Cities and wealth in the South Atlantic: Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro before 1860

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 634-668

  Johnson, Lyman L ^a   Frank, Zephyr ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHARLOTTE   (United States)

^b STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMPARATIVE STUDY; ECONOMIC GROWTH; ECONOMIC HISTORY; GLOBALIZATION; URBAN DEVELOPMENT;

ARGENTINA; BRAZIL; BUENOS AIRES [ARGENTINA]; RIO DE JANEIRO [BRAZIL]; SOUTH AMERICA;

EID: 33746108528     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417506000259     Document Type: Article

References (166)

1. Carlos Díaz Alejandro was not unique in asserting that there had been little "vigor" or "opportunity" in the period before 1860, in Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), even though the best studies of the period documented growing exports and an expanding livestock sector. Despite these signs of dynamism most scholars emphasized the impediments to development.
2. See, as examples, Miron Burgin, The Economic Aspects of Argentine Federalism, 1820-1852 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1946), 277-78;
3. Jonathon C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776-1860 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 225.
4. Hilda Sabato provides a useful analysis of this process in Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market. Buenos in the Pastoral Age, 1840-1890 (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). She sees the transfer of land to raising sheep and the related boom in wool exports beginning at the end of the 1840s as the "decisive change." She says, "It would be through the export of wool that Argentina would gain a significant place in the world market, thus developing its internal productive capacity and promoting a rapid process of capital accumulation centered in Buenos Aires" (23). We find this "accumulation" well established earlier.
5. Roy Hora recently offered a brief summary of this period: "For decades there was little technical innovation, no attempt to modernize production. By mid-nineteenth century, the pampas were predominantly a backward cattle-grazing region." See his The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas. A Social and Political History 1860-1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10.
6. See John Lynch in his Argentine Dictator. Juan Manuel de Rosas, 1829-1852 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);
7. Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), for two evocative and convincing versions of this argument.
8. Leff found little evidence of real growth over the course of the nineteenth century, casting doubt even on the dynamism of the post-1850 period. Leff is well aware, however, of the regional dimensions of Brazilian development and finds evidence of moderate, if unspectacular growth in the Southeast (Underdevelopment and Development in Brazil, Vol. 1: Economic Structure and Change, 1822-1947 [London: Allen and Unwin, 1982], 29-30);
9. Werner Baer devotes just a few pages to the first half of the nineteenth century, suggesting that industrial growth only picked up in the 1880s, in The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 26.
10. Waren Dean similarly focuses on the later nineteenth century in his book, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880-1945 (Austin: University of Texas, 1969), 3.
11. One of the classic formulations of this argument that the estancia was "pre-capitalist" is found in Jacinto Oddone, La burguesía terrateniente argentina (3d ed., Buenos Aires: Ediciones Populares Argentinas, 1956).
12. A more modern version of this argument written for a popular audience is Enrique Wedovoy, "La estancia, θ?explotación capitalista o feudal?" Todo Es Historia 27 (1994), 318: 60-78.
13. A very useful recent examination of this period is found in Carlos Newland and Javier Ortiz, "The Economic Consequences of Argentine Independence," Cuadernos de Economía, 38, 115 (dic., 2001): 275-90.
14. One important component of this later expansion was the diversification of the livestock sector, especially the rapid development of sheep raising. See Sabato, Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market, especially 23-66.
15. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Campaña en el ejercito grande aliado de Sud América, ed. Tulio Halperín Donghi (Mexico, Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958);
16. Facundo. Edicióncrítica y documentada, Prólogo de Alberto Palcos (La Plata: Universidad nacional de La Plata, 1938).
17. John Lynch in Argentine Dictator summarized the Rosas economy in the following way: "An economy of hides and salt beef could not generate growth. It perpetuated a primitive technology and low level of employment, and it depended upon markets which were inherently stagnant," 308.
18. Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785-1870 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 290.
19. Amaral's research resides in a rich context of revisionist work that has examined the early national countryside in terms of social relations, demography, labor, and material culture. Among the many fine studies included in this literature are Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Jorge D. Gelman, El mundo rural rioplatense a fines de la época colonial: estudios sobre producción y mano de obra (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1989)
20. Raul O. Fradkin, ed., La historia agrarian del Río de la Plata colonial. Los establecimientos productivos, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1993);
21. María Mónica Bjerg and Andrea Reguera, eds., Problemas de historia agraria (Tandil: IEHS, 1995).
22. See also Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Jorge D. Gelman, "Rural History of the Río de la Plata, 1600-1850," Latin American Research Review 30, 3 (1995): 75-105, for an informative literature overview.
23. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, "Un siglo de estancias en la campana de Buenos Aires: 1751 a 1853," Hispanic American Historical Review 79, 4 (1999): 703-34. It is worth noticing that Garavaglia's dates suggest his commitment to the theme of continuity, in effect linking the Rosas era to the period before the creation of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. Amaral, on the other hand, pushes continuity forward to link the colonial past to the period of rural takeoff well after the defeat of Rosas.
24. From the estate records of estancias Garavaglia created two data sets, of sixty-five years (1751-1816) and thirty-seven years (1816-1853). He found 308 inventories for the first period and 328 for the second. Analyzing the records from 1816-1853 as a single period necessarily eliminated any opportunity to identify cyclical and secular changes within the economy during the period studied here. See Garavaglia, "Un siglo de estancias," 705-9, for his description of sources and method.
25. For a study of state formation in Brazil during the period in question, see Jeffrey Needell, The Party of Order: Society, State, and Slavery in the Conservative's Struggle for the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2006).
26. An exception is Stephen Haber and Herbert Klein, "The Economic Consequences of Brazilian Independence," in Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic History of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 243-59.
27. For the domestic use agriculture sector and retarded economic growth, see N. Leff, Under-development, 20-22;
28. for schooling rates and the human capital argument, see Stanley Engerman, Stephen Haber, and Kenneth Sokoloff, "Inequality, Institutions, and Differential Paths of Growth among New World Economies," MS., 1998; for transport costs,
29. see William Summerhill, Order against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment, and Railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);
30. for terms of trade see Celso Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil: A Survey from Colonial to Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 116-18.
31. Amilcar Martins Filho and Roberto B. Martins, "Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited," HAHR 63, 3 (1983): 537-68.
32. Douglas Libby, Transformação e trabalho em uma economia escravista: Minas Gerais no século XIX (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1988).
33. Afonso de Alencastro Graça Filho, A princesa do oeste e o mito da decadência de Minas Gerais: São João del Rei, 1831-1888 (São Paulo: Annablume, 2002), 232-33.
34. João Luís Ribeiro Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura: acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantil do Rio de Janeiro, 1790-1830 (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992).
35. See Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, "Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary's County, Maryland, 1658-1777," Historical Methods 13, 2 (Spring 1980): 81-104;
36. Alice Hanson Jones, "Wealth Estimates for the American Middle Colonies, 1774," Economic Development and Cultural Change 18, 4 (July 1970): 1-48;
37. Gloria L. Main, "Probate Records as a Source for Early American History," William and Mary Quarterly 33, 1 (Jan. 1975): 89-99.
38. Notable studies that make extensive and systematic use of estate records in the analysis of Argentina rural history include: Jeremy Adelman, Frontier Development, Land, labor, and Capital on the Wheatlands ofArgentina and Canada, 1890-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
39. Capitalism on the Pampas, by Samuel Amaral;
40. and in a series of articles by Juan Carlos Garavaglia, including "Un siglo de estancias" mentioned above and "La economía rural de la campaña de Buenos Aires vista a través de sus precios: 1756-1852," in, Raúl Fradkin and Juan Carlos Garavaglia, eds., En Busca de un Tiempo Perdido. La economía de Buenos Aires en el país de la abundancia, 1750-1865 (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2004), 107-59. For Brazil
41. see Zélia Maria Cardoso de Mello Metamorfoses da riqueza: São Paulo, 1845-1895 (São Paulo: HUCITEC, 1982);
42. Renato Leite Marcondes, A arte de acumular na economia cafeeira: Vale do Paraíba, século XIX. (Lorena: Stiliano, 1998);
43. João Fragoso, Homens de grossa aventura: Acumulação e hierarquia na praça mercantile do Rio de Janeiro, 1790-1830 (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1992);
44. Katia Mattoso Bahia, Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1992).
45. We have looked closely at the issue of using "probate" estimates of individual wealth as a measure of average wealth holding in the living population. Both of us examined large numbers of inventories and surveyed the literature on average wealth holding based on alternative sources, such as the U.S. censuses of 1850 and 1860. We concluded that estate inventories, at least in the case of Argentina and Brazil in the nineteenth century, tend to subsume the wealth of surviving family members in the estimates of decedent wealth. The wealth of married couples accumulated during the marriage was considered community property. Dowries and some other forms of wealth acquired prior to marriage were included in the listing of assets but deducted from the divisible part of the estate. Our estimates include the value of dowries.
