Herbert S. Klein

• PhD History
• Professor at Columbia University & Stanford University

Although Brazil today is one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters and has the highest positive trade balance, it is still a net importer of wheat. Changes in consumption stemming from European migrants, who switched from cassava flour to wheat products in the late 19th century, led to mass importation of wheat. Brazilian governments in the...

Resumo A história das finanças públicas está relativamente bem desenvolvida na historiografia brasileira, entretanto a maioria das pesquisas concentrou-se nas finanças do governo central e nas atividades dos governos estaduais, com menor ênfase nas finanças municipais. Neste ensaio, estudamos a composição e evolução dos orçamentos da cidade de São...

This essay surveys both the traditional findings and new debates that have used the Spanish imperial royal financial accounts to analyze the colonial economy and government. The crisis of the seventeenth century, the relations between colonial elites and royal government, the impact of income transfers among treasury offices, the sale of offices, t...

Assim como em outros segmentos da agricultura brasileira, nos últimoscinquenta anos ocorreram transformações extraordinárias na pecuária. Atividadetradicional estabelecida no país desde o início da colonização, caracterizava-se atérecentemente pela criação extensiva e de baixa produtividade. Embora a pecuáriaargentina apresentasse características s...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

This book is the first modern survey of the economic and social history of Brazil from early man to today. Drawing from a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, it provides a comprehensive overview of the major developments that defined the evolution of Brazil. Beginning with the original human settlements in pre-Colombian society, it mov...

Brazil is currently the world’s leading orange grower and the leading world exporter of all types of processed orange juice. It grows 35% of world oranges and accounts for 72% of the orange juice production. Three of every five glasses of orange juice consumed in the world today are produced at Brazilian factories and Brazilian juice makes up three...

The growing wealth of the world in the past seventy-five years has led to an increasing demand for cheap animal protein. While the modern chicken meat or broiler industry was first developed in the United States and Western Europe, it is Brazil which today is the primary world exporter of broiler chickens. We examine the origin and growth of the in...

The basic change which explains the sudden growth of agricultural exports was the modernization of national agriculture and the expansion into frontier tropical zones which occurred after 1950. This involved massive government intervention in terms of subsidized credit, controlled prices and stocks, and support for the introduction of machinery, fe...

The production and export of sugar defined the colonial history of Brazil. It was here that the first modern slave-based plantation system was created in America. Up through the end of the seventeenth century, it was the dominant Atlantic producer of sugar. Although production continued to grow it was replaced in world markets in the eighteenth cen...

Coffee has been a fundamental crop in Brazil since the beginning of the nineteenth century. We analyze the major changes over time in regions of production, size of units, and types of coffee produced. From a plantation system with enslaved labor it now involves small family farms as well as mechanized commercial producers. It now is a major produc...

Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay today account for well over a third of world exports of cellulose, yet this industry only came into existence in the late twentieth century. The evolution of this industry in Brazil is the object of this chapter. This was an infant industry that required direct government support to be successful, even leading in the earl...

Can Brazilian agriculture be sustained without further deforestation? What are the potential impacts of global warming on continued agricultural expansion? We describe the policies of the government meant to deal with these two issues and how successful they have been. These are the basic themes dealt with in this chapter. It explores the developme...

Brazil has undergone an extraordinary change in its agriculture in the past half century in terms of output, land use, and productivity. It has also gone from being primarily a coffee exporter to becoming one of the world’s largest agricultural exporters in dozens of agricultural and pastoral products. It is one of the most dynamic parts of the nat...

Brazil has become the leading world exporter of animal products, and above all of beef. For most of its evolution the cattle industry was a low-productivity industry. When Argentina turned itself into a great exporter of chilled and frozen beef at the end of the nineteenth century, Brazil with its larger herds never engaged in exports. It was only...

Brazil has emerged as a leading maize producer only in the past two decades. It is associated with the expansion of soybean production and has also had an impact on national meat production. We examine how this transformation of maize production occurred as a rotation crop, and then the rise of the second and third crops “safrinhas” as a result of...

Today Brazil is the world’s second leading source of cotton, reprising the role it played for a brief time in the early nineteenth century. But this history of its production is a complex one of both growth and stagnation, and includes profound changes in the types of cotton exported and where and how it was produced. It went from being a product o...

In the past 50 years, South America has emerged as the dominant world producer of soybeans, a crop of no significance in the region before the middle of the twentieth century. As of the crop year 2019/2020, Brazil and Argentina produced 176 million tons which is over half of all world production and these two countries alone will also account for 5...

