Education, Race, and Inequality: Expenditure on Elementary Education, Racial Ideologies, and

Immigration Policies in Brazil from 1890 to 1930

Josué L. Nobrega Jr1

________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: In this paper I examine the effect of racial heterogeneity on the provision of elementary education in Brazilian states in the period of political decentralization of public finances (1889-1930). Previous literature on provision of elementary education in Brazil did not explore systematic effects of racially biased motivations on the variation in the distribution of educational resources across different states. Using census data for the racial composition of Brazilian states in the period, the empirical analysis and the statistical model I employ suggest that states with larger share of descendants of ethnic African groups provided less expenditure on elementary education; on the other hand, states which promoted the settlement of white European ethnic groups spent more on elementary education in the period. This pattern holds when I conditioned the results to other explanatory factors of expenditure in education per capita - such as the state tax revenues per capita, and the total expenditure on elementary education as a share of states’ total tax revenues. I describe how statistical differences on educational expenditure per capita across states in Brazil are dependent upon the racial composition of the population. Alongside with statistical analysis, the resulting distribution of educational resources in the period is a privileged angle to further explore the structuring of racial disparities in Brazil. I provide additional historical evidence about the mechanisms that account for the empirical results. I argue that racially motivated immigration policies of labor supply and the settlement of European groups in some states were related with discriminatory policies against the African descendant population.

Keyword: Race and Ethnicity; Education; Distributive Politics; Racial Policy; Brazil

________________________________________________________________________

1 Graduate Student, Department of Political Science. University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA). josuenobrega@ucla.edu

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INTRODUCTION

Brazil has experienced long-term patterns of inequality often associated with poor

educational provision and insufficient promotion of schooling across states and regions

(Mariscal and Sokoloff 2000; Martinez-Fritscher, Musacchio and Viarengo 2010;

Carvalho Filho and Colistete 2010). Differences on schooling and literacy are also related

with the unequal application of the rights of citizenship and inefficient public policies

among distinct racial groups (Fernandes 1965; Hasenbalg 1978; Telles 2004). This paper

addresses the question of inequality on educational provision in Brazil emphasizing the

role of historically established racial differences across states as an explanation for poor

governance, low public good provision, and differences on investments in primary

education. I advance the argument that an increase in the fiscal capacity of states to spend

on education and the ideological drive to change racial characteristics of the Brazilian

population led to significant differences on educational expenditure per capita across

states.

Historically, most of the extension of social rights in Brazil happened under weak

access to legal channels of political accountability, disproportionally affecting the

political participation of the population of African descendants (Love 1970; Skidmore

1972; Hasenbalg 1978; Weyland 1996). The legacy of unequal citizenship particularly for

blacks and mixed with black (Pardos or Mullatoes)2 from the long period of African and

2 These are the terms used in the census to refer to mixed-race persons of African descent. Pardo is used as a racial category since 1960, and mulatto is the term used in the first racial census of 1872.

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Afro-Brazilian enslavement affected the social, economic, and political rights of

citizenship from African descended groups in Brazil.3 As a consequence, this has led to

persistent levels of economic inequality, low political participation, voter

disenfranchisement, and increasing forms of discrimination against African descendants

(Andrews 1991; Reichmann 1999; Telles 2004).

In this paper I argue that the racial heterogeneity among Brazilian regions have

influenced the educational expenditure per capita in the country. Given the enduring

historical inequalities between African descendants (Blacks) and European descendants

(Whites) in terms of literacy4 and years of schooling, I compare the expenditures on

elementary education per capita in Brazil focusing on the racial differences present at the

beginning of the twentieth century.

In order to test my argument, I investigate the determinants of education

expenditure per capita across states in Brazil in the period of the First Republic (1889-

1930). The focus on this period is linked with state’s financial autonomy to collect export

taxes and autonomously spend on public goods inaugurated by the Constitution of 1891.

The period is also concomitant with the termination of approximately three hundred years

of enslavement of Africans and African descendants.

The empirical analysis identified that states with larger shares of African

3 The censuses of 1940, 1950, and 1980, and the National Household Surveys of the 1970s and 1980s, documented the clear disparities between Whites and Blacks in terms of education, income, and health. These data do indicate that the socioeconomic status of the mixed population is intermediate to Blacks and Whites. Nevertheless, the overall social position of the mixed population (Pardos) is much closer to Blacks than to Whites. 4 The educational census of the population with more than 65 years old in 1988, particularly important for a study on schooling in the early twentieth century, registers 68.8% of illiteracy among Blacks and Mixed with black, compared to 31.4% of illiteracy among Whites. (Source: Census IBGE, PNAD Data, 1988) On average, illiteracy rates are 20% higher among blacks and mixed with blacks compared to whites since the redemocratization of Brazil in 1988 for all age groups.

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descendants in their population between 1890 and 1930 had statistically significant

differences in expenditures on education per capita compared to other states. In summary,

the evidence I gathered suggests that states with large majorities of African descendants

tended to spend less in education per capita. I argue that on the one hand, states that

invested in the long-term supply of African slavery labor in the population are also where

white plantation elites would receive a less than proportionate share of the benefits of the

expenditure on public schools and elementary education. The provision of few

educational opportunities for African descendants was in the interest of plantation elites

in control of local political systems organized through indirect elections and restrictions

on voting based on literacy requirements. On the other hand, the empirical evidence

suggests an opposite pattern linked with the share of European immigrants in each state.

The data analysis suggests that states that promoted racially biased immigration policies

of European settlement tended to spend more in education per capita in the period. I

exam how the politics of subsided immigration from Europe with state funding for

settlement in new agriculture frontiers seems to have an effect on the propensity of local

elites to spend on elementary education.

For the analysis I use ordinary least square estimators to consider the data on

educational expenditure per capita and test the hypothesis associating the effect of race

on its provision. Using controls for the effect of important explanatory factors

emphasized by the literature on the determinants of educational provision, such as

institutions associated with differences on plantation crops and past colonial institutions,

the enfranchisement of the population, and the wealth of each state, my empirical

findings suggest that there is an association between the expenditure on education per

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capita and the share of Blacks and Mixed with black (Pardos) in each state population.

