Inflação, subsistência e carestia em Minas Gerais em meados do século XIX

Abstract

During the first half of the nineteenth century, amongst Brazilian parishes located close to the sea, those devoted to the production of foodstuffs were far more densely peopled than those attached to export crops. The production for export in central and southern Brazil lead to population densities that could not match those produced by the export areas in the Empire’s Northeast, and this also applied to food-producing parishes in both regions. Among other factors, density was inversely correlated to the distance from North Atlantic, where the results of eighteenth-century economic growth (affecting population growth and the slave trade) were manifest during the subsequent fifty years. Those differences were not exactly coincident with the diversity of colonization patterns, and were not a direct result of slavery.