Proto-Industrialisation XIX Minas

Proto-Industrialisation in a Slave Society: The Case of Minas Gerais
Author(s): Douglas Cole Libby

Source: Journal of Latin American Studies , Feb., 1991, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 1-
35
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave
Society: The Case of Minas Gerais
DOUGLAS COLE LIBBY
The proto-industrialisation model and the slave economy

As originally proposed in the early I970s, the pr
model was meant to serve as a more complete expla
in the general transition from agrarian feudalism t
rather vaguely referred to as the period of manufactur
emphasised the role of proto-industrialisation in cha
toward fully-fledged factory system industrialisat
theories dealing with the complex interplay of
demographic, cultural and technological processes e
uncertainties generated by the original debates over
transition. Certainly, it is no longer possible to den
rural/peasant non-agricultural productive activities t
early factory industry as a whole, as well as to soc
the emergence of a proletariat.
In more recent years, however, the proto-industr
been challenged to account for examples of historic
obvious proto-industrial nature, which did not lead
factory-based industrialisation. Proto-industrialisat
clusively viewed as a preparatory phase in the indust
L. A. Clarkson likes to insist, a good many example
production in the secondary sector were clearl
industrialisation as a general economic trend in c
societies even though they did not constitute an ini
industrialisation. In fact, the cottage industries of
subject to decay, the causes of which were varied a
complex, usually resulting in a process of de-indus
and others also disagree with the chronological lim
1See, for example, F. Mendels, 'Proto-industrialization:
Industrialization Process', Journal of Economic History, vol. 3
2 L. A. Clarkson, Proto-industrialisation: The First Phase of I
1985), pp. 28-38. Also H. Kisch, 'The Textile Industries in Si
A Comparative Study', in P. Kriedte, H. Medick & J. Schlum
before Industrialisation (London/Paris, 1981), pp. 178-200, esp
Douglas Libby is Associate Professor of History at the U

Minas Gerais.
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 23, 1- 5 Printed in Great Britain

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2 Douglas Cole Libby
proto-industrial model. Rural industry was commonplace in certain

regions from the end of the Middle Ages onwards and, perhaps more
importantly still, proto-industrial labour relations and productive
organisation survived the successful implantation of the factory system
and were, indeed, a valuable complement to the latter.3 The practical
result of the critical revision of the proto-industrial model has been a
broadening of the concept which tends to allow for the inclusion of a
much wider range of observable historical phenomena within what might
be labelled as proto-industrial phases or tendencies. Bearing in mind the
broadened concept, this article argues for the existence of a Brazilian or,
more specifically, a mineiro late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century variant
of proto-industrialisation. It focuses on those pre-conditions and features
of proto-industrialisation which, in one way or another, shed light on the
remarkable growth and eventual demise of a domestic textile industry in
late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Minas Gerais.
Proto-industrialisation can broadly be defined as wide-scale rural
production of industrial goods destined for distant markets and based on
low-cost peasant labour. Among the pre-conditions necessary for a proto-
industrial 'take-off' were the breakdown or modification of feudal
relations of domination; the growth of inter-regional and/or international
commerce; and a pattern of demographic growth provoked by the
spreading implementation of more productive agricultural methods
which, in turn, liberated a certain proportion of peasants to pursue non-
agricultural activities. These basic pre-conditions reinforced each other.
Thus, the weakening of seigniorial domination resulted in the feudal
lord's willingness to commute labour services, or even to promote proto-
industrial activities. This made it easier for merchants, stimulated by the
increasing demands of the export trade, to capitalise on an untapped rural
labour force, advantageously unfettered by urban guild regulations.4
Once unleashed, proto-industrialisation is thought to have further
consolidated population growth as a result of the widening economic
horizon of the peasant family which encouraged earlier marriage and
family formation as well as increased birth rates.5 The overall agricultural
3 Clarkson, Proto-industrialisation, p. 52. See also: M. Berg, The Age of Manufactures:
Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain, 1700-1820 (London, i985), pp. 289, 313-14;
J. K. J. Thomson, 'Variations in Industrial Structure in Pre-Industrial Languedoc', in
M. Berg, P. Hudson & M. Sonenscher, Manufacture in Town and Country before the
Factory (Cambridge, I983), pp. 6 -93.
4 Based on P. Kriedte, 'The Origins, the Agrarian Context and the Conditions in the
World Market', in Kriedte, Medick & Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before In-
dustrialisation, pp. 12-37.
5 H. Medick, 'The Demo-economic System of Proto-industrialisation, in ibid., pp.
74-94, especially pp. 82-9. It should be noted, however, that recent studies have shown
that the links between proto-industrialisation and increased demographic growth rates

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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Society 3
context must also be emphasised. On the one hand, proto-industrial rural

labour did not altogether abandon agriculture or husbandry. Indeed, the
subsistence nature of these pursuits was an essential element of low-cost
peasant labour. By extension, the peasant mentality, fixed as it was on the
all important maintenance of independent means of survival - a stubborn,
instilled resistance to entering into wage relations -would prove
invaluable in assuring merchants the continued advantages garnered from
so-called 'peasant self-exploitation'.6 On the other hand, a more
productive agricultural sector and proto-industrialisation were com-
plementary, for the partial shift away from subsistence farming implicit in
the latter provided commercial agriculture with an expanding market, the
consolidation of which may have reassured peasants that reallocation of
work time in favour of commodity production was an increasingly valid
survival option.7
However, if one attempts to compare the social and economic
conditions of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Minas Gerais with
the pre-conditions briefly described above, a number of rather serious
problems immediately present themselves. In the first place, the
captaincy/province of Minas was most definitely not, in any sense, a
feudal society. It was a slave society with all the attendant differences such
a designation implies in relation to feudal Europe (notwithstanding
certain historiographical tendencies which insist upon emphasising the
continuities between Latin American slave systems and feudalism).8 In a
slave system, after all, the social institution of slavery constitutes the
predominant form of labour. That does not preclude the existence of an
independent, free peasantry engaged in subsistence farming, but it does
presuppose that slave labour is absolutely indispensible for the more
were neither automatic nor straightforward. Indeed, the demographic issues raised by
the proto-industrial model are proving to be extremely complex, although there seems
to be no reason to doubt that, in general, population increase did accompany proto-
industrialisation. See, for example: B. Hill, 'The Marriage Age of Women and the
Demographers', History Workshop, vol. 28 (Autumn I989), pp. I29-47.
6 H. Medick, 'Household and Family in Agrarian Societies and in the Proto-industrial
System: An Approach to the Problem', in Kriedte, Medick & Schlumbohm,
Industrialisation before Industrialisation, pp. 38-73.
7 Clarkson, Proto-industrialisation, p. I6.
8 N. W. Sodre, Historia da Burguesia Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, I976), pp. 25-35. Sodre
speaks of the 'feudal peripheries' of the dominant slave system, but the implication is
that those regions which exited from the system - including parts of Minas - retreated
into feudal configurations. A recent return to the theme of feudalistic institutional
forms imbedded in the Brazilian slave system is S. Hirano, Pre-capitalismo e Capitalismo
(Sao Paulo, 1988).

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dynamic sectors of the economy. However, it must be quickly added that

the Minas Gerais of the post-gold rush period was a distinctly atypical
slave system. The rapid decline of gold production which took place from
I760 on had removed, in a sense, the very raison d'etre of the mineiro slave
economy. Despite Pombaline policies aimed at revising the mining
economy9 the region irrevocably slipped out of the colonial mercantile
system, since it was unable to produce other goods in large volumes for
the European market.
The logical result of this divorce from the colonial regime should have
been the gradual extinction of the slave system. Indeed, until quite
recently, most interpretations of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Minas assumed that the period was one of deep economic stagnation,
sluggish population growth and even out-migration of bondsmen, as
destitute mineiro slave holders liquidated their valuable stock through sales
to coffee growers in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and the Mata Mineiro.10
Furtado takes the assumption even further, observing that the system
underwent '... a general process of atrophy and loss of vitality, and
eventually broke down into a mere form of subsistence economy' and
that, among non-indigenous populations, the Western hemisphere had
never witnessed '... so complete a process of involution from an economic
system.'11 But over the last decade a good deal of scholarly investigation
relating to the nineteenth-century mineiro economy has been carried out.
The results indicate that, while the slave system in Minas was not the most
dynamic in Brazil, it clearly did not suffer from secular stagnation and
atrophy. This article attempts to demonstrate that such results tend to
support the hypothesis that conditions were ripe for economic de-
velopment bearing a notable resemblance to examples of European proto-
industrialisation.
The seminal works representing this new investigation are those of

Amilcar and Roberto Martins.12 The central argument of their analysis is
that the mineiro population - both free and slave - grew at a steady pace
throughout the nineteenth century, and that this demographic tendency
9 See F. A. Novais, Portugal e Brasil na Crise do Antigo Sistema Colonial (1777-18o8) (Sao
Paulo, 1981), pp. 240-4, 264-5.
10 See, for example: E. V. da Costa, Da Sengala a Colonia (Sao Paulo, i982), pp. 42-6; F.
Iglesias, A Economia Politica do Governo Provincial Mineiro, 183-18i89 (Rio de Janeiro,
I95 8), pp. I30-i: R. E. Conrad, The Destruction ofBragilian Slavery, i80o-i888 (Berkeley,
I972), pp. 127-8.
1' C. Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil (Berkeley, i965), pp. 93-4.
12 A. V. Martins Filho and R. B. Martins, 'Slavery in a Non-export Economy:
Nineteenth-century Minas Gerais', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 63, no 3
(Aug., i983), pp. 537-68; R. B. Martins, 'Growing in Silence: The Slave Economy of
Nineteenth-century Minas Gerais, Brazil', unpubl. PhD diss., Vanderbilt University,
1980.

