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Brazilian Export Growth and Divergence in the Tropics during the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2016

CHRISTOPHER DAVID ABSELL  and
ANTONIO TENA-JUNGUITO
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Abstract

The objective of this article is to reappraise both the accuracy of the official export statistics and the narrative of Brazilian export growth during the period immediately following independence. We undertake an accuracy test of the official values of Brazilian export statistics and find evidence of considerable under-valuation. Once corrected, during the post-independence decades (1821–50) Brazil's current exports represented a larger share of its economy and its constant growth is found to be more dynamic than any other period of the nineteenth century. We posit that this dynamism was related to an exogenous institutional shock in the form of British West Indies slave emancipation that afforded Brazil a competitive advantage.

Spanish abstract

El objetivo de este artículo es reconsiderar tanto la exactitud de las estadísticas oficiales de exportación y la narrativa del crecimiento de exportaciones de Brasil durante el período inmediatamente posterior a la independencia. Aquí se realiza un examen sobre la exactitud de los valores oficiales de las estadísticas sobre la exportaciones brasileñas y encontramos evidencias de una subvaloración considerable. Una vez corregidas, durante las décadas post independentistas (1821–1850), las exportaciones de Brasil representan una parte mayor de su economía y demostramos que su constante crecimiento resultó ser más dinámico que en cualquier otro periodo de ese siglo. Sostenemos que dicho dinamismo se relacionó con un choque institucional externo en la forma de la emancipación de esclavos de las colonias británicas en el Caribe que dio a Brasil una ventaja competitiva.

Portuguese abstract

O objetivo deste artigo é reavaliar tanto a precisão das estatísticas oficiais relacionadas às exportações quanto as narrativas sobre o crescimento das exportações brasileiras no período logo após a independência. Realizamos um teste de precisão dos valores das estatísticas oficiais de exportações brasileiras e encontramos evidências de uma considerável subvalorizarão. Uma vez feitas as correções, durante as décadas pós-independência (1821–1850) as exportações brasileiras representaram uma parcela maior da economia do país e o crescimento constante das exportações demonstra ter sido mais dinâmico que em qualquer outro período do século XIX. Postulamos que este dinamismo estava relacionado ao choque institucional exógeno representado pela abolição da escravidão nas Índias Ocidentais britânicas que garantiram uma vantagem competitiva ao Brasil.

Keywords

Brazilexport growthaccuracytropicsnineteenth centuryslaveryBrasilcrecimiento de exportacionesexactitudtrópicosiglo XIXesclavitudBrasilcrescimento das exportaçõesprecisãotrópicosséculo XIXescravidão

JEL classification

F14: Empirical Studies of Trade N76: Latin America • Caribbean
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 677 - 706
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 J. P. Wileman, Brazilian Exchange: The Study of an Inconvertible Currency (Buenos Aires: Galli Bros., 1896), p. 129.

2 See Leff, Nathaniel H., ‘Tropical Trade and Development in the Nineteenth Century: The Brazilian Experience’, Journal of Political Economy, 81: 3 (May–June, 1973), p. 690 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 For the full series of data underlying this article, please see the online appendix.

5 Teresa A. Meade, A Brief History of Brazil, 2nd edition (New York: Infobase, 2010), p. 89; Werner Baer, The Brazilian Economy: Growth and Development, 5th edition (Connecticut: Praeger, 2001), pp. 16–18; Fishlow, Albert, ‘Brazilian Development in Long-Term Perspective’, The American Economic Review, 70: 2 (May, 1980), p. 102 Google Scholar; Batista, Paulo Nogueira Jr., ‘Política tarifária britânica e evolução das exportações brasileiras na primeira metade do século XIX’, Revista Brasileira de Economia, 34: 2 (1980), p. 204 Google Scholar.

6 Caio Prado Júnior, História econômica do Brasil, 38a edição (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1990), pp. 192–204; Celso Furtado, Formación económica del Brasil (México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962), pp. 113–23. On the decline of gold and the cotton and sugar industries in the eighteenth century, see Roberto Cockrane Simonsen, Historia económica do Brasil (1500–1820): curso professado na escola livre de sociología e política de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1957).

