CONSUMPTION BASKETS AND COST OF LIVING
IN SOUTHERN LATE COLONIAL BRAZIL: RIO
GRANDE, 1772-1823
JULIO DJENDEREDJIAN
Universidad de Buenos Aires/Conicet
a
JUAN LUIS MARTIRÉN
Universidad de Buenos Aires/Conicet
b
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the cost of living and evolution of welfare ratios
among urban workers in Rio Grande’s vila, the main commercial enclave
of the southern Portuguese dominions in America. From diverse sources
(military and hospital expenditure accounts, merchant credit bills from
probate inventories), we build different consumption baskets to calculate
their cost in seven benchmark years: 1772, 1792, 1802, 1809, 1816, 1819
and 1823. The evolution of cost of living shows a consistent upward
trend during the period, which, however, does not substantially affect wel-
fare ratios. In order to build regional comparisons, we follow Allen’s meth-
odology (2001) to estimate welfare ratios of skilled and unskilled workers
in Rio Grande, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The results of using this
approach could be useful to adjust the methodology for further inter-
national comparisons.
Keywords: living standards, consumption baskets, welfare ratios, late
colonial Brazil, Rio de la Plata
JEL codes: J31, N16, N96
a
Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana «Dr. Emilio Ravignani». juliodjend@yahoo.com.ar
b
Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani”. jlmartiren@hotmail.com
Revista de Historia Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History
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Page 1 of 31. doi:10.1017/S0212610919000405 © Instituto Figuerola, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 2020.
RESUMEN
El artículo examina la evolución del costo de vida y de los niveles de
bienestar de los trabajadores urbanos en la vila de Río Grande, el principal
enclave comercial de los dominios meridionales portugueses en América.
A partir de diversas fuentes (cuentas de gastos militares y hospitalarios, y
cuentas privadas tomadas de inventarios post-mortem), se construyen
diferentes canastas de consumo y se calcula su valor monetario en distin-
tos momentos del período analizado. Los resultados muestran un encare-
cimiento constante del costo de vida, que es acompañado en general por
incrementos en el nivel de salarios, sobre todo de trabajadores con
menor calificación. Establecemos asi mismo comparaciones regionales,
siguiendo la metodología propuesta por Robert Allen (2001) para estimar
la evolución del poder de compra de los trabajadores calificados y no cali-
ficados en Rio Grande, Buenos Aires y Montevideo. Esta estrategia y sus
resultados pretenden discutir y mejorar esa metodología para realizar
comparaciones internacionales.
Palabras clave: niveles de vida, canastas de consumo, poder de com-
pra, Brasil tardocolonial, Río de la Plata
«The conservation of Public Health depends mainly on good quality
food, and meat being a food of first necessity, and the most commonly
consumed; needs a lot of caution to be distributed to the public.» Luiz
Pelazzy, Health Chief Guard, Vila de Rio Grande, 5 November
1824
1
1. INTRODUCTION
The words of the official in charge of public health of Rio Grande—the
main Atlantic port of southern Brazil in the early 1820s—are eloquent
about the emblematic place that fresh meat occupied in the local daily
diet. It was not only the cheapest protein source in this region, but also
a critical food supply. This was an unusual phenomenon in late colonial
Brazil; as a result, Rio Grande became an especially interesting case to
analyse
2
. It also shares common features with the nearby Rio de la Plata
1
Arquivo Histórico do Rio Grande do Sul (AHRS), Autoridades Municipais, Maço A-MU-167,
Cámara Municipal de Rio Grande. Own translation.
2
Dry meat (charque), with a farinaceous (manioc or corn), and some linen for clothing, made
up the basic scheme of popular consumption in late colonial Brazil. This was assumed by the
JULIO DJENDERDJIAN AND JUAN LUIS MARTIRÉN
2 Revista de Historia Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History
provinces, which makes it particularly attractive for a comparative
approach
3
. Geographical proximity, geopolitical importance, a similar fac-
tor endowment and abundance of livestock, had given the Rio Grande
Captaincy and its neighbours an undeniable com mon imprint.