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was based upon an economy dedicated to subsistence agriculture, as well

as to local and regional markets.13 With regard to the slave population,
these authors suggest that its growth, up to the closing of the Atlantic
slave trade in I85o, depended upon massive imports which may have
made Minas one of the most important destinations for African bondsmen
in the Americas during the nineteenth century.14 That the mineiro
population - including the slave contingent - increased is abundantly
clear from the nineteenth-century census material presently available. This
fact should have alerted the earlier historians who had insisted on the
stagnation hypothesis, since it is obvious that a marked growth in th

number of slaves, to the extent that it was even partially dependent on the
slave trade, could only have occurred where conditions of relati
economic vitality prevailed. However, it does remain to be explained ho
an economy weighed down by a vast subsistence sector managed t
generate sufficient trade credits to pay for massive slave imports.15
In an on-going debate with the two Martins, Robert Slenes has
attempted to solve this apparent riddle by pointing to several mo
dynamic sectors of the mineiro economy which, in fact, did link up, directl
and indirectly, to the general Brazilian economy.16 Specifically, Slene
points to the renewed diamond boom which attracted numerous
prospectors and their slaves from the I83os through the i86os; to t
spread of coffee cultivation into the southeastern corner of the provin
from the I830s on; and to the continued gold mining activities which,
his view, had not declined as dramatically as most previous analys
conclude. These sectors had a double positive effect on the mineir
economy: first, they generated trade credits because they were direct
linked to the export economy and, secondly, they stimulated what can
13 Obviously, the Martins do not ignore the spread of coffee cultivation into a rat
reduced area of the Mata Mineira region which, by the i 85 os, had undoubtedly beco
the most dynamic pole of the provincial economy. They insist, however, and I fu
agree, that in terms of labour absorption, the mineiro coffee fields were of very limite
importance when compared to the basic food crops and ranching which characterise
the rest of the vast provincial agricultural sector. As will be seen, I do take issue wi
their assumption that extractive and industrial activities were also of reduced numeri
importance in the occupational structure of Minas.
14 Martins Filho and Martins, 'Slavery in a Non-export Economy', p. 549.
15 The Hispanic American Historical Review article was accompanied by comments whi
were quick to question how this anomaly could have occurred. See: 'Comments o
" Slavery in a Non-export Economy "', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 63, n
3 (Aug. 1983), pp. 569-90, with comments by R. B. Slenes (pp. 569-8 ), W. Dean (p
582-4) and S. L. Engerman and E. D. Genovese (pp. 585-90). The Martins reply cam
in: A. V. Martins Filho and R. B. Martins, 'Slavery in a Non-export Economy:
Reply', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 64, no. I (Feb. I984), pp. 135-46.
16 R. W. Slenes, 'MMltiplos de Porcos e Diamantes: A Economia Escravista de Mi
Gerais no Seculo XIX', Cadernos IFCH/UNICAMP, no. I7 (June, I985).

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defined as a moderately commercial agricultural sector. Owing to its size,

it is this latter sector which Slenes considers to have been the most
important of the dynamic segments of the economy. Commer

agriculture was based mostly on slave holdings dedicated to basic fo
crops. These were capable of producing marketable surpluses, the vol
of which probably increased in direct proportion to the size of the s
force.
Here the connections to the export economy were indirect, but far fro
limited to exchange relationships with mineiro export sectors. Large p
of Minas had originally been settled on the basis of commercial agricu
and ranching, with the mining centres as their principal markets. As
of the general accommodation to the decline of mining activitie
diminishing commercial demand, regions such as the South and the
called Oeste Mineiro sought and found new markets on the co
especially the fast-growing city of Rio de Janeiro. Caio Prado Juini
singled out this area as the only example of a slave economy wh
dedicated to basic foodstuff production in colonial Brazil.17 Th
commercial slave farming was enormously stimulated by the arrival o
royal court at Rio de Janeiro in 1808, by which time this system h
spread into nearly all of the vast territory of Minas, including not a
former mining areas.18 Finally, the rapid development of coffee cultivati
in the Paraiba valley from the 183os on provided mineiro agriculture
ranching with an ever-expanding market. As Slenes would put it
multiplier effects of these indirect connections to the export econo
assured the survival and growth of the slave system in Minas.
Nevertheless, it would seem somewhat questionable to assume that this
hybrid slave economy was capable of generating enough income to satisfy
the need to import slaves, especially if this need was as extensive as that
usually associated with a 'typical' slave system. In other words, how could
Minas afford to import both slaves and the textiles, iron and related
utensils and also the luxury goods which comprised the normal imports
of slave economies? The answer can only be that Minas was able to
produce a major part of the industrial commodities it needed on its own
and, thus, could concentrate its hard earned monetary resources on the all-
important procurement of slaves. Unless, that is, dependence on the slave
trade was not so great as has been suggested, owing to a certain
reproductive capacity of the creole slave population. As will be suggested
17 C. Prado Junior, Formacao do Brasil Contemporaneo. Coldnia (Sao Paulo, I976), pp.
I97-203. The author notes that the first cattle drive from the South of Minas to Rio
de Janeiro took place in 1765.
18 See A. Lenharo, As Tropas da Moderafao: 0 Abastecimento da Corte na Formafao do Brasil
(Sao Paulo, I979).

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below, the final answer may well consist of a combination of both these
tendencies.
Let us now return to the problem of comparing conditions in Minas
during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with those that
fomented European proto-industrialisation. It should now be clear that,
despite the fact that it constituted a slave social formation, Minas'
economy was vitally dependent on non-export and, almost certainly by
extension, non-plantation agriculture.19 When speaking of moderate
commercialisation, what this article suggests is that the mineiro agricultural
sector seems to have been two-tiered and flexible. Two-tiered because
there was a relatively large group of slave holders - roughly one-third o

all households in the decade of 1830 contained bondsmen20 - who were
able to commercialise their surpluses when market conditions permitted
while the enormous non-slave holding group was comprised of
independent peasants and artisan producers, usually operating within th
limits of a subsistence economy. When market conditions were
exceptionally good it is possible that the latter group was able to enter, a
least marginally, into mercantile exchange relationships, while the form
was able to survive crisis periods by simply contracting production an
sitting it out.21 Exactly what the mechanisms were that made this syste
function we may never know, for direct sources are practically non
existent. Nevertheless, what is relevant to our present purposes is that t
mineiro slave system bore a distinct resemblance to those Europea
societies in which a certain degree of agricultural specialisation and socia
differentiation had begun to develop. These are the conditions whic
'liberate' peasant labour - and, as we shall see in the case of Minas, slav
labour as well - to engage in domestic industrial production. Whether th
dynamic balance between subsistence farming and liberated labour tim
developed into a form of proto-industrialisation depended, of cours
upon the existence of markets for eventual industrial commodities. Th
problem of markets will be discussed when the domestic textile industr
is examined.
General demographic indicators

Having established that those basic conditions of proto-industrialisation
related to agricultural dynamism would appear to have existed in Minas,
and given that a process of breakdown of feudal relations does not apply
19 A disassociation of the plantation system and the commercial production of basic
foodstuffs was not axiomatic, however, Cf. J. R. Irwin, 'Escravidio e Trabalho em
Sistema de Plantacao', Revista do Departamento de Historia, no. 6 (June 1988), pp. 5-I4.
20 D. C. Libby, Transformafao e Trabalho em uma Economia Escravista: Minas Gerais no Seculo
XIX (Sio Paulo, I988), p. 97.
21 Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil, pp. 55-8.

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Table i. Population of Minas Gerais by gender and legal status, I786, i80o, 1823
Free Slave (%)
Year Men Women Total Men Women Total Free Slave
1786 94, 66 94,546 188,712 116,191 57,844 I74,035 52.0 48.0

I805 109,191 109,032 218,223 124,924 63,857 188,781 53.6 46.4
*I823 I35,271 I43,329 278,620 85,529 54,836 140,365 66.5 33.5
* A partial count, since the totals for the important comarcas of Sabara and Serro d
discriminate sex or legal status. The total population of the two comarcas was I
Source: Populacao da Provincia de Minas Geraes, Arquivo Piblico Mineiro
Provincial, I833, Loose manuscript in collection currently undergoing orga
(Planilha 30.099, doc. 02).
in this particular case, it is now necessary to turn to broad m

demographic tendencies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centu
will be necessary to demonstrate that the period began with a ge
trend toward population growth which accelerated as the pro
proto-industrialisation consolidated itself.
In 1833, the Repartifao de Estatistica of the provincial governmen
up a recompilation of past censuses. At present, it is not possible
upon what documents this recompilation was based, and the
provided suffer certain limitations, as the source itself states: 'It b
us to observe that great cares are taken in avoiding the Canvass a
fiscal burdens resultant thereof, so that the numbers obtained h
incomplete, especially as regards slaves.'22 At any rate, the av
statistics, which are summarised in Table i, will have to serve to in
general trends.
According to Table i, there was a steady growth of the free popu
from 1786 to 1823. In fact, the tendency would appear to have bee
strong, for if it is presumed that the free/slave ratio for the count
two comarcas (districts) which did not discriminate gender and lega
in 1 823 was the same as that which prevailed for the rest of the provi
population, the total free population in that year would have been r
375,000. The 3.9% annual increase from 1805 to I823, calculated on
basis of the adjusted figures for the latter year, is suspiciously high
probably more indicative of under-enumeration in the I805 census t
an exceptionally high population increase thereafter. Neverthe
general growth trend seems clear enough. Since the historiography
deals with this period is unanimous in concluding that, already b
free migration into Minas had ceased along with diminishin
22 Populacao da Provincia de Minas Geraes, Arquivo Ptblico Mineiro, Belo Hor
Se9ao Provincial, I833, Loose manuscripts in collection currently unde
organisation.

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production, it can be assumed that the growth indicated here was basically
a natural one.23 It is quite probable that, underlying these aggregate
figures, there were marked regional differences whereby the original
mining centres were losing population to the rest of Minas.24 Overall,
therefore, the growth rate appears to have been accelerating among the
free population during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a
pattern similar to those noted among European peasant populations
involved in processes of proto-industrialisation.
As to the slave population, it is difficult to advance much beyond
speculation, given that demographic studies in this particular area remain
at a rudimentary stage. The total number of slaves in 8z 3 appears to have
been approximately 89,000. That figure is almost exactly the same as the
figure for I805 which, in turn, is only slightly higher than the I786 count.
Apparently, then, the slave population was roughly holding its own in this
period, although the dubious reliability of these counts must be borne in
mind. The question that then arises is how was the mineiro slave popula-
tion maintained - or did it, at least in part, maintain itself? Conventional
wisdom would have it that the maintenance of a typical slave population
was achieved through restocking via the international slave trade. That
may be too simple an answer since, as it should be clear by now, the mineiro
slave population was far from typical. Moreover, it is generally accepted
that mineiro import capacity would have been at its lowest point exactly
during the lapse between the 1786 and I805 censuses.25 Exactly how this
may have affected the trade into Minas is simply not known, but it does
seem reasonable to suppose, along with Luna and Cano,26 that the decline
of gold mining and the accompanying accommodation into a mixed
subsistence/mercantile economy led to a reduction of slave exploitation
which, in turn, would have been favourable to natural reproduction. On
the other hand, the 1808 opening of Brazilian ports to foreign shipping,
in conjunction with the extinction of British and US traffic, greatly
augmented the supply of slaves and undoubtedly mineiro slave holders
availed themselves of this situation which was to continue up to the
suppression of the traffic to Brazil in i85o.27
The aggregate count for 823 contains a fairly elaborate classification of
the population which, among other things, distinguishes between native-
23 F. V. Luna and I. del N. da Costa, Minas Colonial: Economia e Sociedade (Sao Paulo,
I982), pp. 22-3. 24 Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brai/, p. 94.
25 K. Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies: Brazil & Portugal I7Jo-I808 (Cambridge, 973),
pp. 128-9.
26 F. V. Luna and W. Cano, 'Economia Escravista em Minas Gerais,' Cadernos
IFCH/UNICAMP no. io (Oct. I985), pp. 2-I2.
27 H. S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade
(Princeton, 1978), chaps. 3 and 4.