The growing wealth of the world in the past seventy five years has led to an increasing demand for cheap animal protein. While the modern chicken meat or broiler industry was first developed in the United States and Western Europe, it is Brazil which today is the primary world exporter of broiler chickens. We examine the origin and growth of the in...

Today Brazil is the world’s second leading source of cotton, reprising the role it played for a brief time in the early 19th century. But this history of its production is a complex one of both growth and stagnation, and includes profound changes in the types of cotton exported and where and how it was produced. It went from being a product of smal...

La creciente riqueza en el mundo en los últimos setenta y cinco años ha llevado a una cada vez mayor demanda de proteína animal barata. Mientras que la moderna carne de pollo o la industria broiler fue desarrollada primero en los Estados Unidos y Europa Occidental, hoy es Brasil el principal exportador de pollos broiler. Este artículo examina el or...

Fiscal history has become one of the most active new fields of research on colonial Spanish America. This trend has resulted from a number of recent breakthroughs, most notably the reconstruction of colonial treasury records and the appearance of the first revisionist studies based on the new data. These works are challenging traditional views, par...

Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay today account for well over a third of world exports of cellulose, yet this industry only came into existence in the late twentieth century. The evolution of this industry across the three countries is the object of this study. This nascent industry required direct government support in all three countries to be successfu...

Analisamos comparativamente informes demográficos de qualidade aceitável acerca dos escravizados nascidos na África para Minas Gerais, São Paulo e Maranhão de 1804 a 1848. As parcelas dos nascidos na África em relação aos escravizados e às razões de sexo de todos os cativos, de acordo com as idades, auxiliaram-nos a remontar a dinâmica retrospectiv...

Brazil and Argentina have emerged as leading maize producers and exporters in the past two decades. In both cases the modern maize industry is associated with the expansion of soybean production and has also had an impact on national meat production. We examine how this transformation of maize production occurred, how it evolved in different ways i...

The Chaco War began on 18 July 1932, when Salamanca announced to the startled nation that the Paraguayan forces had seized a Bolivian fort in the Chaco. That this fort was in reality a Paraguayan one that had been seized by the Bolivians at the end of May was ignored. Salamanca ordered a major offensive that night and carried out a state of siege....

Bolivian society evolved in a highly complex and unusual environment. Although situated in tropical latitudes, it was in fact an unusual high altitude society only comparable to those few similar societies found in the Himalayas. From the earliest human settlement to the present day, a good part of its people have lived at altitudes over five thous...

Bolivia is an unusually high-altitude country created by imperial conquest and native adaptions – today, it remains one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the world with one of the largest Amerindian populations in the Americas. It has seen the most social and economic mobility of Indian and mestizo populations in any country in Latin America. T...

The shock of the election of 2002 followed by the massive, violent, and ever more effective blockades by mestizos and indigenous groups created the backdrop for the emergence of the first coherent and powerful mass political party led by mestizo and indigenous leaders. By the time of the presidential election of December 2005, most of the tradition...

Bolivia is an unusually high-altitude country created by imperial conquest and native adaptions – today, it remains one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the world with one of the largest Amerindian populations in the Americas. It has seen the most social and economic mobility of Indian and mestizo populations in any country in Latin America. T...

The year 1880 marked a major turning point in Bolivian history. To contemporaries, the most dramatic event of this year was the utter defeat of Bolivian arms at the hands of the Chilean invaders and the loss of its entire coastal territory in the War of the Pacific. Less dramatic but equally important was the establishment of a new government to re...

Bolivia is an unusually high-altitude country created by imperial conquest and native adaptions – today, it remains one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the world with one of the largest Amerindian populations in the Americas. It has seen the most social and economic mobility of Indian and mestizo populations in any country in Latin America. T...

Bolivia is an unusually high-altitude country created by imperial conquest and native adaptions – today, it remains one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the world with one of the largest Amerindian populations in the Americas. It has seen the most social and economic mobility of Indian and mestizo populations in any country in Latin America. T...

José Ballivián was born in La Paz in 1805, and came from an upper-class family, his uncle being Sebastián de Segurola, the royal official who led the suppression of the Tupac Amaru rebellion. But he himself was relatively uneducated, having entered into a military career at the age of twelve. An important leader in the independence armies, he was t...

The nineteenth century in Upper Peru began with a severe long-term depression that had a profound effect on its literate urban populations and its mining export economy. This decline and the serious agricultural crises that erupted in the countryside formed a crucial background to the region’s response to the collapse of the imperial government in...

