ABSTRACT
During his journey to colonial Brazil, the British traveller John Luccock observed a rural order where the planter class ruled rural society, seminomadic landless freemen effectively occupied the margins or boundaries of alienated land, and slave labour sustained the rural order. 1 At the time of his travels, in the decade following the arrival of the Portuguese monarch and the court at Rio de Janeiro 'in 1808, the hinterland of Rio de Janeiro was undergoing rapid settlement in response to increasing international demand for coffee. The 'first phase' of the coffee economy expanded into the sparsely settled forested Western Paraiba Valley, including eastern Sao Paulo and rural Rio de Janeiro, where it reached its heyday in the 1840s and 1850s. By the 1870s the 'first phase' was showing signs of economic reversal but the 'second phase' was at its height in the Eastern Paraiba Valley. A decade later, coffee production extended to the north-eastern tip of Rio de Janeiro province where the cycle lasted until the 1940s.