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o Douglas Cole Libby
Table 2. Participation of Creoles and Africans in the slave population of

Minas Gerais by gender and sex ratio, I823
Creoles (%) Africans (%) Total (%)
Men 42,158 49.3 43,371 50.7 85,529 I00.0
Women 40,771 74.4 14,o64 25.6 54,835 I00.0
Total 82,929 59.1 57,436 40.9 I40,365 I00.0
Sex Ratio 103.4 - 308.4 - 49.6
Source: PopulaSao da Provincia de Minas

Provincial, I833, Loose manuscript in coll
(Planilha 30.099, doc. 02).
born and African slaves. Table 2 discriminates between the creole and
African slaves and the results are somewhat surprising.

In the first place, nearly 6o percent of the total slave population w
native-born, a proportion which does not back up claims that Minas w
totally dependent upon the slave trade and that its participation in th
latter was enormous. The large creole segment was in sharp contrast to
demographic configuration of slave populations in areas dedicated to t
export economy, such as Bahia, where African slaves nearly alway
constituted two-thirds or more of the slave force.28 Also, the low sex r
correspondent to the creole group clearly suggests that natural r
production was a distinct possibility. Two preliminary studies of minei
slave demographics have corroborated this finding by demonstrating t
the equilibrium between genders among the always larger groups
native-born slaves was a general rule during the nineteenth centu
Furthermore, when sources permit the elaboration of age pyramids,
results for the creole slave population are of the wide-based variet
typical of fully reproductive populations.29 Although it is not yet possi
to make definitive assessments, it does seem clear that natural reproduction
played a role in the maintenance and, later, the growth of the la
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mineiro slave population. At the sam
time, the considerable size of the African group makes it equally clear t
the slave trade continued to play an important role in sustaining the sla
population in Minas, at least up to the termination of international traf
28 S. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, irfo-
(Cambridge, I985), p. 349. 'Throughout the period i6oo-i82s, Brazilian-born black
never seem to have made up more than one-third of the slave force.'
29 For an analysis using large comarca/munictpio aggregates see C. A. Paiva, D. C. Li
and M. Grimaldi, 'Crescimento da Populacao Escrava: Uma Questao em Aberto
Anais do IV Seminario sobre a Economia Mineira, CEDEPLAR/FACE/UFMG, (A
1988), pp. 1 -32. A second article deals more with growth patterns in a few select
districts for which chronological series of data are available. D. C. Libby and
Grimaldi, 'Equilibrio e Estabilidade: Economia e Comportamento Demografico nu
Regime Escravista', Papeis Avulsos, no. 7 (Dec. 1988), pp. 26-43.

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Table 3. Free and slave population of Minas Gerais, selected data, I83I-I840,
i8y4-i8y7, 1'873
I83i-I840* i854-i856t I873:
Free 75,447 7I4,939 I,669,276
Slave 34,334 246,643 370,459
* Based on a sample of 5 3 district nominal lists which
represented somewhat more than Io% of the provincial po
t Based on population estimates referring to 40 muni
municipios in 855.
: Based on the corrected Recenseamento figures.
Sources: Mappas de Populacao, Arquivo Publico Mineiro, P
mapa I6; Pasta 3, mapa 3, Pasta 4, mapa 5, Pasta 5, mapas 3,
Pasta 8, mapas 17, 33; Pasta 9, mapas I, 4; Pasta o0, mapas
I83I-40. Mappas de Populacao, Arquivo Publico Mineiro,
Caixas 14, 17, 39, 41, 42, 49, I831-2. Francisco Diogo P
Relat6rio apresentado a Assembleia... I855 (Ouro Preto
Directorio Geral de Estatistica, Recenseamento da populafao d
procedeu no dia lo de agosto de r872 (Rio de Janeiro, 1873-6),
in I850. Slave demographics in Minas may ha

nineteenth-century Cuba,30 although it may prov
just what the proportional contributions of natura
were in relation to overall increases. Clearly, the d
the mineiro economy provided an ambience pr
reproduction of its slave population. Such stabili
resemble the settledness of which Higman spe
conditions favourable to natural slave reproductio
doubt that proto-industrialisation contributed a g
ambience of settledness.
Although sources are few and far between, such data as is available for
the rest of the nineteenth century demonstrates that general growth trends
continued. Table 3 displays the results obtained from a sample of district
censuses dating from I831-I840, municipal population estimates from
I854-1857 and the provincial aggregates of the 1872 Recenseamento. Not
surprisingly, the proportion of slaves in the total population was steadily
diminishing as abolition slowly but surely approached. Nevertheless, in
1872 the actual number of slaves had increased by some 96 percent when
compared to the I823 estimate.32 Meanwhile, the free population had
30 J. E. Elben, 'On the Natural Increase of Slave Populations: The Example of the Cuban
Black Population', in S. L. Engerman and E. D. Genovese, Slavery in the Western
Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1974), pp. 211-46.
31 B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834 (Cambridge, 1976),
pp. 134-8.
32 In fact, the census for Minas was undertaken a year after the originally scheduled date.
The original Recenseamento publication is rife with tabulation errors which have recently

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augmented by some 345 percent. Obviously, such inflated growth rates

reflect the under-enumeration of the 1823 count, and here it would be as
well to note that the document itself estimated the real total in 1823 to
have been around 800,000, which would have meant roughly 532,000
freedmen and 268,ooo bondsmen. Comparing these estimates with the
1873 census results, it can be concluded that, during the fifty years which
separate the censuses, the total population was growing at an approximate
annual rate of 2.2%, the free population at 4.6% p.a. and the slave
population at 0.8% p.a. Such rates are perfectly plausible given that the
slave population was constantly 'contributing' to the free population
through manumissions. These estimates serve to verify general growth
tendencies for the entire period under consideration, tendencies which
may be deemed favourable to a proto-industrial take-off, and to its gradual
consolidation.
The mineiro occupational structure
The sources which provide data on the occupational structure permit

us to outline the dimensions of mineiro domestic industry. A sample of
manuscript nominal lists dating from 1831-40 allows for a fairly complete
look at the mineiro occupational structure. The twenty-six districts
included in the sample were chosen on the basis of their geographic
distribution (see Figure i) and because each nominal list contains
information regarding the occupation of all economically active indi-
viduals. Such complete information is a genuine rarity for Brazilian census
documents, especially since the data is not in aggregated form. Since the
purpose of the sample is to make a comparison with data obtained from
the Recenseamento de 1872 for the same districts, a modified version of the
Recenseamento's classificatory system was applied to the earlier nominal
lists.33 This system does not reflect customary categorisation and has been
adapted because doing so may help to clarify the complexity of a pre-
industrial occupational structure which basic sectoring could easily
been corrected by a study group at the Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento

Regional of the Faculdade de Ciencias Econ6micas, Universidade Federal de Minas
Gerais. The figures used in the present article are corrected and were kindly provided
by Professor Clotilde Paiva. For a general examination of the problems which the
Recenseamento presents to researchers see C. A. Paiva and M. do C. S. Martins, 'Notas
sobre o Censo Brasileiro de i872', Anais do II Seminario sobre a Economia Mineira,
CEDEPLAR/FACE/UFMG, (Sept. 1983), pp. I49-63.
33 It should be noted here that the data for 1873 were organised by parishes which did
not necessarily coincide with the administrative districts, the former being somewhat
larger when differences did occur.

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100 50 0 km
Fig. i. Districts included in occupational structure sampl

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Table 4. Occupational structure of Minas Gerais by category, gender and legal statu
Artisans and
industrial Wage
Liberal workers with workers o
professions declared undeclared Domestic To
and others Commerce occupations Agriculture occupations s
No. (%) No. (%) No. (%) No. (%) No. (%) No. (
83 1-40
Free men 240 2 884 8 1,893 i8 6,822 64 835 8 11 ** o

Slave men 179 z 1,625 I2 5,440 70 267 4 242 3 7,7
All men 240 2 I,063 6 3,518 19 12,263 66 I,I02 6 253 I 18
Free women 44 ** 47 ** 8,843 86 977 9 20 ** 427 4 I o
Slave women -5 ** 2,343 5 939 20 6 ** I ,307 28 4,
All women 44 ** 52 ** II,86 75 1,916 I3 36 ** 1,734 12 14
Total work force 284 I I,115 3 I4,704 44 14,I78 42 1,138 4 1,987
1873
Free men 854 2 i,o68 3 2,172 7 17,369 52 10,206 30 1,951 6 3
Slave men 2 ** -_ 422 4 5,603 58 1,189 i2 2,475 26 9
All men 856 2 i,o68 3 2,594 6 22,972 53 11,395 26 4,426 10 4
Free women I6o ** 27 ** 11,763 36 6,680 20 567 2 13,816 42 3
Slave women - - 1,42I I7 3,149 38 280 3 3,525 42 8,
All women I6o ** 27 ** 13,I84 32 9,829 24 847 2 17,34I 42 4
Total work force ,oI6 I 1,095 I 15,778 19 32,801 39 12,242 14 21,767 2
* Based on sample data (See figure i).
** Indicates less than i %.
Sources: Mappas de populaSao, Arquivo Piublico Mineiro, Pasta I, mapas 4, 7; Pasta 2, m
mapas 3, 24, 32; Pasta 6, mapa 13; Pasta 8, mapa 17; Pasta 9, mapa i; Pasta io, mapas i8,
Mineiro, Secao Provincial, PP i/io, Caixas 14, 17, 39, 41, 42, 49, 1831-7. Arquivo Pub
1830-I835. Directorio Geral de Estatistica, Recenseamento da populafao do Imperio do Brazil a que s
1873-6), Vols. 9, io.

