Precedents of mass migration: Policies, occupations, and the sorting of foreigners in São Paulo, Brazil (1872)

Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza

Economic History of Developing Regions, 2022, vol. 37, issue 1, 1-26

Abstract: This paper studies the distribution of foreigners across counties of the province of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1872. The analysis stresses the historical importance of policies that fostered immigration in the nineteenth century by discussing the two main migratory strategies pursued in Brazil by the 1870s, namely the recruitment of foreign bonded labourers to the plantations and of settlers to rural colonies. The empirical approach studies the sorting of foreigners according to the economic, institutional, demographic, and geographic characteristics of the counties. Results show that the number of foreigners in 1872 was positively correlated with the ease of access to a region and with contemporaneous immigrant networks. The number of foreigners in 1872 also correlated negatively with the free, non-white, population, suggesting a degree of substitutability in local labour markets in a period before mass immigration to the region. Finally, the economic structure of the counties influenced the allocation of foreigners. Agricultural employment was associated with less immigrants, while manufacturing and trade-related activities were linked with a larger number of foreigners.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20780389.2021.1911637 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rehdxx:v:37:y:2022:i:1:p:1-26

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rehd20

DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1911637

Access Statistics for this article

Economic History of Developing Regions is currently edited by Alex Klein and Alfonso Herranz-Loncan

More articles in Economic History of Developing Regions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().