46. For a clear discussion of Brazilian inheritance law during the nineteenth century, see Linda Lewin, "Natural and Spurious Children in Brazilian Inheritance Law from Colony to Empire: A Methodological Essay," The Americas 48, 3 (Jan. 1992): 351-96.
47. As a rough indicator of the coverage of the estate samples relative to potential wealth holding decedents in Rio de Janeiro, we found an average of thirty-five records per year for the 1850s, selecting one out of every three cases. Thus, for a given year in this period, there are about 105 inventory records in the National Archive. Using rough indicators of mortality rates, about 600 heads of households and another 400 spouses comprise the yearly number of potential wealth holding decedents. From this, we suggest that the surviving estate records represent no less than 10 percent of decedent heads of households and spouses. For an extended discussion of these matters, see Frank, Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), data appendix. The consistent proportion of married decedents is reassuring with regard to the representative value of the samples. Although we lack detailed household-level census data for the city of Rio, evidence from neighboring Minas Gerais shows that the number of married decedents in a similarly constructed probate sample mirrors the proportion of married heads of households in the living population. In São Jose, Minas Gerais, the figure was 60 percent married in the inventory sample (c. 1820, N = 125) and 59 percent married among all living heads of households (c. 1831, N = 3,978). In Rio, married decedents comprised 62 and 64 percent of the samples circa 1820 and 1855 respectively. This level is consistent and quite plausible vis-à-vis the living population, although we still expect that the married decedents were older on average than their living married counterparts. Sources for Minas: Raw census data, generously provided by Clotilde Paiva; inventory sample, drawn by Frank from the collection of the Museu Histórico, São João del Rei.
48. See, for example, Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1800-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 7.
49. Thomas H. Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 131-37.
50. The manuscript census data for Rio de Janeiro that would help fix this number more precisely has been lost or destroyed. According to Karasch's careful analysis, there was an average of 3.6 slaves per household in Rio de Janeiro circa 1849. If we assume two-thirds of households owned no slaves, the mean slaveholding in the city would equal 10.9, roughly equal to the mean number of slaves in the estate samples, although, subtracting rural slaves from the inventories results in a mean of between six and seven slaves in the city itself.
51. The source for this calculation is the Lançamento da Décima Urbana, 1849, Arquivo da Cidade, Rio de Janeiro. Additional support for our contention that at least 30 percent of houses were owner-occupied can be found in later estimates of this ratio for the city of São Paulo. In the 1880s, when São Paulo's level of urbanization was probably similar to that of Rio de Janeiro in the 1820s, the estimated proportion of owner-occupied houses was 32 percent, Relatorio apresentado ao exm. sr. Presidente da provincia de São Paulo pela commissão central de estatística (São Paulo: Typ. King, 1888), 25.
52. For a discussion of the proportion of households with wealth in Rio, see Ricardo Antonio Rocha Silveira, "The Distribution of Wealth in Brazil - The Case of Rio de Janeiro: 1870s to 1980s," Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1985, 106, 110.
53. Information on the age of decedents prior to the 1880s is largely unavailable in Brazilian estate inventories. Our simple method to account for age bias in the estate samples is to assume that the age effects found for the 1880s can be projected back to earlier years. For the 1880s, we have forty-nine cases for which age and wealth can be fixed. As we expected, the younger (fifteen to thirty-nine) and the older (sixty+) held less wealth on average than those in the middle range of age (forty to fifty-nine). The consequence of multiplying the mean wealth in each range by its approximate weight in the total population results in a 20 percent decline in the estimate of mean inventoried wealth. This figure is based on a later period, and on a small number of observations, so it must be seen as a very rough approximation.
54. Our assumption that 55 percent of households were propertyless should be considered an extreme assumption. See, for example, Silveira "The Distribution of Wealth in Brazil," 106, 110. Note, as well, that this approach differs from our estimate for Buenos Aires, in which the "nonprobate-type" population is assumed to hold 25 percent of total wealth.
