desire to render agricultural holdings more profitable was behind the first manufacturing ventures as well. Sugar culture was the original export business of the Paulistas in the region northwest of the capital. In the 1880s several centrals were constructed there, again as joint stock companies. Most of them soon fell into the hands of a French corporation that already owned mills in Rio state, but still others were built by planters in the Ribeirão Prêto area, farther to the north, probably with coffee profits. These eventually supplied the major part of the expanded internal market.10 The growing coffee trade called forth other industrial ventures. Coffee beans must be hulled, dried, and sorted to be marketable, and the shortage of labor stimulated experimentation with machines to perform these tasks. Although the mechanics who perfected the new equipment were often German, English, or Italian, the initiative and capital behind their workshops were Paulista. These same shops produced a great range of cast and machined equipment, principally for farm and railroad use, such as boilers, pumps, box cars, and the like. The largest industrial employer in São Paulo in 1896 was the planter-owned Paulista Railroad. Its repair shops, with 703 employees, made railway carriages.11
Most important of the agricultural-transformation enterprises, however, was the cotton spinning and weaving industry that was created in the wake of the modest cotton export boom of the 1860s. Some of the planters who had grown cotton, foreseeing the eventual return of the American South to the world market, wisely invested some of their profits in textile machinery. Of the nine mills erected in the 1870s and 1880s, all were sturdily profitable. Still more were built in the city of São Paulo and in Santos, the latter principally for coffee bagging. By 1903 there were thirteen mills employing 2,910 looms.12
Other plants for the transformation of agricultural or mineral resources, built before the First World War with coffee money, included meat packing plants, leather tanneries, corn and manioc mills, saw mills, lime and cement plants, and kilns for bricks, ceramic pipes, and glassware. In the 1920s even steel making was attempted on a small scale by two planter-owned companies. Occasionally planter interests extended beyond the manufacture of goods whose raw materials they could supply. They owned factories for making drugs, gunpowder, enamelware, and sanitary fixtures. Counting the larger firms in São Paulo, the planters employed almost half of the workers engaged in manufacturing.13
Finally, there was much interest in urban improvements as companies were formed to provide electric lighting, tramways, water supply, telephones, and for pretentious public construction. Although the public buildings were intended to embody the civic pride of local planters, a good number of them represented useful economic or social overhead that should have been applied to more productive tasks.
Why were the Paulista planters so enterprising? Is it possible to maintain that there was in São Paulo, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a concentration of entrepreneurial ability more intense, or a capitalist mentality more highly developed, than in other parts of Brazil or Latin America ? Although the profit motive appears to have been more strongly evident in São Paulo than in other parts of Brazil, the capitalist spirit does not appear to have been more intense there at that time. Rather, it encountered historical circumstances more favorable to its wider employment.
The strongest evidence that factors other than cultural or genealogical were at work may be seen in the large number of Paulista landowners who did not shift from subsistence crops to coffee, and the even larger number of Brazilians who migrated from other states to participate in the coffee boom. These came mostly from the states of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro and smaller numbers from Alagoas, Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, and other parts of Brazil. A resident of the Ribeirão Prêto area in 1882 estimated that its population was eighty percent mineiro. Still other planters were second- or third-generation immigrants: Portuguese (Vergueiro, Souza Queiroz), English (Whitaker, Simonsen), or German (Diederichsen).14 If entrepreneurial talent was not the monopoly of Paulistas, but was distributed more or less evenly geographically, then the large cultural differences among the various regions of Brazil were not relevant to entrepreneurial ability or to the tendency to reinvest. The increase in entrepreneurial activity in São Paulo may be better accounted for by the more intense operation of the market economy, that is, by the greater profitability of coffee, and by the fuller use of money as a medium of exchange.
