The Shaping of the First Republic: an Introduction

The outstanding fact in Brazilian nineteenth century economic history was the great development of coffee production from the 1830s. On the one hand the rapid spread of coffee plantations in the hinterland of the state of Rio de Janeiro consolidated the southward drift of the dynamic nucleus of economic activity begun with the gold rush of the eighteenth century and gave birth to a class of wealthy slave-owning planters who became the political mainstay of the imperial regime established after Brazil’s political independence from Portugal in 1822. On the other hand it defined the pattern in which the country was to be integrated in the new international division of labour emerging during the Pax Britannica. Its main characteristics were the growth of the new staple’s exports to the United States — which towards the end of the century would become Brazil’s largest market — and other dynamic coffee-consuming countries such as the German States; a great dependence on industrial imports, especially from the United Kingdom, until the decline of British competition and import substitution in cotton textiles and other British industrial staples substantially reduced her share in Brazilian imports in the last decades of the century; and a growing foreign long-term debt in the form of both government loans issued in London for fiscal reasons since political independence through Rothschilds — who became the sole agent for the Brazilian government by the middle of the century — and, later, of public utility company loans, mostly railway loans, which increased substantially from the late 1860s.