Sharecropping, small farmers and day laborers: German-speaking migrants and immigrants in the provinces of Santa Catarina and Espírito Santo (1840-1860)

Abstract

This article investigates questions of land ownership and free labor arrangements in the

main German-speaking immigrant settlements in the provinces of Santa Catarina and Espírito Santo between 1840 and 1860. Specifically, it evaluates the circumstances of the foundation and initial development of the colonies of Blumenau, Dona Francisca, and Santa Isabel in the province of Santa Catarina, and Santa Leopoldina, Santa Isabel, and Rio Novo in Espírito Santo. It highlights that, despite being small rural landowners, most immigrants settled in the Dona Francisca and Blumenau colonies worked in paid activities parallel to agriculture, dedicating themselves only partially to cultivating their land. Additionally, the article emphasizes that, at the same time that large coffee planters in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro employed Europeans as sharecroppers on their coffee farms, the sharecropping system as a form of free labor relationship was also experimented in the Dona Francisca colony, one of the most important nuclei of German colonization in 19th-century Brazil. This study also brings to light the history of the Kaffeepflücker in the Santa Isabel colony, in Santa Catarina. Little known in economic historiography, the history of the Kaffeepflücker constitutes one of the most interesting chapters of German immigration to Brazil in the 19th century, highlighting the interprovincial migration of foreigners initially hired to work as sharecroppers in the coffee-growing regions of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In this context, this article also highlights the interprovincial migration of partner colonists towards Espírito Santo, as well as German colonization in the Capixaba province, where the colonists were settled as small rural landowners and achieved relative prosperity from the free cultivation of coffee.