Vassouras

This book is a now classic social and economic study of the origins, apogee, and decline of coffee in the Parahyba Valley of South Central Brazil. Local society, the free-planters, professionals, tradesmen, and lower class citizens-and the slaves, are viewed through the routine of plantation life. The author shows how abolition, erosion, and bankruptcy transformed virgin forest into a wasteland of eroded hillsides and abandoned towns, of disillusioned planters and poverty-stricken black freedmen.

Author Biography

Stanley J. Stein is Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor in Spanish Civilization and Culture at Princeton University, and coauthor, with Barbara Hadley Stein, of The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (Oxford).