The study of consumption baskets and food supply markets in the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries has already been addressed by the Brazilian historiog-
raphy, especially for large urban centres such as Rio de Janeiro and
Salvador de Bahia (Lobo et al. 1971; Johnson 1973; Mattoso 1973;
Barickman 2003). However, little is known about this issue in the south-
ernmost regions of the country, characterised by the previously mentioned
peculiarities. Thus, we aim to fill this gap through the analysis of the vila of
Rio Grande, a strategic enclave for the Portuguese Crown, and the main
urban core of a growing hinterland between 1780 and 1820
4
.
Despite the promising results achieved by the academic literature on
colonial Latin America in recent years, there is a need to enhance our
knowledge, as well as to stress the critical differences with the consumer
structures of Europe or North America, which have been studied in
more depth
5
. The contribution of this paper lies not only in presenting
the composition and cost of local consumption baskets, but also in analys-
ing the feeding patterns of the lowest income groups of the population in a
slave economy. In other words, it allows us to study the hierarchical deter-
minants of the local diet, and their impact on relative production costs, as
well as on price cycles.
The article is divided into three parts. The first one focuses on the com-
position of local food baskets. It seeks to identify the kinds of food con-
sumed in Rio Grande, to estimate their quan tities and caloric weight.
Based on hospital sources and public sector accounts, this section presents
three types of consumpt ion baskets used at that time. Following these bas-
kets’ composition, we also elaborate ‘Respectable’ baskets and ‘ Bare Bones’
baskets (BBB), adapting the caloric intake to the methodology proposed by
Allen (2001). Once the consumption patterns have been identified, the
second part will focus on the cost of living between 1772 and 1823. For
this purpose, we present evidence about the monetary cost of each basket
officials (report of the Viceroy of Brazil, in Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro,
Caixa 72, doc 6614, cit. in Rodrigues (2017) and Barickman (2003, p. 89)).
3
Literature on living standards in Late Colonial and Post independent Rio de la Plata is abun-
dant. See Johnson (1990), Arroyo Abad et al. (2012), Djenderedjian and Martirén (2015), Moraes
and Thul (2017), Frid (2017), Gelman and Santilli (2018).
4
A historiographical renovation in the last two decades has offered new insights into the econ-
omy and society of Rio Grande during the colonial period. Some of the most outstanding works are:
Osório (1999), Kühn (2006), Gil (2009). Socio-productive and demographic data for the period
under analysis in Medeiros dos Santos (1984).
5
For Latin America, in addition to the above-mentioned cases on the Rio de la Plata, see also
Dobado and García Montero (2010), Challú and Gómez Galvarriato (2015), Dobado (2015).
CONSUMPTION BASKETS AND COST OF LIVING IN SOUTHERN LATE COLONIAL BRAZIL
Revista de Historia Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History
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in seven benchmark years (1772, 1792, 1802, 1809, 1816, 1819 and 1823).
We also estimate the total annualised cost of the BBB and Respectable bas-
kets (which include foods and extras). The dataset is crossed with salary
evidence of carpenters and construction workers with different skills (offi-
cials and unskilled labourers or serventes). This strategy allows us to meas-
ure the impact of inflation cycles and to study the changes in workers’
standards of living using Allen’s Welfare Ratio (WR) approach. Finally,
we present a comparative analysis with two other cities in the region:
Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
We use several sources to build up the evidence: merchants’ account
bills and invoices from probate records; account ledgers from the
Provedoria and the warehouses of the Real Fazenda of the Vila of Rio
Grande; accounts of the Intendencia da Marinha, the Military Hospital,
the local penitentiary and the Comandancia Militar da Capitania do Rio
Grande. Specific details on these sources and methods are shown in the
Appendix (Data Sources section).
2. BUILDING THE BASKET IN LATE COLONIAL SOUTH BRAZIL:
COMPOSITION AND CALORIC INTAKE
One of the foremost difficulties involved in measuring living standards
in pre-statistical times is to build reasonable consumpti on baskets.