The results are consistent with the hypothesis that states with large afro-Brazilian

majorities invested significantly less revenue in elementary education. Moreover, I find

that the share of European immigrants is positively associated with more elementary

education expenditures per capita. The effort to spread the access to education seems

more likely to target new white European groups in states where the ruling elites subsided

projects of “white” settlement.

The paper is organized as follows. In section 1 I briefly describe the historical

background of the period. I review the degree to which state elites have access to

influence educational policy in the Constitution of 1891. I report the characteristics of

previous education policies that actively denied access to schooling of African slaves and

their descendants. I also describe the important role of racially discriminatory ideologies

on the promotion of immigration policies, and in the investments of state funds for the

settlement of white European communities. State policies actively provided public

subsidies and land distribution targeted to settle white Europeans in sub-national units of

Brazil under ideological motivations to “whiten” the population.

In section 2 I discuss the main findings of the literature that associate economic,

institutional, and natural factors in the provision of educational resources in general, and

specifically educational expenditure in Brazil. Economic historians tend to emphasize the

relationship between low educational provisions with the quality of the colonial

institutions (Colistete 2001; Wenegast 2003; Martínez-Fritscher et all 2010). I propose an

alternative hypothesis where the differences in educational expenditures across regions

can be associated with discriminatory policies of one racial group against the others. As

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such racial discrimination may lead to inadequate public goods provision.

In section 3, I describe the data and the characteristics of my main dependent

variable, expenditure on education per capita. I use different empirical strategies of

statistical analysis to test the strength of my empirical findings. The main finding of the

paper is that educational spending is associated with racial differences across states in the

Brazilian federation. The empirical findings are consistent with the hypothesis about the

effect of race.

Section 4 offers a concluding argument in which racially motivated policies in

Brazil are associated with educational spending. The new evidence accounts for another

dimension for advancing the interpretation of the structural patterns of racial inequality in

the country. I provide historical evidence for politicians’ motivations between 1890 and

1930 to avoid the spread of elementary education in Brazilian states with an afro-

Brazilian majority.

POLITICAL DECENTRALIZATION, RACIAL IDEOLOGIES, AND

IMMIGRATION POLICIES IN THE FIRST REPUBLIC (1889-1930)

The most important changes from 1880’s decade inaugurated in Brazil were

associated with gradual emancipation of African and afro-Brazilian captives in 1888

(Andrews 2010); this transformation is also concomitant with the breakdown of the

Monarchic regime and the inauguration of the so called First Republic. In 1889, the

Republican movement successfully overthrew the emperor in a military coup establishing

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a new Constitution. The Republican government brought major institutional reforms

through the Constitution of 1891; among them were the extension of the political

autonomy to the sub-units of Brazil through federal states, the decentralization of the

public finances across the federation, and the literacy requirement on voting

enfranchisement.

The historical concomitance of the end of slavery and the First Republic also

brought out new themes of debate across states involving the economic demand for labor

in new coffee plantation frontiers. The parliamentary debates about the incentives to

supply the labor necessities were strongly associated with the ideological motivations to

change the racial characteristics of the national identity in the new Republic (Hall 1969;

Skidmore 1993; Schwarcz 1996). Before the inauguration of the Republic, African slaves

and the local freed African descendants supplied most of the labor for regional

plantations. Brazil received a total of around 4 million enslaved Africans (1.5 million

would arrive in the 19th century, with around 40% of the total of enslaved persons in the

Americas) (Love 1970). In 1870 over two thirds (2,887,500) of the total Brazilian

population (3,617,900) was African descendant, and less than one fourth was considered

white (843,000) (Tannenbaum 1947).5

The substitution of the slave labor and the demographic choice of the Brazilian

citizen’s racial characteristics were at the top of politicians’ agenda in the early twentieth-

century (Love 1980), and several states used their export tax revenues to raise funds and

disburse on the settlement of European agricultural colonies (Hall 1969). Hence, the

5 The racial categories used in the first national census of 1870 recorded Whites, Blacks (Negros) and Mulattoes, with Blacks and Mullatoes designated as free or slave.

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Republican political elite decided to handle the political, social, and economic

consequences of the slave emancipation without the integration of the afro-descendant

population in new state initiatives of citizenship expansion (Fernandes, 1967).

The proposed reforms motivated state elites to advance racially motivated

legislative initiatives of citizenship expansion through immigration, subsiding white

European settlers to the fast growing coffee economy of the Southeast and to the vast

unexplored agricultural frontier in the Brazilian South (Monbeig 1952; Hall 1969;

Holloway 1974). Therefore, the Republican government selectively chose by law white

European immigrants to substitute the slave and freed afro-Brazilian labor in the most

dynamic economic regions of the period. 6 The ideological motivation around race and

citizenship in the period considered African ethnic attributes less valuable to the process

of expansion of citizenship of the Republic, and the idea of mestiçagem (racial mixture)

was associated to the improvement of the population through high-status European ethnic

features (Holloway 1974; Skidmore 1993; Schwarcz, 1996; Telles 2004). The new labor

supply policy combined the objective to promote a modern nation through economic

incentives to “whiten” the demographic racial characteristics of the population (Andrews

2010).7

The “whitening ideology” had considerable impact on state policies to attract, and

to settle immigrants mainly from Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal to substitute the

6 Decree 528, 06/28/1890. Forbidden the entrance of Africans and Asians as part of the immigration and colonization initiatives. (Holloway, 1974) 7 It is important to emphasize that racial categories in Brazil developed differently than United States. Blacks and Mixed have in general several categorizations through color identities. However, African descendants and African ethnic attributes are historically identified with low-status citizenship. Phenotypical characteristics such as the skin color and the texture of the hair promote specific racial profiling to this population. For an overview of Brazilian racial discussion see Telles (2005).

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local African descendant population and former African slaves (Holloway 1974). It

formed a powerful ideology for Brazilian policy-makers to speed up the process of

immigration into the country and to expand the investments on infrastructure (Reichmann

1999). These ideologies reached party politics and have influenced political decisions

about race in parliamentary debates with discriminatory evaluations about the capacity of

blacks to develop the Brazilian economy (Fernandes 1965; Skidmore 1974).