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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Sociey I 5
obscure. More traditional categorisation tends to mask the fluidity of such

structures and in some cases results in misleading anachronisms.34
The first category is composed of members of the liberal professions,
civil servants, the military, ecclesiastics, so-called capitalistas (proto-
bankers) and those who lived on income (quite frequently an income
generated by slaves whose labour was rented to others). The category is
denominated 'liberal professions and others'. Factory owners or industriais
(practically non-existent in both samples) and merchants and clerks
comprise the second general category used in the Recenseamento. For
present purposes it will suffice to refer to this category simply as
'commerce'. The third generic category of the Recenseamento includes
operdrios or workers employed in industry. The majority of these operarios
were in fact independent producers - artisans and cottage industry
workers - rather than salaried employees as the term would suggest
today. Since the category is broken down into the various branches of
industry,35 it will be referred to as 'artisans and industrial workers with
declared occupations'. The fourth category includes all those engaged in
agricultural and ranching pursuits: large and small farmers and ranchers,
slave and free field workers, cowboys etc. Its denomination is simply
'agriculture'. Jornaleiros or day labourers compose the fifth category
which is called 'wage workers of undetermined occupation'. The sixth
category includes those who were engaged in all sorts of housework or
'domestic service'. Finally, the eighth category is constituted by children,
the aged, the infirm and destitute, students and persons without any
declared occupation and, thus, is denominated 'unoccupied'.
In looking for a moment at the results of the 1831-1840 sample,
displayed in Table 4, it can be seen that, at the aggregate provincial level,
the categories 'agriculture' and 'artisans and industrial workers with
declared occupations' employed by far the largest number of workers.
Indeed, the two categories employed 86 percent of the actual labour force,
with 'artisans...' accounting for 44 % and 'agriculture' 42 %. Thus, the
industrial sector, obviously including the proto-industries, actually
outstripped agriculture in terms of labour absorption. These aggregate
34 See: I. del N. da Costa, PopulafJes Mineiras (Sao Paulo, 1981). In his study of nominal
lists dating from 1804, the author designatesjornaleiros, i.e. day labourers, as belonging
to the service sector when, in fact, such individuals represent an embryonic proletariat
which was almost certainly only able to find employment in the primary and secondary
sectors. Admittedly, the number ofjornaleiros registered in the I804 lists is very small,
probably because they were seldom heads of household. Using the same classification
when sources indicate large groups ofjornaleiros, however, would be most misleading.
35 The Recenseamento's subcategories were: seamstresses, mine workers, metalworkers,
wood workers, textile workers, masons, leather workers (saddle makers and tannery
workers), dyers, tailors, hat makers and cobblers.

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figures tend to mask certain regional differences: in five of the regions

analysed employment in agriculture slightly surpassed that in industry,
while in the three remaining and more populous regions industrial
activities absorbed much larger segments of the labour force. Those
categories which might be thought of as comprising the service sector -
'liberal professions and other,' 'commerce' and 'domestic service' -
employed just over io percent of the labour force and even that minor
participation would be greatly reduced if it were not for the inclusion of
the rather large group of female slave domestics. The final category
belonging to the labour force, 'wage workers of undetermined
occupation', is an ambiguous one, as seen in note 34 above. Exactly what
kind of employment these day or task workers were engaged in simply is
not known and it is likely, of course, that the nature of their temporary
jobs changed with the vagaries of the agricultural calendar, as well as with
economic fluctuations. In the I831-40 nominal lists these jornaleiros
accounted for only 3 % of the employed population, but they will present
problems when analysing the Recenseamento.
Having established the preponderance of craft and cottage industrial
activities, it becomes important to examine this sector more closely. Table
4 reveals an obvious and important difference in the occupational
structure when gender is taken into account. Men, especially free men, did
not participate in the industries in proportions even approaching those of
their female counterparts. If we consider the male labour force, both free
and slave, only 1 8 % was engaged in some sort of industrial activity, while
the corresponding proportion for the female contingent was 75 %. Clearly
some kind of specifically female pursuit was responsible for this enormous
difference. That pursuit was the domestic textile industry and, if the
sample is at all reliable, it can be deduced that tens of thousands of mineira
free and slave women passed their days manipulating distaffs, spinning
wheels and looms. In two of the regions of Minas more than 90 % of the
free female labour force was engaged in spinning or weaving and,
according to the sample, in only one region was this proportion less than
5o%.36 Fully 58% of the overall slave and free female labour force
participated in the domestic textile industry. The dimensions of this
cottage industry clearly placed it in the same league as the proto-industrial
textile sectors of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Indeed, if
one considers Minas, which is larger than France, as a single region, its
36 That region was composed of the Jequitinhonha-Mucuri-Doce river valleys where, as
will be seen, the cottage textile industry was extremely active. The regional sample is
somewhat biased due to the inclusion of the Peganha district which, in 83 I, was a
frontier environment where women frequently helped in laying out the new fields. It
could be said that the district did not fit into the general ambience of settledness which
marked most of the province at that time.

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proto-industrial experience was truly enormous when compared to proto-

industrialisation on the other side of the Atlantic.
If women sustained Minas' cottage industries, what sort of industrial

activities were the men performing ? Part of the answer lies in the fact that
the illusion of instantaneous wealth, fuelled by the existence of gold
deposits, proved very slow to die. The largest single sub-group among
male labourers in the 'artisan...' category was composed of miners,
although their predominance did not even approach that of the female
spinners and weavers. The fact that in the I83os and I84os Minas retained
a relatively substantial mining segment corroborates Slenes' contention
that certain dynamic sectors maintained links to the export economy.
Whatever the real importance of mining, it should be noted that the male
industrial work force, although smaller, was much more diversified than
its female counterpart. The bulk of mineiro industrial workers in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century was made up of artisans.
Metalworkers were the most numerous, followed by those who worked
in wood, cobblers, tailors, masons and leather workers. Among the
metalworkers, the twenty-six district sample contained a small sub-group
of individuals engaged in iron smelting. This was a fast-growing proto-
industry which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere.37
An examination of the sample data available from the Recenseamento
should give a rough idea of how the mineiro occupational structure
evolved during the three to four decades which separate the two efforts at
census taking. As was seen earlier, the Recenseamento publication contains
errors which have been corrected. While the nominal lists suffer from a
certain lack of uniformity, especially as regards occupational denomina-

tions in the agricultural sector, the supposedly more scientific effort of the
Imperial government presents the researcher with far more serious
problems. The probable cause of these errors was the fact that tabulation
was done on a piece work basis, a method which may very well have led
to serious distortions in the categorisation of occupations.38 It may not be
too far off the mark to imagine that occupational indications which did not
fit neatly into the classification schedule were relegated to the 'domestic
service' or 'unoccupied' categories, thus severely distorting final results.39
Absolute increases in nearly all categories of free labour should be
expected, since it has already been demonstrated that the free population
37 Libby, Transforma?ao e Trabalho, chap. 3.

38 I wish to thank Professor Robert W. Slenes for calling my attention to this method of
tabulation. See: Directoria Geral de Estatistica, Relatorio e Trabalhos Estatisticos (Rio de
Janeiro, 1874), pp. 49-5 I.
39 I have discussed the tedious problems of the two series at considerable length
elsewhere. See Libby, Transformafao e Trabalho, pp. 28-45, 89-92.

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was growing at a healthy rate during the period. However, if the results
are accepted at face value, radical changes in the distribution of both the
slave and free work forces would appear to have occurred. The
combination of agricultural and industrial activities still predominated,
accounting for 57 % of the total work force, a steep drop from the 86 %
revealed in the I831-1840 sample. Agriculture's share had suffered a
moderate reduction to 39 %, while the proportion of workers engaged in
industry had plummeted to a mere 19%. The composite service sector,
made up of the 'liberal profession and others', 'commerce' and 'domestic
service' categories, had leapt from ten to 28 % of the total work force. It
is important to note that this sharp rise was entirely due to the enormous
growth of the latter category. In a like manner, and possibly due to a
process of proletarianisation of certain segments of the free male
peasant/artisan population, the 'wage workers of undetermined oc-
cupation' category had apparently undergone a three-fold proportional
increase in its participation in the work force.
Again, with a wary eye on the reliability of the data, what can be made
of the changes in the occupational structure? The enormous drop in the
proportion of industrial workers would seem to indicate that a process of
de-industrialisation had interposed itself at some point during the lapse
between the censuses. A more detailed look at the composition of the
female work force appears to corroborate this interpretation. According
to the Recenseamento, slave and free women industrial workers accounted
for 36 % of the total female work force in I873. That dramatic drop from
the i831-1840 figure is exacerbated by the fact that spinners and weavers
no longer comprised the largest sub-group within the category.
Seamstresses had taken over that position. Among the male industrial
workers a steady decline in the number of miners had led to a more even
distribution among the various crafts. The resultant reduction in the
'industrial' character of the category was partially attenuated by the firm
second position of the metalworkers sub-group which almost certainly
included a fair number of iron foundry workers and toolmakers.40
40 The mineiro iron industry may have been in decline by the I870s, but the evidence is
inconclusive. Evidence from the 86os confirms the existence of at least 140 foundries.
Most of these were small-scale operations based on a hybrid of African and eighteenth-
century European technology which had developed during the first three decades of
the nineteenth century. The average foundry employed from eight to twelve workers,
although a few had several forges and utilised as many as eighty workmen. The only
Catalonian forge in the province appears to have engaged over a hundred trained
slaves. Dependence on slave labour was characteristic of the entire industry right up
to emancipation. The iron produced by the foundries fuelled what seems to have been
a large number of toolmaking shops about which, unfortunately, very little is known.
I would conclude that in the I87os between foundries and tool shops, this particular

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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Society i9
But why did this apparent de-industrialisation not lead to a proportional

growth in the agricultural sector with its enormous subsistence sector
(which, logically should have served as a catch-all for 'redundant'
industrial workers)? Table 4 reveals that, in fact, this was at least partially
the case among female workers in general, but not so among males. That
the 'domestic service' category should have grown so enormously among
both genders is exceedingly suspicious, however. Given the insertion of
spinning and weaving activities into the daily household routine, it may
very well have been that the 'domestic service' category of the
Recenseamento glossed over the existence of a considerable number of
textile workers. If so, the dramatic quality of the de-industrialisation
process would be somewhat lessened. Much the same rationale may be
employed in relation to the agricultural sector which, in its subsistence
form, was equally routine and domestic for both men and women. The
fluidity of the occupational structure, whether seasonal or daily, probably
caused confusion when the time came to define individual activities for the
purposes of the census. In other words, it is very probable that in many

cases the same individual was simultaneously engaged in agricultural,
industrial and domestic pursuits.
And what of the distribution of the jornaleiros (day labourers)? Again,
these proto-proletarians must have taken whatever employment was
available to them, and that obviously would mean that the agricultural and
industrial sectors were the chief beneficiaries of this wage labour. But that
interpretation misses the point that these individuals represent, at least in
part, the failure of proto-industrialisation to maintain a symbiotic
relationship between subsistence farming and industrial pursuits. As the
opportunities for sustaining peasant independence through cottage
industry diminished, male family members must have been forced to seek
temporary outside employment, leaving a good deal of subsistence
farming tasks to female household members who had once spun and
woven. The problems related to the deterioration of mineiro proto-
industrialisation will be taken up in more detail when we turn to the
domestic textile industry.
To what extent was the occupational structure of Minas different from
that of other Brazilian regions? As far as I know, nowhere outside Minas
have nominal lists been found which include information as to the
occupation of all household residents. Those studies which do deal w

occupational structures are forced to work only with heads of house
mineiro proto-industry could have employed as many as 4,000 individuals. Cf. Li

Transformaafo e Trabalho, chap. 3.