7 Leff, Nathaniel H., ‘A Technique for Estimating Income Trends from Currency Data and an Application to Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, Review of Income and Wealth, 18: 4 (1972), p. 363 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Leff used data on the currency stock, together with official export statistics, to estimate the long-run trend of income growth, estimating growth rates of 2.7 per cent from independence to 1869, 2.1 per cent from 1869 to 1894, and 4.3 per cent from 1895 to 1913.

8 Leff, ‘Tropical Trade and Development in the Nineteenth Century’, Table 4, p. 683.

9 Leff, Nathaniel H., ‘Economic Development and Regional Inequality: Origins of the Brazilian Case’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 86: 2 (May, 1972), pp. 243–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 de la Escosura, Leandro Prados, ‘Lost Decades? Economic Performance in Post-Independence Latin America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 41 (2009), p. 281 Google Scholar. Thus Brazil forms an exception to the rule in what has come to be known as the lost decades argument. Also see Bates, Robert H., Coatsworth, John H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., ‘Lost Decades: Postindependence Performance in Latin America and Africa’, The Journal of Economic History, 67: 4 (December 2007), p. 921 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alan Dye, ‘The Institutional Framework’, in Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John Coatsworth and Roberto Cortés Conde (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America. Volume II: The Long Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Independence, however, has been recognised as a costly process in terms of the temporary loss of fiscal sovereignty due to the payment of indemnities to Portugal and the continuation of a tariff agreement with Great Britain. On the fiscal impact of independence, see Paiva Abreu and Correa do Lago, ‘Property Rights and the Fiscal and Financial Systems in Brazil’, pp. 338–40. On the relationship between Brazil and Great Britain, see Stephen Haber and Herbert S. Klein, ‘The Economic Consequences of Brazilian Independence’, in Stephen Haber (ed.), How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 245–8.

11 However, Brazil was by no means immune from border disputes or secessionist revolts during the post-independence period. See Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 20.

12 Leff, ‘Tropical Trade and Development in the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 684–6; Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 41–5, 169–78; Batista Jr., ‘Política tarifária britânica e evolução das exportações brasileiras’, pp. 215–23. The slave trade was abolished by Great Britain in 1807. It was not until 1833 with the Slave Abolition Act that full emancipation occurred. On the British West Indies, see Sheridan, Richard B., ‘The West Indian Sugar Crisis and British Slave Emancipation, 1830–1833’, Journal of Economic History, 21 (1961), pp. 539–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833 (New York: Octagon Books, 1963); Ward, J. R., ‘The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies, 1650–1834’, The Economic History Review, 31: 2 (May, 1978), pp. 197–213 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Klein and Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil, p. 74.

14 Ibid ., pp. 78–9; do Lago, Luiz Aranha Corrêa, ‘O surgimento da escravidão e a transição para o trabalho livre no Brasil: um modelo teórico simples e uma visão de longo prazo’, Revista Brasileira de Economia, 42: 4 (1988), p. 329 Google Scholar.

15 See Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 210–11, online Appendix Table A.2, which gives the following figures for Brazil (in thousands of slaves): 1801–10: 241.3, 1811–20: 327.7, 1821–30: 431.4, 1831–40: 334.3, 1841–50: 378.4, 1851–60: 6.4.

16 Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chap. 3, 12 and appendix.

17 Klein and Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil, p. 153. For Bahia see Bert Jude Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 137; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 343. For Pernambuco, see Galloway, Jock H., ‘The Sugar Industry of Pernambuco during the Nineteenth Century’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58: 2 (June, 1968), pp. 285–303 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 On slave prices in Bahia, see Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, p. 139. For long-run slave price trends in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, see Klein and Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil, pp. 98–299. For a comparison with Cuba, see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), appendix C.

19 On the internal slave trade: Klein, Herbert S., ‘The Internal Slave Trade in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: A Study of Slave Importations into Rio de Janeiro in 1852’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 51: 4 (Nov. 1971), pp. 567–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On abolition, see Robert Edgar Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972); Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade; Klein and Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil, chap. 10. On immigration, see Leff, Nathaniel H., ‘Economic Retardation in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, The Economic History Review, 25: 3 (Aug. 1972), p. 494 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, p. 36; for the number of mills in Pernambuco, see Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco: Modernization without Change, 1840–1910 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), appendix 3.

