2024/02/06 by Rodrigo Goyena Soares · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #History of Colonial Brazil #Literature, Culture, and Criticism #Urban Development and Societal Issues
paper · pdf · doi:10.11606/issn.2316-9141.rh.2024.214314
openalex publication_date 2024/02/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Along with the Brazilian Law of Free Birth (1871), extensively discussed in historiographical literature, other reforms undertaken by the Viscount of Rio Branco, when head of the Council of Ministers (1871-1875), tended to be analyzed separately and thematically, and thus without rendering a clear meaning to his cabinet´s work. Through budgetary and banking-related primary sources, this article proposes that Rio Branco remedied the emancipation measure with financial, productive, and tax reforms in order to appease farmers in dire straits due to the wave of abolitionism. Despite the wide range of projects, also examined here, the capital mobilized by Rio Branco was specifically earmarked for coffee farmers of the Paraíba Valley. The Bank of Brazil, to which the greatest fraction of the Rio de Janeiro coffee capital was migrating, played a major role in the process. Thus, a type of uneven reformism, already glimpsed in the 1850s, was carried out by Rio Branco through a greatly increased public debt: on the whole, it focused on a recoinage of the imperial currency.