ABSTRACT
Though Latin America contained bastions of chattel slavery in Cuba and Brazil, forms of unfree labour which were not chattel slavery were more widespread during both the colonial period (c. 1500–1820) and the national period (post-1820). These included forced labour drafts (the Peruvian mita, New Spain's repartimiento de indios and coatequitl); prison labour (presidios and obrajes); and, above all, debt-peonage. Comparative studies of the latter institution (which are rare) stress the central importance of Latin America, not least Mexico. And national studies, past and relatively present, give a picture of Mexico as a nation of peonage and poverty which, according to a polemical account of 1908, included 750,000 chattel slaves and 5 million debt peons. 1 However, as a recent debate has shown, the nature of Latin American debt peonage is highly contentious. 2 Was it de facto slavery, debt being a device to create a class of slaves long after formal slavery had been abolished? Or was debt simply the result of cash advances, made in order to secure a basically proletarian labour force? In other words was the debt-peon a surrogate slave or surrogate proletarian? The question is by no means academic. It presumably made a difference to the endebted individual, in ways which will be suggested. Such subjective differences would have affected the quality, productivity and control of labour. Furthermore, landlords, in opting for a debt-peonage system, made decisions which carried major implications for economic development. In simple terms, the choice of a de facto servile system placed a premium on extra-economic coercion. Possibly this inhibited productivity. Certainly it meant that landlord competition in the market depended heavily on extra-economic factors (e.g., political and physical controls) rather than on relative economic efficiency in the free market. It made more sense to invest in, say, political bribes or a plantation police force, than in a steam plough. Profits accrued according to economically irrational principles—and more so in a society where de facto slave labour was dragooned within the society itself, by classic extra-economic coercion, rather than being imported through an international slave market. In this respect, Latin American slave systems (in Brazil and Cuba) adhered more faithfully to market practices (pressures to modernise, equalisation of the rate of profit) than their debt-peon equivalents; and it is no coincidence that erstwhile chattel slave societies (Cuba and, a fortiori, São Paulo in Brazil) made a more successful transition to agrarian capitalism in the wake of abolition than did predominantly debt-peon societies (compare Yucatán, Guatemala).
