ABSTRACT
Crop specialization was evidence of the development of exchange characteristics in the rural economy. It was accompanied by a major increase in production as compared with 1802 and by a low or even negative rate of population increase in the rural bairros in this period. The increased value of labor--a necessary complement to the rise in land values--provided an indirect stimulus for rural crop specialization. Crops whose cultivation within the district were clearly concentrated in certain bairros in 1836 included rice, coffee, peanuts, tobacco, manioc flour. In fact the course of economic and demographic differentiation of the community of Sao Paulo from its immediate hinterland from 1765 to 1836 proceeded very much as expected in terms of other studies of urbanization. The transformation of the Sao Paulo economy from one of subsistence in 1765 to one of exchange oriented toward exports by 1836 is most dramatically revealed in the analyses of occupational structure and of agricultural production.
