Luna, Francisco Vidal and Herbert S. Klein. An Economic and Demographic History of São Paulo, 1850–1950. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2018. xxv + 448 pp.

An Economic and Demographic History of São Paulo, 1850–1950 is a major undertaking by two eminent scholars, economist Francisco Vidal Luna and historian Herbert Klein, and it provides a comprehensive socio-economic survey covering the state’s formative years from the 1850s, as an agro-export supplier, to the 1950s, its age of heavy industry. São Paulo has been the most industrialized and populated state of Brazil since the early twentieth century and its capital, the city of São Paulo, is the world’s fourth-largest metropolitan area. Corroborating the literature on the exceptional nature of the region, Luna and Klein reiterate how it went from being one of the most marginal and backward areas of the nation to its leading agricultural, industrial, and financial center. This book is the second of a three-volume history: it follows Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford UP 2003) and precedes a last volume that will bring us to the present. This volume places special emphasis on the creation of modern-state government and finances, including a discussion of the construction of public and private provincial/state public institutions linked to the coffee economy and its internal market, as well as that sector’s leading role in the eventual integration of over two million Eurasian immigrants into Brazilian society.

In a nation still under the influence of the sugar and crude-cotton textile industries, São Paulo’s coffee production from the 1850s moved the crop from a trend to a dominant position, which led to a revolution in the agricultural production of the backward rural province. This commercial reality—marked by large virgin territories, regional concentration of farms, a shortage of labor, and precarious transport—faced a labor problem (African slavery vs. Eurasian immigrant labor) and the conflict within São Paulo and with other provinces produced by this question. In contrast to other locales, the paulista coffee growers were able to take advantage of an efficient rail transport network, which later led to expanding domestic and export markets. In this process, coffee also allowed the government to establish a significant tax system and create an effective finance system. Relying on the successful western paulista interior’s implementation of a Eurasian immigrant wage-labor policy, the region contributed to the progressive erosion of the African-slave regime. Paulista coffee elites created a large and complex state structure supported by state taxes and fees, which promoted the transition to capitalism and urbanization. Accordingly, “the educational institutions that the state now promoted and the creation of a large and complex state bureaucracy that it established led to the rise of a new middle class with the skills to create a modern state apparatus” (62). The state’s investments in health, education, and transportation surpassed all other Brazilian provinces and all other coffee-growing areas in the world until the 1950s. This coffee fazendas’ extensive but not-well-integrated system, designed solely for the agro-export market, created a logic of its own.

Aiming at understanding the fiscal life of the province and the state (e.g., the interplay among laws, taxes, and exports), the authors dig into extensive studies on the financial conditions of the province and the dominant liberalism discourse among the imperial elites. Despite the scarcity of studies on the politico-administrative organization of the region in the nineteenth century, the authors focus in chapters two and three on the construction of the provincial/ state government agencies and the evolution of the tax system, which became key to economic development and urban policies. They delve into a wealth of data (e.g., provincial documents and state constitution) that illuminate annual budgets (taxes, income, and expenditure). For instance, the taxes related to slave ownership, taxes on urban property, as well as annual budgets, vary from place to place in the state. Therefore, though these sources are very rich in themselves, they reflect many gaps in relation to the different categories and processes they cover (e.g., state building during the first republic, the diversion of coffee capital into banking and commercial and industrial activities, the process behind the Força Pública, and so on), which makes it almost impossible to compare or to fully assert which groups comprised this paulista elite as well as how it was able to gain almost complete control of public administration. There are other comprehensive chapters devoted to analyzing economic crisis, the state’s place in national and international commerce, the paulista elite’s loss of hegemony, industrial growth, infrastructure and urbanization of the state, and trends in population growth and structure. All of these chapters offer important support to those studying the region.

Through nine chapters, 99 tables, 49 figures, and 11 maps (which note that, at different times, the states of Minas Gerais and Paraná were once part of São Paulo), the authors take us on an intense and extensive data-driven journey to the state’s ten regions. Despite the relative lack of systematic information available, the authors have collected a comprehensive set of primary and secondary sources, which weave together traditional research (e.g., Wilson Cano, Warren Dean, Joseph Love, Verena Stolke) and original research (from both academia and state-institutions), along with extensive historical data (e.g., provincial reports and censuses). Luna and Klein’s data-driven work offers a sorely needed synthesis of the quantitative underlying the importance of coffee and its institutions as well as providing the authors’ perceptions about the social and economic changes experienced in this period. The data adds richness as well as historical intra-provincial geographic variation, and many times, a needed attention to the interplay between the traditional literature and other recent historiographical work. Though any unifying discourse of a given collection of a wealth of data may be elusive, this accessible volume offers valuable data-driven information and an excellent case for comparative research on areas in the developing world like São Paulo. There are two other important contributions made by this volume. One is the interesting assemblage of data they bring to the forum and the other is the bibliography on the city. The authors do present the available sources, trace and explain them, and analyze vital circumstances, which can be of key importance to those studying São Paulo. Undergraduates may find it less appealing, but this book is a welcome contribution and required reading for historians of world history, economy, Brazil, and Latin American Studies.