Jorge Mangonnet | Law of the Landless: The Origins of Property Rights in Post-Emancipation Americas

Why and how do private property rights over critical resources such as rural land emerge? Existing theories point to growing scarcity or to liberal revolutions ''from above.'' Yet, in plantation economies like Imperial Brazil (1822–1889), individual and exclusive rights were adopted where land was abundant and commercially worthless, and where liberal revolts had failed. This presentation argues that private property rights were a political response to emancipation — in particular, a global campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. Facing imminent labor shortages, planters enacted the Land Law of 1850 (a highly restrictive private property law) to keep a free agricultural workforce off the land it needed to subsist, depress rural wages, and block the rise of a smallholder class. This strategy was feasible, however, because (i) switching to an alternative system of forced labor, such as indentured Asian workers, was too costly (due to geographic, economic, and institutional barriers) and because (ii) planters had preserved the de jure means of political influence of the colonial period in the post-independence era, allowing them to shape land policies in their favor. Drawing on archival evidence from Brazil’s imperial period, this presentation shows that canonical explanations based on export booms or radical liberal reform cannot account for the timing and design of property law in the post-emancipation Brazil — and that property rights created to extract cheap labor left a long shadow of slow growth, inequality, and rural conflict.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Jorge Mangonnet (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, he was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Mangonnet’s research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy, with a focus on property rights, redistribution, and conflict. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Cambridge University Press Politics of Development Element Series, among others. His research won the 2021 Mancur Olson Award for the Best Dissertation in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association, and received a departmental distinction from Columbia University in 2020. 

During his stay at Princeton, Mangonnet will work on his book manuscript, “Law of the Landless: The Origins of Property Rights in Post-Emancipation Americas”, which examines how the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the plantation economies of Latin America prompted landed elites to create private property rights over rural land.

DISCUSSANT

Miqueias Mugge, Academic Research Manager, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University