55. Census of 1821, cited in Karasch, Slave Life, 62.
56. The 1845-1849 sample is discussed in detail in Frank, Dutra's World, 57. The ratio of urban real estate to total wealth, in this period, was 42 percent.
57. Source of property tax estimate: Lançamento da Decima Urbana, Rio de Janeiro, 1849, Arquivo Geral da Prefeitura, Rio de Janeiro. We are grateful to the archivists at the AGPRJ for allowing us to use the property tax books. This is the first study to make systematic use of this invaluable source. The calculation of $232 per head was arrived at by summing up the total rental value of the 14,703 properties listed for the seven central parishes - Sacramento, São José, Candelária, Santa Rita, Santa Anna, Engenho Velho, and Gloria - and then assuming that the value of the 1,402 remaining properties (those listed in the tax rolls but not given a value and not indicated as "without value") was equal to the mean for the known properties. The relationship between rental value and full value was established by analyzing monthly rental rates of identical properties found in both estate records and the decima urbana. The implied ratio of rental value to full value is 0.08.
58. For a description of Leff's method, see his Underdevelopment, 101, 123.
59. The source of Leff's price index is: Eulalia Maria Lahmeyer Lobo, História do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: IBMEC, 1978), vol. 2, 748-50. Lobo actually constructed three indexes, purportedly measuring different types of consumption. Leff used Lobo's 1856-weighted series, which shows by far the largest increase.
60. For explicit criticism of Lobo's price indexes, see Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, Bahia: Século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1992), 557-60;
61. Carlos Manuel Peláez and Wilson Suzigan, História Monetária do Brasil (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1976), 112-13.
62. Lobo's 1919-weighted index has been used recently, in lieu of the 1856-weights, by William Summerhill, Order against Progress, 86-90. Summerhill also rejects Lobo's 1856-weighted index as unreliable.
63. Nominal wealth per head rose at a rate of 4.5 percent per annum over the period under consideration.
64. Mircea Buescu, 300 Anos de inflação (Rio de Janeiro: APEC, 1973), 223. The Buescu series is based on wholesale prices from newspapers in Rio de Janeiro. It is not weighted and relies on interpolation to fill the series. Thus, just as we suspect that Lobo's series overstates inflation, it is possible that Buescu's series understates it.
65. See Marta B. Goldberg, "La población negra y mulata de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1810-1840," Desarrollo Económico 16, 61 (abril-junio 1976): Especially 84, 88-89, for discussion of the episodic end to the slave trade and effects of recruitment and manumission on population size.
66. See also Lyman L. Johnson, "Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires," Hispanic American Historical Review 59, 2 (May 1979): 258-79.
67. There were still two decedents in 1855 that had three or more slaves listed in their inventories, despite abolition. We recommend the still very useful Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of Rio de la Plata (London: John Murray, 1852) by Sir Woodbine Parish, especially pp. 114-16
68. the best modern summary is in George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).
69. A more compact discussion of the incremental abolition of slavery is found in Lyman L. Johnson, 'The Competition of Slave and Free Labor in Artisanal Production, 1770-1815," International Review of Social History 40, 3 (1995): Especially 421-24.
70. This is convincingly argued by Newland and Ortiz in "Economic Consequences," 284-87.
71. Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 227-29, estimates estancia profits in this period. In a close analysis of two estates, he finds annual profits in 1831 (a six-year analysis) to be 18.2 percent, and the one-year profit for the 1856 case to be 27.5 percent.
72. See María Alejandra Irigoin, "La expansión en la campaña de Buenos Aires, 1820-1860: θ?una consecuencia de la financiación inflacionaria del deficit fiscal?" in, Raúl Fradkin y Juan Carlos Garavaglia, eds., En Busca de un Tiempo Perdido. La economía de Buenos Aires en el País de la abundancia, 1750-1865 (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2004), 287-330. She argues that the inflationary policies of the Rosas government promoted land concentration and social inequalities.
73. All estimates provided for the City of Buenos Aires are composites of these two two-year periods, 1829-1830 (120 cases) and 1854-1855 (179 cases). This is the universe of surviving estate inventories.
74. Because some parish registers were destroyed during the second term of Juan Domingo Perón, these estimates must be regarded as imperfect. Unfortunately, there are no alternative sources.