With the peaking of silver production by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, both at Oruro and Potosí, and its subsequent secular decline, a fundamental shift in the economic space and social organization began to occur within Upper Peru, the American region most profoundly affected by the so-called seventeenth-century crisis. The most i...

The Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the leader of European expansion on a global scale. The Portuguese initiated European world domination through the conquest of the oceanic trade routes of Africa and Asia. And Spain – and more specifically the Castillian kingdom within the Spanish state – undertook the conquest and...

Bolivia in 1950 was still a predominantly rural society, the majority of whose population was only marginally integrated into the national economy. Of all economically active persons registered in the census of 1950, fully 72 percent were engaged in agriculture and allied industries. Yet this workforce only produced some 33 percent of the gross nat...

Bolivia is an unusually high-altitude country created by imperial conquest and native adaptions – today, it remains one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the world with one of the largest Amerindian populations in the Americas. It has seen the most social and economic mobility of Indian and mestizo populations in any country in Latin America. T...

The transatlantic migration of peoples to the Americas after 1492 was influenced by a series of factors determined by conditions in the regions of origins as well as the zones of arrivals. To begin with both Castile and Portugal were at the height of their empires when the New World was opened up to foreign penetration. There thus existed innumerab...

Economic inequality has become one of the most important themes in the social sciences. The debate has revolved around two basic models. Was Kuznets correct in his prediction that inequality declines with economic growth, or was Piketty, along with others in the Berkeley/Paris/Oxford group, correct to counter that capitalism without severe constrai...

La colección editorial Itinerarios del Instituto Mora tiene como tradición publicar los estudios de historiadores internacionalmente reconocidos. En esta ocasión se han reunido en un volumen los ensayos más destacados del profesor Herbert S. Klein sobre la Real Hacienda en España y la América española a lo largo de tres centurias.

In the past 50 years, South America has emerged as the dominant world producer of soybeans, a crop of no significance in the region before the middle of the 20 th century. As of the crop year 2019/2020, Brazil and Argentina produced 176 million tons which is over half of all world production and these two countries alone will also account for 57 pe...

Cambridge Core - Social and Population History - Modern Brazil - by Herbert S. Klein

While the plantation accounts for 90% of slave ownership and experience in the Americas, its centrality to the common conceptions of slavery has arguably led to an oversimplified understanding of its multifarious forms and complex dynamics in the region. The Many Faces of Slavery explores non-traditional forms of slavery that existed outside the pl...

O surgimento do Brasil como grande produtor agrícola mundial no final do século XX é um dos desenvolvimentos mais importantes da história moderna. Desde 1960, o Brasil deixou de ser um importador de alimentos, concentrado na exportação de apenas um produto, para se tornar o maior exportador líquido de alimentos do mundo e o terceiro maior produtor...

Cambridge Core - Economic History - Feeding the World - by Herbert S. Klein

Traditional historical literature has stressed a generalised crisis throughout the world in the 17 th century. First proposed for Europe with its numerous dynastic, religious and state conflicts, it has now been expanded to include Asia and the Middle East as well. It was also assumed that there was a significant crisis in the Americas, a theme whi...

Describes the origin, growth and eventual domination of the coffee economy in the state, and the role coffee production played in the entire paulista economy. How coffee was grown, the nature of the coffee plantations, their changing labor force from slave to free labor are the themes analyzed. The impact of the railroad construction in the second...

This chapter analyzes the impact of the international crisis of 1930 on the Brazilian economy and Government. It shows how the liberal federalist system that was developed from 1889-1930 was destroyed and replaced by an authoritarian, centralist and interventionist regime thus breaking the power hold of the paulista elite on the central government...

The creation of a modern communications network, the construction of a massive hydroelectric complex and the birth of a major world metropolis from a previously undistinguished urban center are the themes examined. All of these developments were made possible by major investments of the state and of the private sector in the basic infrastructure. S...

This chapter examines the basic themes discussed in the book and the major conclusions reached which explain the rise of São Paulo to its important leadership position. We stress the importance of coffee, the role of the state in promoting the economy, the impact of immigration and the infrastructure established which enabled the state to become th...

The growth of this powerful state government to 1930 would be crucial to the survival of São Paulo agriculture in the next half century. The secular growth of the coffee economy up to the end of the 19th century was spectacular. But the constant incorporation of ever more virgin lands into this coffee economy created problems of overproduction as t...