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a category that may not have been particularly representative of the

population as a whole.41
A study which analyses demographic trends in the captaincy/province
of Sao Paulo between 1798 and i828 offers a fairly solid basis for
comparison with data relating to Minas, especially since, in terms of the
weight of non-export agriculture in the regional economies, Sao Paulo
and Minas were quite similar during this period.42 In analysing data
relating to heads of household contained in four general censuses dating
from 1798, i8o8, i818 and 1828, Marcilio finds that the percentage of
those engaged in primary activities varied from 69 to 71 %. The crafts,
mining and cottage industry occupied from ten to 1%, while those
classified as belonging to the tertiary sector accounted for between 9 and
I3 % of heads of household. The author distinguishes a fourth category
of 'others', including vagabonds/beggars (fully 75 % of the category),
dependents, new residents and those of undetermined occupation, which
comprised from seven to eleven per cent of this selected population
during the period under consideration.43 As will be recalled, the I831-40
sample for Minas revealed that industrial workers amounted to 44% of
the work force and agricultural workers 42 %. Since it has already been
demonstrated that mining, although not altogether insignificant, was not
the predominant factor in the composition of the secondary sector, it has
to be assumed that proto-industrialisation accounts for the marked
differences between the occupational structures of Minas and Sao Paulo.
It could be argued that Marcilio's head-of-household sample would tend
to obscure the possible existence of a cottage textile industry, since the
sample is naturally biased in favour of the male population. That
possibility, however, is most unlikely since neither spinners nor weavers
41 Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, p. 446. In his analysis of
an i8I6-17 Bahian census of slave holdings, a canvass which was concentrated in the
heavily plantation-dominated Rec6ncavo region, Schwartz finds that fully 84 % of all
slave owners whose occupations were listed were engaged in agricultural pursuits.
Craft workers and small manufacturers accounted for only three per cent of all slave
holders, while the corresponding figure for the service sector was three per cent. A
similar analysis for Minas clearly demonstrates the striking difference between regions
dedicated to mono-cultural export activities and those that were not. Mineiro artisans
and manufacturers comprised 24 per cent of all slave holders, those engaged in
agriculture 6o per cent and members of the composite service sector i6 per cent. Cf.
Libby, Transformacao e Trabalho, pp. 110-18.
42 M. L. Marcflio, 'Poblaci6n y fuerza de trabajo en una economia agraria en proceso de
transformaci6n. La provincia de Sao Paulo a fines de la epoca colonial', in N. Sanchez-
Albornoz, Poblacidnj Mano de Obra en America Latina (Madrid, I985), pp. 115-26.
43 This relatively large marginal segment contrasts with findings for Minas. The number
of vagabundos, mendicantes, esmoleiros, etc. observed in the 83 1-40 manuscript nominal
lists is statistically insignificant. It is tempting to suggest that the relative absence of
marginal segments in the mineiro population may very well reflect the option which
proto-industrialisation represented in terms of survival strategies for the poor.

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were to be found among the subcategories within the secondary sector.

The author does include a 'clothing and foodstuff' subcategory which, no
doubt, was replete with female heads of household.44 Based on the
evidence thus far available, then, it would seem fair to say that the mineiro
occupational structure was somewhat unique exactly because of its proto-
industrial sector. I personally suspect that some similarities may eventually
turn up with regard to the extreme south and perhaps the centre/west of
Brazil. A recent study has shown that the city of Rio de Janeiro and
vicinity was an active centre for craft activities and some small-scale
manufacturing, but in no other Brazilian region could one expect to find
industrial development on the same scale as late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century mineiro proto-industrialisation.45
Pre-conditions in Minas
There should be no doubt by now that the slave economy of late

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Minas Gerais distinguished itself from
other Brazilian regional economies, especially when its more thoroughly
diversified occupational structure is considered. In order to understand
the singularity of economic development in Minas after the decline of gold
mining, it may be necessary to rethink Furtado's notion of the resilience
of colonial slave economies. This resilience rested upon the plantation's
ability to retreat into subsistence activities in order to survive the
recurring crises imposed by international market conditions, only to
refocus efforts on mono-cultural export agriculture as soon as the crisis
had subsided.46 The point is, of course, that retreat into subsistence
activities, even when quite prolonged, did not represent a threat to the
structure of the plantation or the slave system as a whole. Minas was
unable to hit upon a viable substitute for its former export production, but
instead of settling into a stagnation aimed at simply maintaining colonial
structures it gradually adapted and accommodated itself to the situation
and, in the process, modified those same structures. If so, it may justifiably
be asked why a more diversified economy did not also emerge, for
example, in Sao Paulo which was, at least before the widespread
introduction of coffee, a region with weak links to the export sector,
surviving as it did on the basis of subsistence activities and a low degree
44 A study of the cotton export boom in Sao Paulo, provoked by the United States Civil
War, affirms that, prior to the I86os, cotton cultivation had been abandoned for many
decades. Thus it would seem even more unlikely that a paulista cottage textile industry
took hold during the nineteenth century. See A. P. Canabrava, O Algodao em Sao Paulo:
i86i-I-87 (Sao Paulo, i984), p. 2!.
45 G. Beauclair, 'A Pre-indtistria Fluminense, I808-I850', unpubl. tese de Doutoramento,
Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1988.
46 Furtado, The Economic Growth of BraZil, pp. 5 5-8.

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of commercial exchange with plantation zones. To put it another way,

why was the mineiro path of accommodation and adaptation not viable for
Sao Paulo and other Brazilian regions such as the south, the northeastern
and northern hinterlands or the central western plains? Clearly it is
necessary to establish what were the factors peculiar to Minas which
stimulated an economic development so atypically connected to colonial
export structures and, above all, characterised by a sort of insular
independence, the principal expression of which was mineiro proto-
industrialisation.
Minas Gerais is, of course, a vast hinterland cut off from the narrow
coastal plains by a formidable series of mountain ranges. During all of the
colonial period and most of the Empire, this meant that the region was
relatively isolated, due to the extremely precarious road system and a
transportation network which relied chiefly on mule trains. Resultant high
transport costs were the price of this isolation, a price rendered even
higher by a complex fiscal system that taxed commodities entering and
leaving Minas according to their composition and weight. As long as
large quantities of gold continued to flow out of Minas these were
apparently minor encumbrances, but when the supply of readily extracted
precious metal and gems began to dry up Minas' import capacity declined
proportionately. A retreat into subsistence activities was the immediate
response to this economic contraction, one that would prove to be very
deep and long-lasting. However, another more gradual path was open,
involving the local production of goods which had previously been
imported - in other words, a process of import substitution. Thus, it was
initially the isolation of Minas which spurred proto-industrialisation.
Insular conditions are the opposite of what stimulated European proto-
industrialisation,47 for it was increased access to foreign or inter-regional
markets which is considered a vital pre-condition to the unleashing of
regional processes of proto-industrialisation. As Kriedte puts it:
'Domestic demand alone, owing to its low elasticity, could not have
launched proto-industrialisation.'48 What I am trying to suggest for the
mineiro case is that the formula was reversed, as it would have to be for an
economy inserted into a rigid mercantile colonial system. Finding itself
gradually cut off from international markets, the mineiro economy was
47 Kriedte, 'The Origins, the Agrarian Context, and the Conditions in the World
Market', in Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before Industrialisation, p.
i6. The author does mention that the less fertile mountainous regions of Europe were
usually the first to proto-industrialise because feudal relations were generally weaker
there or broke down earlier. If one really wanted to stretch comparisons, it could be
said that the post-gold rush mountains of Minas were also ripe for proto-
industrialisation because colonial relations of production were weaker or breaking
down more rapidly than in other regions of Brazil. 48 Ibid., p. 33.

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forced to turn in upon itself and, in doing so, discovered that it was
possessed of a domestic market capable, at least initially, of spawning
proto-industrialisation.
After all, given the prevailing political and economic relations of
domination, it should come as no surprise that any Latin American form
of proto-industrialisation would have had to be based upon a process of
import substitution. Moreover, just as in twentieth-century import
substituting industrialisation, the success of mineiro proto-industrialisation
depended upon the size of its potential domestic market. Other Brazilian
markets were important in consolidating the mineiro cottage industry, but
local demand appears to have persisted as its principal mainstay.49 This
provides not only the key to the relative success of proto-industrialisation
in Minas, but also the factor which clearly differentiated Minas from all
other non-export regions of Brazil, whether isolated or not. None of these
other regions possessed a population minimally comparable to that which
the 'golden age' had bequeathed to Minas in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.50 This large population can be thought of as the
'critical mass' making possible a more diversified economic development
than colonial slave systems normally allowed, including a process of
proto-industrialisation. Let us now turn to the evidence bearing directly
on this aspect.
The domestic textile industry
It is very probable that the earliest settlers of Minas Gerais soon took up
the cultivation of cotton and its transformation into cloth for immediate
use, much as the Indians had been doing for centuries.51 At some point
during the second half of the eighteenth century this practice surpassed
the limits of home consumption, and locally produced textiles were more
or less openly commercialised within the captaincy. In 1775 the governor
of Minas, Antonio de Noronha, informed the authorities in Lisbon of the
multiplication of 'manufacturing establishments', warning that they
49 See, for example: R. B. Martins, 'A Indiistria Textil Domestica de Minas Gerais no
Seculo XIX', Anais do II Semindrio sobre a Economia Mineira, CEDEPLAR/
FACE/UFMG (Sept. I983), pp. 85-8.
50 D. Alden, 'The Population of Brazil in the Late Eighteenth Century: A Preliminary
Survey', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 43 (May, I963), pp. I73-201.
Analysing census material dating from 1772 to I782, the author finds that Minas
accounted for slightly more than a fifth of the total colonial population. The mineiro
population is estimated to have been nearly 320,000, that of Bahia 289,000,
Pernambuco's 240,000 and that of Rio de Janeiro 2 6,ooo. Of all the other captaincies,
only Sao Paulo had a population above Ioo,ooo (II6,975).
51 J. C. Banner, Cotton in the Empire of Brazil: The Antiquity, Methods and Extension of Its
Cultivation, Together with Statistics of Exportation and Home Consumption (Washington,
I885), pp. I0-13.