21 For the case of São Paulo, see Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, Slavery and the Economy of São Paulo, 1750–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 56–7.

22 Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Antonio Delfim Netto, O problema do café no Brasil (São Paulo: Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas, 1981); Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

23 For Bahia, see Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, chap. 5. For Pernambuco, Galloway, ‘The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco’, pp. 288–90.

24 Paiva Abreu and Corrêa do Lago, ‘Property Rights and the Fiscal and Financial Systems in Brazil’, p. 327.

25 Lee J. Alston, Gary D. Libecap and Bernardo Mueller, Titles, Conflict, and Land Use: The Development of Property Rights and Land Reform on the Brazilian Amazon Frontier (Michigan, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 35; Marcelo de Paiva Abreu and Luiz Aranha Corrêa do Lago, ‘A economia brasileira no império, 1822–1889’, in Marcelo de Paiva Abreu (ed.), A ordem do progresso, edição atualizada: dois séculos de política econômica no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2014); Dean, Warren, ‘Latifundia and Land Policy in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 51: 4 (Nov. 1971), pp. 606–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Joseph Ryan, ‘Credit where Credit is Due: Lending and Borrowing in Rio de Janeiro, 1802–1900’, unpubl. PhD diss., University of California – Los Angeles, 2007, p. 88.

27 Frank, Zephyr, ‘Wealth Holding in Southeastern Brazil, 1815–60’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 85: 2 (2005), pp. 242–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the case of Minas Gerais, see Filho, Amilcar Martins and Martins, Roberto B., ‘Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais Revisited’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 63: 3 (Aug. 1983), pp. 537–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laird W. Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

28 In the case of sugar, see Eisenberg, Sugar Industry in Pernambuco, pp. 63–7: for coffee, see Stein, Vassouras, pp. 17–20.

29 Ryan, ‘Credit where Credit is Due’, pp. 82–103; Eisenberg gives prime interest rates for Recife, which descended from 18 per cent in 1835 to 9.43 per cent in 1857. Eisenberg, Sugar Industry in Pernambuco, p. 64.

30 Klein, Herbert S., ‘The Supply of Mules to Central Brazil: The Sorocaba Market, 1825–1880’, Agricultural History, 64: 4 (Fall 1990), pp. 1–25 Google Scholar.

31 For the expansion of the railway and associated social savings costs see Summerhill, William R., ‘Big Social Savings in a Small Laggard Economy: Railroad-Led Growth in Brazil’, The Journal of Economic History, 65: 1 (Mar. 2005), pp. 74–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 William R. Summerhill, ‘The Development of Infrastructure’, in Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John Coatsworth and Roberto Cortes-Conde (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 2, The Long Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 293–328. For the case of Cuba, see Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García, Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History 1837–1959 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

33 William R. Summerhill, Order Against Progress: Government, Foreign Investment and Railroads in Brazil 1854–1913 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

34 Klein, ‘Supply of Mules’, pp. 9–10.

35 Aida Mansani Lavalle, ‘Análise quantitativa das tropas passadas no registro do Rio Negro (1830–1854)’, unpubl. thesis, Universidade Federal do Paraná, 1974; Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, Tropas em marcha: o mercado de animais de carga no centro-sul do Brasil imperial (São Paulo: Annablume, 2008), chap. 2.

36 The pessimistic perspective is most eloquently articulated in Oskar Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); for the optimistic perspective, see Federico, Giovanni and Tena-Junguito, Antonio, ‘On the Accuracy of Foreign Trade Statistics (1909–1935): Morgenstern Revisited’, Explorations in Economic History, 28 (1991), pp. 259–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Morgenstern, On the Accuracy of Economic Observations, p. 180.

