YSI-EHES Economic History Graduate Webinar: André Lanza

André Lanza, doctoral candidate from the University of São Paulo will present his paper: FROM “ARMS TO THE FARM” TO LANDOWNERS? IMMIGRATION AND ECONOMIC MOBILITY IN SÃO PAULO STATE, BRAZIL (1886-1905).

Registration form to attend the webinar: here.

Abstract: During the age of mass migration, São Paulo state, Brazil, received over 2,5 million immigrants. Attracting immigrant labor was a priority, especially after the abolition of slavery. These foreigners had the dream to become landowners, but the dominant view among the farmers and the policymakers was that immigrants should be committed to work on the coffee farms, not own land right away. What is puzzling in this case is that, despite the existence and enforcement of land laws designed to protect the existing elites, many immigrants did obtained land, settled in it, and made significant improvements on it. According to my research, by 1920 European immigrants owned about 25% of the rural establishments in the state in São Paulo, or over 15% of the occupied land. The existing literature on European immigration and on the agricultural development of Sao Paulo is not clear on whether immigrants arriving to work on the coffee farms were able to ascend to landowner status. In this paper, I aim to explain it using individual data on the rural landowners of the state from an agricultural census of 1905 and over 1,5 million entries of the Immigrants Hostel registry records. By using an state of the art data analysis techniques, I crossed the names of the Europeans registered at the Immigrants Hostel with the foreigners listed as landowners in the 1905 census. This allowed me to identify who were and how many of the immigrants who passed through the Hostel were actually able to acquire land. In this paper I show that the answer varies with the nationality of the immigrant, their timing of arrival and with their location at the state.