In the first decade of the Republic, the state of São Paulo alone received more

European immigrants than Argentina in the period 1891-1900 (Hall 1969). Almost

700,000 Europeans made their way to the state. Until 1930, 2,233,000 white immigrants

came to the state, in which more than 1,000,000 were from Italy. The demographic

change in São Paulo after the end of the period of state sponsored immigration

transformed drastically the racial characteristics of the population of the state (Loveman

2009). In 1890, approximately 48% of the population was considered non-white

compared to 14% of non-whites in the decade of 1930 (Brazilian Censuses, 1890 and

1940). In this context, European settlers were fortunate in being able to receive fertile soil

in those regions, better employment opportunities, and higher wages in the coffee

plantations (Holloway 1974). The concerted action of local state elites raised funds for

recruitment in Europe, and they received government grants to aid private immigration

societies specifically targeted to subsidize immigrants of these regions. Therefore, local

governments spent substantial amounts of tax revenues in public policies of immigration

attraction in regions such as the Southern Italy, the north of Portugal, parts of Spain and

Germany, Poland, Ukraine and other Eastern Europe countries (Hall 1969; Holloway

1980). Many tax incentives supported immigration companies in the provision of food,

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lodging, and land for settlers. The government sponsorship of immigration shared the

costs of subsiding white settlement among all states in the federation, but benefited

mostly states expanding new coffee agriculture frontiers in Southeast Brazil (Holloway

1974). Government incentives were also helpful to avoid the migration of the settlers to

other countries with similar policies, such as Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, or even to the

United States (Toplin 1976; Loveman 2009).

Local politicians in states with large Afro-Brazilian majorities also tried to settle

European immigrants in other regions as part of the “whitening” effort, but with less

success to settle them in sugar cane, cotton, tobacco, and cocoa plantations (Holloway

1980). In fact, politicians all over the federation had pessimistic views of the African

descendants prospects for effective political and economic participation, restricting the

integration of afro-Brazilians not only in the in the civic life of the new regime, but also

unequally offering labor contracts in the wage economy of the coffee expansion in

different conditions in relation to Europeans (Love 1970; Andrews 1988; Skidmore

1993). The states with sugar cane and cotton plantations located in the Northeast region

of Brazil had less export revenues to invest on immigrants, and still could employ the

labor from the long-term supply of African slaves from previous periods. Local freed

African descendants provided most of the labor in those regions and received fewer

incentives from the central government funding for immigration settlement (Holloway

1980).

In the next section I briefly review the spread of education in Brazil in such

historical context. I also review the explanatory causes for public goods expenditure in

general, and educational expenditure in particular, emphasizing the main explanatory

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causes in the literature.

ON THE PROVISION OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN THE FIRST

REPUBLIC

The republican constitution of 1891 decentralized the educational expenditure to

state level jurisdictions, and local governments were allowed to tax exports and keep

most of the revenues (Martínez-Fritcher et al 2010). This significant decentralization of

public finances allowed states not only the right to tax exports, but also property, land

transfers, industries and professions. Specifically important for this study, the political

decentralization affected the way schooling was financed; articles 55 and 56 of the 1891

Constitution gave autonomy to municipalities to spend on elementary education freely.

Thus, the expenditure on elementary education was mostly financed as a share of state’s

tax and exports revenues (Martinez-Fritscher 2009). Martínez Fritcher et al (2010) argues

that the decentralization of taxation over the Brazilian territory in 1891 had the important

effect of increasing the expenditure on education across states. 8

In retrospect, the advancement of elementary schooling in Brazil on previous

periods was very restricted (Love 1970; Martínez-Fritcher et al 2010). The imperial

government of 1824 provided most of the education investments in the capital of the

8 This pattern adds more evidence to the literature that studied the early growth of schooling in advanced democracies, which has noticed the relationship between local level autonomy and its importance to explain why Northern United States and Germany took the lead in public education in the nineteenth century (Lindert 2004). Studies about the timing of the expansion of public schooling in Brazil stress the importance of the decentralization of revenues in this period to increase the expenditure on education per capita (Martínez-Fritscher, Musacchio and Viarengo 2010).

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country, the city of Rio de Janeiro (Colistete et al 2010). Indeed, the monarchical

government provided few educational opportunities in general, and definitely impose

limits on the rights of slaves to be enrolled in schools by statutes that made it illegal to

teach them to read or write, also restricting the enrollment of freed Afro Brazilian

children with slave parents (Andrews 2004). At the end of slavery in 1888, only 15% of

the population of Brazil was literate.

This placed Brazil as one of the countries with the lowest literacy rate in the

Americas (Engerman, Sokoloff, and Mariscal; Martínez-Fritcher et al 2010). The level of

elementary education in Brazil was lower not only compared to literacy rates in countries

of the region such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia, or Uruguay, which around 1890 had

literacy rates between 30% and 50%, but also compared to Caribbean countries such as

Jamaica and Barbados which also had large Afro-American populations (Engerman and

Sokoloff 2002; Engerman, Mariscal and Sokoloff 2009).

As a matter of fact, most of the increase of spending on elementary education in

Brazil presented a very substantial regional variation. This paper will focus on the

literature that could explain this variation.

Studies about the regional differences on the spread of education in Brazil suggest

the association between the various forms of local colonial heritage and the variation on

expenditures on education across states (Carvalho Filho and Colistete 2010). Such

explanations on the variations of the expenditure on public goods per capita, such as

education, are related to the widespread argument in cross country comparisons that

acknowledge how colonial institutions are often associated with inadequate public good

provision, poor policies, and inequality (e.g. Engerman and Sokoloff, 1997; North,

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Summerhill and Weingast, 2000; Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2002).

In general, the literature about country cases like Brazil has used the colonial

origins of institutions looking back to the sugar cane cycle for instance, and the slavery of

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explain differences on public good provisions

in subsequent periods (Naritomi et al. 2007; Carvalho Filho and Colistete 2010).

Wegenast (2010), for example, discusses the role that endowments and crop choices have

to explain lower levels of education in some states. Most of these analyses associate the

levels of inequality in the late nineteenth-century as an important determinant of long-

term redistributive transfers, including expenditures on education.

Other studies, such as Mariscal and Sokoloff (2000), argue that enfranchisement

served as a central mechanism in which inequality has affected the spread of schooling

comparing country cases. Most recently, Sokoloff, Mariscal and Haber (2011) emphasize

the variation observed in the spread of schooling in United States and Canada in

comparison to Latin America and Caribbean arguing that voting expansion would explain

differences on educational expenditures among these regions. Case studies, specifically

about the variation within Brazil, suggest that large state revenues from coffee plantations

and the better political institutions associated with them had shaped the differences

observed in the expenditures on elementary education across states (Martínez-Fritscher et

all 2010). Accordingly, the increasing export revenues from favorable prices of the

international coffee market affected states’ wealth in the period 1889-1930, and, as a

consequence, the total amount invested on elementary education.