75. The Buenos Aires estate records were adjusted using statistical weights developed from those used by Alice Hanson Jones in Wealth of a Nation to Be (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). The inventory-age adult populations from the 1827 and 1855 censuses were distributed into life cycle cohorts YOUTH (ages fifteen to twenty-four), ADULT (twenty-five to fifty), and OLDER ADULT (over fifty) as percentages. The calculation of the 1829-1830 "w" weight, age adjustment, will be used here to demonstrate the procedure, since the same procedure was used for both periods. We used the provincial census of 1827, the census that provided the closest chronological fit for the first of our two groups, to adjust the inventoried population. First, the reported ages of potential wealth holders in the census were assigned to the three life cycle cohorts used in coding the estate information. The results were: YOUTH = 30 percent, ADULT = 54 percent, and OLDER ADULT = 16 percent. And second, these census-based percentages were then divided by the actual number of cases found for the three life cycle categories in the estate records to create the age weight. For example, the YOUTH cohort for the 1827 census included 30 percent of the total population of potential wealth holders. The estate records for the 1829-1830 provided twenty-seven cases where decedents could be confidently assigned to the YOUTH cohort. Consequently, the weighted average for the YOUTH cohort is 0.30/27. This calculation produces a weight of 0.01111 for the YOUTH cohort and, after the appropriate calculations, 0.00530 and 0.00137 for the ADULT and OLDER ADULT cohorts. This calculation follows that used by Alice Hanson Jones. Her full explanation of the original method is found in American Colonial Wealth, 3 vols. (New York: Arno Press, 1978), vol. 3, 1879- 1880. Once the weights for each age cohort were established, the sorted total estate values from the inventories were multiplied by the weights to establish the age-adjusted means for all the wealth categories. When applied to the universe of cases, "w" must equal 1.
76. The second weight, our "wA" weight, adjusted the "w" weighted estate data to reflect the estimated average wealth of the adult population of potential wealth holders not found in the estate records. We estimate that 22.8 percent of potential wealth holding decedents were inventoried in 1830. In this case, PROB = 0.228 and (nonprobate) NPROB = 0.772 (NPROB = 100 percent = PROB). Here again, we follow closely the methods developed by Alice Hanson Jones in her study of colonial British America. We estimate that the "nonprobate type" population of wealth holders had 25 percent of all wealth. For additional clarification of the methods used here see the discussion for finding the weighted average for the nonprobate-type wealthholder on p. 1985f of Alice Hanson Jones, American Colonial Wealth, vol. 3. The formula reads: WA Weighted Average = PROB (0.228) multiplied (*) by w (age Weighted Average) plus (+) NPROB (0.772) multiplied by Zi. Basically Zi is the w weight (age adjustment) over the proportion of the estates that will bring the mean wealth of the cases up to that point to one-quarter of mean total wealth. By plugging in all of the known values, the new "nonprobated" weighted average equation reads as follows: 0.228* (w) + (0.772/ 0.70140) * (w). This equation can be further reduced by using simple algebra. (So wa = w * (0.228 + (0.772/0.70140)). For the remaining cases the formula simplifies to wA = w * PROB (or w * 0.228). The sum of these new weighted averages, when applied to the universe of cases, (wA's) must equal 1.
77. Estate inventory values were assessed in paper pesos throughout the period. Mean inventoried wealth for the city of Buenos Aires in 1830 (including money owed to decedents) was 10,191 paper pesos. In 1855 mean wealth was 163,033 paper pesos. The conversion to constant 1830 pesos is made by dividing by 3.27. Professor Samuel Amaral generously helped us through the numerous problems of currency conversion.
78. Although we approached the process of adjusting our data to reflect wealth among the living in different ways, the final effect of our calculations turned out to be remarkably similar. For Buenos Aires circa 1830, the adjusted mean value for net household wealth is 39 percent of the raw figure; in Rio de Janeiro, the adjusted net mean is 36 percent of the raw value.
79. The next highest decile was better off and experienced greater growth in wealth, rising from just under $8 to $24 by 1855.
80. Fernando Enrique Barba, Aproximación al studio de los precios y salarios en Buenos Aires desde fines del siglo XVIII hasta 1860. Series y problemas en torno al tratamiento de los mismos (La Plata, Argentina: Editorial de la Universidad nacional de la Plata, 1999). According to Barba's graphical depiction of inflation in Buenos Aires, we concluded that the price level may have risen eightfold over the period 1830-1855 - implying an 8.0 percent per annum rate of increase.