38 Platt, D. C. M., ‘Problems in the Interpretation of Foreign Trade Statistics before 1914’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 3: 2 (1971), pp. 119–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 For example, see Ficker, Sandra Kuntz, ‘Nuevas series del comercio exterior de México, 1870–1929’, Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 20 (2002), pp. 213–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maria del Mar Rubio and Mauricio Folchi, ‘On the Accuracy of Latin American Trade Statistics: A Nonparametric Test for 1925’, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Departament d'Economia i Empresa Working Paper, 2005; Carreras-Marín, Anna and Badia-Miró, Marc, ‘La fiabilidad de la asignación geográfica en las estadísticas de comercio exterior: América Latina y el Caribe (1908–1930)’, Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 26: 3 (2008), pp. 355–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tena-Junguito, Antonio and Willebald, Henry, ‘On the Accuracy of Export Growth in Argentina, 1870–1913’, Economic History of Developing Regions, 28: 1 (2013), pp. 28–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bonino-Gayoso, Nicolás, Tena-Junguito, Antonio and Willebald, Henry, ‘Uruguay and the First Globalization. On the Accuracy of Export Performance, 1870–1913’, Revista de Historia Económica/Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 33: 2 (2015), pp. 287–320 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 do Lago, Luiz Aranha Corrêa, ‘Balança comercial, balanço de pagamentos e meio circulante no Brasil no Segundo Império: uma nota para uma revisão’, Revista Brasileira de Economia, 36: 4 (1982), pp. 489–508 Google Scholar; O comércio exterior do Brasil no Segundo Império: uma reavaliação (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getulio Vargas, 1986); Gustavo Henrique Barroso Franco, ‘O balanço de pagamentos do Brasil, 1870–1896: novas estimativas’, Texto para Discussão No. 201. Departamento de Economia PUC-Rio, 1988.

41 Wileman, Brazilian Exchange.

42 Brazil, Regulamento das alfândegas e mesas de rendas (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1866), p. 242.

43 Brazil, Commercio exterior do Brasil, 1910 a 1914, Vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Directoria de Estatistica Commercial, 1915), p. XXI.

44 Wileman, Brazilian Exchange, p. 83.

45 Franco, ‘O balanço de pagamentos do Brasil’, p. 2.

46 Although occasionally reference was made to the pauta. For example see Brazil, Importação e exportação, movimento maritimo, cambial e do café da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1905), pp. 208–9.

47 Brazil, Commercio exterior do Brasil, 1910 a 1914, Vol. 1, p. XXI.

48 While it is outside the purview of this article to provide a comprehensive explanation for the bias shown in the official statistics, it is possible to offer a number of conjectures. One reason might be simply that official values were not updated in a timely fashion. There is evidence of this in the case of import values which were modifiable only by Act of Parliament and thus were frequently unrepresentative of market values. See Versiani, Flávio Rabelo, ‘Industrialização e economia de exportação: a experiencia brasileira antes de 1914’, Revista Brasileira de Economia, 34: 4 (1980), p. 24 Google Scholar. This is evident in certain cases (for example, cotton during the first decade of independence) in which official prices tend to lag behind international price changes. Another reason for the bias may be the influence of commercial associations. As Eugene Ridings observed, it was in the interest of export lobbies to reduce as much as possible the elasticity of the official price schedule with relation to ascending price movements in order to avoid an increased tax burden. If prices were descending, however, they would lobby for the frequent adjustment of official prices in order to avoid paying more taxes. See Eugene Ridings, Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth-century Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 199. This remains an open question for future research.

49 Franco, ‘O balanço de pagamentos do Brasil’, p. 2; ‘Setor externo’, in Estatísticas históricas do Brasil, séries econômicas, demográficas e sociais de 1550 a 1988, 2a edição (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 1990), p. 561.

50 Summarising his conclusions over three periods, Wileman estimated the ratio of local to foreign valuations as 97 per cent for the period 1865 to 1878, 88.3 per cent for the period 1879 to 1886, and 98 per cent for the period 1886 to 1888. Wileman's sample of trading partners included Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany (Hamburg), the United States, Portugal, Austria, Uruguay and Argentina. To the total valuation of imports from Brazil to these countries was added 10 per cent for ‘unspecified countries’ and 15 per cent was subtracted to cover the freight factor. See Wileman, Brazilian Exchange, pp. 122–3.

51 Ibid ., p. 124.

52 Federico and Tena-Junguito, ‘On the Accuracy of Foreign Trade Statistics’; Tena-Junguito and Willebald, ‘On the Accuracy of Export Growth in Argentina’; Antonio Tena-Junguito, Las estadísticas históricas del comercio internacional (1890–1960): fiabilidad y comparabilidad (Madrid: Banco de España, Estudios de Historia Económica, no. 24, 1992).

