Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900. The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society

(Paperback, Revised edition)

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Description

This book is a now classic social and economic study of the origins, apogee, and decline of coffee in the Parahyba Valley of South Central Brazil. Local society, the free-planters, professionals, tradesmen, and lower class citizens-and the slaves, are viewed through the routine of plantation life. The author shows how abolition, erosion, and bankruptcy transformed virgin forest into a wasteland of eroded hillsides and abandoned towns, of disillusioned planters and poverty-stricken black freedmen.

Reviews

"The key theme is actually ... not coffee, or even Vassouras, but the use and abuse of soil and labor under slavery and its unhappy impact upon society."--Virginia Quarterly "By narrowing his canvas to one municipio, the author successfully combines sound historical perspective with the microcosmic insights characteristic of contemporary community studies."--Marvin Harris, American Historical Review

Author Bio

Stanley J. Stein is Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture at Princeton University, and coauthor, with Barbara Hadley Stein, of The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (Oxford).