This volume contains eight previously unpublished essays concerning the socioeconomic history of two widely separated parts of the former Portuguese empire—India, long the goal of countless intrepid Portuguese explorers and the early empire’s principal source of wealth, and Brazil, which replaced India as the empire’s most valuable colony and later became a leading nation in Latin America.
Each essay is based upon fresh research in primary sources and sheds new light on important historical concerns. M. N. Pearson explores the ethnic and social structure of Portuguese India and explains the causes and manifestations of deeply rooted tensions there. Catherine Lugar contributes an important study of the colonial Brazilian tobacco industry. Michael C. McBeth and Frank D. McCann evaluate the status of the Brazilian soldier during the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively.
June E. Hahner provides a pioneering study of the upgrading of employment opportunities for Brazilian women between 1850 and 1920. Gerald Michael Greenfield examines the problems of obtaining adequate public services during the 1880s in the rapidly growing metropolis of Sao Paolo. Thomas H. Holloway shows that the success of the rapidly expanding coffee industry of Sao Paolo in the 1880s depended on an abundant supply of labor and that once newly arrived European immigrants were available, planters ended their opposition to abolition and actually came to support it in order to end social and political unrest. Sheldon L. Maram analyzes the Brazilian labor movement, handicapped and divided by foreign-born leaders and native workers.