Demographic growth and migrations in the transition to salaried labor in Brazil

Abstract

This article discusses the thesis according to which there was insufficient labor available for the expansion of the coffee industry after slave trading was outlawed in Brazil. Establishing a capitalist labor force without international immigration would therefore have been very difficult. On the basis of a re-reading of certain classical works in economic historiography, especially those by Celso Furtado (1974), Maria Sílvia Carvalho Franco (1984) and João M.C. de Mello (1982), and research into statistical data and other bibliographic sources, the prevailing analytic approach should be expanded to show that the transition to salaried labor, the regulation of the ownership of rural land, international policy on immigration, and the varying degrees of mobilization of Brazilian workers were all components of a strategy set up by the federal government and the oligarchies, and was not intended solely to fill in for the supposedly insufficient number of workers on the labor market.