228 CHAPTER 10 RACE, NATION, AND THE MEANING OF FREEDOM, 1821–1888
Brazil made more economic progress in a few years
than it had during the almost seven decades of im-
perial rule. Fazendeiros replaced freedmen with
immigrants on the coffee plantations; in the cit-
ies, black artisans lost their jobs to immigrants.
For the former slaves, however, little had changed.
The abolitionist demand for the grant of land to
the freedmen was forgotten. Relationships between
former masters and slaves in many places remained
largely unchanged; racist traditions and the eco-
nomic and political power of the fazendeiros gave
them almost absolute control over their former
slaves. Denied land and education, freedmen were
now compelled by the “whip of hunger” to labor
at the hardest, most poorly paid jobs. Moreover,
political reforms that established high income and
literacy requirements for citizen participation effec-
tively disenfranchised the freedmen, but they also
dramatically reduced voting among free people of
color and poor whites. In a society in which, ac-
cording to the 1872 census, only 16 percent of the
people were literate, this legislation disfranchised
99 percent of eligible voters and set the stage for a
century of covert, race-based discrimination.
Peru
The liberation of Peru from Spanish rule had come
from without, for the creole aristocracy, whose
wealth was derived from the forced labor of in-
digenous peoples and enslaved Africans in mines,
workshops, and haciendas, rightly feared that
revolution might set fi re to this combustible social
material. The liberators, General José de San Mar-
tín and Simón Bolívar, had attempted to reform the
social and economic institutions of the newly cre-
ated Peruvian state. Before he left to meet Bolívar
in Guayaquil, San Martín had decreed a ban on
slave importation, the automatic emancipation of
all children born of slaves in Peru, the abolition of
native tribute, and the end of all other forms of in-
digenous forced labor; he also proclaimed that all
inhabitants of Peru, whether native or creole, were
Peruvians.
Because these reforms did not conform to the
interests of the creole elite, however, they were
never implemented after San Martín left Lima to
meet Bolívar in Guayaquil. When Bolívar assumed
power in Peru in 1823, he enacted reforms that re-
fl ected the same liberal ideology. Wishing to create
a class of independent small-holders, he decreed
the dissolution of indigenous communities and
ordered the division of communal lands into indi-
vidual parcels; each family was to hold its plot as
private property, with the surplus to become part
of the public domain. While attacking communal
property, Bolívar left alone feudal property, the
great haciendas serviced by yanaconas orcolonos
(native sharecroppers or serfs), who were required
to pay their landlords a rent that amounted to
as much as 50 to 90 percent of the value of their
crops.
The well-intentioned Bolivarian land reform
played into the hands of hacendados, public offi -
cials, and merchants, who used it to build up vast
estates at the expense of indigenous communal
lands; the process began slowly but gathered mo-
mentum as the century advanced. Bolívar’s efforts
to abolish native tribute had no greater success.
After he left Peru in 1826, Peru’s creole govern-
ment reinstituted the tribute for serranos under
the name contribución de indígenas, and for good
measure it also reintroduced the contribución de
castasfor the mestizo population of the coast.
The new government’s heavy dependence
on such tribute as a source of revenue refl ected
the stagnant condition of the Peruvian economy.
The revolution completed the ruin of the mining
industry and coastal plantation agriculture, both
of which had been declining since the close of the
eighteenth century, and the scanty volume of ex-
ports could not pay for the much greater volume of
imports of manufactured goods from Britain. As a
result, the new state, already burdened with large
wartime debts to English capitalists, developed a
massive trade defi cit with Great Britain, its larg-
est trading partner. Wool exports increased after
1836, and in 1840 a new economic era opened
on the coast with the exploitation of guano, but
in its fi rst stage, the guano cycle failed to provide
the capital accumulation needed to revive coastal
agriculture.