São Paulo is the most studied subnational region in Latin America, and United States scholars have contributed to this concentration. This latest book surveys São Paulo’s coffee industry and the modifications it induced in Paulista society. The major themes addressed are the movement of the coffee frontier westward through the state; the arrival and dispersion of more than two million workers from abroad; and plantation labor relations. The findings, while not uncritical of Paulista leaders, cast immigrant labor arrangements in a better light than usual and compare them favorably with plantation societies in other areas of the world.
Several theoretical interests guided Holloway’s research. First, he sought a comprehensive view of how nineteenth-and early twentieth-century capitalist expansion affected a peripheral economy like São Paulo’s. He found that although the relationship was one of dependency, the Paulistas were able to appropriate large amounts of capital, technology, and, above all, human resources from the world economy, which they later used to further development. Moreover, the national elite never lost its hold on essential political and social controls during the rapid growth of the export economy.
Second, he wished to explore the applicability of Turner’s frontier thesis to São Paulo’s west. Results were mixed. The “escape valve” for ameliorating social tensions probably existed, for the immigrants often moved with the coffee frontier. Yet it most benefited those countries of Southern Europe that sent emigrants. Democratic propensities on the frontier were clearest in individual opportunity, and Holloway believes that the immigrants were relatively free and well off. Nevertheless, they had no voice in the political system, firmly managed by the national elite.
Third, Holloway hoped to explain peculiar phenomena in the plantation system itself. How did first generation peasant immigrants become owners of small-and medium-sized farms? Why did their tendency to migrate westward induce overexpansion in acreage? Finally, why did the immigrants form a new middle class instead of blend into the local proletariat of peasants and former slaves? In brief, his answer to these questions is that São Paulo simply did not fit the model of “exploitative labor systems in plantation societies and monopolistic control of land resources in the hands of the native elite” (p. xvi). The labor market was open at too many points, allowing the immigrants to follow the best jobs on the frontier, to move into landownership and urban employment, or to return to Europe. Labor shortage (exacerbated by abolition in 1888) and abundance of land enhanced the immigrants’ bargaining power.
One of the most exciting contributions of this book is its analysis of immigrant landownership, based on notarial evidence from several regions. In addition, extensive use of agricultural periodicals allows Holloway to depict the planters in a realistic light, neither as despotic nor as progressive employers. They were first of all capitalists whose attempts at rationality and profit maximization were limited by imperfect knowledge about and control over factors of production.
Students of Brazilian and Latin American history need to read this book for its timely corrective to the “oppressive planter” myth and for its portrayal of the coffee economy in an international context. Nonspecialists will benefit from its clear exposition, many tables and graphs, and well-chosen photographs.
