Author: Roberto Saba

In the 19th century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately 4  million people, the latter nearly 2 million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for the global market, and governing elites feared the system’s demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress.