Over three long winters, from 1877 to 1879, the rains failed throughout much of the Brazilian northeast.1 During those years, recalled ever since as the time of the Great Drought, northeastern Brazil suffered enormous damage to life and property.2 Sparing only the narrow, sugar-growing coastal strip, the drought ravaged the backlands, or sertão, devastating its main revenue-producing activities, cotton and cattle raising, as well as the subsistence farms of the sertanejos, or backlanders.3 Given the precarious level of economic existence that characterized the lives of the backland masses even in good times, the Great Drought removed the thin margin between subsistence and abject penury, reducing large numbers of sertanejos to the options of starvation or migration.4 Thus, as had occurred during previous times of drought, refugees poured out of the parched backlands in search of food and shelter.
Whether crowding the towns of the northeastern coast, journeying to the Amazon to tap rubber, or swelling the masses of the poor in such center-south cities as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, those streams of drought migrants, or retirantes, provided clear evidence of the inadequacy of government relief policy.5 Though the imperial government responded to the drought by establishing a central relief commission and authorizing the expenditure of enormous sums of money on relief efforts, the positive impact of these actions seemed negligible when compared to the magnitude of the suffering.6
By the time the drought had officially ended, stories of retirantes dying from starvation, of people looking like “walking skeletons” as they trekked from place to place in search of sustenance, and of massive instances of fraud and peculation had appeared in major Brazilian newspapers and magazines and echoed as angry accusations in both chambers of the Brazilian parliament. Minister of the Empire Carlos Leôncio de Carvalho, for example, spoke of “frock-coated thieves in kid leather gloves” in reference to reports of serious fraud in the northeastern province of Rio Grande do Norte.7 Domingos José Nogueira Jaguaribe, an imperial senator representing Ceará, the province hit hardest by the drought, spoke of extensive profiteering there and sarcastically suggested the future possibility of people trying to “invent a drought” so as to profit from relief efforts.8
While traditional partisan politics accounted for some of this rhetoric, the wide-ranging critique occasioned by the Great Drought bespoke deeper concerns.9 Indeed, elite discourse on the drought formed part of a larger discourse regarding the nature of Brazil and its people. The Great Drought served as a metaphor for the range of problems that impeded the realization of Brazil’s destiny as a great, civilized nation. It evidenced Brazilian backwardness by highlighting problems of agricultural productivity and the inadequacies of transportation and communication throughout the nation’s vast interior. It also brought coastal elites face to face with the sertanejos, a confrontation that confirmed those elites’ worst fears about their nation’s future.10
If elite discourse revealed a sense of unease with the nation’s low level of national development and progress, it also indicated that such sentiments did not remain confined to any particular region, political faction, or economic group. To be sure, as elites “increasingly measured themselves against a broader West” and discussed the changes needed to modernize Brazil, they often disagreed on specific proposals.11 However, their belief in the need for reform, as well as their disagreements, took place within a “common mental universe.”
The term common mental universe comes from Jacques Le Goff, who writes in the tradition of the history of mentalités, an approach that seeks to identify mental structures—ways of seeing and of not seeing—characteristic of people in particular historical eras. It attempts to reveal and explicate an implicit mental world that is reflected in societal structures and culture.12 I follow the spirit of that approach by dealing with the implicit assumptions undergirding elite discourse regarding the drought and the retirantes. The term discourse also merits some discussion. Viewed broadly, discourse includes “all forms of spoken interaction, formal and informal, and written texts of all kinds.”13 Conceptually, discourse analysis stresses the active, constructive nature of language. From this perspective, texts do not only reflect societal values, assumptions, and power relationships, but actively “construct a version of reality.”14 To the extent that particular “representations of reality” gain sufficient authority, they in effect become reality. In this sense, “language constitutes the world of things.”15
Elite discourse regarding retirantes, relief policy, and the causes of northeastern droughts communicated specific images or representations of Brazil and its people. The origins, nature, and appeal of those representations gain clarity if we move beyond that drought-spawned discourse to consider other significant reform issues of that time as framed within the elite’s “common mental universe.” To reveal those links and representations, this essay identifies some of the specific concerns raised by the Great Drought and then, focusing on issues of agricultural productivity and labor supply, relates them to the broader reform critique that marked later nineteenth-century Brazil.
Retirantes and Relief
As retirantes fled the sertão, comments by northeastern elites often indicated a less-than-charitable attitude. The head of Recife’s Public Health Department saw as a partial motive for the migration the retirantes’ “innate laziness and indolence.”16 This theme already had been sounded in the Jornal do Recife, which noted that “from everywhere there rise complaints against that population, enervated by laziness and the absence of the habit of labor. Healthy men, robust and without defects … judge it their right to be fed while spending their life lying down in a hammock. … As a consequence, our province is becoming the receptacle for the inert and vicious population of the neighboring provinces.”17
The remedy typically proposed for such problems was the implementation of a regime of honest—and ultimately uplifting—toil. As a member of Pernambuco’s Associação Comercial Beneficente remarked, the retirantes “ask for money when they ought be asking for work.”18 Carlos Wanderley, in the Correio de Natal, wrote that “labor is the circulatory system of the nation and the respiration of the individual. Inertia kills like asphyxiation; it is a dangerous embolism.” He also scorned the idea of “tolerating vice, idleness, national unproductiveness and categorizing all this as relief to the poor.”19
Speaking in the Imperial Senate in 1877, the Bahian Baron Cotegipe, who had written an article on improving sugar production through mechanization, affirmed the government’s basic goal of providing work relief “instead of providing goods to these individuals and having them give themselves over to idleness and to all the consequences resulting from that condition.”20 And in his 1878 report, the minister of the empire reiterated the twofold objective of government relief policy: “to have the retirantes subjected to peaceful and moralizing labor and to free the public coffers of burdens arising from the drought and aggravated by idleness.”21 At a local level, the Câmara Municipal of Natal, a city that reeled under the influx of retirantes, applauded the provincial president for recognizing that the giving of alms “degrades feelings while labor elevates and ennobles character,” and affirmed that retirantes, now productively employed, felt “happy and joyous because bags of sweat ran down their cheeks.”22
Moral imperatives thus justified a public policy that used retirante labor and public funds to initiate or advance a wide variety of projects. Municipalities used drought victims to work on roads, construct public buildings, and even as supplementary gravediggers to accommodate the increased demands produced by drought-spawned death.23 Provincial officials developed contracting schemes in which retirantes labored for railroad impresarios or planters.24 More ambitious attempts to force retirante labor involved the establishing of agricultural colonies, where, at least in theory, drought migrants ultimately would become self-supporting.25 Most such work-relief schemes failed, apparently because of fraud on the part of the public officials who ran the colonies and exploitative behavior on the part of the private contractors. Perhaps the worst case of fraud occurred in Rio Grande do Norte, where retirantes at the Sinimbú colony were subjected to a virtual reign of terror as the colony’s director not only inflated the settlement’s numbers, but pocketed most of the supplies needed to sustain the legitimate population.26
While highly critical of wrongdoing on the part of relief commissions, public officials typically saw no connection between such behavior and the response of retirantes. They remained wedded to a belief in work relief and, more important, to the idea that retirantes really did not want to engage in honest toil. As the provincial president of Alagoas complained, “almost all the retirantes are extraordinarily indolent, and one gets very little labor from them.”27
The defective nature of the sertanejos typically arose in public discourse. According to one Ceará official, “these were people without law or manners,” whose behavior deteriorated further when they “gathered together in large numbers.”28 A Pernambucan delegate to the 1878 agricultural congress held in Recife referred to the population fleeing the sertão as “the pariahs of our backlands,” and an Alagoas relief commission accused the retirantes of having abused the relief system: “cloth exchanged for tobacco, meat for cigarettes, cleansing soap for impure honey.”29 The moral shortcomings so clearly evidenced by retirante behavior found some explanation in climate and patterns of economic activity. The head of the Relief Commission of the Vila do Teixeira in Paraíba spoke of the sertanejos as “in large part idlers because the fertility of the soil during good times maintains them with little labor.”30 A Ceará district judge ascribed much of the suffering in his part of the province to “the habitual idleness of men … caused by climate … who knew nothing about how to save for times of adversity.”31
According to this general line of thought, the sertanejos themselves bore the responsibility for the suffering spawned by the drought. A Liberal imperial senator from Goiás remarked that the inhabitants of Ceará had never bothered to dig artesian wells or plant shade trees, since “once droughts ended, the lands so quickly recovered and the seasons so rapidly restored themselves.”32 An article on the drought published by the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional, a Rio de Janeiro—based organization that often stressed the need for individual effort and a positive spirit of association, scorned the sertanejos as “voluntarily ignorant and routinized.” They had done nothing to help themselves, fatalistically waiting for God to send rains. The situation was not totally uncontrollable. “If wells were properly dug and dams built, surely they [the sertanejos] would never lack water for their cattle.” Instead, they merely scratched “ephemeral little holes” in the beds of rivers dried up by drought. Rather than promote agricultural innovations, sertanejos deliberately allowed them to fail “so as to prove that any type of cultivation other than the one they have been using all along is inappropriate in the sertão.”33
Important both symbolically and substantively was a series of meetings held at the Polytechnical Institute in Rio de Janeiro in October 1877 that focused on problems of drought in the northeast. Brazil’s most eminent scientists attended, and Emperor Pedro II’s son-in-law, the Conde d’Eu, presided.34 Much of the discussion centered on the possibility of altering the northeastern climate by building a large number of great reservoirs, thereby increasing humidity through surface-water evaporation. Questions of reforestation, construction of wells, and improvement of transportation and communication also were broached.35 Here again, despite debate as to what constituted the best means of dealing with drought, there seemed little doubt that improvement was possible and that science and technology, rightly understood and applied, held the key.
Guilherme Schüch Capanema, chief of the geological section of a commission that journeyed to Ceará during 1859–61 on behalf of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, did not attend the Polytechnical Institute meetings because of illness, but nonetheless penned some widely published remarks on the problem of drought. Educated in mathematics and physical sciences at the Escola Militar in Rio de Janeiro and holding an engineering degree from the Polytechnical School of Vienna, Capanema typified a modern, scientific outlook congenial to reformers.36 Writing in Rio de Janeiro’s establishment daily, the Jornal do Comércio, he dismissed the possibility of altering climate by increasing humidity.37 Pointing to the positive aspect of drought as a weathering agent, Capanema observed that the real issue was the negative impact of the longer droughts, such as the present Great Drought. For this, what truly was needed was “foresight, perseverance and good sense.”38
After scathingly remarking the sertanejo propensity for making promises to some saint in times of trouble, Capanema suggested that instead of relying on such supernatural prescriptions they ought to pay more attention to the canons of science. Stock raising could be improved—especially given that present practice simply allowed cattle to forage freely—and warehouses established to store grain. The Cearenses could establish a true cattle complex including dairy and cheese factories and facilities for making dried beef.39
The real problem, then, was not climatological but attitudinal. Indeed, Capanema related how in 1861 he had made efforts to have grass dried and stored in Ceará for use as cattle feed. However, the “enlightened Cearense” whom he had asked to engage in this practice “was not convinced of the advantages of departing from traditional practice, and … my efforts were merely a scientist’s foolishness.”40 In a book published in 1878, Capanema reiterated this theme. He portrayed the recurring droughts in Ceará as positive, “the weathering agent responsible for producing the fertile soil of the area.” That the backlanders did not profit from this natural advantage was no one’s fault but their own: “The country in which birds fly through the air already roasted and seasoned has yet to be discovered.”41
Similar strains appeared in a report by a committee of the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional issued in response to a request by the imperial government to suggest ways of dealing with northeastern drought. The report adopted a prescriptive approach that would radically alter traditional sertanejo practice. Indeed, within the ten-point majority report, only one item spoke of the need for special favors from the imperial government—a ten-year exemption from consumption and export taxes (direitos de consumo e exportação)—while the remainder spoke of encouraging a variety of new agricultural patterns and practices. For example, the committee suggested subdivision of plots, intensive cultivation using the plow and fertilizer, establishing systems for drainage and irrigation, and providing practical agricultural education.42
Beyond its specific suggestions, this report really asked a question: Why fatalistically accept the vicissitudes of nature and remain satisfied with what the land yielded with little or no labor when the dictates of science, coupled with a willingness to innovate, work hard, and adopt rational organizational procedures for agriculture and the raising of livestock, could make the sertão flourish and provide the sertanejo a more secure and comfortable existence? The report also provided an answer: rotinismo, the blind following of traditional practice, the bane of all Brazilian agriculture. In this regard the recently established Jornal do Agricultor, Princípios Práticos de Economia Rural pointed to the irrigation systems so commonly and profitably employed in Europe, Egypt, India, and China. Irrigation would minimize the impact of drought in the northeastern provinces and “lead their population toward cultivation, abandoning the fatal routine of cattle raising in open ranges, totally dependent on the naturally occurring grasses of the plains.”43
The northeast’s belief that the central government provided preferential treatment to the south gave a regional flavor to its analysis of the specific measures needed to guard against future drought. The Great Drought provided an opportunity to voice regional grievances and, as Cunniff observes, “opportunity to finish major projects started in the prosperous sixties and now stagnating in the depressed seventies.”44 Thus, complaints of inadequate infrastructure and capital, seen as the concomitants of unfavorable central government policy, often surfaced in northeastern discourse. For example, a Pernambucan planter, Comendador Antonio Valentím de Silva Barroca, pointed to inadequate roads and railroads in Pernambuco as a cause of the agricultural decline in the interior. In turn, this magnified the problems of drought, both in terms of the precarious nature of existence in the sertão and the difficulty of providing relief supplies. The comendador suggested that if the central government had spent as much on railroads as it now had been forced to spend on drought relief, the province would have some six hundred kilometers more of railroads, and much of the damage and suffering of the drought would have been avoided.45
But when it came to such fundamental ideational questions as the moral and economic importance of forcing the national population to work, the necessity of improving agricultural techniques, and the promise of technology, the northeastern critique scarcely varied from that emanating from Rio de Janeiro. Northeasterners themselves indicted the rotina, urged the adoption of more enlightened agricultural practices, and suggested that such techniques would translate into a better product.46 And northeasterners often posited drought relief in terms that justified infrastructure improvement as a means of providing work and, hence, moral uplift to retirantes. As one Cearense remarked in regard to the work opportunities proffered by railroad construction: “Life without labor leads man to idleness, which predisposes him to vice and crime.”47
This summary view of discourse on the Great Drought has shown that retirante inferiority and aversion to labor informed the common elite view; that how best to transform the drought victims from public charge to public resource formed a constant theme for public officials—one that typically invoked both means to compel labor and the moral virtue of work; and that suggestions as to why drought produced such disastrous consequences typically blamed the rotina and northeastern refusal to follow the dictates of science. It remains now to demonstrate the strong relationship of these central understandings to the larger discourse on Brazilian society.
The Reform Critique
The vogue for modernization and the quickening pace of progress in Brazil during the latter decades of the nineteenth century have become associated most closely with the emergence of new interest groups linked to the railways, industries, banks, insurance, immigration companies, and public utilities. According to Emília Viotti da Costa, for these new groups, “the institutions created after Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822 and the political hegemony of traditional landed and commercial oligarchies had become anachronistic obstacles to progress.”48 The spread of coffee cultivation added another element of change, as newly rich planters in Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo competed for government favor with the great northeastern sugar planters and the urban commercial elite of Rio de Janeiro.49
This more complex socioeconomic fabric affected the political system. Abolitionism and positivism both gained force, and traditional political alignments shifted. Three formal political manifestos—Liberal, Radical Liberal, and Republican, all issued between 1868 and 1870—evidenced these changes as well as the increased political salience of reform. According to Viotti da Costa, the three proclamations sought an identical goal: “They intended to curtail government interference in the private sector, to increase provincial autonomy, and to undermine the power of the traditional oligarchies.”50 At least at the level of theory, to convert the Brazilian government from centralized, authoritarian, and interventionist patterns to standard liberal, laissez-faire practices was in fact to free the nation and the energy of its people from the dead weight of tradition. In this sense, then, as Jeffrey Needed observes, adherents to the causes of abolitionism and republicanism saw these “as ideals of national redemption and progress.”51
Despite these tensions, a larger societal consensus remained intact.52 For Brazilian elites, says Seymour Drescher, “the significant comparisons [with the ‘civilized’ West] were not those of the marketplace such as crop output, productivity, profits, the net worth of slaveholders, or the aggregate wealth of the nation [but rather] Brazil’s relative dearth of railroads, canals, towns, factories, schools, and books.”53 New technology seemed not to threaten the existing order, and it easily formed a consensual focus for a broad range of elites.
Consensus also flowed from shared social assumptions. Since Brazilian elites typically emerged from a common educational and institutional context, ideological homogeneity reinforced that which emerged from social class.54 Furthermore, ties of family and household informed political stances in imperial Brazil far more powerfully than did formal political beliefs.55 Thus, with issues of reform, apparent political divisiveness only masked an underlying consensus that reflected the Brazilian elites’ “common mental universe.”56 That said, it is still the nature of those larger understandings, as framed in prescriptions for a changed Brazil, that requires specification. Discourse on the Great Drought has brought us to the edge of those understandings. Discourse on agricultural decline and problems of labor supply—issues hotly debated in later nineteenth-century Brazil and also central to discussions of the Great Drought—provides an opportunity to confront them directly.
The fortunes of most of the elites and the health of imperial revenue in later nineteenth-century Brazil remained linked to export agriculture.57 Declining prices for both coffee and sugar in the 1870s therefore aroused wide concern.58 With the impending abolition of slavery, presaged by the 1871 Law of Free Birth (which gave full freedom upon reaching the age of 21 to all those henceforth born of slave mothers), many planters saw this agricultural crisis as linked to questions of labor supply and management—issues that were potentially explosive and divisive. At the level of specific policies, as will be noted, proposed solutions for agricultural and labor problems showed substantial regional variation.
Nonetheless, elite discourse on these issues evidenced shared formulations regarding the nature of Brazil and its people, framed in terms of a specific paradox: why had a nation so richly endowed failed to achieve a higher level of development? The idea that Brazil’s especially rich natural endowment destined it for greatness dates back at least to the early seventeenth century with the publication of Ambrosio Fernandes Brandão’s Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil. It gained wider currency in the following century with the appearance of Andre João Antonil’s Cultura e opulência do Brasil.59 Nineteenth-century Brazilians waxed lyrical about the nation’s endowment and potential. Dr. Miguel Antonio da Silva, director of the Imperial Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura and editor of its Revista Agrícola, opined that “all those who knew Brazil … considered it the richest part of the world” in terms of climate and fertility of soil. He suggested that the future held great promise for Brazil, not only as a preeminent agricultural nation but as a world leader in commerce.60
Especially after midcentury, however, Brazilian elites increasingly emphasized the need to develop the nation’s resources so as to guarantee that promised future. The notion of Brazil as being a young country, a characterization that suggested both the need and the potential for substantial change, proved a common formulation in public discourse. For example, an 1877 journal article dealing with issues of free trade, protectionism, and the promotion of industry opined:
Brazil has an immense territory, extensive coasts, the greatest rivers in the world and majestic forests; it has fertile soil and rich mines; the climate is temperate; one feels neither excessive cold, nor the burning heat of Florida; everything here beckons immigration, since everything is new, everything remains to be accomplished, awaiting the hand of man to exploit its riches.61
This description posed two fundamental questions: How should these riches be developed, and who best knew how to plan and oversee that process? In considering these questions, the reformers identified by Viotti da Costa—the new urban and agricultural interests—saw themselves as constituting its answer. If slaves and sugar had been the coin of the realm, in a newer age these no longer sufficed. Sugar’s fall on the world market, a decline often ascribed to the inability of northeastern planters to compete successfully with more rationally organized enterprises in other countries, clearly evidenced this truth. As one São Paulo planter explained, even though Brazil’s cane sugar was naturally richer in sugar content than beet sugar, the latter won out because Europe had “more skill and perfected agricultural processes.”62 Problems afflicting much of the grande lavoura in the center-south, seen by reform elements as inevitable concomitants of a slave labor system and reliance on the rotina, further suggested a need for change.63
Publications of the major agricultural, commercial, and industrial associations repeatedly identified an aversion to innovation and a reliance on outmoded techniques as root causes of Brazil’s agricultural problems. O Auxiliador da Indústria Nacional, the journal of the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional, advocated the merits of science and technology while railing against the rotina.64 For example, it noted the absence of any attempt to commercialize manioc, despite the fact that advanced machinery easily could be applied to its production, and concluded: “Nature gifted us with extraordinary natural riches; however, among us, the art [of working with this endowment] remains in its infancy. ”65
The Revista Agrícola reproduced a report of a professor from the Polytechnical Institute detailing a trip through Minas Gerais that pointed to the “weight of tradition” that kept planters from linking their property to the railroad stations. “It would suffice to build a few kilometers of proper road, but the so-called fazendeiros, some of them lodged in true little palaces [palacetes], remain content with rough trails that are totally impassable when it rains.” While agreeing to the obvious truth of the proposition that Brazil was a resource-rich land, the professor pointed to the admonition of the Greek poet: “It is through labor that the gods render to us all goods.”66 Another article in the Revista Agrícola, “O agricultor e as sciencias,” which appeared in 1879, cited the need for mechanization and a more scientific approach to agriculture, and underscored a simple but compelling reason for adopting new techniques: “In the present day, traditions transmitted from fathers to sons have little value; mere agricultural notions already no longer suffice.”67 The constant theme sounded by such publications was that to achieve its destiny, Brazil must adopt the practices and procedures used by the more advanced nations of the world. In a word, Brazil needed to become “modern.”
Agricultural associations, of course, represented but a narrow spectrum of the planter, commercial, and bureaucratic elites of imperial Brazil, a spectrum obviously linked to reform. The general theme of modernity, however, and its definition in terms of science and technology surfaced in many other contexts. Antonio Augusto da Costa Aguiar, who wrote on “The Agricultural Crisis” in response to the prominent Republican journalist Quintino Bocaiúva, saw the planters as the cause of the grande lavoura’s stagnation.68 Characterizing fazendeiros as “indolently and egotistically reclined in the shadows of their houses,” he observed that they did not open roads—indeed they sometimes resisted roads being built too near their land; “they don’t use the plow or have any use for machinery. The routines of fire and the hoe, of the cart with movable axle—a veritable antediluvian fossil—for many of them continue as the principal tools of labor.”69
The 1875 report of a survey undertaken by a central government commission underscored the backwardness of Brazilian agricultural practices as compared with those of Europe and the United States. Noting the absence of technological innovation, it cited slavery and the nation’s abundance of land as causes, and stressed the importance of eliciting foreign expertise and establishing agricultural instruction.70 Two years later, the Câmara dos Deputados established a special commission of agriculture to investigate the problems afflicting the grande lavoura. Its report began by observing that of the three basic factors of production—nature (resources), labor, and capital—Brazil truly enjoyed only a good natural endowment. This factor by itself had little value “if the labor needed to exploit it were missing and if absent also were the capital from which labor is nourished.” Hence, the low productivity of agriculture clearly derived from the “absence of professional instruction, means of transportation, labor, and capital.”71
Further indication of the degree to which such propositions had begun to form a new orthodoxy—not just for radical reformers but for all who sought the sources of Brazil’s economic woes and slow pace of development—were discussions at two agricultural congresses that met in 1878 in Rio de Janeiro and Recife. Convened by the imperial government, the Rio congress brought together fazendeiros from the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Espírito Santo, and Rio Grande do Sul to discuss problems afflicting the grande lavoura. Their political affiliations ran the full gamut, and they represented areas with differing levels of economic development and prosperity. Even so, Peter Eisenberg’s investigation of these planters’ attitudes toward economic issues finds little evidence of regional variation. He concludes that whether from the Paraíba Valley, Minas in the south, or the Paulista west, planters constituted a single class.72
How did this class view the issue of modernity? One member of a São Paulo commission suggested the need to improve techniques and mechanize production and remarked that Brazilian agriculturalists did very little to develop their property.73 Another congress attendee, citing the example of São Paulo, said that Brazil’s agriculturalists would have to “awaken from the lethargy in which they live.”74 Styling fazendeiros as “terrified by innovation,” yet another delegate suggested that Brazil follow the United States’ example and establish model farms. That way, fazendeiros could see with their own eyes that better means than a pilão could be used for processing coffee.75
Stung by their exclusion from the Rio de Janeiro congress, northeastern planters and merchants, largely under the auspices of Pernambuco’s Sociedade Auxiliadora da Agricultura, organized their own meeting in Recife. Struggling in the throes of the Great Drought and smarting from what they perceived as the imperial government’s longstanding favoritism toward southern coffee interests, the Recife congress delegates emphasized the difficulties of obtaining agricultural credits and the need for more roads and railroads; but they generally agreed with their southern counterparts on the desirability of improved agricultural techniques.76 Members of Pernambuco’s Associação Comercial Agrícola attacked the rotina as the most direct cause of the low quality of northeastern sugar—not surprising, given that their membership mostly represented commercial agents rather than planters.77 However, the congress’ official report, representing broad consensus among planters and merchants, also emphasized the paucity of agricultural improvements throughout the region and suggested the “urgency” of establishing sugar-processing mills that would employ advanced machinery.78
At the Rio de Janeiro congress the existence of a “crisis” in labor supply formed another point of consensus. Suggestions for alleviating the labor shortage produced heated debate between proponents of immigration and those who favored domestic labor.79 Within this debate, however, substantial agreement existed regarding the negative attributes of the Brazilian masses. From this perspective, the labor shortage resulted not from insufficient population, but from the insufficiencies of that population.
Most of the elite, notes Viotti da Costa, believed “that Brazilians were not much inclined to work and needed to be forced to it.”80 Indeed, at both the Rio and Recife congresses, in comments that might just as easily have been made in reference to retirantes, planters repeatedly expressed their frustration with the national population’s inability or unwillingness to serve effectively as agricultural laborers.81 Augusto Olímpio Gomes de Castro, a Conservative imperial deputado from Maranhão who opposed emancipation, explained Brazilians’ reluctance to labor by invoking the same belief in Brazil’s abundance and climatological determinism that had surfaced in the comments on drought. Maintaining that perhaps not even a third of the free population truly engaged in steady toil, he asserted that “the lowest portion of our population … has no needs other than the natural ones, and those are the very ones the climate and fertility of the soil make easily obtainable.”82
The negative impact of climate with regard to the Brazilian people also marked the words of the engineer Antonio Luiz da Cunha Bahiana on the opening of a new central sugar mill in Rio de Janeiro:
A very new nation, originating from an eminently routinized race, inhabiting a warm and humid zone where everything flourishes, but where man’s energy for labor is in inverse proportion to this flourishing, without agricultural and industrial education, the majority of Brazilians in three centuries have destroyed and consumed more than they have produced.83
Joaquim Manoel de Macedo, a physician educated in Rio de Janeiro, member of the Sociedade Auxiliadora de Indústria Nacional, and founding member of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, remarked: “Bodies we have; what we lack is fulfillment of the duty of working … in every município of every province there are hundreds of robust but idle men, who live off easily gotten natural resources of this prodigious country. ”84
Questions about the impact of tropical climate on development and on the nature of such countries’ populations, both broached in the above remarks, suggest thought patterns common in the later nineteenth-century Western world. The era of the “new imperialism,” which saw European nations “take up the White Man’s Burden,” was marked by racial thinking that mixed evolution and environmentalism to produce what has been termed “scientific racism.” Among the various tenets congenial to this outlook was the presumption that the hardy folk of more northern latitudes had developed beyond the levels of those in the tropics precisely because only those most fit could survive the rigors of climate, and because that survival depended on continuous effort and innovation.85 Notions of biological race reinforced this school of environmental determinism: Social Darwinism asserted the existence of a racial hierarchy with the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic peoples at the top and the darker races at the bottom. By this classification, Iberians already held a position inferior to that occupied by Anglo-Saxons. The mass of Brazil’s population, marked by Indian, African, or, even worse, mixed race, constituted an extremely poor base for constructing a great nation. Such peoples lacked the initiative, inventiveness, and capacity demanded by modern society.86
Concern with modernity and expressions of faith in science and technology also reflected broader patterns of Western thought. By the early nineteenth century, in both Western Europe and the United States, the development of new techniques for harnessing energy and wedding it to production through machinery had sparked significant material changes. A broader cultural and social dialogue accompanied these innovations, defining civilization as virtually conterminous with the increasing development and effective use of such techniques.87 The new technologies also carried implications for labor in that their use required more skilled and educated workers. And by this measure, patterns of labor and production in Brazil, which employed precious little machinery and relied heavily on animate sources of power, suggested barbarism rather than civilization.88
Darwinism reached Brazil in the 1870s, initially through French translations.89 Its Brazilian proponents, while divided into various factions, shared one trait: “an exaggerated concern” with finding some philosophical or scientific approach that could both explain Brazilian reality and provide positive prescriptions for achieving progress.90 Brazilian Darwinism also settled into an intellectual mileu in which a broad “scientism” stressed the application of scientific knowledge and approaches to the solution of national problems.91
Beyond the tenets of external philosophies and ideologies, Brazilian writers have noted the complementary existence of a domestic ideology of vadiagem that provided its own basis for deprecating the national labor force. Vadiagem, literally the condition of living as a vagrant, was a legal category that defined those who, though capable of working, nevertheless refused to work; but it had a richer societal meaning in nineteenth-century Brazil. Lucio Kowarick, whose Trabalho e vadiagem provides the most complete exposition of this concept, argues that because the great plantation-slave labor complex that formed the bedrock of Brazil’s economy provided no place for free labor, it marginalized nonslave elements, transforming them into “society’s pariahs.”92 The slave system affected the attitudes of both slaveholders and free laborers by degrading the value of the supervised manual laborer.93 At the same time, it predisposed the planter class to view labor relations with free workers as more precarious, and therefore prompted planter demands for stringent codes to control labor. Finally, according to Kowarick, the marginalization of free labor in essence condemned that element of society to itinerant patterns of labor, which in turn led planters to view those workers as “the embodiment of a useless rabble that preferred idleness and vagabondage, vice, and even crime to the disciplined labor on the fazendas.”94 Tellingly, as Hamilton de Mattos Monteiro observes, such terms as ociosos and vadios typically were employed to describe rural bandits.95 Furthermore, as an ironic complement to the planter mindset, free workers resisted plantation labor out of the fear that they essentially would become enslaved.96
As previously noted, the urgency underlying—indeed generating— wide concern with “the proletariat that vegetates in our fields” stemmed from the impending transition from slave to free labor.97 The varied currents of Darwinism, environmental determinism, and vadiagem all found expression in the debate over the best means to solve the labor crisis. Much attention focused on foreign immigration as an alternative source of labor. Schemes to import Indian or Chinese laborers attracted some support, but fears about the racial impact of such peoples proved more persuasive than any suggestions as to their docility and cheap cost.98
Dr. Nicolao Joaquim Moreira, president of the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Industria Nacional and editor of its revista as well as that of the Imperial Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura, strongly argued against importing Chinese workers on the basis that mixing racial extremes must be avoided. To Moreira, both anthropological law and empirical data indicated that inferior races indelibly imprint their characteristics on superior races.”99 Significantly, at the 1878 Rio de Janeiro agricultural congress a São Paulo planter based his own arguments against importing Chinese workers on those of Moreira, saying that Moreira’s “authority in this matter is recognized. 100 From this genetic perspective, European laborers, while posing some problems of social control, seemed far more attractive.101 A Mineiro planter at the Rio congress warned that Brazil had much to lose by importing the “degenerate races of other countries,” and concluded that for both the present and future needs of agriculture, the nation needed “civilized races.”102
Darwinism, however, also carried a more positive interpretation, one conducive to societal improvement.103 Brazilian Darwinism especially emphasized the possibility of positive social change through management of the process of natural selection.104 Similar optimism could be found in the tenets of vadiagem. Indeed, both perspectives asserted that hard-working European immigrants would serve as positive, uplifting examples to native Brazilians. Then, following those examples and engaging in sustained toil, the Brazilian masses would acquire more positive habits and values. Thus, having warned against the importation of Chinese coolies, Moreira concluded: “from an anthropological point of view, it is the Caucasian race that we should bring here, preferring for industry and commerce the Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxons are the only people capable of inspiring among us the feverish enthusiasm for industry.”105
If foreign workers proffered one solution to the question of labor, the existing national population promised another. Some Brazilians argued that the national worker—if properly disciplined—posed fewer threats to the social order than did Europeans and a lesser threat to the genetic order than did coolies. This idea found especially great support in the northeast, since experience so far had suggested that this region was unlikely to benefit from European immigration.106 Indeed, the agricultural colonies formed during the drought in part reflected the northeastern preference for devoting imperial revenues to the funding of domestic rather than foreign colonial settlements. And even those who saw immigration as the preferred alternative still stressed the importance of creating a more disciplined national worker.