It is also probable that the apparently greater entrepreneurial ability of the successful planters conceals pre-existing accumulations of capital. In the 1880s the coffee-growing area was not the locale of many rags-to-riches success stories. It is highly unlikely that planter families from the Paraíba do Sul Valley or from Minas moved to the Paulista West because of economic necessity. The new lands had to be bought. Therefore the newcomers must have been already prosperous families who were transferring assets from a region of declining fertility to one of potentially higher return. For example, in the municipality of Guaratinguetá, on the Paulista side of the Paraíba Valley, the shift to coffee production in the 1830s was much more common among sugar growers than among subsistence farmers, since the former had ready cash to buy slaves.15 Still others entered coffee planting from trade, particularly importing, slave dealing, or animal trading. One of the most successful families, the Da Silva Prados, was descended from mule traders. The families who sold their properties often lacked merely the capital to develop the land themselves rather than a capitalistic mentality. Thus the Count of São Clemente, who sold 9,000 acres of his patrimony to Schroeder, Gebrüder and Company of Hamburg, was capitalist enough to demand debentures in return, not cash, and a place on the board of directors of the new company.16
It has been suggested, nevertheless, that there was a difference in the degree of adaptability between the coffee planters of São Paulo and those of the Paraíba Valley, and that the difference is to be attributed to cultural traits. Unlike the Paulista planters those of the Paraíba Valley were unable to adjust to a free labor system. They resisted abolition and eventually lost their plantations, retreating to the professions and the bureaucracy. Was this difference due to a lack of capitalistic mentality on the part of the Paraíbans? Pointing to the avidity with which the planters of the older coffee-growing region sought patents of nobility and to the luxury of their mansions, Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz contends that the Paraíbans were would-be aristocrats who did not reinvest their profits but spent them on needless luxuries. The Paulistas, on the other hand, she says, were commercial bourgeois, frugal and adaptable, who were interested in organizing a new internal market.17
The contrast is greatly overdrawn. It can be seen that in São Paulo, as in Rio state, there were many families who failed to maintain their fortunes when their coffee trees declined in fertility. There were also Paraíbans who managed to transfer their wealth to the newer areas in São Paulo state. Persons of Paraíba Valley families prominent in the later development of São Paulo included Rodolfo de Miranda, Nazareth de Souza Reis, Gabriel Dias da Silva, and A. P. Rodovalho. The fondness for titles existed in both places, but was not a necessary indication of an aristocratic mentality. There were barons in São Paulo as well as in the Paraíba Valley, though many of the former were at the forefront of the economic reorganization: the Baron of Piracicaba, the provincial governor who pressed for abolition; the Count of Alvares Penteado, builder of the largest textile plant, the Marquesses of Monte Alegre and São Vicente, organizers with Mauá of the Santos Railroad; and the Count of Prates, involved in finance, urban real estate, and factories.
The real difference between the planters of the Paraíba Valley and those of the Paulista West lay in the contrasting circumstances surrounding the beginnings of their separate development. Coffee production in the Paraíba Valley reached its apogee before 1860; in São Paulo it could not begin to increase until the Santos-Jundiaí railroad was completed in 1867. Paraíba, then, developed entirely in the shadow of slave labor. Even though the trade was banned in 1850, slavery remained viable for another ten years, because the increase in the price of slaves after the end of the trade doubled the value of existing “stocks.”18 During the 1850s and 1860s, therefore, profits in the Valley were reinvested in an expensive supply of new slaves.