Although it is a fairly simple task to identify the main staple foods, serious
problems arise when estimating specific proportions or quantities. This is
due to the fact that depending on the purchasing power of the individual,
or on their ethnic or social class group (an important point in a strongly
hierarchical society, as was the case of Rio Grande), the amount or kind
of each food could dramatically change, not to mention cultural or age
constraints. Namely, an accurate determination of the type and quantity
of goods available is vital to estimate the caloric content and cost of a bas-
ket and subsequently to make inferences about the subsistence level of a
person or family group.
To this end, sources derived from charitable institutions (asylums, hos-
pitals, religious communities), mendicants (convents) or public or military
(hospitals, prisons) have offered quite useful results to the literature
(Gelman and Santilli 2015a, 2016, 2018; Moraes and Thul 2017).
However, some precautions are required. For example, hospital diets
were determined by the medical practices of the time, and as they had a
therapeutic role, they included foods of high relative value, better quality
or not commonly consumed by healthy people (poultry, e.g.). Moreover,
in highly hierarchical societies, the consumption of religious communities
could only represent the daily diet of very small groups of the population,
JULIO DJENDERDJIAN AND JUAN LUIS MARTIRÉN
4 Revista de Historia Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History
leaving a large part of the population out of the analysis, particularly those
ethnically or economically segregated.
As we intend to represent the social and ethnically segmented consump-
tion baskets, we are combining two types of documents: expense bills of
the Military Hospital of Rio Grande and rations’ records of public and
private workers, prisoners and Azorean residents. The first one is quite a
valuable source, which includes monthly data on the expenditures made
between 1792 and 1803. Although these records only cover 12 years of
the period under analysis, they provide a very clear picture of consumption
patterns and of the elasticity of the food purchases. Having processed all
the monthly entries of each item, we found that fresh meat, wheat bread,
manioc flour (farinha, hereafter), rice and sugar monopolised the food
purchases and the caloric intake
6
. However, their relative weight varied
in relation to price fluctuations. This evidence allows us to know the strat-
egies developed by the hospital staff to change diet components, in order
to save costs in case of inflation.
As previously mentioned, meat was very cheap and abundant
7
.Itpro-
vided food security in Rio Grande, since cattle was not only an economic
asset but also a strategic resource, carefully protected and moved to safer
places when wars broke out. This abundance constituted a reservoir for
times of scarcity, especially during agrarian crisis. Even in the course of
the worst droughts, while cereal prices soared, the meat supply could
increase, as more animals were sent to markets due to their breeder’s con-
cerns about their survival in a context of grass shortage. Although ranches
in Rio Grande were not as large as those in the neighbouring provinces of
the Banda Oriental or Entre Ríos, nor were their herds so overabundant,
cattle ranching was always one of the main rural activities (Osório
1999). In short, there is a sharp similarity with the cases of Buenos Aires
and Montevideo, where the weight of fresh meat in the population’s
daily diet has been already stressed by the literature (Johnson 1990;
Moraes and Thul 2017; Gelman and Santilli 2018).
6
See Table A1. Additionally, Figure A1 shows the general expenses incurred. Food is more
important throughout the period.
7
Luccock, Saint-Hilaire or Isabelle, three of the best known chroniclers who travelled or lived
in Rio Grande during the first decades of the 19
th
century, agreed that meat, accompanied by far-
inha, was the main food of the population. Bread, on the other hand, was less common in the
lower classes, although until 1822 Rio Grande was a large producer of wheat. According to
Saint-Hilaire: «Each man’s ration is four pounds of meat a day [1.84 kilograms], and they only
feed on the fatter, fleshier parts of the animal. The soldiers of the region have easily become accus-
tomed to such a regime, which is in fact little different from their usual way of life; notwithstanding
the emergence of diseases due to excessive carnivorous feeding, mainly dysentery, among the
Paulists [from São Paulo], more accustomed to beans and flour than to meat.» (Saint Hilaire
2002 [1887], p. 52). Own translation
CONSUMPTION BASKETS AND COST OF LIVING IN SOUTHERN LATE COLONIAL BRAZIL
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