81. Here we use the paper peso to silver peso conversion as a proxy for the exchange rate. The conversion rises from an index value of 100 in 1830 to 324 in 1855.
82. The calculation is 0.45 [exchange rate] * 4.7 + 0.55 [domestic prices] * 8.0.
83. Table 2, line 1, adjusted to per-head values by dividing by 5.5 in 1830 and 6.2 in 1855.
84. The annual growth in wealth per head in Buenos Aires was slightly slower than that found for household wealth because we discovered a slightly larger average household size in 1855 than in 1830 in contemporary censuses.
85. For similar arguments, see Elizabeth Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban Development in São Paulo (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 112-33.
86. In the case of Buenos Aires there are no systematic analyses of wages in this period. Labor supply and wages are, however, discussed by Miron Burgin, The Economic Aspects of Argentine Federalism, 1820-1852 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1946), 28, 267.
87. See also Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 159-81.
88. For instance, the mean value of cash and bank deposits per inventory in Rio de Janeiro was 7.5 times higher than in the smaller interior city of São João del Rei, in the populous state of Minas Gerais, circa 1855. For the latter case, Frank analyzed 367 estate records for the period 1850-1860. A smaller sample for São Paulo (N = 119) indicates that Rio's decedents held, on average, about three times as much wealth in cash and bank deposits at the same juncture.
89. Brazilian figures from Leff, Underdevelopment, 241, 247; Argentine figures graciously provided by Carlos Newland. The rate of increase in both instances was measured in terms of the rise over the periods 1821-1825 to 1856-1860.
90. Throughout the period under review, over half of all Brazil's exports flowed through the port of Rio de Janeiro. An even greater percentage of Argentine exports exited via the port of Buenos Aires and nearby provincial ports.
91. Parish, Buenos Ayres, 358. Local exporters developed numerous ways around these obstacles.
92. See Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 90-91.
93. Registro Estadistico del Estado de Buenos Aires, 1856, tomo segundo, Direccíon General de Estadistica, Provincia de Buenos Aires, 1857, 77.
94. Following his overthrow, Juan Manuel de Rosas fled into exile in England but was tried never the less by his successors. The case focused on illegal executions and the seizure of properties of political enemies. See Causa Criminal Seguida contra el ex-gobernador Juan Manuel de Rosas, edición facsimile de la original de 1864 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Freeland, 1975), 2.
95. For a recent publication that convincingly argues that the Rosas-era political priorities focused the province's limited assets in institutions devoted to repression, see Juan Carlos Garavaglia, "La apoteosis del Leviathan: El estado en Buenos Aires durante la primera mitad del XIX," Latin American Research Review 38, 1 (Feb. 2003): 135-68.
96. For the property law regime in existence prior to 1829, see Andres Lamas, La legislación agraria de Bernardino Rivadavia (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1933), especially 38-62.
97. For the Rosas period see summaries in Sabato, Agrarian Capitalism, 42-44
98. Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 85, 147-48.
99. Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital. Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 115-27. On p. 132 Adelman quotes one group of merchants who addressed Rosas stating, "The liberty we enjoy in the possession of our property, and in the transaction of our business; and in the uniform kindness with which our proper requests have been always attended to, are reasons that ... draw forth our warmest expressions of gratitude" (126).
100. Amaral provides indirect evidence of a growing preference for direct ownership rather than leaseholds in his study of the estancias of Buenos Aires province. Overall, from circa 1820 to circa 1850, the ratio of the value of estancias on leased land to those on owned land value fell from 0.30 to 0.13. Leasing was especially common on the southern frontier of the province, where property rights were weakest, in the 1820s. By the 1850s, however, the ratio of leased-to-owned land in the former frontier zone was 0.06, even lower than the province-wide average, The Rise of Capitalism, 313-14.
101. See also, Sabato., Agrarian Capitalism, 42-43.
102. For a discussion of the economics of Brazilian Independence, see Haber and Klein, "The Economic Consequences of Brazilian Independence," 243-59.
103. Although the Atlantic trade was supposedly illegal in Brazil according to a treaty signed with Great Britain in 1826, Brazil only passed a law outlawing the trade in November of 1831. Passed at a point when the trade was in disarray and antislavery forces briefly ascendant, the law was enforced sporadically and eventually ignored as slaves poured into Rio de Janeiro in the 1830s and 1840s. For a clear discussion of the legal and political questions involved, see Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), especially 69-87.
