Today the Brazilian state of So 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 So Paulo into one of the largest metropolises in the world. pThis book thus provides the first comprehensive portrait of the economy and people of So Paulo during the critical transition from the traditional eighteenth-century colonial world to the modernizing world of the nineteenth century. pThe result is a major rethinking of the history of early slavery in Brazil--it shows that, contrary to previous beliefs, slavery was as deeply entrenched and exploited in So Paulo as elsewhere in Brazil, and that the state's early economic growth as the world's leading coffee-producing region after 1850 was made possible by an expan