Beyond Masters and Slaves: Subsistence Agriculture as a Survival Strategy in Brazil During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

HE accumulation of capital has been a preferred framework for choice of topics of study in Brazilian historiography. This tendency is found not only in the emphasis on regional studies that concern principal exporting areas and, later, industrial centers,' but also in social history. Studies involving sociohistorical analysis are concerned predominantly with the type of work force which contributed to capital accumulation: slavery until the nineteenth century, immigration during the First Republic, urban workers after 1930. I do not intend to deny the obvious relevance of these topics of analysis, but only to emphasize that this tendency has led to neglect of the demographic variable as a fundamental factor in the historical study of any society. For example, the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of specific interest here, has been studied preferentially from the viewpoint of agricultural exportation based on slave labor, whereas free and freed people composed 41 percent of the Brazilian population by -8i8, a proportion which grew to 84 percent by 1874.2 Notwithstanding its numerical significance (comprising a majority by the second half of the past century), the poor free population in slave society has almost