As with their proposals for work relief for retirantes, the elites proceeded from the assumption that left on their own, the masses preferred to idle about and live off nature’s bounty. Hence, demands for new legislation that would eliminate idleness by fixing labor and providing police penalties usually formed the substantive questions in most discussions of the labor issue. For example, a memorial to the Rio agricultural congress from the Companhia União dos Lavradores called for stricter laws with harsher penalties for ociosos and vagabundos and advocated forcing such people into agricultural colonies so as to “oblige them to acquire habits of work.”107 One planter suggested that the labor crisis could be solved within a single year by means of a new labor law accompanied by strong police measures.108 And the congress’ official response to the question of the most efficient and convenient way” of providing sufficient labor for the grande lavoura stressed “prompt and severe execution of the laws that prohibit vagabondage” and the creation of a “rural code” regulating relations between proprietors and those who worked their land.109
This emphasis on legal compulsion finds explanation in Ademar Gebara’s research on the transition from slave to free labor in Brazil. Gebara stresses the attendant problems of devising alternative means of social control, and he sees the Law of Free Birth as part of an attempt to “control, discipline, and organize the Brazilian labor market.”110 This law had clear links to the 1879 labor law that established a system of sharecropping, legally obligating workers to fulfill long-term contracts.111 Furthermore, elite assertions of the moral imperative of work attempted both to create a societal consensus advocating regular toil as the social obligation of any good citizen, and to provide a rationale for disciplining labor.112
This essay has shown that discourse on land and labor in Brazil paralleled discourse generated by the Great Drought on several significant points: rotinismo, vadiagem, the great fertility and fecundity of Brazil, and a definition of progress that stressed mechanization, rational organization, and the dictates of science. These parallels, which occurred despite regional perspectives and differing political affiliations, evidence some of the central understandings shared by elites in later imperial Brazil. Seen from the perspective of the “common mental universe” of later nineteenth-century Brazilian elites, discourse on the Great Drought becomes not simply a critique of retirantes or northeastern planters but a broader critique of the Brazilian nation.
When focused on problems generated by the Great Drought, the assumptions underlying reform produced a construction of reality in which neither harsh nature nor retirante suffering took center stage. Instead, elite discourse created a landscape filled with lazy sertanejos, indolent and arrogant fazendeiros wedded to their rotina, and ineffective government policy. The sertão could flourish—as could all of Brazil—if only the masses were uplifted, the stranglehold of the rotina abolished, and rational, modern techniques encouraged by a progressive state.
This article grew out of a paper prepared for the 46th International Congress of Americanists. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Robert M. Levine and Thomas E. Skidmore for their helpful suggestions on revising that paper. The author also acknowledges the thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript by David Bushnell, Ciro F. S. Cardoso, Murdo MacLeod, two anonymous HAHR reviewers, and especially Sheldon L. Maram, and thanks the UW-Parkside Committee on Research and Creative Activity for assistance with research expenses.
At the time of the Great Drought, Brazilians did not regard the northeast as a separate region. Instead, “there were the provinces … of the North, from Amazonas to Bahia, and the provinces … of the South, from Espírito Santo to Rio Grande.” Evaldo Cabral de Melo, O norte agrário e o Império, 1871–1889 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1984). 13. The discussion presented here deals with the provinces (now states) of Ceará, Piauí, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Paraíba, and Alagoas.
According to Gilberto Freyre, “When a Brazilian hears talk of drought, he immediately thinks of Ceará and of 1877. It is as though that place and those two sevens … have become the dramatic synthesis of the great droughts that Brazil has suffered.” Freyre, Preface to Introdução à sociologia das sêcas, by Lopes de Andrade (Rio de Janeiro: Editora a Noite, 1948), 7. The only account in English is Roger L. Cunniff “The Great Drought, 1877–1889” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Texas, Austin, 1970), which deals mainly with Ceará. See also two articles by Cunniff, “The Birth of the Drought Industry: Imperial and Provincial Response to the Great Drought in Brazil’s Northeast, 1877–1880,” Revista de Ciencias Sociais 6:1–2 (1975), 65–82; and “From ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ to ‘Land of Misery’: The Creation of the Image of Northeast Brazil,” Forum for Arid Land Studies 5 (1989). Rodolpho Theophilo focuses on the drought in Ceará in História da secca do Ceará (1877 a 1880) (Fortaleza: Typografia do Libertador, 1883). See also Joaquim Alves, História das secas (Séculos XVII a XIX) (Fortaleza: Edições de Institute Ceará, 1953). While the drought remains most closely associated with Ceará, it in fact reigned throughout most of the northeast.
As Cunniff, “Birth of the Drought Industry, 65–66, succinctly observes: “From February 1877 to May 1880, the social and economic dislocation generated by this drought devastated five northeastern provinces. …”
Typically trapped in dependent labor relations (though some cotton farmers were an exception), sertanejos had little opportunity to accumulate wealth. For a comprehensive description of labor patterns in the northeast see Manuel Correia de Andrade, A terra e o homen no nordeste, 2d ed. (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1963). Robert M. Levine observes: “Even in relatively good years, the rural diet fell deficient in calories, carbohydrates, animal fats, vitamins, thiamine, and protein.” “‘Mud Hut Jerusalem’: Canudos Revisited,” HAHR 68:3 (Aug. 1988), 551.
On the labor patterns of rubber tappers see Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom 1850–1920 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1983). Retirante comes from the verb retirarse, to remove oneself. These drought refugees also were known as os flagelados, the beaten ones.
Between 1874 and 1876, expenditures by the Ministry of the Empire, the government department responsible for drought relief, accounted for about 6 percent of all government disbursements. By comparison, those by the Ministry of Agriculture constituted about 22 percent. During the years of the Great Drought, Empire’s share recorded the following percentages: 1877, 8.1; 1878, 14.7; 1879, 26.9. For those same years, expenditures by Agriculture averaged about 26 percent. By 1881, Empire’s percentage had dropped to 6.5, and it remained at about that level throughout the 1880s. See Laura Randall, A Comparative Economic History of Latin America, 1500–1914, 4 vols. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1977), vol. 3, Brazil, 236. Cunniff, “Birth of the Drought Industry,” 66, notes that the more than 70,000 contos spent on relief by the imperial government represented over 20 percent of the government’s total revenues during the drought years. For a comprehensive overview of imperial finances see Liberato de Castro Carreira, História financeira e orçamentária do Império do Brasil, 2 vols. (Brasília: Senado Federal, 1980), vol. 2, Após a guerra do Paraguai.
Brazil, Congresso Nacional, Anais da Câmara dos Deputados do Império do Brasil (cited hereafter as Deputados, Anais), Feb. 11, 1879, P. 459
Brazil, Congresso Nacional, Anais do Senado do Império do Brasil (hereafter Senado, Anais), Feb. 7, 1879, 2:64.
Relief efforts had begun in 1877 under a Conservative administration; the following year, the Liberals, who had been out of power for the past decade, took over. For a convenient summary of major political issues and events from 1850 to the early 1870s see Richard Graham, “Brazil from the Middle of the Nineteenth Century to the Paraguayan War,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983–86), 3:747–94, esp. 779–84 and 789–94. For the period from independence to midcentury, the most comprehensive source is Roderick J. Barman, Brazil, The Forging of a Nation (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988). For a brief overview of political parties during the Empire see Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, História e teoria dos partidos políticos no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Alfa-Omega, 1974), 22–53.
