A Summary of Vassouras

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The setting for Stanley J. Stein's book Vassouras takes place in one of the most unique environments in the world. Housing large tracts of virgin rain forest, Vassouras represents the ideal climate for the coffee cultivation that has come to dominate Brazilian agriculture, and during the latter half of the 19th century proved as the foremost region for coffee growing in the world. However, by the beginning of the 20th century, Vassouras had declined as a major coffee producing region, and its decline demonstrates important aspects of Brazilian cultural and economic life. Vassouras ultimately lost its affluence as a coffee producer because of the destructive and ineffective agricultural practices of its farmers and the crumbling of the slave-based society that served as its dominant labor force. The experience of Vassouras also demonstrates larger themes in Latin American economics at the end of the 19th century.

Vassouras's boom and bust depended largely on the institution of slavery. Slaves worked plantations and provided virtually all the labor in the cultivation of coffee. Instead of hurting the economic status of the fazenda owners, the end of the slave trade in 1851 improved their condition in the short-run, as it made the value of their slaves double. This provided for more financial resources for the fazenda owners and which ultimately led to expanded production and increases in the land used for coffee cultivation. However, with the anti-slavery movements of the 1870s, the economic condition of the fazenda owners became more precarious, as they knew that they would inevitably lose the backbone of their labor force. This realization lead to decreased investment in the region, and by the eventual end of slavery in 1888, the fazenda owners were left without a labor force they could exploit. However, exploitation was not limited to only the labor market. In one of the greatest ecological disasters in history, fazenda owners cleared large tracts of rainforest and quickly exhausted the soil through using poor farming practices. The more prosperous the region became, the more forest fazenda owners destroyed. This trend of exploitation of land and labor proved representative of Latin American economics of the period, as large landowning families used free or cheap labor, in the form of slaves or repressed indigenous and mixed classes, to cultivate lands in largely ineffective measures.

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