To the Editor:
The nineteenth-century sugar planters of northeastern Brazil have found their U. B. Phillips in J. H. Galloway, who writes in the November 1971 issue of the HAHR (51:4, 586-605) that “There was in fact no economic rationale for planters buying slaves at mid-century and after,” because they had an alternative source of labor in the moradores, tenants who could be “required to work in their landlords’ fields in return for the use of a plot of land.” Galloway states that “Money invested in slaves would have been better spent on improving milling machinery and in buying agricultural implements to make the plantations more efficient and competitive.” He wonders “to what extent, if at all, planters examined the economics of their own plantations.”
I would like to suggest, in the spirit of Conrad and Meyer but without their painstaking detail, that a prima facie case can be made for a positive expected return to investment in slaves by sugar planters in the mid-nineteenth century. Suppose a planter in 1856 considered purchasing a prime-age creole male slave. The mid-range price for such slaves reported by the British consul in Pernambuco was £ 126 (J. H. Galloway, “The Sugar Industry of Pernambuco during the Nineteenth Century,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, June 1968, p. 297n.). To obtain the same work without a slave, the planter would have expected to pay a laborer one shilling six pence a day for perhaps three hundred days a year, or £22.5 a year. (Wages for free laborers were reported to range from 1s. 6d. to 2s. a day in rural areas: Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1857, Vol. 44, p. 252.) Feeding and clothing a slave cost about £7 a year, according to a report on sugar estates in southern Pernambuco (Annexes ao Relatório da Agricultura, Commercio e Obras Publicas apresentado á Assemblea Geral Legislativa, Rio, 1869), so the net return to the prospective slave owner would have been approximately £ 15.5 a year. The owner might have received that return for twenty years; Galloway accepts an estimate that the average “working life” of slaves was twenty years by 1860 (“The Sugar Industry,” p. 298).
Using these figures and assumptions, the expected internal rate of return on an investment in a slave may be found from the following equation:
where P is the price of prime-age male creole slaves in 1856, R is the estimated net annual return from owning a slave, T is the estimated number of years R will be obtained, e is the natural logarithm, i is the estimated internal rate of return, and t is the number of years after 1856. Using the values £126 for P, £15.5 for R, and 20 years for T, one obtains an estimated internal rate of return of 10%. Not surprisingly, that is just a little higher than the discount rate on prime commerical notes in Pernambuco in 1856, which suggests that the price of slaves was determined by the expected value of their labor.
Three objections might be raised here. The first is that since not all labor was needed for the entire year, the planter would not have had to hire a worker for three hundred days. But the plantations did need at least some year-round workers, and the point at issue is whether it ever would have been sensible to buy a slave. A second objection might be that slaves were less productive than free workers so that it is inappropriate to use the wage for free field labor as an alternative. But it is also possible that slaves were more productive than free workers. Consider the report of a British consul about wages on sugar plantations in Cuba in 1878: “Slaves fetch the highest wages for field work, and range from 25 to 30 dollars (gold) per month, with maintenance, and in some cases even higher. Foreigners and Cubans as a general rule avoid the work on sugar plantations, as being too severe on account of the climate; their wages generally rum from 20 to 25 dollars.” (Great Britain, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, Reports, 1878-79, Vol. 70, p. 551.)
A third objection might be that I have missed Galloway’s point, namely that the alternative to owning slaves was not to hire labor but to lease land to moradores de condição in exchange for their labor. But a morador could bargain over conditions and if the planter were too demanding, a tenant might tell him, “My lands begin where yours end,” meaning that he could find someone who would offer easier terms. Probably the tenant had to be offered land which had an annual rental value comparable to the wage-equivalent of the labor he was to perform.
If that is true, the difficulty of obtaining enough moradores to handle the field work may be illustrated from data provided by Galloway’s HAHR article (p. 596) for São Pedro do Rio Fundo in 1854. The 26 plantations listed had over 2,000 slaves worth £260,000 and land worth £170,000. At an interest rate of 10%, that land would represent an annual rental value of £ 17,000. The cost of labor equivalent to that done by the slaves might have been £22.5 each, or £31,000. That figure should be reduced to allow for the young and old among the slaves. Even so, one can see that a planter might have had to lease his entire property in order to obtain enough labor to replace his slaves. Another way of looking at the same point is to note that the value of the land represented the capitalization of its services and the value of the slaves represented the capitalization of their services. Since the value of the slaves was fifty percent greater than that of the land, the planters probably could not have leased their land in return for an amount of labor equivalent to that done by their slaves.
Emancipation probably brought at least some reduction in the supply of labor as ex-slaves took the opportunity to enjoy more leisure. The reduction in the supply of labor should have caused real wages to rise, whether in money or in use of land.
How, then, might one explain the deteriorating situation of the moradores in the last decades of the nineteenth century? In the 1880s the price of sugar fell as a result of over-production of beet sugar in continental Europe and subsequent dumping on the English market. Population in the Northeast continued to increase, so the supply of labor rose relative to demand and real wages in all forms fell, to about half of their mid-century level. As one aspect of that fall, moradores had to work harder in order to obtain enough land for themselves and their families. The transition from slave to free labor occurred gradually as the price of slaves, sustained somewhat by the demand for slaves in southern Brazil, rose relative to real wages in the Northeast. Planters bought slaves for year-round work while employing more and more wage labor for seasonal tasks.
