The process of expansion of the pioneer frontier describes the progressive integration of the frontier region into the national economy. The same process contains the cycle of accumulation on the pioneer frontier. In other words, the cycle of accumulation runs its course through the integration of the frontier region into the national economy. This national economy is capitalist, where accumulation takes place through the appropriation of surplus value; the frontier economy is not originally capitalist, but, on the contrary, is characterised by clearly ‘pre-capitalist’ production, and occasionally market, relations. Thus the transformation of the ‘natural environment’ of a frontier region into a ‘productive society’ describes the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist relations occurring within the cycle. Given the heterogeneous structure of the Brazilian social formation, where different modes of production exist side by side, the transition implied by the cycle may never be complete.

The concept of transition implies changes both in production relations and in the markets for goods, land and labour. These changes are complex, and take place over time. But it is possible to capture the principal dimensions of change by distinguishing three consecutive ‘stages’ of frontier expansion, called here the ‘non-capitalist’, the ‘pre-capitalist’, and the ‘capitalist’. There are doubts which quite rightly surround any division of social process into ‘stages’, and the strategy is adopted here as a heuristic device which should not be taken to deny the central idea of the process of frontier expansion.