53 This ‘price’, as well as those derived from the UK import statistics, is effectively the computed unit value; that is, total value over total quantity. We take the official prices of these commodities from Brazil, Anuário estatístico do Brasil de 1939/1940 (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 1941), pp. 1374–8.

54 Tobacco and herva mate, while also occupying lesser but still important portions of Brazil's exports, have been dropped due to the absence of data on international prices. Even in the absence of these commodities, the sample covers an average of 88 per cent of the value of exports during the period in question, ranging from a minimum of 66.6 per cent in 1844/45 and a maximum of 93.9 per cent in 1895 according to official statistics.

55 The correlation coefficients of the selected commodities during the period 1854–1912 are as follows: coffee = 0.91, sugar = 0.98, cotton = 0.99, hides = 0.84.

56 Import price data records of UK, France and Belgium were valued at fixed prices until 1854, 1847 and 1846, respectively. This implies that the use of these records to evaluate Brazil's official valuation is not useful and justifies the use of the international price series used here.

57 For this period we are obliged to drop rubber from the sample due to the lack of international price data. This is not such a problem, however, as rubber occupied a marginal portion of Brazil's total exports. The sources for prices and weights are given in online appendix 1.

58 See Steven Topik, ‘The World Coffee Market in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, pp. 5–6.

59 For the period 1910 to 1913 it accounted for 57.73 per cent of total sugar exports. Brazil, Commercio Exterior do Brasil, 1910 a 1914, Vol. 1, pp. 72–5.

60 For a precise explanation of how this transition has been undertaken, see online appendix 1 and Figure A1. In the case of hides, we were unable to locate data on world exports, and thus our price series until 1846 is the arithmetic average of a number of different sources. This is not such a problem for the reconstruction of our series, however, given that hides occupied a relatively minor share of exports during the century. Furthermore, our adjustment serves to establish a middle ground between the dynamism of the early series and the trend of the UK series.

61 The weight of trade costs depends largely on the commodity in question. Generally, this factor ranged between 4.37 per cent (sugar, 1857) to 23.46 per cent (rubber, 1898) of the c.i.f. value. Such variability was due not to freight rates, which generally tended to decline during the period, nor to insurance costs, but rather to export taxes which differed quite drastically between commodities, particularly during the Republican period. Unlike other Latin American countries, Brazilian export taxes did not decline during the latter half of the century. Instead, provincial governments took advantage of the opportunity to define export taxes awarded to them by the Republican Constitution of 1891. This resulted in a sharp increase in the weight of taxation during the last decade of the nineteenth century which, in the case of the taxation of rubber exports in the state of Pará, saw ad valorem taxes rise as high as 22 per cent. For the case of Amazonia, see Felipe Tâmega Fernandes, ‘Stretching the Inelastic Rubber: Taxation, Welfare and Lobbies in Amazonia, 1870–1910’, Harvard Business School Working Paper 10–032 (2009).

62 See online appendix 4.

63 Gonçalves, Reinaldo, ‘Índices de comércio exterior do Brasil’, Revista Brasileira de Estatística, 42: 168 (1981), pp. 331–62Google Scholar. This index uses a sample of eight commodities (cacao, coffee, cotton, herva mate, hides, rubber, sugar and tobacco) with 1880 as the base year, the unit values of which are taken from the Anuário Estatístico of 1939/40. This index was later reproduced in Estatísticas históricas do Brasil, séries econômicas, demográficas e sociais de 1550 a 1988, 2nd edition (Rio de Janiero: IBGE, 1990), p. 597.

64 Blattman, Christopher, Hwang, Jason and Williamson, Jeffrey G., ‘Winners and Losers in the Commodity Lottery: The Impact of Terms of Trade Growth and Volatility in the Periphery 1870–1939’, Journal of Development Economics, 82 (2004), pp. 156–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The BHW index is a chained Laspeyres index that uses the British c.i.f. unit values.