The Paulistas’ experience was quite different. There were never enough slaves, and by the 1870s it was already apparent that they were a poor investment. In 1872 they formed only nineteen percent of the state’s population, having declined from twenty-eight percent in 1854.19 In 1878, for the first time, the legislature of São Paulo passed a prohibitive tax on the importation of slaves from other states. Once diverted from new slave purchases, profits were available in São Paulo for more productive purposes. The initial cost of European labor was trifling compared to the traffic with Africa. By 1900 the state program of subsidizing immigration had cost only $7,000,000 and had brought in almost a million immigrants.20
It might be more easily argued that the shift to capitalist forms of land and labor utilization came at the beginning of the Paraíban coffee expansion rather than at its end. In the Paraíba Valley many of the early estates were assembled by merchants from the city of Rio or by men who had possessed mining interests to the north. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century their land acquisitions were greatly augmented as a result of laws in 1835 and 1850 that abolished primogeniture and substituted cash payments for grants in the distribution of crown lands.21
The willingness to shift to free labor, however, did not necessarily imply a more rational or humane approach to its utilization on the part of the Paulistas. Apparently they originally intended to deal with the new European workers as ruthlessly as they had with the slaves whom the immigrants replaced, but in time the constant shortage of labor forced the planters to relax their hold. A standard labor contract evolved, and the terms of payment expanded sufficiently to discourage debt servitude. To a degree, therefore, the free labor system stimulated a capitalistic outlook, rather than vice-versa. In support of this interpretation one may contrast the pessimism of Max LeClerc’s report of 1890, which found most of Antônio Prado’s “colonists” in debt and declared the system unjust, with that of Pierre Denis, who found the terms of labor in the same region favorable to the workers in 1909.22
The nature of coffee cultivation, as it was practiced in Brazil, enhanced the selective effects of the market. Because land was very cheap relative to capital and labor, no effort was expended on prolonging its fertility. As a consequence 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 real estate promotion, in its broadest sense, and on a grand scale. It meant railroads, urbanization, sawmills, and the successive waves of woodsmen, wage laborers, and merchants.23
Repeated dislocations of the casa grande must have weakened the planter’s identification with his plantation. The past was hundreds of miles behind him; his future, or perhaps his son’s, was still farther on, for an estate covered with thirty-year-old coffee trees would be but a meager inheritance.
In summary, the entrepreneurial success of the Paulista planters as a class may be attributed not to innate or to cultural endowments, but (1) to the operation of a profitable market, which attracted outsiders and rewarded the capable; (2) to capital brought from other places and other activities; (3) to the necessity of conforming to the requirements of a market economy, particularly to free labor; and (4) to the nature of coffee cultivation, which rewarded the capitalistic, i.e., reinvesting planters.
In proposing explanations for the planters’ entrepreneurial prowess, however, the obverse of the argument must not be overlooked: Why was there so little competition from other economic groups, internal and external?
One important reason is that the planters controlled the machinery of government and used it constantly and effectively to advance their own interests. It is not remarkable that this should have been so. Because of the confusions of the Brazilian land-holding system planters could not acquire large domains without some degree of political influence to legitimize claims. During their long struggle to promote the coffee trade they also used the provincial and imperial parliaments to press for government subsidies for immigration, the abolition of slavery, and the reduction of imperial powers over Paulista economic policy. When the overthrow of the empire in 1889 offered them an opportunity to improve their position, they advocated in the constituent assembly a political decentralization that gained for São Paulo all the essentials of sovereignty with few of its expenses: control of the imperial lands, the right to levy export taxes and to borrow abroad, and a state army. They also supported disestablishment of the Church and increased rights for naturalized citizens, partly from a desire to encourage immigration.
Perhaps it was because of their thoroughly politicized view of economic development that the planters restricted themselves largely to undertakings that the state government could concede as monopolies, such as railroads, utilities, and emission banks or projects that could be strongly assisted through government favoritism. The railroads received “privileged zones” and guarantees of profit, which by 1904 had cost the government of São Paulo the equivalent of $40,000,000.24 Similar guarantees were granted to sugar mills. Other planter-backed companies secured public works contracts, concessions to sell accident insurance required by law, and the right to import agricultural or textile equipment free of tariffs. The government also reduced the risks of foreign competition by imposing high duties on agricultural raw materials from abroad such as cotton and sugar. Foreign branch banks were excluded from government favors and restricted to the commercial discounting business. Finally, if a particular project of the planters proved unprofitable, the government could be induced to buy them out. The resulting public corporation invariably continued to be directed by members of plantation families, presumably in the interests of their group.25
The state government ignored the needs of the landless as effectively as it promoted those of the planters. It did not attempt to create a literate, stable, or skilled citizenry either in the towns or in the countryside. There was no public policy of land distribution, universal education, or broadened political rights that might have eliminated the dependence on imported laborers and technicians or induced the immigrants to regard Brazil as a new homeland. The expenditures on primary education averaged 65 cents per capita a year (three milreis) from 1890 to 1900.26 As a result the other classes of society were deprived of their chance at upward mobility. Nearly all Brazilian entrepreneurs came from the plantation elite. By 1930 not a single manufacturer seems to have had indubitably native-born lower- or middle-class origins, and only a very few appeared thereafter. This is a striking contrast with industrialization in other countries: Johannes Hirschmeier, for example, points out the importance of peasant and merchant participation in Japanese industrialization.27 In such circumstances only the urbanized European immigrants could challenge the hegemony of the planters.