In short, the literature on education provision in Brazil has important case studies

that shed lights on some of the fundamental determinants of the inequality on educational

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provision in general, mainly emphasizing the key role played by the coffee economy.

However, in accordance with the historical evidence mentioned before, this paper puts

forward an alternative conjecture acknowledging that patterns of inequality on education

provision have also been constant along the racial lines of the Brazilian population

(Hasenbalg 1979; Stepan 1991; Reichmann 1999; Telles 2004). For the Brazilian case,

however, such studies did not explore the important association between race and

educational provision acknowledged in countries in which the levels of inequality are

very correlated with the distribution of the population along racial lines like United States

and South Africa (Smith 1984; Margo 1990; Marx 1998).

In this paper I expand the hypothesis of the previous literature on determinants of

the educational expenditure in Brazil taking into account the influential contribution from

the large body of empirical evidence in distributive politics which has identified how

policies linked with racial and ethnic diversity matters for political and economic

outcomes in numerous country cases (e.g. Bates 1974; Horowitz 1985; Fearon 2003;

Posner 2005; Sawyer 2006; Fearon, Kasara, and Laitin 2007; Chandra 2009; Alesina and

Zhuravskaya 2010). As the previous section briefly review, the period is known by the

spread of racial theories that formed an ideology for Brazilian policy-makers to speed up

the process of European immigration into the country (Hall 1969; Stepan 1991;

Reichmann 1999). More important, these ideologies reached local politics within the

states and exerted decisive influence on politician’s choices about educational policies

and cultural strategies to “whiten” the population (Skidmore, 1993; Loveman 2009).

Thus, I advance the argument that racial differences could impact the provision of

educational resources in Brazil.

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Racial Differences as an Explanatory Factor to Educational Expenditures

My main working hypothesis is that the results of an increase in the fiscal

capacity of states to spend on education and the ideological drive to change racial

characteristics of the population led to significant differences on elementary educational

expenditure per capita.

The explanation is explicitly designed to establish empirically the link between

mechanisms that might link racial favoritism to the distribution of educational spending.

This hypothesis departs also from recent contributions that associate cross-country ethnic

variation to the low production of public goods (Habyarimana et al 2007; Chandra 2008;

Baldwin and Huber 2010; Alesina and Zhuravskaya 2011). Conceptually, I propose a

definition of race based on the Brazilian census classification.9

In most of the states, a Brazilian white minority elite from the colonial period has

controlled a disproportionate share of economic resources, land, and political power over

time. Moreover, racial hierarchies from the colonial period in states with majority of

African descendants were also important to advance economic limitations to the political

participation of Afro-Brazilians in political decisions (Love 1970). I suggest that unequal

distribution of elementary education across racial groups was a very strategic power

9 The census on Brazilian racial differences can also be theoretically convergent with the broad definition of ethnicity proposed by Chandra (2006) to explain consistently the impact of ethnic differences on economic and political outcomes. That is, according to Chandra (2006) descendent-based visibility and constrained change in the short run are often the most important factors of characterization across a wide range of studies about the potential effect of ethnicity. I assume that it can also be applied to differences between the African Descendants (blacks and mixed with black) and the European Descendants (whites) classified in the Brazilian censuses.

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resource from local elites when they represent the minority of the population. Departing

from the core argument that state elites had different preferences across the diverse racial

groups of Brazil, they influenced government expenditure to secure their interests linked

with economic advantages and public subsidies to settle white European groups in the

country. The theory suggests that the heterogeneous distributional patterns of education

expenditure were associated with the policies to change the racial characteristics of

citizens. Therefore, the desired improvement of the racial characteristics of Brazil

advocated by the enthusiasts of the eugenic policies in the late nineteenth century was

focused on the distribution of economic benefits and patronage in prosperous economic

frontiers to white European settlers.

Thus, I argue that the presence of an economically and political dominant group

represented in the Brazilian political system of the period may lower the spread of

elementary education given their heterogeneous preferences about the racial

characteristics of the population. Under this circumstances, the association between racial

favoritism and policy decisions goes beyond the effects of the institution of slavery,

income inequality, and the wealth of the states. White elites influenced by eugenic ideas

would also benefit from the continuing that the restriction on the spread of elementary

education to African descendants would have for political participation and the levels of

enfranchisement in states with black majorities. I expect a negative association between

the share of African descendants and the expenditures on elementary education.

However, I also expect that educational funds could be redirected to secondary and

college level where they would be directed benefitted from the general levels of

education expenditure.

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Differently, I suggest that elites in control of some states responded more directly

to white European immigrant demands with respect to public goods. White elites found

the provision of public funds, subsidies, and land distribution to white Europeans

instrumental to the project of white settlement in some regions. It is important to

emphasize once more the fact that immigration policies in Brazil gave particular attention

to the formal exclusion of populations from Africa and Asia from the efforts of settlement

in prosperous agricultural areas of the country. The distribution of government aid for the

colonization of lands in the South of Brazil was racially motivated to “whiten” the

country. Thus I expect a positive correlation between the share of immigrants and the

expenditure on public elementary education.

In the next section I explain the data and I provide the empirical strategy to test

the hypothesis.

DATA AND EMPIRICAL DESIGN

This section describes the empirical data for the analysis of educational spending

in the period. The Appendix explains in detail the sources and describes the calculation of

the key variables used in the present analysis.