65 This description of the context prior to the start of our series (1800–20) is based on the elaboration of a chained Laspeyres-Fisher export price index, adjusted for trade costs, calculated from data on sugar, coffee, cotton, hides, and tobacco prices from Arthur D. Gayer, Walt W. Rostow and Anna J. Schwartz, Microfilmed Supplement to Volumes I and II of The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy 1790–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953) and Anne Bezanson, Robert D. Gray and Miriam Hussey, Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia, 1784–1861 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936–37). Prices rose rapidly from the beginning of hostilities until the French loss in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and then fell consistently before rising again during the hostilities between the United Kingdom and the United States. For the economic impact of the Napoleonic Wars, see Bulmer Thomas, Economic History of the Caribbean, p. 78; O'Rourke, Kevin, ‘The Worldwide Economic Impact of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815’, Journal of Global History, 1 (2006), pp. 123–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Leslie Bethell, Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 6–7; José Luis Cardoso, ‘1808: o ano zero de autonoma econômica do Brasil’, in Pedro de Avillez (ed.), Rio de Janeiro, capital do império português (1808–1821) (Parede: Tribuna a Historia, 2010), p. 120; Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, chap. 2.

67 See Leff, ‘Tropical Trade and Development in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 690; ‘Economic Development in Brazil, 1821–1913’, p. 41.

68 Prado Júnior, História econômica do Brasil, pp. 159–67.

69 Leff, ‘Economic Development and Regional Inequality’, pp. 244–5.

70 For a theoretical discussion of constant market share analysis, see Edward E. Leamer and Robert M. Stern, Quantitative International Economics (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1970), chap. 7; Richardson, J. D., ‘Constant Market Shares Analysis of Export Growth’, Journal of International Economics, 1 (1971), pp. 227–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an example of its application to economic history, see Antonio Tena-Junguito, ‘Protección y competitividad en España e Italia, 1890–1960’, in Leandro Prados de la Escosura (ed.), El desarrollo económico en la Europa del Sur: España e Italia en perspectiva histórica (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992), pp. 342–50.

71 Although it is customary to further disaggregate export growth into market distribution and commodity composition effects, we are restricted by the questionable quality and paucity of official bilateral data. A test of the accuracy of the geographical distribution of bilateral statistics by value and quantity highlights a number of serious problems. To begin with, the series is incomplete. Data are only available for the years 1842/43, 1852/53, 1862/63, 1872/73, and the period from 1901 onwards. Furthermore, the Brazilian export records are found to be considerably and consistently overvalued when compared to trading partner import records. This incorrect geographic assignment of exports might have been driven by differing conceptions of origin and destination and in some cases by smuggling or fraudulent practices by government officials in customs houses. See Platt, ‘Problems in the Interpretation of Foreign Trade Statistics before 1914’, p. 121; Brazil, Relatorio do Ministerio da Fazenda (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1876), pp. 66–7; da Cunha Thompson Flores, Mariana Flores, ‘Contrabando na fronteira meridional do Brasil – por fora e por dentro da Alfândega (1845–1889)’, Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais, 4: 7 (2012), pp. 122–42Google Scholar.

72 While an analysis of the competitiveness of Brazil's coffee exports post-1890 is outside the purview of this article, it is possible to briefly speculate on the determinants of such competitiveness. Despite the abolition of slavery and the post-1906 government valorisation scheme that used Brazil's monopoly supplier position to alter world prices in favour of Brazilian producers, competitiveness was most likely achieved by way of the devaluation of the exchange rate, which itself was linked to the revenues derived from the renewed coffee export boom of this period. On exchange rates for Brazil, see Catão, Luis A. V. and Solomou, Solomos N., ‘Effective Exchange Rates and the Classical Gold Standard Adjustment’, The American Economic Review, 95: 4 (Sept. 2005), pp. 1259–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cardoso, Eliana A., ‘Exchange Rates in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: An Econometric Model’, Journal of Development Studies, 19: 2 (1983), p. 175 Google Scholar. On the coffee crisis and subsequent intervention see Delfim Netto, O problema do café no Brasil; Hutchinson, Lincoln, ‘Coffee “Valorization” in Brazil’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23: 3 (May, 1909), pp. 528–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a study on the extent of Brazil's market power, see Marcelo de Paiva Abreu and Felipe Tâmega Fernandes, ‘Market Power and Commodity Prices: Brazil, Chile and the United States, 1820s–1930’, Texto para Discussão No. 511. Departamento de Economia PUC-Rio (2005), p. 8.

