Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886-1934

When slavery was abolished in 1888, Sao Paulo, Brazil, subsidized the immigration of workers from southern Europe and Japan. Faced with a worldwide coffee market and abundant land for expansion, native planters developed a package of incentives to attract workers, in contrast to the coercive labor systems historically common in other plantation systems. By the 1930s a clear majority of the small and medium-sized coffee farms were owned by first-generation immigrants.

Originally published 198...