Like the swing of the pendulum: The history of government-sponsored rural settlements in São Paulo, Brazil (1820s–1920s)

Bruno Gabriel Witzel de Souza

Economic History of Developing Regions, 2023, vol. 38, issue 3, 305-334

Abstract: This paper studies the history of government-sponsored rural settlements in the province/state of São Paulo, Brazil, as a pendular movement, whose points of reversion depended on the interests of a landowning elite to obtain labour for newly expanding plantations from the 1820s to the 1920s. Faltering infrastructure and ill-defined property rights over public lands were persistent constraints to the development of such rural settlements. Part of this failure can be attributed to a lack of State capacity and part to the opposition of plantation owners to the settling of independent smallholdings. The paper complements this historical-institutional analysis with a quantitative description of such settlements in 1898–1920. These late government-sponsored rural settlements showed the potential to grow in demographic and economic terms and had an overall demographic and occupational composition well aligned with the goal of creating a family-based peasantry. However, there were enormous heterogeneities in ethno-linguistic composition, educational attainment, and economic prosperity between and within such rural settlements, which point to idiosyncratic features that should be taken into account in future research assessing the short- and long-run effects of immigration and settlement policies in Brazil.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2023.2243035

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