In order to document the causes of expenditures on elementary education, I use

census data on the total expenditures on education in each state from 1890 to 1930; I

replicate the variable calculations of the analysis used by Musacchio et al (2010) on the

average expenditure on education per capita. I also used the data on the total revenues per

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state and the average state expenditure on education as a share of the total revenue from

previous analysis on the topic (Lindert 2004; Martínez-Fritscher et al 2010). In order to

test the impact of the racial differences, I used the census data about the number of

European immigrants of each state and I calculate the average share of white immigrants

in each state population until 1930. The share of African descendants in the population is

also calculated as an approximation until 1930 using census data. The census on race and

slavery is limited to the year of 1871, with estimates valid for the population in the year

of 1890 (Vidal Luna and Klein 2005). To estimate the share of African descendants for

the period (Blacks and Mixed), I assumed the share of Afro-Brazilians in the total

population of the states until 1930 as fixed, and I compare the share of Blacks and Mixed

with Black with the census of 1940. I considered that these descendent-based attributes

did not suffer a considerable change on average through internal migration in the period,

except in those states that received large waves of European immigrants. As a control of

my proxy measure of the share of Afro-Brazilians, I correlate the share of the black and

mixed in the census data of 1940 with the information of the previous census of race in

1890. They are very correlated with the proportions of Black and Mixed populations in

subsequent periods (r=0.78). I found some variation in the share of people considered

“black”, but not in the number of mixed with black (“pardos”). I assumed a 50%

threshold of African descendants (blacks+ mixed with black) population in the 1940’s as

a control for the proxy of the state shares in 1890. For example, the share of blacks and

mixed with blacks in the state of Pernambuco as a share of the total population varies

from 72% in 1890 to 65% in 1940, but it is still more than 50% of the total population

identified as African-descendant. Thus, I keep the correlation between states with black

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and mixed majorities in both periods as a control.

The empirical findings section is divided into three parts. Initially, I am interested

in showing that variation on African descendants in each state led to a variation in

expenditures on education. That is, I want to focus on the variation over the share of

Afro-Brazilians in each state population and how it affects the expenditures on education

per capita. I start by running ordinary least square regression using a log measure of

expenditure on education per capita.10 The models include several controls. One is the

average revenue per capita of each state between 1901 and 1925, which is known to have

a very strong relationship with the level of public good provision per capita. I also

include controls for rival explanations of the literature, such as the importance of the

coffee plantation economy and the share of voting enfranchisement (Mariscal and

Sokoloff 2000; Wenegast 2008; Engerman, Mariscal and Sokoloff 2009; Martínez-

Fritcher et all 2010). I include a control for total expenditure in education as a share of

the total revenue, which has relationship with other political and economic differences

across states, such as ideological differences.

Once more, to check whether racial differences have influenced educational

expenditures as hypothesized, I assume the share of blacks and mixed with blacks

(pardos) over the total population as the main proxy for my theory.11

10 The log transformation was necessary because the data on educational expenditure per capita data exhibit right skewness (positively skewed). 11 Given Brazil’s history of slavery and late emancipation (1888), I would want to check if the expansion of education we document benefited blacks and mixed race Brazilians as much as it benefited say white Europeans. The models in this section treat a state as the unit of analysis. As noted previously, the data used to construct the measures are from Brazilian Census from the 1890 to 1930 period. I averaged most of indicators used to measure the economic indicators.

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RESULTS

The multivariate model I employ estimates the relationship between the

logarithmic values of expenditure on elementary education on these variables. The

currency unit of the period is difficult to interpret in substantive terms without a more

complete analysis of exchange rates. However, log transformed coefficients are usually

interpreted in terms of percent change, which can give an approximation of the

substantive meaning of the results. Ordinary least squares regression shows that even

when other explanatory actors emphasized by the literature were take into account,

African descendants received less educational resources on average than white European

immigrants (Table 1).

In Table 1, models 1 to 4 include the controls and the measure of educational

provision per capita as the dependent variable.

Model 1 includes only the variables of interest: the share of the African

descendant population and the share of white immigrants from Europe. Consistent with

the theory expectations, the coefficient for both explanatory factors is in the expected

direction, negative for afro-descendants, and positive for European immigrants. States

that increased the share of white European immigrants spent considerably more on

elementary education than states with larger share of African descendants on average.

According to model 1, the impact of educational spending is very economic significant

for the states that received more immigrants. At every increase one percent of increase in

European immigrants, the expenditure on elementary education per capita expands 7.5%.

Asymmetrically, every one percent increase in the share of African descendants in the

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population is related with almost 2.5% less spending on elementary education per capita

on average. The statistical significant results for the difference between blacks and whites

in this context stresses the important historical connection linking the provision of

elementary education and the inequality along racial lines in the Brazilian population.

However, this model did not suggest a causal relationship about the effect of race. As the

historical analysis of the immigration policies suggest, most white European immigrants

went to rich coffee regions—with higher tax and exports revenues per capita. Thus, the

link between white immigrants and the higher expenditure on elementary education could

also be probably associated with their settlement in regions with more revenues from the

coffee economy. The next models include the most important control variables to

establish how the association between race and education expenditure is conditioned to

other covariates.

Model 2 uses a measure of the total revenue per capita in each state to control for

the actual wealth and financial capacity to spend on elementary education. The average

total revenue per capita of each state is also expected to have a statistically significant

impact on education expenditure per capita, given the superior capacity of states with

higher tax revenue to spend on public goods. Although the increase on expenditure in

education per capita associated with the new state revenues is highly probable, the change

is statically inconsequential according to model 2, especially when racial variables are

considered. The results for the association between race and educational spending are

also affected in their 10% statistical significance level using this control. However, I

consider that this limitation in the quantitative result could plausibly be the result of an

analysis with a small sample size (20 observations). In order to examine this result in

22

detail, I will explore possible implications of a substantive relationship on my

explanatory variables considering that this relationship can still be analyzed taking into

account the patterns of the standard errors of the models. I illustrate this connection

subsequently in the analysis of the figure 1, and in the analysis of the interactive effect of

race on different sets of states organized graphically in figures 2 and 3.

Model 3 also expects that coffee plantations would increase expenditure on

education per capita, a very central conclusion of the literature. The dummy variable on

major coffee economies kept the coefficient in the expected direction, but with

considerable statistical error.

This result means that the expected influence of the expansion of the coffee

export revenues in new agriculture frontiers did not affect the expenditure on education

per capita uniformly. Consequently, a very important consequence is the rejection of the

direct association between an increase on the expenditure on elementary education per

capita to the revenues from the coffee exports. Model 3 also shows how the important

correlation between the share of immigrants of each state and the presence of coffee

plantations has affected the statistical significance of both covariates and in the

explanatory power of the share of immigrants.

