Internalizing colonialism: land concentration and capital markets in Brazil (1850–1906)
My doctoral research investigates how Brazil’s political and economic slaveholding elites adapted and reinterpreted colonial financial models to maintain control over land and nature as commodities during the transition from slavery to free labor. Focusing on the period between 1850 and 1906, the study analyzes the creation of financial institutions that promoted land commodification and facilitated the concentration of property in the expanding coffee frontiers. It argues that, amid the crisis of slavery (1850–1888), Brazilian elites internalized mechanisms developed by European metropoles, particularly France, in their colonies in Africa and the Caribbean (Algeria, Martinique, and Guadeloupe), as well as by other capitalist powers such as the United States, England, and Germany, which had established mortgage banks and agricultural credit systems to finance capitalist agriculture. In this process, Brazilian elites sought to interpret and remodelate these colonial instruments of land and credit control to ensure their political and economic dominance in the post-abolition era. By tracing how financial institutions became central to the reconfiguration of property and sovereignty after slavery, the research reveals that the so-called modernization of Brazil’s financial system was, in fact, an internalization of colonial logics of domination over land, labor, and nature.