Historical circumstances largely account for the ability of the Paulista planters to develop the coffee economy without having to alienate most of their resources to foreigners. The Europeans and North Americans never intruded in the São Paulo area to the extent that they did in Cuba, Argentina, Mexico, or Chile for several reasons not connected with the degree of competition offered them by the planters. In the first place, unlike the foreign trade of other Latin American countries, the control of Brazilian trade was divided. Most Brazilian coffee was sold to the United States and Germany, but the trade was financed in England. The British did not drink much coffee, nor did they regard control of coffee as vital to their foreign trade. For these reasons they did not interest themselves in São Paulo as much as in Buenos Aires. Though the British held first place among suppliers of Brazilian imports, the Germans were certainly aggressive competitors, and German exporting and importing houses such as Theodore Wille engaged in the coffee business, owned plantations, imported electrical and mechanical equipment, and financed factories. The Americans, French, Italians, and Portuguese supplied the Paulista market with fewer goods and invested less capital in banks and other businesses than either the British or Germans. But the Paulista market was never the private sphere of influence of a single country or a single financial combine.28
Even so, if the European powers had not been discouraged repeatedly concerning the prospects of investment in São Paulo, or if they had not suffered the catastrophes of world war and depression, their inroads upon Paulista capitalism might have been far greater. During these recessions of European influence the Brazilians were able to work out their own solutions to the shortage of capital and imports and to buy up foreign interests at bargain prices. The English, for example, had options to extend the Santos railroad beyond Jundiaí but chose not to do so, thereby opening the way for Paulistas. On another occasion a group of British investors became unnerved at the revolutionary ferment of 1889 to 1893 and sold out the Rio Claro line to the Paulista Railway.29 The First World War proved disastrous to German investments. Their banks were liquidated, their ships confiscated, and their alliances with local politicians discredited.30 At different times, and in varying degrees, these accidents occurred to the rest of the foreigners in São Paulo.
Even though the undertakings of the planters seemed ambitious and manifold, they were not a complete program of development. The role of immigrants in the growth of the Paulista economy was large, especially in the manufacture of consumer goods, for if the planters by their efforts created an internal demand, they did not do a great deal to satisfy it. How can their absence from this sector and the considerable success of the immigrants be explained?
Part of the reason for this success may lie in certain advantages which they possessed but which have usually been ignored by those accepting uncritically the statements of the “self-made” immigrant industrialists. Many of the immigrants who went into trade preferred the import business, in which they could more easily establish and maintain connections with the industry and capital of their home countries. Most of those who eventually became industralists had started out as importers.31 It is true that the capital for their machinery usually came, not from savings frugally extracted from the import business, but directly from their overseas mercantile and industrial contacts. For example, most of the capital for Puglisi and his group in milling and sugar refining came from the Banca Commerciale Italiana. Francisco Matarazzo was financed by an English bank.32 The function of importing was nevertheless useful to their later manufacturing activities, since it provided them information concerning demand, tariffs, and relative costs. Furthermore, as members of the immigrant community they shared tastes in food, clothing, and furnishings that were remote from the planters’ experience. Finally, it is likely that as a group the immigrants possessed a higher level of technical and commercial skill, considerable business experience, or even a formal technical education. Matarazzo and Puglisi Carbone had been independent merchants in Italy; Briccola, Boyes, and Kenworthy were all engineers who went into banking and textiles; and Crespi was a textile salesman for an Italian firm before he constructed his own factory. There were only a few exceptions: Pereira Ignacio, the founder of the Votorantim group, was a cobbler’s son.