It seems likely to me that throughout most of the nineteenth century sugar planters in northeastern Brazil purchased field slaves because they expected good returns from such investments. The example given in this letter suggests that such may have been the case. Proof would require a thorough study. The issue of the “expected profitability” of slavery appears to have been almost an after-thought in Galloway’s excellent article, which is valuable both for its insights and for its presentation of information from widely dispersed sources.
University of Florida
David Denslow, Jr.
Professor Galloway replies:
My paper was not directed towards the measuring of the profitability of slavery, nor did I address myself to the issue of whether “it would ever have been sensible to buy a slave.” The view I set forth very briefly in the conclusion to my paper is that given the circumstances in the Northeast of Brazil, where there existed alternate forms of labor to slavery, capital invested in slaves would have been more wisely employed in buying machinery and agricultural implements or, to put it another way, in modernizing the plantations. Investment in slaves, at this time, was not, it seems to me, an investment likely to produce economic growth.
Mr. Denslow’s equation is interesting and he does make a case for buying slaves. But the equation also shows that there was a considerable risk in investing in slaves and that the return was not likely to be unusually large. A planter buying slaves was gambling not only on the longevity of slaves, the date of abolition, and amount of compensation, if any, but also on the costs of maintenance and changes in wages. For such a risky investment, perhaps it would have been reasonable for a planter to expect higher rates of return than those “comparable to what a planter might have expected to receive on alternate investments.” During the 1860s, when Mr. Denslow argues a higher rate of return would have been obtained from slaves because of the rise in wages, the switch from slavery to other forms of labor continued.
Mr. Denslow questions whether the morador was such a readily available alternative to slavery as I have suggested. Planters, in general, did have abundant land and cultivated only a small part of it in cane. The extensive methods of agriculture employed alone indicate that shortage of land was not a problem. Even if it were, the change from morador to morador de condição in itself did not require the leasing of more land; the morador de condição now had to work in return for land he already held. Furthermore, if a planter no longer had to maintain slaves, the slave plots on the plantations presumably became available for lease to moradores de condição. Of course, as the class of moradores de condição grew, more land was needed. Certainly, a planter could employ a mix of moradores de condição and wage laborers to suit his own circumstances. There was now an exchange of land which otherwise would have been idle or occupied by a morador in return for labor. How strong really was the bargaining power of the moradores? I do not know, but given that we are dealing with a traditional society in which the rural poor were ignorant, illiterate, unorganized, without recourse to law, in need of a livelihood, as well as being very numerous, I doubt that it was a very strong one.
University of Toronto
J. H. Galloway
To the Editor:
By no means am I inclined to defend inflexibly all of my published views on the APRA. Some of them now seem to me clearly wrong. On the other hand, I object to the patent distortion of some of my views which, if reported accurately, may still be tenable. Thus I take exception to a passage in the article by Thomas M. Davies, Jr., “The Indigenismo of the Peruvian Aprista Party: A Reinterpretation,” HAHR, 51:4 (November 1971). Let me refer to these two matters separately.
First, enlightened perhaps by an ability in very recent years to sympathize partially with some of the enraged frustration that United States youth has displayed in the face of the “establishment’s more blatant hypocrisies, I now find it possible to understand why high minded, idealistic Peruvians felt it absolutely necessary to rise up against the far greater and less disguised hypocrisies that confronted them on every hand during Augusto B. Leguía’s eleven-year rule. Had I been young and Peruvian in the 1920s, probably I would have been an Aprista, although I like to think that later in life I would have had enough sense to abandon this cause.
On the second matter, Davies quotes me (p. 644) to the effect that Haya de la Torre sought not Indian integration “but the total obliteration of one set of values, the European, and the unilateral elevation of another, the Indian.” If Davies will recheck the article of mine that he cites, “The Old and the New Apra in Peru, Myth and Reality,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, 18 (Autumn, 1964), 10-11, he will see I clearly specify Haya da la Torre did not personally identify the Indian as the sole possessor of virtue in Peru but that “many of his more intemperate associates tended to do so.” Quite clearly, I excluded Haya de la Torre from those who sought the unilateral elevation of Indian values. One can only hope Davies was less careless in handling other sources in his article.
In a 1967 book The Modern History of Peru (p. 240)–a dreadfully titled work for which fact I totally disclaim responsibility—I noted that although various Apristas glorified and extolled the Indian, the main concern of the movement from its very founding lay with the middle sectors. “Indigenismo was professed, at least in part, because it was in style at the time among many intellectuals a circumstance from which the wily Leguía had also sought to derive advantage.” It appears to me that Davies and I are in fundamental agreement that the APRA’s indigenismo was largely window dressing. In this respect, his article is less a reinterpretation than a confirmation of a view that I and quite a few Peruvian authorities before me have held for some years.
