What was the impact of the Land Act of 1850?

Conflicts between neighbors in nineteenth-century Brazil: experiences in Valença and Campinas

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze how the Land Law of 1850, the most important legislative body on the land issue in Brazil, was applied, with its provisions and punishments established by its Decree of 1854, and to understand how this legislation was operationalized in the social reality of two coffee growing locations: Valença, in the Vale do Paraíba Fluminense, and the municipality of Campinas, in Oeste Paulista. It is essential to understand how the “new property”, discussed by the proprietary class within the State, dialogued, agreed and confronted the customary reality of individuals who directly enjoyed the land in a logic already of the market and for the market. In this case, the tortuous process of creating the notion of property must be investigated from this analytical perspective that confronts the legislative text, which particularizes a certain property, with the social relations that expand the look of the historian interested in the different ways of being owners.