Today the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo is one of the world's most advanced agricultural, industrial, and urbanized regions. Its historical evolution, however, is poorly understood. Most scholarly attention has been paid to the period after 1850, when coffee rose to economic dominance, or to the period since 1880, when large-scale European immigration turned the city of Sao Paulo into one of the largest metropolises in the world. This book thus provides the first comprehensive portrait of the economy and people of Sao Paulo during the critical transition from the traditional eighteenth-century...