African Slavery and the Reckoning of Brazil

Guilherme Lambais and Nuno Palma

No 18716, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: More enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil than in any other country in the New World. Using new archival data, we build real wage and slave price series for Brazil covering 1574-1920. Wages initially matched those in Europe but fell as the slave trade expanded, only recovering when the trade ended and slave prices rose. We develop a directed technical change model with slave tasks to explain this finding. We also estimate a large, positive causal effect of slave trade prohibition on wages, consistent with our model. Post-prohibition, there was technological change towards free labor and concentration of slave labor in high-disamenity occupations.

Keywords: Comparative development; Slave trade; Colonial Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J47 N36 N96 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12
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Working Paper: African Slavery and the Reckoning of Brazil (2023)
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