Land Inequality in a Coffee Economy: São Paulo During the Early Twentieth Century

This article examines the distribution of land ownership in northeastern São Paulo, Brazil, the leading coffee export region in the world at the early twentieth century. Based on a detailed agricultural census, we find a widespread presence of small and medium-size farms, with varied degrees of land concentration across subregions and municipalities. Still, large farms and latifundia controlled most of the productive resources in northeast São Paulo, resulting in higher land inequality than observed in most of other export regions in the Americas, such as the US South’s cotton areas in the antebellum period.