Large estates and social organisation

In Latin America, agrarian structures are not only an element of the production system but also the basic feature of the entire social organisation. We have seen, in chapter 2, that both in the economies whose point of departure was export agriculture and in those initially organised around mining production, the large estate tended to become the basic element of social organisation. From the outset, the principle governing grants of land was that grantees should have the necessary means to exploit their lands in order to produce a surplus which could be converted into cash and partially transferred to the Crown. After independence, several countries sought to modify this principle by promoting colonization schemes under which lands were granted as family holdings to settler families who undertook to work the land themselves. This policy was nearly always bound up with the encouragement of European immigration and achieved some success in Southern Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

The family farm system made headway in regions which remained relatively isolated and were characterised by the prevalence of recent settlement of European origin. Thus, in the southern regions of Brazil, where there was no profitable export crop, the pioneer European ‘colonies’ were forced to turn to a subsistence economy, producing marginal surpluses for sale in the home market, particularly in the rapidly expanding coffee areas. Given the abundance of land and the farming techniques which settlers brought from Europe.