It would be a mistake to assume that the immigrants completely dominated the manufacturing sector, or that their success in this area foreshadowed control in other sectors of the economy. Some statistical evidence indicates that a sizable part of industry remained in the hands of planters. The 1940 census showed that 56 percent of all industrial capital in São Paulo then belonged to “Brazilians.” Some of these Brazilians would have been second-generation immigrants, how many is difficult to determine. A survey made in 1961 showed that 35 percent of all Paulista industrial groups with more than a billion cruzeiros in capital had agricultural holdings.33 Furthermore, the impact of the immigrant industrialists is somewhat less than the gross totals would suggest. From the beginning the planters have been silent partners of many immigrant entrepreneurs, especially in machinery and metalworking. The bulk of immigrant enterprise has always been on a very small scale; as late as 1950 the average Paulista firm employed only nineteen or twenty workers. The effective economic and political power of these craft shops was slight. In other fields of economic activity the planters apparently continued to hold a majority interest. Of the thirteen largest Paulista banks eight are owned by planters.34 In land promotion, insurance, urban real estate, and exporting planters own the largest firms.
The immigrant industrialists, furthermore, proved not to be an instrument for progress, in the sense of redirecting the export-orientation of the Paulista economy. Instead the planters managed to neutralize the political and economic threat which the immigrants represented; indeed the planters even obtained their cooperation. The immigrants never captured the machinery of the state government, much less the federal. Very few of the first generation foreigners sought Brazilian citizenship, for naturalization would have cost them too much. It would have depreciated the value of their prestigious European origins, especially of their dearly-purchased patents of nobility, and would have been a bad example to set for their workers, immigrants like themselves whom they were satisfied to keep out of polities.35 The immigrant industrialists therefore chose the path of collaboration. When they needed favors they sought them individually through political representatives of planter interests. As for their children, these generally married into planter families, acquired landed wealth of their own, and came round to the view that the coffee crop and its producers must be supported above all else. It was the immigrant Alexandre Siciliano, for example, owner of the largest foundry in São Paulo, and a son-in-law of a prominent planter-politician, who conceived the coffee valorization scheme of 1906.36
It has been assumed that the revolutions of 1930 and 1932 represented a major setback for the political interests of the Paulista planters and marked the arrival of the industrial bourgeoisie to power. Such an interpretation is difficult to reconcile with the initial hostility of the Vargas regime to industries that did not employ domestic raw materials and the support that most manufacturers gave to Vargas’ opponent in 1930 and to the rebellion in 1932. At best the industrial-bourgeois revolution, if such it was, came only gradually between 1920 and 1955. The argument possesses even less significance than appears at first, however, given the above-described correspondence of interest and even of identity between the groups. Furthermore, measures taken by the Vargas government to support the price of coffee were instrumental in preserving most of the plantations, as Celso Furtado has shown. By 1940 foreigners and naturalized Brazilians together owned only a quarter of all land in use in São Paulo. Nor had the concentration of land ownership diminished.37
In spite of the challenge of other interest groups, then, the planters maintained their position in the regional economy. They continued to open new coffee lands and by the 1930s and 1940s had found other sources of agricultural income: cotton exporting, cattle raising, vegetable oils, dairying, and truck farming. Their unimpaired political and financial power enabled them, perhaps more successfully than the immigrants, to expand into heavy industry, since the recent surge of industrialization is so thoroughly the creation of state intervention. Among the very largest metallurgical companies one now finds firms belonging to the Villares, Vidigal, Simonsen, Monteiro-Aranha, Souza Rezende, Pessoa de Mello, and Barcellos Corrêa groups. It would be hard to imagine a firm better connected than planter-controlled Cobrasma, the largest Paulista heavy machinery company, that buys its raw materials from government steel mills, obtains its financing and part of its capital from the national Development Bank and nationalized railways, sells principally to government-owned companies, and has directors who have also held high federal financial posts.38
It may seem strange that the planters accepted an industrialism unconnected with agricultural valorization, in spite of the inevitable conflicts of interest between export agriculture and an incipient industrial system. There were several factors that mitigated rivalries and enabled the planters not only to acquiesce in the new order but in large measure to take charge of it. The most important was probably the obvious deterioration of the world coffee market. None of the repeated attempts to restore prosperity through new export products—beef, citrus, cotton, and minerals—was entirely successful. The planters appear to have come, by the 1940s, voluntarily to invest in manufacturing activities even beyond those that valorized their own landholdings. By the time the federal government greatly accelerated this redistribution in the 1950s by exchange policies that favored industry, the planters appear to have been in a position to exercise effective control over the disbursement of these funds as industrial loans and subsidies. As a result not only has the economic position of the planters remained constant within the state, but the predominance of São Paulo in the Union has constantly grown, so that it now contains relatively more of Brazil’s population, industrial output, and personal income than ever before.
