RT Dissertation/Thesis
T1 The Bittersweet Century: Slavery, tariffs and Brazilian export growth during the nineteenth century
A1 Absell, Christopher David
AB This dissertation revises the veracity of the official statistics and conventional narrativeof Brazil’s export performance during the nineteenth century. An accuracy test revealsthat the official export series is undervalued. When corrected using international prices,post-independence (1822-1850) export growth is found to be the most dynamic of thecentury. This dynamism was driven by the rapid growth of coffee exports in the southeastand the revival of sugar exports in the northeast. The first part of the dissertation positsthat Brazil’s dynamic post-independence export performance was associated withexogenous institutional change that improved Brazilian competitiveness in internationalmarkets, specifically British West Indies slave emancipation. The second part of thedissertation tests the emancipation hypothesis. Results indicate that, for the case of sugar,British slave emancipation served to increase the demand for Brazilian sugar in the Britishmarket. Increased demand was due to two British policy interventions. Initially, thepremature end to the system of apprenticeship in the West Indies in 1838 correspondedwith increased imports of Brazilian sugar, much of it destined to the British re-exportmarket. The reduction of duties on non-colonial sugar in 1846, together with decliningsupplies from the British West Indies, led to rapidly increasing quantities of Braziliansugar retained for consumption. I estimate that the British policy interventions contributedto an increase in Brazil’s market share of five per cent. Given the size of the British sugarmarket, however, this corresponded to around 15 to 28 per cent of the volume of Brazil’sexports. A comparison with other markets indicates that these trends were largelyconfined to the British sugar market. For the case of coffee, the determinant of the rapidgrowth of coffee exports is found to be the reduction and abolition in 1832 of the tariffon coffee in the United States. The consequent fall in the duty-paid price led to a rapidincrease in consumption and the expansion of the potential of the American coffeemarket. In less than a decade, the United States became the principal consumer of coffeeexports from Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil became the leading supplier of coffee to theAmerican market. I estimate that the reduction and abolition of the American tariff oncoffee is associated with an increase of around one-third in the volume of coffee exportsfrom the port of Rio de Janeiro. Given that the cultivation of coffee was dependent on theexploitation of African slave labour, I also find that the reduction and abolition of thetariff corresponded to an increase of one-quarter in the number of African slaves importedto the southeast during the 1830s. Overall, the results of this dissertation represent animportant re-interpretation of the determinants of Brazilian export growth during the postindependenceperiod.
YR 2019
FD 2019-11
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/29887
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/29887
LA eng
DS e-Archivo
RD 1 sept. 2024