Levine, “Canudos,” 547, remarks: “Unlike many nineteenth-century Europeans who prided themselves on their enlightenment but were disillusioned with tyrannical governments and small-mindedness in their own countries, … urban Brazilians felt pride in their material as well as their political accomplishments, and shame at the dark, primitive world of the hinterland.”
Seymour Drescher, “Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective,“ HAHR 68:3 (Aug. 1988), 436. For an additional reference on elite unease, see Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).
Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Gold-hammer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 71; also 58 and 225–29. See also Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Goldhammer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 1–13.
Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behavior (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987), 7. As a general reference, see Diane MacDonnell, Theories of Discourse: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Interesting both theoretically and substantively as examples of historically oriented research are Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989); and H. D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988). For a literary investigation, see David W. Foster, The Argentine Generation of 1880: Ideology and Cultural Texts (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990).
Potter and Wetherell, Discourse, 6.
Harootunian, Things Seen, 10. As Nicola Gavey points out, “discourses vary in their authority,” and “dominant discourses appear ‘natural,’ denying their own partiality.” “Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis: Contributions to a Feminist Psychology,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 13:4 (Dec. 1989), 463. Foster, Argentine Generation, 13, speaks of “texts that serve to define and confirm a society’s self-image.”
Inspector of Public Health Dr. Pedro Attahyde Lobo Mostoso to Provincial President Dr. Adolpho de Barros, June 11, 1878, Arquivo Publico do Estado de Pernambuco, Recife, Saúde Pública 4, 1878–81.
Jornal do Recife, Nov. 9, 1877.
Trabalhos do Congresso Agrícola do Recife em outubro de 1878 comprehendendo os documentos relativos aos factos que o precederam (hereafter Trabalhos do Congresso) (Recife, 1879), 426.
Correio de Natal, Nov. 9, 1878. Emphasis in original.
Senado, Anais, June 27, 1877, 1:253. At the time he spoke, Cotegipe held the post of minister of the treasury.
Relatório … do Ministro e Secretario de Estado dos Negócios do Império (Rio de Janeiro, 1878), 119.
Câmara Municipal of Natal to Provincial President Dr. Manoel Januario Bezerra Montenegro, Nov. 18, 1878, printed in Jornal do Recife, Dec. 19, 1878.
In Recife, for example, in addition to working at the municipal cemetery, retirantes helped enlarge the hospital, worked on landfills, and built roads. See Jornal do Recife, Sept. 30, 1878; and Central Relief Commission to the Vice President of Pernambuco, Mar. 1, 1878, Arquivo Público do Estado de Pernambuco, Da 35, v. 2.
With reference to railroad impresarios, Cunniff, “Great Drought,” 177, remarks: “The beleaguered entrepreneurs were quick to see in the crisis a providential opportunity to draw Imperial funds into their projects, and in the masses of desperate drought refugees a vast pool of cheap labor.”
Every northeastern province experimented with these colonies. Some notable examples include Pernambuco’s Colonia Socorro, Alagoas’ São Francisco, and Rio Grande do Norte’s Sinimbú. Discussion of these colonies and of the range of provincial work relief projects may be found in the relatórios of the provincial presidents and of local and provincewide relief commissions.
Some of this sordid story is presented in Antonio Cypriano de Araújo to First Vice President of Rio Grande do Norte, Oct. 7, 1878, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Ministério do Império, Presidentes, Correspondencia do Presidente da Província (hereafter AN, Presidente), IJJ9/212. In Alagoas, an investigation by the provincial president found only 7,000 residents, whereas the colony’s director had reported a population of 13,000. President of Alagoas to Minister of the Empire, Sept. 5, 1878, AN, Presidente, IJJ9/294. In Paraíba, “powerful local landlords” distributed government supplies “as patronage among their own tenant clients.” Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 53–54.
President of Alagoas to Provincial Assembly, 1878, AN, Presidente, IJJ9/294.
Inspector of the Treasury of Ceará to Vice President of the Province, Feb. 26, 1878, AN, Presidente, IJJ9/162.
Trabalhos do Congresso, 325: O Liberal, Rio Grande do Norte, Oct. 15, 1878.
Relatório … pela Comisão de Socorros da Villa do Teixeira ao … Presidente desta Província …, 15 ouf. 1879, AN, Presidente, IJJ9/233.
District Judge to President of Ceará, Apr. 27, 1877, AN, Presidente, IJJ9/188. As the two other causes he noted that an absence of rains had killed cattle and plantings, and that the press exaggerated conditions, which in turn created undue alarm and caused people to abandon their normal behavior.
Senado, Anais, June 27, 1877, 1:254.
Antonio J. J. de Mendonca Belém, “A secca actual,” O Auxiliador da Indústria Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (hereafter O Auxiliador) 45 (Nov. 1877), 538–50.
Alves, Sêcas, 203. Speaking of the various participants, Cunniff, “Great Drought, 186, remarks: “Their eminence and credentials in Brazilian technological circles were such that the opinions of any one of them were guaranteed respectful attention, and any recommendations they might make jointly were sure to carry considerable weight.
Alves, Sêcas, 197–202. Alves, who writes as something of a passionate northeastern nationalist, notes that debate yielded a report but no implementation. Ibid., 203.
Capanema belonged to the Imperial Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura and the IHGB and founded the Sociedade de Estatística do Brazil. Augusto Victorino Alves Sacramento Blake, Diccionario Bibliográphico Brazileiro, 7 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, Typografia Nacional, 1883–1902), 3:199.
Viriato de Medeiros, an engineer from Ceará, disparagingly coined the term rainmakers for those who asserted that it would be possible to alter the northeastern climate by building reservoirs. Cunniff, “Great Drought,” 195.
Jornal do Comércio, Oct. 23, 1877.
Ibid.
Ibid. Capanema also related the story of how a former minister of the empire, the Viscount of Bom Retiro, had tried to acclimatize camels as a means of emergency transportation during times of drought. His experiment failed because of the lack of interest among those entrusted with the camels. Capanema concluded this anecdote by observing that “today, perhaps they [the camels] would have saved some lives.”
Capanema, Apontamentos sobre as sêcas de Ceará (Rio de Janeiro, 1878), quoted in Cunniff, “Great Drought,” 69.
O Auxiliador 46 (Jan. 1878), 32–33. The committee also recommended introducing various new crops, including wheat, southern European cereals, and tea; establishing fisheries; building storage silos for grains; bringing in people from the western United States to teach retirantes how to farm and people from Buenos Aires to instruct in meat salting; and creating central mills for sugar and sweet potatoes and central farms for such products as coffee, cacao, rubber, and tapioca.
Jornal do Agricultor 2:1 (Jan.–June 1880).
Cunniff, “Birth of the Drought Industry,” 70.
Trabalhos do Congresso, 165. Silva Barroca had previously published much of this commentary in a series of articles in the Diário de Pernambuco, in June, July, and August 1878, writing under the pseudonym Ceresiades. The drought did, in fact, provide a strong impetus for railroad construction in the northeast. See Castro Carreira, História financeira, 782–92; and Cabral de Melo, O norte, 200–201.
For example, the Pernambucan Associação Commercial Beneficente, while acknowledging the degree to which the rotina had caused the decline of sugar, nonetheless affirmed that several good engenhos had been producing a good product. Trabalhos do Congresso, 114. 273.
Jornal do Comércio, Mar. 7, 1879, P. 3.
Emilia Viotti da Costa, “Brazil: The Age of Reform,” in Bethell, Cambridge History 5:732.
María Yedda Linhares and Francisco Carlos Teixeira da Silva, História da agricultura brasileira, combates e controversias (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1981), 32.
Viotti da Costa, “Age of Reform,” 752. She notes as well that “If the programme seemed to appeal to the emerging urban groups, it also attracted progressive planters and provincial elites dissatisfied with the central government’s policies.” The Liberal manifesto, among other things, called for decentralization, judiciary autonomy, educational reform, direct elections, abolition of life tenure in the Senate, establishing a civil register, religious freedom, extension of the vote to non-Catholics, and gradual emancipation. The more radical faction among the Liberals called for still broader limitations on the role of government. The Republican party, newly formed in 1870, issued its own manifesto, which both echoed and extended the Liberal platform. Ibid., 751.
Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 13.