The important result of model 3 is the statistical significant effect that any

increase in the share of African descendants represents in diminishing the expenditure on

education per capita. The corresponding decrease on elementary education expenditure

was 2.5% lower when the share of Afro Brazilians increases. Model 3 also rejected one

of the rival hypothesis analyzed by Engerman and Sokoloff (2000) about the effect of

voting on schooling. According to model 3, the increment in the number of voters did not

23

have statistical significance for the expenditure on educational resources in the Brazilian

case.

In the analysis of the model with more explanatory power, model 4, the African

descendants’ share accounts for statistical significant differences on educational

expenditures when several other factors were controlled. Every increase in the percent of

the African descent population has a statistically significant negative effect on the percent

invested in education per capita. However, the magnitude of the effect does not seem

very powerful considering the log units as the source of interpretation of the analysis.

That is, 2.2% less spending on elementary education per capita for each increase on the

share of African Descendants in the population is a very modest impact. The

interpretation of the coefficient in log units has advantages and disadvantages in this case.

The disadvantage is the impossibility of the interpretation on changes in units of

expenditure per capita in monetary terms. But the advantage seems to be more

substantive in comparative terms. In contrast, immigrants can receive on average 5%

more education expenditures per capita from the states where they were settled. These

differences in comparative terms with African descendants can be translated into

substantial differences in percentage of educational expenditure, with nearly twice the

revenues spent in white immigrants compared to Afro Brazilians (5% and 2.2%,

respectively). As a matter of fact, the increase of Afro-Brazilians in the population is

likely to decrease the expenditures on education per capita as predicted, and this impact is

more substantive in comparison with the opposite pattern observed for the share of white

European immigrants.

24

TABLE 1. Effect of Race on State’s Expenditure on Elementary Education Per Capita (Ordinary Least Squares Estimates) ===================================================================== (1) (2) (3) (4) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Intercept) 0.945 -0.395 0.608 -0.173 (0.533) (0.893) (0.933) (1.071) %ForeignEuropean 7.511* 5.583 4.142 3.856 (3.077) (3.080) (4.100) (3.991) %AfricanDescendant -2.420* -1.663 -2.502* -2.211* (0.862) (0.911) (0.996) (0.991) log(AvgRevCap) 0.472 (0.261) Coffee 0.514 0.453 (0.486) (0.474) sharevoters 10.618 10.321 (13.896) (13.508) exp_edu.totalexp1901.25 5.637 (4.113)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- R-squared 0.551 0.628 0.631 0.674 adj. R-squared 0.499 0.558 0.532 0.558 sigma 0.594 0.558 0.573 0.557 F 10.444 8.990 6.407 5.801 p 0.001 0.001 0.003 0.004 Log-likelihood -16.330 -14.465 -14.380 -13.121 Deviance 5.994 4.974 4.933 4.349 AIC 40.659 38.929 40.760 40.242 BIC 44.642 43.90 46.734 47.212 N 20 20 20 20

====================================================================== Notes: The dependent variable is estimated as ln(expenditure on education per capita). Coefficients marked with * indicate significant at 10%. Standard errors in parenthesis.

As hypothesized, the share of African descendants has affected the expenditure on

education per capita consistently on 3 of the model estimations. Although the models I

have discussed seems to be consistent about the effect of race on educational expenditure,

this analysis can be improved when I consider the differences in the general wealth of

states measured as the average revenue per capita (model 2). In order to deal with this

25

inconsistency of the statistical results, Figure 1 presents all models on the determinants of

the average expenditure on Education per capita organized graphically to explore any

consistent pattern among all models.

An alternative interpretation would be to consider the lines representing the

standard errors of the effect of the African descendants on expenditures on elementary

education suggesting a pattern whereby African-descendents in some Brazilian states,

and the immigrants on other states, mediating independently the motivations about the

Figure 1. Comparison among Models (colors): Estimated Coefficients (points) and Standard Errors (lines) from an OLS Model of Elementary Expenditure on Education per Capita (log) by the Total Expenditure on Education, Share of Voters, Coffee, Revenue per Capita, Foreign Europeans, and African Descendants, Brazil, 1890-1930

(Intercept)

AfricanDescent

ForeignEuropean

log(AvgRevCap)

Coffee

sharevoters

exp_edu.totalexp1901.25

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

!

−10 0 10 20 30 40Coefficient

Variable

modelName

!

!

!

!

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

26

decisions on expenditures in states with similar levels of wealth (measured as revenue per

capita).

In order to illustrate how the effect of the variation of racial differences as

determinants of expenditures on education could mediate the association between wealth

and expenditures, I classify two sets of states based on the average revenue per capita. I

suggest that this strategy can be a form to isolate the intervenient effect of race on

different levels of wealth, and possibly to reveal patterns of substantive trends that were

restricted by the sample size limitations. I classify randomly the first quartile of the

distribution of total average revenues per capita in the period as representing wealth

states. All other states were classified as poor. I do not consider this classification

appropriate theoretically, but instrumental for a comparison between sets of states in

different positions of the distribution of tax and exports revenues. I assume this

classification useful to evaluate to which extent the association between race and

education provision has an independent impact on different groups of states.

Figures 2 and 3 plot the main model of interest with an interaction between race

and a dummy variable dividing wealthy and poor states. Once more, I classify as

“wealthy” states of the first quartile of the distribution of the average fiscal revenue per

capita.

Figure 2 graphs the estimated effect of race (measured as the % African

descendants and the % of white European immigrants) on the propensity to spend on

elementary education in wealthy states. Not only the increase on the share of European

settlers in the population of a wealthy state has the positive effect on the expenditure on

elementary education, but also the variation on the share of African descendants on rich

27

states decreases the likelihood to spend more on elementary education. Although one

could expect that racial biases could be dissipated in wealthy states, such bias tends to be

constant even in states with more revenue to spend on education.

Figure 2. Effect of Race on Expenditure in Education per Capita in Wealthy States

%White European Immigrant %African Descent

The same association is also constant in the comparison among states classified as

poor. Even though they received much less European immigrants, in figure 3 the pattern

also continue suggesting the association between race and expenditure on elementary

education per capita.