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24 Douglas Cole Libbj
threatened to free the region from dependence upon European imports.52

Four years later Noronha reiterated his warning by noting:
... the independence in which the peoples of Minas have placed themselves in
relation to European products, nearly all individuals having established, on their
own farms, manufactures and looms with which they clothe themselves and their
families and slaves, producing cloth and burlap and other lighter fabrics of linen
and cotton and even wool.53
The response was not long in coming, for in 1785 the Portuguese
crown issued its famous decree of 5 January prohibiting the colonial
manufacture of a long list of fabrics. As regards Minas, however, more
important was the specific omission of certain coarse cotton fabrics.54 The
fact that subsequent implementation of the decree only resulted in the
seizure of thirteen looms - none of which were from Minas - strongly
suggests that the vast majority of Brazilian production was concentrated
among the unrestricted fabrics.55 On the other hand, given the notorious
incapacity of the colonial administration to carry out crown orders
effectively, it may be that the prohibited manufacturing did not altogether
cease.
Apparently as part of efforts aimed at executi

following year an extensive inventory of mineiro
local representatives of the metropolitan govern
has not been properly studied to date, but a curso
that well over a thousand looms are listed and th
produced varied somewhat, although the typi
appears to have predominated. A fair amount of
commercialised, some of which was bartered wh
for home consumption. If the ratios of spinners
the basis of data from the nineteenth century,
inventory, the thousand plus looms may have gen
over 3o,ooo spinners. Thus, it is not surprising t
indicating that weaving time was frequently 'ren
a determined proportion of the cloth produced.
With the arrival of the Portuguese court in Ri
elevation of Brazil to metropolitan status, deli
52 Maxwell, Conflicts and Conspiracies, p. 63.

53 D. de Carvalho, Noticia Historica sobre o Algodao em Mina
54 Ibid., p. Io.
55 Novais, Portugal e Brasil na Crise do Antigo Regime Colonial, pp. 272-3.
56 Inventario de Teares de Minas Geraes em i786. Arquivo Publico Mineiro, Secao Colonial,
1786, manuscript, microfilm. Unfortunately, the Inventario has not been made fully
available to the public as yet. It may well represent the only source which will afford
reliable data as to rates of productivity in the mineiro cottage textile industry. At this
point, one can only speculate that such rates were quite low.

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policies were developed. The textile industry was to have benefited

through fiscal exemptions for enterprising manufacturers and through the
hiring of foreign masters who were to train Brazilian workers. However,
the opening of Brazilian ports to foreign shipping and, more especially,
the tariff privileges accorded to Great Britain in the commercial treaty of
18 0 contradicted these policies. The resulting flood of factory produced,
low-cost British textiles would appear to have snuffed out nearly all
domestic cloth production in coastal regions, as well as in more accessible
inland areas. In compensation, during the decades of 810o and 8z20
certain Brazilian regions, the north of Minas included, exported raw
cotton for use in Lancashire factories.57
The nineteenth-century French traveller Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, on
his first journey into Minas, coming up from Rio on the traditional route
to Vila Rica, mentioned the cultivation and spinning of cotton only when
he reached the northwest limits of the Metalirgica region.58 As he pushed
further north into the vast region of the Jequitinhonha-Mucuri-Doce
rivers cotton became the principal crop. A good deal of the cotton
production was destined for export, for the short-lived boom was very
probably at its peak in the years of Saint-Hilaire's wanderings through
Minas and Brazil. As the French traveller carefully observed, these
northern exports were effected by way of Bahia, in sharp contrast to the
Rio de Janeiro orientation of most mineiro commercial exchange, although
he also noted that raw cotton was often shipped to various other regions
of Minas. Notwithstanding the impulse toward exports, a considerable
amount of production was locally consumed. In Sucuriui, Sao Domingos,
Agus Suja, Chapada and Minas Novas, Saint-Hilaire was amazed to learn
that nearly all the women were occupied in spinning and weaving, a state
of industriousness he had never before witnessed in Brazil. The list of
products included 'blankets, hammocks, coarse cloths and even very fine
towels and napkins', all of which were marketed locally, in Bahia and i
Rio de Janeiro.59 During his trip through the enormous Sao Francisco
Valley and his loop back through the diamond district, Saint-Hilaire di
not make any observations of cotton plantings or cottage textile industry
However, on re-entering the Metalirgica region he visited a small village
where cotton did not grow well but where the female population was
largely dedicated to the making of cotton cloth, blankets, bed clothes an
towels as well as to the ample production of cotton caps 'which are use
57 Martins, 'A Indtistria Textil Domestica', pp. 78-9.

58 A. de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem pelas Provincias do Rio de Janeiro e Minas Gerais (Sao
Paulo/Belo Horizonte, I975), p. 119.
59 Ibid., pp. I19, 17I-2, 228, 284, 289 (Quotation p. 284).

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in the region itself, in neighbouring villages and even in the back lands'.60
This example clearly demonstrates the considerable diffusion of the
domestic textile industry even into areas which relied upon what must
have been a lively inter-regional trade for their raw materials. It should be
noted that such diffusion would mean that an urban proto-industrialisation
was also a distinct possibility. During his return to Rio, Saint-Hilaire laid
over for a time at Sao Joao d'El Rei, probably the most important
entrepot of Minas at the time. He mentioned dispersed cotton plantings
over a large area, including parts of the South, Mata Mineira and the
Metaltrgica-Mantiqueira regions, although the quality of the fibres was
inferior to what he had seen in the north. Among the varied produce
'exported' to Rio de Janeiro from Sao Joao, raw cotton and coarse cotton
cloth were prominently listed.61
In 1819 Saint-Hilaire undertook a new journey which was to take him
to the far western reaches of the captaincy and thence into Goias. He thus
passed through the entire mineiro West and Alto Paranaiba regions, as well
as part of Paracatu. In the small towns of the West he noted that cotton
was an important component of trade, although he did not specify in what
form, nor did he indicate the destination of this particular commerce. In
the Alto Parana'ba region the Frenchman was surprised to find that:
In the vicinity of Araxa, however, and perhaps in other parts of the comarca, the
farmers make crude woolen cloth.62
During a rapid trip through the South, on his way to Sao Paulo in 1822,
Saint-Hilaire again observed sheep breeding and the production of wool
fabrics. Moreover, while staying over night at the home of a mule train
owner, he was informed that the husband 'was off to Araxa in search of
cotton to take to Rio de Janeiro'.63 Thus, it can be seen that Saint-Hilaire
confirmed the existence of what can only have been an extensive cotton
cultivation in a region in which he had made no mention of the same only
three years earlier.
In fact, the ability of foreign travellers to observe all aspects of the
regions through which they passed may have been somewhat impaired.
As was mentioned earlier, Saint-Hilaire himself had been amazed at the
industriousness evidenced by the cottage textile industry of the North.
However, it would appear that only in that region was he allowed to
60 A. de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem pelo Distrito dos Diamantes e Litoral do Brasil (Sao Paulo/Belo
Horizonte, 1974), p. 47. Saint-Hilaire specifically mentioned that cotton was shipped
into Tapera from northern production areas such as PeSanha and Minas Novas.
61 Ibid., pp. 102, III.
62 A. de Saint-Hilaire, Viagem as Nascentes do Rio Sao Francisco (Sao Paulo/Belo Horizonte,
I974), pp. 91, 96, 12z, 136.
63 A. de Saint-Hilaire, Segunda Viagem do Rio de Janeiro a Minas Gerais e a Sao Paulo (Sao
Paulo/Belo Horizonte, 1975), pp. 38, 49, 52 (Quotation p. 52).

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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Societ 27
participate in routine household activities, meaning that he had direct

contact with women. The rigid social customs of the hinterlanders, rich
and poor alike, simply did not permit strangers, much less foreigners, to
meet their womenfolk, especially not when the latter were unbefittingly
performing their daily tasks. Thus, it seems unlikely that any of the
foreign observers, even such an astute one as Saint-Hilaire, would have
been able to ascertain the full extent of mineiro proto-industrialisation.
In the mid-I83os an Englishman who had been involved in the early
British mines which were established in Minas and who knew the
province well wrote a small tract on the Brazilian economy in whi

commented that:
Raw cotton does not pay for collecting it for exportation in the more remote parts
of the province of Minas, where soil and climate conditions combine to produce
a better quality than can be got from land more adjacent to the coast; the spinning
of it, therefore, into coarse cloth for home consumption and exportation to the
coast becomes almost a matter of necessity, as employment for the female part of
the population of the interior, whose earnings in this occupation rarely exceed is.
9d. per week. If by improved means of conveyance a better price were obtained
for the cotton, this labour would be applied to gathering it, and the spinning of
it would be left to England.64
As a good subject of her majesty, Sturz's chief preoccupation in writing

his tract was to demonstrate how British commercial and industrial
interests could best exploit Brazilian resources, as his last remarks a

shows. Nevertheless, he managed to convey a concise picture of min
rural industry in which some of the principal components of pr
industrialisation are clearly evidenced: low cost rural labour in an imp
juxtaposition with subsistence farming, a certain degree of agricultu
specialisation as well as exportation, although in conjunction with he
home consumption. With copies of the provincial customs house rep
for the fiscal year of i827-8 at hand, Sturz informed that Minas
exported some 2,3 39,605 yards of spun cotton cloth, i,964 pounds of s
cotton yarn, as well as 267,000 pounds of raw cotton. He reckoned h
consumption at roughly 5,800,000 yards of cotton cloth, while at the
time noting that the export figures should be 'considered as much be
the real amount; the laxity of the parties appointed to levy a toll the
being acknowledged'.65
The most telling evidence of a widespread textile proto-industrialisa
was obtained in the aforementioned i83 -I840 nominal list samp
Indeed, even the most casual perusal of the manuscripts cannot help
64 J. J. Sturz, A Review, Financial, Statistical & Commercial, of the Empire of Brazil and
Resources: Together with a Suggestion of the Expediency and Mode of Admitting Brazilia
Other Foreign Sugars into Great Britain for Refining and Exportation (London, 1837),
11 I-I2. 65 Ibid., 1o-i 2.