104. The most troubling rebellion took on the color of a civil war in Rio Grande do Sul, known as the Farrapos revolt. Other rebellions broke out in the North and Northeast. For a synopsis, see Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, 68.
105. Roderick Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-91 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 120-21.
106. Maria Bárbara Levy, História do balsa de valores do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: IBMEC, 1978), 77;
107. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Da senzala a colônia (São Paulo: UNESP, 1997 [1966]), 35.
108. For a discussion of the Commercial Code in general, see Richard Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 25-26. Note that the chartering of joint-stock companies depended upon the approval of the Imperial government. Partnerships, in general, were also registered under the rules of the Chamber of Commerce (Junta Commercial), which stipulated strict rules for the relationships among partners and their outside creditors.
109. See Código Comercial, Lei 556, de 25 June 1850, especially Articles 797 through 913 on bankruptcy and the dissolution of partnerships.
110. da Costa, Da Senzala;
111. Graham, Britain, 25
112. For 1845-1849, there were 116 observations drawn from the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro in the same manner as the other samples cited in this paper. For more detail regarding this smaller sample period see Frank, Dutra's World, ch. 3.
113. Among the numerous studies to confront these questions are Adelman, Frontier Development;
114. Hora, Landowners of the Argentine Pampas;
115. and Sabato, Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market.
116. Rio's immediate hinterland was not appropriate for coffee cultivation. Sugar was the plantation crop of choice, but this industry was in decline in the area during the nineteenth century. For the stagnation in the 1870s of coffee estates in the old plantation area of the Paraíba Valley, see Stanley Stein's classic study, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957).
117. The expansion of coffee in São Paulo is well documented in Warren Dean's Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
118. Baer, Brazilian Economy, 17-18.
119. For a good discussion of transport bottlenecks before the railroads, see Summerhill, Order against Progress, ch. 2.
120. Inventários, Rio de Janeiro, AN. Mean wealth among this group was 73,882 dollars.
121. For an account of the residential patterns of coffee planters, see Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149-55.
122. Rate reported in terms of mil-réis of 1850, deflated according to Leff's formula with Lobo's 1919 weights for the Rio CPI.
123. Population figures cited in Karasch, Slave Life, 62, 66.
124. The idea that rising prices in the 1850s would have restricted access was suggested by Seymour Drescher, "Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective," HAHR 68, 3 (Aug. 1988): 429-60, specifically 446.
125. This study separates the urban residents found in the estate records from the rural. As a result, the percentages presented here are different than those published elsewhere based on the entire sample of decedents.
126. The authors thank Mark Szuchman for his help with population estimates for Buenos Aires. See also Nicolás Besio Moreno, Buenos Aires. Puerto del Río de la Plata. Capital de la República Argentina. Estudio critico de su población, 1536-1936 (Talleres gráficos Tuduri: Buenos Aires, 1939).
127. Fernando Aliata reports these numbers derived from John Lynch in "Edilicia privada y crecimiento urbano en el Buenos Aires posrevolucionario, 1824-1827," Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana, 3d series, no. 7 (1993): See 62-68.
128. Parish, Buenos Ayres, 104-5, draws attention to accumulating urban real estate wealth.
129. Jeremy Adelman, in Republic of Capital, notes, "That under such uncertain circumstances and faced with great volatility in markets, Buenos Aires capitalists adopted a decidedly risk-averse approach to economic affairs, while at the same time being opportunistic" (124).
130. Quote found in Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, 29.
131. This calculation depends on the full probate sample that includes rural as well as urban decedents.
132. See Laura Leonor Cabrejas, "Vivienda, muebles e indumentaria," in, Carlos A. Mayo, ed., Vivir en la Frontera (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2000), 41-70.
133. This paucity of consumer goods is expected, however, and has been confirmed in numerous other studies as well. See, for example, Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, 30-31.
134. For a good description of the interior of Rio de Janeiro's houses, see John Luccock, Notes on Rio de Janeiro and the Southern Parts of Brazil (London: Samuel Leigh, 1820), 118-19.
135. The authors thank Gavin Wright for calling attention to this problem.
136. Although the idea of slaves' owning property is counterintuitive, it was by no means uncommon in American slavery. See Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
137. For a discussion of ex-slaves purchasing bondsmen of their own in Rio de Janeiro, see Karasch, Slave Life, 90;
138. and Frank, Dutra's World.