ForeignEuropean*WealthyState effect plot

ForeignEuropean

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState

WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

WealthyState

ForeignEuropean*WealthyState effect plot

ForeignEuropean

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState

WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

WealthyState

AfricanDescent*WealthyState effect plot

AfricanDescent

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState

WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

WealthyState

AfricanDescent*WealthyState effect plot

AfricanDescent

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState

WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState WealthyState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

WealthyState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

WealthyState

28

Figure 3. Effect of Race on Expenditure in Education per Capita in Poor States

%White European Immigrants %African Descent

The magnitude of the effect would need a better assessment in order to evaluate

how this difference in the variation of the investments on elementary education could

impact the provision of educational resources. But it is important to stress that the

variation on the magnitude of the log units of expenditure on education per capital reveals

a very clear pattern. In both wealthy and poor states, European immigrants were two to

three time as likely to receive more educational resources than African Descendants.

ForeignEuropean*WealthyState effect plot

ForeignEuropean

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState

WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState WealthyState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

WealthyState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

WealthyState

ForeignEuropean*PoorState effect plot

ForeignEuropean

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

PoorState PoorState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

PoorState PoorState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

PoorState

PoorState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

PoorState PoorState

0.00 0.05 0.10 0.15

PoorState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

PoorState

AfricanDescent*PoorState effect plot

AfricanDescent

log(exp_edu_capta1901.25)

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

PoorState PoorState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

PoorState PoorState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

PoorState

PoorState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

PoorState PoorState

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7

PoorState

−1

−0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

PoorState

29

It seems plausible to expand the hypothesis to a future study using a more

disaggregated data analysis to estimate the distribution of educational resources at local

level expenditures within municipalities.

CONCLUSION

In this study, I examine the effect of racial differences on government’s

expenditure on elementary education in Brazil. Despite racist ideologies and racial biases

among Brazilian politicians in this period to be very well documented in the

historiography (Skidmore 1974; Stepan 1991), the effect of racist political motivations on

patterns of distribution of resources in Brazil had very few studies. In fact, the objective

to promote a modern nation through the process of “whitening” the population selectively

chose and invested public funds in white European immigrants in conjunction with a set

of public policies and private investments to keep European settlers in Brazil.

Such biases on the distribution of public resources among racial groups are more

developed in the literature of racial relations in United States. The link between the

differences in human capital accumulation through education and racial inequality is very

well developed in studies comparing the North and Southern United States (Smith 1984;

Margo 1990). Racial inequality in United States provides contributions for this kind of

hypothesis and research design, where policies motivated by race had economic and

political consequences. For example, Smith (1984), Margo (1990) and Collins and Margo

(2006) show how the evolution of racial disparities were enforced by the unequal

provision of education from the emancipation of afro-Americans in the post-Civil War,

30

and considering the potential legacy of racial policies for human capital accumulation.

Much less is known about Brazil and other Latin American countries, which also had

specific policies associated with race (Sawyer 2004; Telles 2005).

The economic growth associated with the coffee economy period have indeed

expanded opportunities for upward mobility in Brazil through education, but the analysis

shows that the distribution of these opportunities disproportionately affected the

opportunities for Afro-Brazilians. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that this

occurred despite substantial increases in the total revenues spent on education. Data of

posterior periods enforces the paper main findings. In 1950 only 48,000 Afro-Brazilians

(out of a total black and mixed population of 16.5 million) had graduated from high

school, and only 4,000 from college. This was a level of educational achievement

considerably lower compared to the white population. One way to examine this

association is to look at the education accomplishments of two cohorts, those who were

6-10 years old in 1920 and those who were of the same age in 1930, using data from the

Brazilian census of 1960 compiled by Martínez-Fritcher et al (2012). The difference in

the educational attainment of afro-Brazilians compared to whites is around twice higher

in the latter group. The percentage of people who never attended school is closer to 80%

in the black and mixed race group, versus 50% for whites.

Given the contemporary difference between blacks and whites on levels of human

development of the Brazilian population, the public debate about specific policies for the

Black population has been very controversial. However, less is known about how this

historical gap between Blacks and Whites can be associated with the differences on the

distribution of public resources across regions.

31

Overall, education could be also an important source of political patronage for

immigrants and provided most of the human capital for the new labor necessities of the

country’s industrialization. The economic interest for a new labor provision after the end

of the slavery, and the political interest for the maintenance of the power led to the

perverse combination of more educational resources for European immigrants, and less

educational spending for the citizens freed after the end of slavery.

The main implication of the initial distributive strategy of elementary education

could have impacted current levels of educational inequality in the contemporary Brazil. I

think this project can be improved in order to explain the accumulated gap in terms of

educational achievement of different ethnic groups, and states, based on the political

decision to provide education for European immigrants, and the denial of elementary

education for the original population formed by the African descendants of Brazil in the

early XX century. The effort to transform Brazil into a white, European society into the

tropics had perverse effect for the social and economic conditions of the Afro-Brazilian

population. In so doing, I think the next step in the research is to reopen the question of

the path of Brazil's development emphasizing the role played by the racial character of its

inequality.

32

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States,” in How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914, Stephen Haber, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Engerman, Stanley L., Elisa V. Mariscal and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Schooling in the Americas, 1800-1925,” in Human Capital and Institutions. A Long-Run View, David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Fearon, James D. 1999. “Why Ethnic Politics and ‘Pork’ Tend to Go Together.” Paper presented at the Social Science Research Council–Macarthur Foundation Workshop on Ethnic Politics and Democratic Stability, University of Chicago, March. Fearon, James, and David D. Laitin. 1996. “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation.” American Political Science Review 90(4): 715–735. Fernandes, Florestan.1965. A Integração do Negro na Sociedade de Classes. São Paulo: Dominus Editora. Goldin, Claudia and Lawrence F. Katz. Education and income in the early twentieth century: evidence from the prairies. 2000. Journal of Economic History 60(3): 782-818. Habyarimana, James, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. 2007. “Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision?” American Political Science Review 101(4): 709–725. Hasenbalg, Carlos. 1979. Discriminação e Desiguladades Raciais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Graal. (tradução de Race relation in post-Abolition Brazil: the Smooth preservation of racial inequalities, 1978. Tese de doutorado [Ph.D. dissertation], Departmento de Sociologia, University of California, Berkeley). Hagopian, Frances. 1996. Traditional Political and Regime Change in Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Michael, The Origins of Mass Immigration in Brazil, 1871-1914 (Phd Thesis, Columbia University, 1969). Holloway, Thomas, Migration and Mobility: Immigrants as Laborers and Landowners in the Coffee Zone of São Paulo, Brazil, 1886-1934 (PhD Thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1974). Holloway, Thomas, Immigrants on the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). Horowitz, Donald L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lindert, Peter H., 2004. Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge University Press.