Elsewhere in his article Davies ignores the rhetoric of the early APRA, much of which did demand little less than the tearing down of the whole Peruvian social, economic, and political structure, and concludes, principally on the basis of Ambassador Fred Morris Dealing’s observations, that Haya was even by 1931 a fairly safe and conservative figure. I suspect that I relied too much on published APRA rhetoric in concluding the party was altogether revolutionary in its early days. Perhaps Davies relies too much on the observations of a diplomat in his diametrically opposed findings. United States ambassadors often do not provide us with more accurate insights into Latin American reality than do the written pronouncements of local political leaders.
If Davies is interested in showing that even the young Haya may not have been altogether a revolutionary indigenista, perhaps I can go him one better. In 1920 Haya hailed the labors of the Madrid-based Unión Ibero-Americana in bringing about closer ties between Spain and Spanish America. Haya’s friendly message to the Unión, printed in that association’s periodical Unión Ibero-Americana (Año XXXV, June 1920, p. 15) stated that the young generation of the old Spanish viceroyalty saluted the efforts to achieve the “ample and effective spiritual unity of the peoples of the Columbian continent with the glorious Spain that lives in our blood.”
Where does all of this leave us with regard to the APRA’s maximum leader? Perhaps it suggests only that historians are not adequately equipped to search for what truly motivated and inspired him. That task, quite possibly, could better be left to psychiatrists and interrogators equipped with truth serum. Mere historians, who can find material to prove almost anything that appeals to them concerning Haya de la Torre, will probably continue to be divided over him and his movement.
Davies (p. 627) regrets the intensely partisan debate that now divides Latin Americanists in the United States in their approach to the APRA. He may well have a point, although I do not feel the situation should be unduly lamented. It is high time that the APRA became as controversial among United States specialists as it has been for many years among Peruvian intellectuals. The fact that it is now becoming so indicates that the old simplistic perspective of the APRA that generally prevailed in the United States through the 1950s, a perspective based I think on inadequate and faulty scholarship, has at least been offset by other perspectives which may be faulty in their own right but which nevertheless introduce a much-needed element of complexity, and therefore inevitably of conflict, in the overall view of the APRA in this country.
University of Notre Dame
Fredrick B. Pike
Professor Davies replies:
Since Professor Pike was one of the original readers of my article (he specifically requested that his name be signed to the report). I am quite frankly surprised by his letter to the editor. In his initial report, Professor Pike objected to a sentence which I subsequently adjusted in the final draft, but he made none of the criticisms found above. This is unfortunate, as I would have responded to them before publication.
It has been gratifying for me to learn that Professor Pike and I substantially agree on many of our interpretations of Peruvian history. Several points raised by Professor Pike in his letter to the editor, however, deserve reply. Regarding the quote on page 644, I do not find that I quoted Professor Pike out of context. In his letter, Professor Pike has left out a phrase which appeared in his own article: “(he [Haya] did, though, once say that the Incas had made the only worthwhile accomplishments in Peru).” Haya is clearly being identified here with the ideas of his “intemperate associates,” and I agree with Professor Pike that early in his political career Haya was guilty of making such sweeping statements. The early Aprista rhetoric was often strident and radical, but my point is that Haya utilized such rhetoric for purely political purposes and was not himself a committed indigenista.
Concerning my reliance on the observations of Ambassador Fred Morris Dealing, in my opinion Dearing was a shrewd analyst, yet I am certainly cognizant of the dangers in accepting his views uncritically. What I hoped to establish was not that Haya was “a fairly safe and conservative figure,” but rather that he presented himself differently to different people.
In regard to my supposed regret concerning the partisan debate over APRA, my sentence reads as follows: “The most unfortunate result of this intensely partisan debate has been the tendency of historians to view Peruvian history in polemical terms of good and evil, thereby failing to confront the political subtleties of an extremely complex society.” I could not agree more with Professor Pike that APRA should at last become the subject of wholesome academic controversy, but what I regret is that this controversy in the past has so polarized historical writing that it has distorted Peru’s complex political and social history.
I appreciate the citation from the Unión Ibero-Americana and had I been aware of it, I would have included it in my article.
San Diego State College
Thomas M. Davies, Jr.
To the Editor:
In Professor Timmons’ review (August 1971) of my book, The Revolutions in Spanish America, he writes “In short, Prago’s book should be of some use to the general reader and the college sophomore. . .” Since the book was oriented precisely toward such readers, Professor Timmons might have written his review accordingly. A book written for popular consumption ought not to be evaluated using criteria reserved for a work aimed at specialists.
Concerning my awareness of Nicolson’s work, it should be noted that my book went to press (fall, 1969) before her work was available in this country.
The two errors in the chronological table are printing errata, as a reading of the main body of the text will reveal.
For my glossary definition of “repartimiento”, please see: Benjamin Keen (ed.), Readings in Latin American Civilization, p. 135 and p. 532; Charles Gibson, Spain in America, p. 151; Bailey W. Diffie, Latin American Civilization, pp. 620-621.
New York Institute of Technology
Albert Prago