The case of the Paulista planters demonstrates that a change in the means of production does not necessarily require a change in the composition of the elite that controls and enjoys the new sources of wealth. It does not seem to show, however, that the success of this elite is due to a greater endowment of entrepreneurial skills or that the failure of other groups is culturally pathological. Instead I suggest that the major determinants have been historical-economic: (1) the advantages of prior successes, such as capital accumulation, and possession of political power; (2) the objective economic stimuli, including potentially high profits, and the challenge of the tasks involved, technological and organizational; and (3) factors discouraging competition from other groups, or encouraging their assimilation.
Brazil, Presidência da República, Plano trienal de desenvolvimento econômico e social, 1963-1965 (Rio, 1962), 9; São Paulo (State), Grupo de Planejamento, Plano de ação, 1959-1963 (São Paulo, 1959), 31.
Thomas C. Cochrane, “Cultural Factors in Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History, XX (December 1960), 515-530.
Everett E. Hagen, On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood, Ill., 1962); Bert F. Hoselitz, “Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, XII (October 1952), 104-105.
Adolfo Augusto Pinto, Historia da viação pública de São Paulo (São Paulo, 1903), 31-54. Anyda Marchant, Viscount Mauá and the Empire of Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), 76-77.
Nícia Vilela Luz, “A administração provincial de São Paulo em face do movimento abolicionista,” Revista de Administração, VIII (December 1948), 80-100.
Pierre Denis, Le Brésil au XXe siècle (Paris, 1909), 132-136.
The origins of this system are described in Stanley Stein, Vassouras, A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 17-20, 81-85.
The identities of coffee brokers, importers, exporters, and bankers were obtained from incorporations and partnerships filed in the public registry of contracts, or Junta Comercial, of São Paulo (hereafter JCSP); from incorporations granted in federal decrees, found in Brazil, Coleção das leis, 1870-1960; and from innumerable commercial almanacs, including Twentieth Century Impressions of Brazil (London, 1913); Monte Domecq’ et Cie., Société de Publicité Sud-Américaine, O estado de São Paulo (Barcelona, 1918); The Brazilian Year Book, 2nd ed. (Rio, 1909); Commercial Encyclopedia, South America, 3rd and 4th eds. (London, 1922, 1924); São Paulo moderno (Porto Alegre, 1919).
Genealogical information was gleaned from obituaries published in O Estado de São Paulo and other newspapers, and from current biographies, principally Personalidades do Brasil (São Paulo, 1933); Quem é quem no Brasil, 1st to 6th eds. (São Paulo, 1948-1961); and Hugo Schlesinger, Enciclopédia da indústria brasileira, 5 vols. (São Paulo, 1959). Dunshee D’Abranches, Governos e congressos dos Estados Unidos do Brasil, 1889 a 1917, 2 vols. (São Paulo, 1917) illuminates political connections.
Henri Raffard, A indústria saccharifera no Brasil (Rio, 1882), 42-59; Júlio Brandão Sobrinho, A lavoura de canna e a industria assucareira (São Paulo, 1912), 5.
Antônio de Toledo Piza, Relatório apresentado ao cidadão Br. Alfredo Pujol . . . (São Paulo, 1896), Appendix.
Jornal do Commereio, Retrospecto Commercial, 1903 (Rio, 1903), 27-28. Alice P. Cannabrava, O desenvolvimento da cultura de algodão na Provincia de São Paulo, 1861-1875 (São Paulo, 1951), 282-285.