73 Giovanni Federico and Antonio Tena-Junguito, ‘World Trade, 1800-1938: A New Data-set'. EHES Working Papers In Economic History, No. 93 (2016). Online statistical appendix available from: http://www.ehes.org/WP Statistical Appendix tables (2016) 2.xlsx.

74 According to Bulmer-Thomas, sugar accounted for over 50 per cent of the commodity exports of the Caribbean in 1820. This would rise to close to 70 per cent in 1880 and fall thereafter. Coffee was the second most important export of the region, maintaining its share throughout the century. See Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of the Caribbean, Figures 5.2 and 5.2.

75 This sample includes Cuba, Guadalupe, Haiti, Indonesia (Java), Jamaica, Martinique, and Suriname. Together with Brazil this sample represented 81.63 per cent of the quantum of world exports in the period 1851–55. Unfortunately, data for total world exports is only available from 1851–55 onwards, calculated by five-year averages. To provide estimates for the decades up until mid-century, we assume that our sample represents 80 per cent of world exports during the period 1823–50, and estimate world exports based on the sum of the sample countries. This is by no means an unrealistic assumption. At the beginning of the nineteenth century nearly all coffee exported to the world market was apparently produced by European colonies, including, most notably, the ex-colony of Haiti (previously Saint Domingue), the world's leading coffee exporter at the turn of the nineteenth century, followed by other French colonies such as Martinique, Dominica, Guadalupe, the Dutch and British colonies in the Guianas and Jamaica. Once estimated, we use the world exports estimate to calculate five-year average country shares. On the world market for coffee, see Topik, ‘The World Coffee Market in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, p. 16.

76 See M. R. Fernando, ‘Coffee Cultivation in Java, 1830–1917’, in William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (eds.), The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 157–8.

77 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘The Coffee Crisis in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, 1870–1914’, in William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (eds.), The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 101–5.

78 This sample includes the British (Trinidad and Tobago, St Lucia, St Kitts, Nevis, Monserrat, Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada, Dominica, Barbados and Antigua), French (French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Martinique), Danish (Danish Virgin Islands), Dutch (Dutch Antilles, Suriname) and Spanish (Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba) colonies of the Caribbean, as well as a number of African and Asian producers (Mauritius, Réunion, Indonesia).

79 Jock H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 130–4.

80 We proxy exports from the Southern United States with the sum of exports of tobacco and thus our estimate might undervalue their total share.

81 According to Eisenberg, beet production in France and Germany increased from 46,472 metric tons in 1841–45 to 2,647,888 metric tons around the turn of the century. His estimate of world beet sugar production in 1896–1900 was 5,009,931 metric tons compared to world cane sugar production of 2,445,469. Eisenberg, Sugar Industry in Pernambuco, pp. 237–40. Furthermore, Cuba's export industries were buoyed by the incorporation of indentured Chinese labour from 1847 onwards. See Hu-Dehart, Evelyn, ‘Chinese Coolie Labour in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labour or Neo-slavery?’, Slavery and Abolition, 14: 1 (1993), pp. 67–86 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 The effect of slave abolition on the sugar plantations of the British and French colonies of the Caribbean is described in Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, pp. 123–30. For an overview of the British West Indies, including the consequences of different land/labour ratios, see Engerman, Stanley L., ‘Economic Adjustments to Emancipation in the United States and British West Indies’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13: 2 (Autumn 1982), p. 196 Google Scholar. For Jamaica, Gisela Eisner, Jamaica 1830–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961). For Guiana, British, Moohr, Michael, ‘The Economic Impact of Slave Emancipation in British Guiana, 1832–1852’, The Economic History Review, 25: 4 (Nov. 1972), pp. 588–607 Google Scholar.

83 Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry, pp. 130–4.

84 See Delfim Netto, O problema do café no Brasil; Paiva Abreu and Tâmega Fernandes, ‘Market Power and Commodity Prices’, p. 8.

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