In addition to tensions among the planters, commercial interests, whose fortunes depended on the health of export agriculture and favorable government policy on shipping and trade, clashed with industrial interests that sought to counteract the dominant conceit that agriculture—and only agriculture—was the bedrock of Brazilian prosperity. Planters also might clash with commercial agents. On business interests and commercial associations see Eugene W. Ridings, “Business, Nationality and Dependency in Late Nineteenth Century Brazil ”Journal of Latin American Studies 14:1 (May 1982), 55–96. An excellent description of the role and functions of coffee factors and an overview of banks and credit in Rio de Janeiro is Joseph E. Sweigart, Coffee Factorage and the Emergence of a Brazilian Capital Market, 1850–1888 (New York: Garland Press, 1987). Sweigart emphasizes cooperation rather than conflict between planter and agent.
Drescher, Brazilian Abolition, 436. This later nineteenth-century sense of disenchantment with older patterns also is pointed out by E. Bradford Burns in Nationalism in Brazil: An Historical Survey (New York: Praeger, 1968), 10. Linhares and Teixeira da Silva, História da agricultura brasileira, 16, identify the later nineteenth century as one of three moments of profound transition in Brazil’s socioeconomic system that engendered controversy and debate among important sectors of the nation and resulted in a certain “ ‘concretization’ … of dominant intellectual strata with regard to the fundamental problem of the country: the relationship between production, labor, and the State.”
José Murilo de Carvalho, “Political Elites and State Building: The Case of Nineteenth Century Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24:3 (July 1982), 396–97, posits the importance of what he terms “ideological homogeneity” as an additional factor of elite cohesion. It arises “through a common world view implanted by formal training, through common career experiences, through common political or life experiences, or through combinations of the above.” Ibid., 397. See also Murilo de Carvalho, A construção da ordem. A elite política imperial (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1980). For other discussions of the formation of elite consensus see two articles by Roderick J. Barman and Jean Barman: “The Role of the Law Graduate in the Political Elite of Imperial Brazil,” Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs 18:4 (Nov. 1976), 423–50, and “The Prosopography of the Brazilian Empire,” Latin American Research Review 13:2 (1978), 78–97; and Eul-Soo Pang and Ron L. Seckinger, “The Mandarins of Imperial Brazil,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 14:2 (Mar. 1972), 215–44. Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, provides many important insights into the links binding elite society. See for example his discussion of the salon in Rio during the Second Reign, 105–6.
Linda Lewin has demonstrated the importance of family-based oligarchies to the functioning of provincial (and later, state) politics, as well as the impact of kinship networks at the national level. She affirms that “in a majority of Brazil’s states, … family alignments determined partisan alignments.” Politics and Parentela, 230. Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 148, argues that “citizens divided politically not because of party loyalties, … but because of personal ties.”
Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 74, referring specifically to the reform broached in the three political manifestos, remarks: “So universally recognized was the need for reform that even the Conservatives felt obligated to support them, particularly after the emperor himself came out publicly in their favor.”
According to Warren Dean, “since the customs houses represented the nearly exclusive source of their [the central government bureaucrats’] revenues and certain imports were critical to the government’s functioning, they had reasons of their own to support a policy of export orientation.” “The Brazilian Economy, 1870–1930,” in Bethell, Cambridge History, 5:688.
Coffee prices—and total government receipts—fell in 1870–72, 1873–74, 1876–78, and 1879–81. See Randall, Comparative Economic History, 3:137. Cotton showed a sharp, continuing decline. In 1871–72, it accounted for about a quarter of Brazil’s export value. For 1884–85, that figure declined to less than 5 percent. In those same years, the figures for sugarwere 14.73 percent and 10.03 percent, respectively. Roger Frank Colson, “Destruction of a Revolution: Polity, Economy, and Society in Brazil, 1870–1891” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1979), vol. 2, tables P, Q, and R. For an analytical overview of economic trends see Nathaniel H. Leff, Underdevelopment and Development in Brazil, 2 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), vol. 1.
Burns, Nationalism, 20. Brandão, a Paraíba planter, wrote the Diálogos in 1618, but they remained obscure until the eighteenth century. See Jose Antonio Gonsalves’ Foreword to Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil (Diálogos das grandezas do Brasil) Attributed to Ambrosio Fernandes Brandão, trans. and annot. Frederick Holden Hall, William F. Harrison, and Dorothy Winter Welkner (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1987), vii–ix. Antonil’s book was published in Lisbon in 1711.
Revista Agricola do Imperial Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura (hereafter, Revista Agrícola) 9:1 (Mar. 1878), 15–16.
O Auxiliador 45 (Mar. 1877), 109.
Congresso Agrícola, Colleção de documentos (Rio de Janeiro, 1878), 178. Stuart B. Schwartz asserts that up to 1840, Brazil essentially kept pace with innovations in sugar production elsewhere in the Americas. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 433. To place Brazil in a world context, see J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
Brazilian agricultural practices did merit concern. Dean, “Brazilian Economy,” 709, notes that even the coffee plantations, “better managed than the average farm, … were backward compared to contemporary agricultural knowledge.”
Nelson Wernek Sodré, História da imprensa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1966), 146. It was under the auspices of the Sociedade that the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro was formed. Ibid., 205.
O Auxiliador 38 (June 1870), 162. The author of this piece, João José Carneiro da Silva, asserted that politics constituted the only area in which Brazil had achieved development equal to that of Europe.
Revista Agricola 8:3 (Sept. 1877), 115.
Ibid. 10:4 (Dec. 1879), 135.
Bocaiúva wrote A crise da lavoura. Succinta exposição (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Perseverença, 1868). Aguiar responded in Crise da lavoura ou resposta ao opúsculo com o mesmo título que publicou na corte o Sr. Quintino Bocauuva (São Paulo: Tvpografia de H. Schroeder, 1868).
Aguiar, Crise, 12. A standard critique of Brazilian agriculture—reliance on slave labor, no irrigation, failure to fertilize or use the plow—appears repeatedly in publications of those pressing for modernization. As reported by the 1866 National Exposition Commission of Rio Grande do Sul: “Lack of knowledge caused the destruction of riches that took centuries to create. The hoe and burning destroyed them in return for products that many times were of lesser value than what had been destroyed [to produce them]; such is [our] system of agriculture.” Relatório … de S. Pedro do Rio Grande do Sul, in Antonio José de Souza Rego, Relatório da 2a. Exposição Nacional de 1866 … (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Nacional, 1869), 488.
Parecer e projecto sobre a criação de bancos de crédito territorial e fábricas centraes de assucar, … pelas comissões da Fazenda e Especial. … (Rio de Janeiro, 1875), as noted in Eulalia María Lahmeyer Lobo, História Político-Administrativa da Agricultura Brasileira 1808–1880 (np., nd. [betw. 1977 and 1982]), 127–28.
Deputados, Anais, June 20, 1877, 1:165.
Peter L. Eisenberg, “A mentalidade dos fazendeiros no Congresso Agrícola de 1878,” in José Roberto do Amaral Lapa, comp., Modos de produção e realidade brasileira (Petrópolis: Editora Vocês, 1980), 167–94.
Congresso Agrícola, Colleção, 186. The speaker, Dr. Moreira de Barros, further observed that Brazilian products had developed a reputation for poor quality and could not effectively compete with products from other nations.
Ibid., 206.
Ibid., 34.
The imperial government said the exclusion of northeastern delegates arose from practical considerations such as the logistics of travel and the need to assemble the conference quickly. Northeasterners, however, saw the exclusion as yet another instance of preferential treatment for coffee planters. Thus Gadiel Perruci styles the Recife gathering as an authentic ‘Protest Congress’ of the northeastern agrarian class.” Introduction to Trabalhos do Congresso Agrícola do Recife, outubro de 1878 (Recife: Fundação Estadual de Planejamento Agrícola de Pernambuco, 1978), xvii. See also Perruci’s analytical summary of the congress proceedings, xx.
Trabalhos do Congresso, 273. Even so, the Associação Commercial Reneficente de Pernambuco cited government favoritism, asserting that the imperial government had provided “no consideration [or] help to the provinces of the north of the empire.”
Ibid., 414. The initial version of the congress’ final report, authored by the large-scale fazendeiros in alliance with the Recife merchant elite, came under attack by other delegates and was revised to reflect their strong concern over the difficulty of obtaining adequate credit. Cabral, O norte, 124–25.