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impress the researcher, since the number of female spinners and weavers
is extraordinary and literally all of the lists attest to the diffusion of this
cottage industry.66 Rare were the domiciles with but one female resident
eight to ten years old or older where the distaff, spinning wheel or loom
were not in operation. Spinning, of course, absorbed the bulk of the
textile labour force, given that the industry was still largely confined to the
manual stage.67 Of the 8,607 textile workers found in the sample, 8,257
were spinners and the remaining 3 5 weavers, giving a ratio of 24 to one.
Why this ratio should have been so high is difficult to ascertain,68 but it
may have had something to do with the nature of the mineiro cotton fibres
or the fact that spinners may have also had to perform the task of ginning
the raw material.69 As was seen in the analysis of the general occupational
structure, the sample indicates that the regional distribution of textile
activities was relatively even. Beyond that, however, the nominal censuses
further indicate the profound social dissemination of the domestic textile
industry. Slave women worked side by side with their mistresses and
other female members of the household, and there does not seem to have
been any hierarchical organisation whereby free women, for example,
controlled the weaving. In fact, the number of slave weavers was
proportionately equal to the number of free weavers. More important still
is the fact that, judging from the census manuscripts, it would be
impossible to describe a typical textile-producing household. Diffusion
was so great that every sort of domicile participated in the textile industry,
from large slave holding farms and even mining units to town houses
dominated by the wealthy lawyer's wife to miserable subsistence farms or
lowly urban dwellings. Such observations clearly discredit the idea that
the domestic textile industry was broken into two very distinct sectors,
namely a 'large property sector' where the bulk of the work was left to
66 Even those nominal lists that tended to contain information about the occupation only
of heads of household registered numerous spinners and weavers, usually widows or
single women who were running their respective domiciles. Thus, absolutely none of
the dozens and dozens of nominal lists from 183 to 840 failed to register the existence
of the cottage textile industry in Minas.
67 Saint-Hilaire provided one example of water power being applied to ginning
operations. Since, as was already mentioned, his direct contacts with the workings of
domestic industry were very rare, it would be difficult to generalise on the basis of this
observation. Saint-Hilaire, Viagem pelas Provincias..., p. 172.
68 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, p. 237. 'Where in 1715 seven carders and twenty-five
weavers kept two hundred and fifty worsted spinners employed, hand jennies reduced
the weaving spinning ratio to one weaver to four spinners.'
69 Saint-Hilaire, Viagem pelas Provincias, p. I II. The author observed that in Sao Joao d'El
Rei merchants ginned the cotton which was bought in outlying areas, however, he
made no mention as to whether the prepared fibres were then shipped to Rio de Janeiro
or sold locally. It may very well have been that in the towns and in those rural areas
where cotton did not grow well producers purchased their cotton already ginned.

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slaves and a 'peasant and urban poor' sector where the spinning and
weaving was done by females and younger children.70 Females above the
age of eight, of all social positions, in all areas, urban or rural, were the
mainstay of this impressive textile industry. And here, of course, we find
that the mineiro version of proto-industrialisation was clearly distinct from
the more peasant-based European variety. Even in Europe, however, the
key to understanding proto-industrial labour force composition was not
so much its peasant character as its intrinsic low cost. As Clarkson points
out, when European proto-industrialisation became more widespread,
poorer segments of the urban population in many areas were forced to
supplement family income through employment in the proto-industries.71
Very probably this was the result of a process of urban immiseration
touched off by the breakdown of guild manufacture vis a vis the
competition of proto-industrialisation.
The rigid gender division of labour present in the mineiro textile proto-
industry is another distinguishing feature in contrast to the European
phenomenon. In the 83 I-40 sample virtually no males were found to be
engaged in spinning or weaving - not even young boys or aged men.72
One can only speculate as to why this was so. The relative vigour of the
agricultural sector - both commercial and subsistence - may provide a
clue. It might be suggested that, within the rural household economy
there existed a sort of balance between industrial and agricultural activities
in terms of income generation and/or survival opportunities. Thus, men
kept to the fields and pastures, while their womenfolk occupied themselves
with spinning and weaving, as well as with routine domestic tasks. That,
however, would leave unexplained the persistence of this gender
differentiation in the towns. A more plausible, if less tangible, general
explanation may be found by remembering that we are dealing here with
a slave society in which we may expect to encounter exceedingly male-
oriented cultural forms. In a slave society, an individual's freedom was
measured by the number of slaves he owned73 and slave ownership by and
70 Martins, 'A Industria Textil Domestica', p. 88.
71 Clarkson, Proto-industrialisation, pp. 53-4.
72 Oddly enough, in the I873 Recenseamento sample a fair number of males - 8.4% of the
textile labour force - was engaged in the domestic textile industry. There is no way of
knowing whether or not they were concentrated in spinning or weaving, since the data
is aggregated for the whole industry. In the Alto Paranaiba region, where the cottage
industry appears to have declined less than in the rest of the province, fully I4.3 % of
the textile labour force was male. Perhaps this demonstrates that, despite the general
tendency toward de-industrialisation, domestic thread and cloth production could
represent a more viable survival strategy than pure subsistence farming. On the other
hand, the already-discussed unreliability of the Recenseamento data must always be born
in mind.
73 This idea is developed in F. H. Cardoso, Capitalismo e Escravidao no Brasil Meridional
(Rio de Janeiro, I977), pp. 208-12.
2 LAS 23

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of itself implied the necessity of maintaining relations of domination

which were potentially violent and masculinised due to age-old sexual
inequalities and accompanying prejudices. Here, of course, it must be
recalled that cultural forms deriving from the master-slave relationship
had a profound effect on the entire society and that, even for the poorest
freedman in a slave social formation, the slave master constituted an
idealised role model. Specifically for the case of mineiro textile proto-
industrialisation, weaving and spinning may have begun as exclusively
female occupations owing to the need for concentrating labour in other,
more lucrative activities such as mining. As a result, manipulating the
distaff, spinning wheel or loom may have been culturally transformed into
activities tainted as unmanly or, more simply, as 'women's work'. If that
were the case, men of all ages and stations in life would have obviously
tended to avoid participating in textile activities if at all possible. There are
European parallels to this kind of phenomenon. As Berg has pointed out,
during the transition to the factory system and corresponding rush
of successive technological innovation, certain tasks were rendered
'unskilled' and as such relegated to women.74 Following Godelier,
Berg observes that:
"In societies where men dominate, women's tasks are considered inferior only
because they have been consigned to women." In other words, the division of
labour is an effect of the social hierarchy and not its cause.75
Of course in the event that, for one reason or another, 'women's work'
were to become particularly lucrative, it is doubtful that male prejudices
could have survived for long. That turn of events does not appear to have
materialised in the case of mineiro textile proto-industrialisation, as will
now be seen.
Unfortunately, direct evidence pertaining to the evolution of textile

activities in Minas in the nineteenth century is scarce. In chronological
terms the only relatively complete set of data available refers to cotton
textile exports. As Sturz noted, the sources underestimated actual exports,
while the level of provincial consumption is anybody's guess. For present
purposes it will have to be assumed that export figures more or less
reflected the ups and downs of mineiro textile proto-industrialisation. The
available data, extracted from sources dating from 1827-8 to I890, are
summarised in Figure 2.
The period began with exports exceeding 2,000,000 metres of cotton
goods, but, although no information is available for most of the decade
of 1830, apparently the industry soon suffered a setback. The 1839-40
74 See Berg, The Age of Manufactures, chap. 6.
75 Ibid., p. I53. The quote is from M. Godelier, 'Work and its Representations', History
Workshop, vol. Io ( 980).

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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Society 3 1
figures indicate a nearly 50% drop in relation to the 1827-9 fiscal year.
An observer writing in i837 noted that the manufacture of finer fabrics
had suffered dearly from the pressures of foreign competition, but he
hastened to add that: '... the weaving of coarse cotton goods still
stands in good stead and occupies many a hand', even though this branch
had also felt the effects of the penetration of foreign cloth.76 There can be
little doubt that the flooding of coastal markets with British goods had
reduced demand for the mineiro product, especially given the onus of high
transportation costs which bore on the so-called Minas cloth.77
Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the decade of 1840 witnessed a
healthy recuperation and in the fiscal year of 1847-8 exports rose to nearly
2,600,000 metres, thereafter oscillating around the 2,000,000 metre mark
for the next five or six years. It may be hypothesised that this temporary
recuperation can be attributed to the resistance and durability of the coarse
mineiro cloth, which had for many decades won favour among Brazilian
slave owners in general as an ultimately sound investment for clothing
Millions
of metres
Fiscal year
Fig. 2. Cotton textiles exportedfrom Minas Gerais I827/8-9o. (Source: Adapted from R. B.
Martins 'A industria textil domestica de Minas Gerais no Seculo XIX,' Anais do II
Semindrio sobre a Economia Mineira, CEDEPLAR/FACE/UFMG (September i983), pp.
86-7.)
76 R. J. da Cunha Matos, Corografia Histdrica da Provincia de Minas Gerais (i837) (Belo

Horizonte, 1981), vol. i, pp. 101-2.
77 Sturz, A Review ..., p. 112. The author calculated the costs of transportation to the
coastal markets as amounting to from 50 to 80 % of the final price of mineiro goods.
2-2

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their bondsmen.78 European factory-produced similars may have taken

some time to effectively equal the mineiro cotton goods from the point of
view of Brazilian consumers. Of course, that they would do so eventually
was inevitable. Thus a second wave of export recuperation beginning in
the early 86os and apparently continuing through the decade might come
as a surprise unless it were not nearly certain that it resulted from the
grave crisis in the European textile industries provoked by the Civil War
in the United States.79 In the early i87os the decline was sharp and exports
remained at very low levels up to I 890, despite the fact that the period saw
more than a dozen textile mills springing up all over the province.80
The appearance of textile mills from 1872 on may suggest that Minas'
proto-industrialisation was 'successful' in making a very rapid transition
to the factory system, is much the same way that parts of continental
Europe had responded to English competition.81 However, that seems
much too facile an explanation and, unless a series of other factors are
taken into consideration, I do not believe it is possible to get to the bottom
of the demise of mineiro proto-industrialisation. In the first place, until well
into the twentieth century, textile mills were small-scale, relatively labour-
intensive enterprises, even when compared to other Brazilian mills. For
example, production data are available for seven of the eleven mills that
were probably operating in 1885. The total production of the seven mills
fell just short of 3,000,000 metres. By averaging individual mill output and
multiplying by the eleven mills which may have been functioning in 885,
we find that total mill output would have been just over 4,700,000 metres.
That figure does not compare at all well with Sturz's 1827-8
(under)estimate for combined exports and home consumption, which
amounted to over 7,400,000 metres. By the time of the proclamation of the
Republic in 1889 then, Minas' textile mills had apparently not even
managed to reach output levels equal to cottage industry production of six
decades earlier. Indeed, they had not managed to substitute even the
estimated output for home consumption in 1827-8, whereas demand had
obviously grown along with the provincial population during this time
span. To speak of a 'successful' transition from proto-industrialisation to
a more 'dynamic' factory system in the mineiro case seems somewhat
tenuous at best.
78 R. F. Burton, Exploring the Highlands of Brazil (New York, 1969), p. 134. In 1867
Burton observed that the cotton goods produced in Sao Joao d'El Rei were 'strong
and outlast many lengths of machine woven stuffs...'
79 See Canabrava, O Algodao em Sao Paulo, for the effects of this crisis in Sao Paulo.
80 See Libby, Transformadao e Trabalho, pp. 2I4-56.
81 See P. Kriedte, 'Proto-industrialisation between Industrialisation and De-
industrialisation', in Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before
Industrialisation, p. 39.