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Love, Joseph L., São Paulo na Federação Brasileira, 1889-1937 (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1982). Loveman, Mara, 2009. “Whiteness in Latin America: Measurement and Meaning in National Censuses (1850-1950).” Journal de la Société de Américanistes. 95(2): 207-234 Luna, Francisco Vidal, and Herbert Klein, Evolução da Sociedade e Economia Escravista de São Paulo, de 1750 a 1850 (São Paulo: Edusp, 2006). Margo, Robert A. (Robert Andrew), 1954- Race and schooling in the South, 1880-1950 : an economic history / Robert A. Margo. Martínez-Fritscher, André Carlos, and Aldo Musacchio, 2009. “Can Endowments Explain Regional Inequality? State Governments and the Provision of Public Goods in Brazil, 1889-1930,” 2009,mimeo. Martínez-Fritscher, André Carlos, Aldo Musacchio, and Martina Viarengo, “The Great Leap Forward: The Political Economy of Education in Brazil, 1889-1930,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10-075, 2010. Marx, Anthony. 1998. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil, London: Cambridge: University Press. Monbeig, Pierre, Pioneiros e Fazendeiros de São Paulo (São Paulo: Hucitec/Polis, 1984). North, Douglass, William Summerhill, and Barry Weingast, “Order, Disorder, and Economic Change: Latin America versus North America,” Governing for Prosperity, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Hilton Root, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Naritomi, Joana, Soares, Rodrigo R., Assunção, Juliano J., 2007. “Rent Seeking and the Unveiling of ’De Facto’ Institutions: Development and Colonial Heritage Within Brazil.” NBER Working Paper 13545, October Nunn, Nathan, “Slavery, Inequality, and Economic Development in the Americas: An Examination of the Engerman-Sokoloff Hypothesis,” MPRA Paper, No. 5869, 2007. Ogbu, John 1977. Racial Stratification and Education: the case of Stockton, California. ICRD Bulletin, 12(3), 1-26 Ogbu, John 1978. Minority Education and Caste: The American system in cross-cultural perspective. New York. Academic Press Posner, Daniel N. 2004. “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi.” American Political Science Review 98(4): 529–546. Reichmann 1999. Race in contemporary Brazil: From indifference to inequality. State College, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press

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Sawyer, Mark Q., Racial politics in post-revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge University Press Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz. 1993. O Especutáculo das Raças: Cientistas Instituições e Questão Racial no Brasil, 1870-1930. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Smith (1984) "Race and Human Capital," American Economic Review, September 1984, 74, 865-98. Skidmore, Thomas, 1974. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Duke University Press. Stepan, Nancy, 1991. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Class and Nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press Summerhill, William R., “Colonial Institutions, Slavery, Inequality, and Development: Evidence from São Paulo, Brazil,” MPRA Paper, No. 22162, 2010 Tannenbaum, 1947. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in The Americas, New York. Telles, Edward. Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Toplin, Robert Brent, 1940- Slavery and race relations in Latin America. Edited with an introd. by Robert Brent Toplin. Wenegast, Tim. "Cana, Cafe, and Cacau: Agrarian Structure and Educational Inequalities in Brazil." Revista de Historia Economica 28, no. 1 (2010): 103-137. Weyland, Kurt. 2002. The Politics of Market Reform in Fragile Democracies: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

36

APPENDIX Data Sources: Variable Definition Source Expenditure on Education Per Capita

Brazil: Expenditures per children estimated using the average total expenditures on education by state for 1914-1915 (except for the Distrito Federal for which we used the expenditure data for 1906) divided over our estimates of population in school age. Data for expenditures comes from Brazil (1926) and from Wileman (1909). Data for Brazil assumes that half of the federal budget was spent on elementary education in the Federal District.

Martinez-Fritscher, Musacchio and Viarengo (2010) 1872, 1890, 1900 and 1920 from Brazil (1923); 1940 from Brazil (1950)

Population 1872 1872, 1890, 1900 and 1920 from Brazil (1923); 1940 from Brazil (1950) Population Census

Race and Foreign Population Levy (1974) for 1872-1970; IBGE (2010, Banco de Dados Agregado – SIDRA. http://www.sidra.ibge.gov.br/) for 2000 figures.

Voters Brazil (1913) and ipeadata.com

Dummy Coffee Bruhn and Gallego (2007), Wenegast (2010)

Education Expenditure and Export Tax Revenue

Willeman (1909) and Brazil (1926), data for the 1880s from Brazil (1887)

State Public Revenue For data before 1897, we use Brazil (1914). For data from 1897 to 1939, see AEB V (1939/40).

37

Table 1a: Average Years Of Schooling across Racial Groups– Census Data

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970

Blacks

Whites

38

Figure 1a. Map of Brazil with the State Borders that prevailed from 1891-1930

Note: The territory of Acre became a state in 1903.

39

MAP 1: Variation of the Racial Heterogeneity of the Brazilian Population according to the Percent of Blacks and Mixed with Blacks in each Municipality.

Source: Census of 2009, elaborated by the Government center of Statistics.

40

Table 1b: Year of Approval and Subsidies to White European Immigrant

Settlement in Brazil

Policy/Law 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

Exclusive

White settlers

State Policy

State Policy

Law Law Law Inclusion of Asians

Transportation Private Funds

State Taxes

Law taxing slaves

Public funds and

tax incentives

Public funds and

tax incentives

Public funds and

tax incentives

Food and

Lodge

Private Funding

Private Funding

Public funds and

tax incentives

Public funds and

tax incentives

Public funds and

tax incentives

Public funds and

tax incentives

Housing Private Funding

Private Funding

Private funding and tax

incentives

Private funding and tax

incentives

Private funding and tax

incentives

Private funding and tax

incentives Work

Contract

Law Law Law Law Law Law

Familiar Land

Distribution

State Policy

State Policy

State Policy and

Law

State Policy and

Law

State Policy

and Law

State Policy

and Law

Education

(Portuguese

literacy)

Private Funding

Private Funding

Public funds

Public funds

Public funds

Public funds

* Author’s elaboration. Source Hall (1969) and Holloway (1974)

41

Source: Martinez-Fritscher, Musacchio and Viarengo (2010)