Eisenberg, A mentalidade, 179. Questions of infrastructure and capital also emerged as critical.
Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 184.
For example, a Minas Gerais representative spoke of the innate laziness of the Brazilian people and their belief that plantation labor was degrading. Rather than engage in such labor and enjoy a better standard of living, they preferred to “stay in their little corner and take a bit of coffee and rapadura.”Congresso Agrícola, Colleção, 155. A Pernambuean delegate saw the absence of economic activity and habits of work as the proximate cause of the … laziness that predominates among the people of our sertões.” Jornal do Recife, Dec. 31, 1878, reporting on the October 7 session of the Recife congress.
Deputados, Anais, June 25, 1877, 1:252; Colson, “Destruction,” 1:304.
O Auxiliador 45 (Nov. 1877), 465. Henrique A. Milet (a French-born Pernambucan engineer, economist, and erstwhile sugar mill owner) held this same opinion: “In a vast country like ours, where the sea, rivers and fields give in return for very little labor that which is necessary to satisfy the primordial needs of humanity, it is natural that only a small number of free men would subject themselves to a regime of constant labor.” Milet, Auxilio à lavoura (Recife: Typographia de Jornal do Recife, 1876), 32.
Rozendo Moniz Barretto, Exposição Nacional de 1875. Notas e observações (Rio de Janeiro: Typografia Nacional, 1876), 153.
According to Benjamin Kidd, author of The Control of the Tropics (London: The Macmillan Company, 1898), “in dealing with the natural [indigenous] inhabitants of the tropics we are dealing with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of the development of the race that the child does in the history of the development of the individual. The tropics will not, therefore, be developed by the natives themselves.” “Benjamin Kidd and the Control of the Tropics,” in Imperialism, ed. Philip D. Curtin (New York: Walker and Co., 1971), 36-37.
For a good general discussion of this thinking see Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism, Science, and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1979). For a specifically Brazilian focus, see Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974).
See Dolores Greenberg, “Energy, Power, and Perceptions of Social Change in the Early Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 95:3 (June 1990), 693-714.
The relationship between energy, machinery, labor, and modernity appears in the words of the English labor leader Thomas Hodgskin, who, according to Greenberg, “contrasted the productive powers of the ‘savage’ with those of ‘civilized man,’ [and] found that the whole difference … arose from the different modes of applying labour in the two states of society.’” Ibid., 703.
Therezinha Alves Ferreira Collichio, Miranda Azevedo e darwinismo no Brasil (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1988), 16. For a detailed chronology of initial Brazilian works reflecting or acknowledging Darwinian thought see Ibid., 46-47.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 17-18, 113. Collichio takes this characterization from Roque Spencer Maciel de Barros, A ilustração brasileira e a idéia de universidade (São Paulo: Editora Convívio, 1986).
Lucio Kowarick, Trabalho e vadiagem. A origem do trabalho livre no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1987), 69. George Reid Andrews notes: “by choosing to invest funds in European workers and refusing to make comparable investments in Brazilians, the province’s planters, and the state apparatus which they controlled … were motivated in equal part by the international currents of scientific racism and Social Darwinism … , and by their own autochthonous ideologia da vadiagem, a firm and unshakable belief in the innate laziness and irresponsibility of the black and racially mixed Brazilian masses.” “Black and White Workers: São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1928,” HAHR 68:3 (Aug. 1988), 495. On questions of free labor, see also Maria Silvia Carvalho Franco, Os homens livres na ordern escravocrata (São Paulo: Kairos Livraria Editora, 1983); and Ciro F. S. Cardoso, Escravo ou camponés? O protocampesinato negro nas Americas (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1987).
Kowarick, Traballio e vadiagem, 46.
Ibid., 65.
Hamilton de Mattos Monteiro, Crise agrària e luta de classes (O nordeste brasileiro entre 1850 e 1889) (Brasília: Horizonte Editora Ltda., 1980), 71-72.
Ibid., 160.
Congresso Agrícola, Colleção, 255. This was a reprint of an article published by Dr. Pedro Gordilho Paes Leme, Oct. 17, 1877.
See Robert E. Conrad, The Planter Class and the Debate over Chinese Immigration to Brazil, 1850-1893,” International Migration Review 9:1 (Spring 1975), 41-55.
O Auxiliador 38 (Oct. 1870), 376. Moreira also was a member of the Brazilian Commission to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. See Sacramento Blake, Diccionario, 309-12. Moreira noted that mixing racial extremes within a limited geographic area would produce a flawed population. This contradicted the teachings of George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an eighteenth-century scientist and author of Histoire Naturelle (1787), who helped to advance the concept of fixed—as opposed to mutable—species. Bannister, Social Darwinism, 17, 21.
Congresso Agrícola, Colleção, 158.
Warren Dean, noting Brazil s relative lack of success in attracting immigrants and the absence of stronger efforts to revive indentures in the 1870s, asserts: “The planters continued to fear, perhaps rightly, that competitively established wages would bestow on the workers the means of destroying their monopoly in the land, and thereby of overturning their society.” Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820-1920 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1976), 123.
Ibid., 146.
Stephan L. Chorover, From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), 88.
Collichio, Miranda Azevedo, 39.
O Auxiliador 38 (1870), 392-93. Celso Furtado applied this thinking to agricultural colonization schemes, asserting that “their raison d’être was a belief in the innate superiority of European labor.” The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times, trans. Ricardo W. de Aguiar and Eric Charles Drysdale (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962). For other discussions of this point see Michael M. Hall, “The Origins of Mass Immigration in Brazil, 1874-1914” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1969); and Robert E. Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery: 1850-1888 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972). While not discounting issues of racial prejudice, Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro argues that the case of the Paulista western frontier indicates that difficulties in obtaining adequate labor domestically spurred support for colonization. “Beyond Masters and Slaves: Subsistence Agriculture as Survival Strategy in Brazil During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” HAHR 68:3 (Aug. 1988), 461-89.
For example, Antonio Coelho Rodrigues, who formally inaugurated the 1878 Recife agricultural congress, heaped scorn on the imperial government’s sponsoring of immigrant colonization projects, sarcastically asserting that “for more than 30 years, official colonization has been a permanent drought for our finances.” Trabalhos do Congresso, 449– 50. For a summary review of northeastern perspectives on immigration, see Cabral de Melo, O norte, 57-92.
Congresso Agrícola, Colleção, 67. The Companhia União also acknowledged various longer-range possibilities for dealing with the problem of labor supply, including more use of machinery and changes that would promote more spontaneous—that is, unsubsidized immigration to Brazil. Established in 1876 by coffee planters, the Companhia União began by marketing coffee but quickly became a mortgage bank. See Sweigart, Coffee Factorage, 141.
Congresso Agrícola, Colleção, Apêndice: “Considerações que tencionava fazer no Congresso Agrícola o Sr. José Caetano de Moraes e Castro, si lhe tivesse cabido a palavra antes do encerramento, Rio, 12 julho, 1878,” 241.
Ibid., 400. This was presented as a substitute to an earlier response from the committee empowered with writing the congress report, which called for laws forcing workers to reside in a specific location.
Ademar Gebara, O mercado de trabalho livre no Brasil (1871-1888) (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1986), 26. Gebara also asserts that the Law of Free Birth, properly understood, was a “repressive” piece of legislation. Ibid., 34.
Conrad, Destruction, 38. Hall, “Origins,” 91, characterizes the 1879 law as “draconian and notes that subsidized immigrants to São Paulo province fell under its provisions. This law was nullified in 1890, and in 1916, the civil code outlawed debt peonage. Dean, Rio Claro, 169. In the northeastern interior at this time, as Linda Lewin notes, “agricultural tenants became incorporated within a subordinate arrangement that they themselves referred to as a sujeição—literally, submission or subjugation,” a system for extracting labor under “onerous and impoverishing terms.” Politics and Parentela, 74.
Celia Maria Marinho de Azevedo, Onda negra meda branco. O negro no imaginario das elites—século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987), 131-32. The 1879 labor law originated in an 1869 project by Alencar Araripe, a deputado from Ceará, whose discussion in 1874-75 brought to the fore questions of using force as a means of assuring the planters “a docile, stable labor force.” Gebara, O mercado, 86.
