The 1878 Fluminense Agricultural Congress: The Coffee Crisis in Brazil during the Second Empire

Abstract

This study aims to demonstrate that the coffee production in Rio de Janeiro during the Second Brazilian Empire, based on large estates and enslaved people, maintained the old production structures inherited from early modernity and the Old Iberian colonial system until its crisis in 1870. The study will demonstrate that, after Brazil’s independence in 1822, the dynamic sector of its economy, coffee, linked to the new international division of industrial labor, led world production. The coffee production in Rio de Janeiro, managed by archaic street planters and aristocrats, was fiercely opposed to the abolition of slavery and free labor. This archaic system collapsed when successive impediments to the import of enslaved Africans, an archaism inherited from the first globalization. The study finally suggests that the sedimentation in Brazil of modern capitalism with urbanization, immigration, free labor, wage labor, and import substitution industry determined the end of coffee production in Rio de Janeiro, paving the way for coffee production in the provincial dynamics of São Paulo.