139. Karasch, Slave Life, 66.
140. Jones, for instance, suggests that counting slaves as potential wealthholders raises the Gini coefficient for the colonial American South by about 17 percent from 0.688 to 0.805 (American Colonial Wealth, vol. 3, 2115, 2122).
141. In an earlier publication, "The Frontier as an Arena of Social and Economic Change: Wealth Distribution in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires Province," in Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 178-79, Johnson estimated the Gini for the city of Buenos Aires in 1855 as 0.78. The small difference between that measure and the 0.79 published here is the result of a minor mistake in coding discovered after the publication of Johnson's essay in Guy and Sheridan.
142. See Jorge Gelman and Daniel Santilli, "Distribución de la riqueza y crecimiento económico," Desarrollo Económico, 43:169 (abril-junio 2003), especially 80-86. Gelman and Santilli adjust the tax data by assigning zero wealth to missing "census units." They report a Gini coefficient of 0.6947.
143. This tax is also discussed in the context of rural wealth holding in their "Una medición de la económia rural de Buenos Aires en la epoca de Rosas: Expanción ganadera y diferencias regionales," in Revista de Historia Económica, año XX, No. 1 (Invierno 2002): 81-107.
144. For a recent example of an emphasis on the latter part of the nineteenth century in the literature on Latin America in the Atlantic World, see Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999).
145. Jeremy Atack and Peter Passel, A New Economic History of American History (New York: Norton, 1994), 116, where exports are reported at over 22 dollars per head.
146. Ibid., 117.
147. For the growth of regional markets, see Winifred Barr Rothenberg's work, From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For another useful study of endogenous growth of the "industrious" type,
148. see David F. Weiman, "Farmers and the Market in Antebellum America: A View from the Georgia Upcountry," Journal of Economic History 47, 3 (Sept. 1987): 627-47. The benefits of public land policies and the role of land sales in raising GDP in the United States is explored in Atack and Passel, New Economic History, 261-70.
149. The benefits of public land policies and the role of land sales in raising GDP in the United States is explored in Atack and Passel, New Economic History, 261-70.
150. Lee Soltow, Distribution of Wealth and Income in the United States in 1798 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 199.
151. Raymond W. Goldsmith, "The Growth of Reproducible Wealth of the United States of America from 1805 to 1950," in, Simon Kuznets, ed. Income and Wealth of the United States: Trends and Structure (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1952), 269, reports real tangible wealth growth of 2.2 percent between 1805 and 1850.
152. Lee Soltow reports real per head growth in wealth holding among males over 20 at 1.9 percent in the United States between 1798 and 1860, Distribution of Wealth and Income, 38.
153. Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis, Minn.: Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], 2004.
154. Randolph Campbell and Richard Lowe, Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1977), 95.
155. Ibid.
156. Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, 259;
157. Boston data from Gloria Main, "Inequality in Early America: The Evidence from Probate Records of Massachusetts and Maryland," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7, 4 (Spring 1977): 559-81, data from p. 560. For an overview,
158. see Carol Shammas, "A New Look at Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality in the United States," The American Historical Review 98, 2 (Apr. 1993): 412-31.
159. The Gini coefficients for the entire province of Buenos Aires, including the urban population examined in this essay, were 0.63 in 1830 and 0.73 in 1855.
160. Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, 285.
161. The range expressed in these figures results from calculating the number of families with zero wealth at 50 and 60 percent of all families respectively.
162. Gloria Main, "Inequality in Early America," 560. The Gini coefficient for Boston according to census data, circa 1860, was 0.94. Tax data for 1845 yields a Gini of 0.91 and a top decile share of 73 percent.
163. There are important exceptions to this generalization: Adelman's Frontier Development;
164. James Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas: A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860-1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).
165. Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments, Institutions, and Different Paths of Growth among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States," in, Stephen Haber, ed., How Latin America Fell Behind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 260-306, for an intriguing synthesis. However, the essay makes clear how little is known about Latin American economies prior to the late nineteenth century.
166. The best overall discussion of the sources of economic underdevelopment in Brazil during the nineteenth century, which places great emphasis on the backwardness of the domestic agricultural sector (the interior) remains Nathaniel Leff's Underdevelopment, vol. 1.