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Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Sociey 33
The small scale of the mineiro mills and their marked dependency on
labour factors might be thought of as legacies from their proto-industrial
predecessors, as might be the extremely low cost of the labour employed
by the early factory system in Minas.82 But the fact is that there appears
to have been very little continuity between the domestic textile industry
and the factory system mills. This is because, from the mid-i8Sos on, it
seems more appropriate to speak of a de-industrialisation process,
notwithstanding the posterior temporary recuperation registered in the
midst of an anomalous conjuncture on the world market. There can be
little doubt that foreign textile manufactures were making steadily more
significant incursions into the mineiro market, as evidenced in an I855
report from Sao Joao d'El Rei which lamented that '... the introduction
of extremely low priced striped English cottons of inferior quality has
ruined this branch of commerce'.83 The fact that such complaints were
not uncommon during the I85os suggests that Minas may have followed
the same path to de-industrialisation as certain European regions had done
earlier. In analysing why such regions were unable to make the transition
to a fully-fledged factory system industry, Schlumbohm observes that:
... there were regions and industries where the trend of capital to penetrate into
the sphere of production was weak or arrested at an early stage: this was the
essential reason why they industrialised late or not at all. In the extreme case a
region de-industrialised under the pressure from regions that had progressed
from proto-industrialisation to industrialisation.84
That would, indeed, seem to have been the case of proto-industrialisation

in Minas. At the same time, the author's observations appear to qualify the
somewhat shallow development of the early textile mills as late
industrialisation in the sense that it followed a period of de-indus-
trialisation. What remains to be explained is why a prolonged phase of
proto-industrialisation, with origins firmly planted in the eighteenth
century and still showing clear signs of vitality in the i83os and I840s,
apparently did not engender any significant patterns of modification in its
predominant relations of production. Here only speculation is possible.
No matter what reservations one may have as to the reliability of the
I873 Recenseamento figures, they undeniably demonstrate that at some
point near mid-century proto-industrialisation in Minas Gerais began to
atrophy. This steadily whittled away at the complex relationship that
82 See Libby, Transformafao e Trabalho, pp. 384-8. The annual earnings of early textile
workers in Minas did not even equal the annual costs of renting and maintaining an
adult male slave in the I87os and i88os.
83 Arquivo Pdblico Mineiro, Secao Provincial, C6dice 570, I855, manuscript.
84 Schlumbohm, 'Relations of Production - Productive Forces Crisis in Proto-
industrialisation', in Kriedte, Medick and Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before
Industrialisation, pp. I Io- I.

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made domestic commodity production a viable option for augmenting

family income, or even for assuring its simple survival. As has just been
seen, for proto-industrialisation to have made decisive contributions to
the drive toward industrial capitalism, new relations of production
involving the penetration of capital into the productive sphere would
have had to emerge. Although, especially after the closing of the
international slave trade in I850, a certain degree of proletarianisation
seems to have taken place among the free population (as reflected in the
number ofjornaleiros/day labourers examined earlier), this was but a very
partial process. Moreover, it does not seem very likely that such incipient
changes in the relations of production had anything to do with the
dynamics of proto-industrialisation. If anything, they may rather have
resulted, at least in part, from de-industrialisation, to the extent that the
diminishing of the domestic textile industry could have forced free males
to seek outside employment, leaving the women to carry on with the daily
tasks of agricultural subsistence.
It is simply not known how the commercialisation of proto-industrial
textiles was carried out. The fact is that there is no evidence in the
extensive documentation directly or indirectly concerning mineiro pr

industrialisation to show that merchants had any part in promoting
modifying the domestic textile industry. This very absence of eviden
almost certainly significant in itself. One can speculate that th
organisation of cottage industry in Minas never advanced beyond
Kaufsystem, under which direct producers remained responsible
obtaining their raw materials and, more importantly, continued to
their wares to market themselves, even when that market consisted
nothing more than a 'passive' merchant or mercantile firm.85 It might
be far off the mark to suggest that merchant interests were incapab
grasping the opportunity that lay before them, because they made th
profits indifferently on both the export and import sides of their led
Here, the high costs of transportation could have been a decisive fac
Another important factor may very well have been the nature of t
merchant class itself. Many merchants appear to have begun their car
as muleteers engaged in the vital carrying trade, which at the same t
unified the vast mineiro territory and linked the captaincy/province to th
rest of Brazil and, indirectly, to the world beyond. Not surprisingly,
well travelled muleteer merchants enjoyed a considerable degre
prestige in the provincial atmosphere of Minas' hinterland.86 Moreo
muleteering nearly always led to the amassing of a fortune wh
85 Ibid., pp. 98-101.

86 Cf. A. A. de M. Franco, 'Paginas do Passado Brasileiro: Tropas e Tropeiros', Cul
Politica, vol. 2, nos. 12 and 13 (1942), pp. 233-8, 262-5.

131.255.74.55 on Thu, 26 Aug 2021 06:16:50 UTC
Proto-industrialisation in a Slave Society 3 5
permitted these so-called carrying trade entrepreneurs to establish

themselves as large slave holders and land owners. In other words, as was
seen earlier in the analysis of the 1830-40 nominal lists, merchants
frequently retained the status of slave masters and in doing so enlarged the
gamut of their productive pursuits so as to mirror the diversity of the
mineiro economy itself. At an individual level, this diversity may have
distracted attention away from the possibilities that more direct
engagement in the organisation of the cottage textile industry had to offer.
On a more abstract level, however, whatever his origins, a large
slave/land owner would tend to downplay the importance of his
commercial activities, notwithstanding their potential for profits, in
favour of his more 'noble' pastoral pursuits, while at the same time
abhorring all form of direct participation in manual labour. This
combination of distractions and social attitudes inherent to the specifics of
mineiro slave society may very well constitute the ultimate explanation for
the failure of Minas' proto-industrialisation to make a direct transition to
a factory based industry.
At any rate, no putting-out system seems to have evolved. Such a
system usually led to deeper and deeper penetration of capital into the
productive sphere and resulted for direct producers in a progressive loss
of independence. Although the structural difficulties impeding an
entrenched slave system from generating and adapting to the changes
necessary for unleashing a full process of industrialisation can have no
direct parallels in the European experience, J. K. J. Thomson's final
appraisal of the obstacles impeding Languedoc's entry into the industrial
age are quite suggestive:
... the many centuries during which the province had played so central a role in
the pre-industrial economy had led to its inhabitants possessing rigid attitudes to
commercial and industrial activities which, though they corresponded to the
circumstances of pre-industrial economy, were less well suited to success in an
industrial one.87
87 Thomson, 'Variations in Industrial Structure in Pre-industrial Languedoc', p. 91.

131.255.74.55 on Thu, 26 Aug 2021 06:16:50 UTC

Proto-Industrialisation XIX Minas

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Proto-Industrialisation in a Slave Society: The Case of Minas Gerais

Author(s): Douglas Cole Libby

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/157532

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The proto-industrialisation model and the slave economy

Douglas Libby is Associate Professor of History at the U

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 23, 1- 5 Printed in Great Britain

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proto-industrial model. Rural industry was commonplace in certain

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context must also be emphasised. On the one hand, proto-industrial rural

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dynamic sectors of the economy. However, it must be quickly added that

The seminal works representing this new investigation are those of

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was based upon an economy dedicated to subsistence agriculture, as well

stagnation hypothesis, since it is obvious that a marked growth in th

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defined as a moderately commercial agricultural sector. Owing to its size,

important of the dynamic segments of the economy. Commer

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there was a relatively large group of slave holders - roughly one-third o

General demographic indicators

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Year Men Women Total Men Women Total Free Slave

1786 94, 66 94,546 188,712 116,191 57,844 I74,035 52.0 48.0

in this particular case, it is now necessary to turn to broad m

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Table 2. Participation of Creoles and Africans in the slave population of

Source: PopulaSao da Provincia de Minas

African slaves and the results are somewhat surprising.

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in I850. Slave demographics in Minas may ha

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augmented by some 345 percent. Obviously, such inflated growth rates

The mineiro occupational structure

The sources which provide data on the occupational structure permit

been corrected by a study group at the Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento

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Fig. i. Districts included in occupational structure sampl

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Free men 240 2 884 8 1,893 i8 6,822 64 835 8 11 ** o

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obscure. More traditional categorisation tends to mask the fluidity of such

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figures tend to mask certain regional differences: in five of the regions

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proto-industrial experience was truly enormous when compared to proto-

If women sustained Minas' cottage industries, what sort of industrial

certain lack of uniformity, especially as regards occupational denomina-

37 Libby, Transforma?ao e Trabalho, chap. 3.

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But why did this apparent de-industrialisation not lead to a proportional

purposes of the census. In other words, it is very probable that in many

occupation of all household residents. Those studies which do deal w

mineiro proto-industry could have employed as many as 4,000 individuals. Cf. Li

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a category that may not have been particularly representative of the

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were to be found among the subcategories within the secondary sector.

There should be no doubt by now that the slave economy of late