Antonio Francisco Bandeira Júnior, A industria de São Paulo em 1901 (São Paulo, 1901) provides a long list of companies, indicating number of workers. Companies with more than 100 workers employed 12,680; of these, planter-owned companies employed 5,530. Product information obtained from advertising in São Paulo newspapers, articles in the Boletim do Departamento de Indústria e Commercio, 1909 to 1925, and in other trade journals.
Luz, “A administração,” 91; some outside origins are also mentioned in Aluísio de Almeida, “Notas para a história de São Paulo,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal, XVIII (July 1952), 18-20; and Pierre Monbeig, Pionniers et planteurs de São Paulo (Paris, 1952), 84, 327.
Lucila Herrmann, “Evolução da estrutura social de Guaratinguetá num período de trezentos anos,” Revista de Administração, II (March-June 1948), 123-127; Almeida, 17.
The Economist (London), LV (June 12, 1897), 854, 872.
“A estratificação e a mobilidade social nas comunidades agrárias do vale do Paraíba,” Revista de História, I (April-June 1950), 215-218.
Stein, Vassouras, 65, 229.
Samuel H. Lowrie, “O elemento negro na população de São Paulo,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal, IV (193.8).
Denis, Le Brésil, 129; São Paulo (State), Anuario estatístico, 1906 (São Paulo, 1907), 163.
Coleção das leis, Law 56, October 5, 1835; Law 601, September 18, 1850.
Max LeClerc, Lettres du Brésil, trans. as Cartas do Brasil (São Paulo, 1942), 82-90; Denis, Le Brésil, 132-136. See also Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “As condições sociáis da industrialização de São Paulo,” Revista Brasiliense (March-April 1960), No. 28, 31-46.
The paradoxically invigorating effects of soil exhaustion are hypothesized by Pedro Calmon in História do Brasil (São Paulo, 1947), IV, 385.
Pinto, História, 182-185.
JCSP lists directors of all publicly-owned corporations.
Primitivo Moacyr, A instrucção pública no estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, 1942), II, Appendix.
Johannss Hirschmeier, The Origins of Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
Identification of foreign interests are from ownership records already cited; from U. S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce trade promotion material, 1911 to 1924; and from antiforeign interest tracts such as Ivan Subiroff [Nereu Rangel Pestana], A oligarchic paulista (São Paulo, 1919), 41-54.
Pinto, História, 36-47, 199-201.
Percy A. Martin, Latin America and the War (Baltimore, 1925), 81-82.
Origins of immigrant entrepreneurs are from biographical sources cited in footnotes 8 and 9, and in memorials, published interviews, and occasional writings too numerous to list exhaustively, including Conde Francisco Matarazzo, Scelta di discorsi e interviste (São Paulo, 1926); Lino Finocchi, In memoria (São Paulo, 1926); Antônio D. Maria, Quem são os Jafet (São Paulo, 1951); and Alfredo Cusano, Gli italiani di oltre mare (Rome, 1913).
O Estado de São Paulo, November 20, 1921; Al conte Francesco Matarazzo, gloria del ingegno e del lavoro (São Paulo, 1954), 24.
Brazil, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Recenseamento Geral do Brasil (Rio, 1950), XVII, Part 3, 462-463; Maurício Vinhas de Queiroz, “Os ‘grupos econômicos’ no Brasil,” Ciências Sociais, I (July-December 1962), 157-168.
Geraldo Banas, “Nos bastidores do setor bancário” (São Paulo, 1959), mimeographed.
José Arthur Rios, Aspectos políticos da assimilação do italiano no Brasil (São Paulo, 1959), 15-16, 62.
Alexandre Siciliano, Valorização do café; bases de contracto entre um syndicate e o Governo Federal apresentadas à Sociedade Rural Paulista de Agricultura (São Paulo, 1903).
Recenseamento. . ., XVII, part 3, 12-13; Celso Furtado, Formação econômica do Brasil (5th ed.; Rio, 1963), 215-220.
Visão (September 25, 1964), 26-29; Anuário Banas: máquinas e ferramentas, 1963 (São Paulo, 1963).
Author notes
The author is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas. The Foreign Area Fellowship Program and the University of Texas provided grants for the research and writing of this paper.
