Old wine in new barrels: Varnhagen’s proposals for the reformulation of the 1850 Land Law

• Autor(a) principal: Christillino, Cristiano Luís
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Anos 90 (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufrgs.br/index.php/anos90/article/view/100034
• topic: Brasil Império; História Política; Lei de Terras; Imigração; História política e do trabalho; Brazilian Empire. Political history. Land Law. Immigration.

Approved in 1850, the Brazilian Land Law was regulated by Decree number 1318 of 30th January 1854. The implementation began in the same year. This law was the first land legislation in the Brazilian Empire and was sanctioned under the debate about the centralization of the monarchical state and the reception ofEuropean immigration. The law soon showed that it would not achieve its objectives around measuring and selling public land. Access to land was the main incentive in the recruitment of European settlers. Francisco Adolfo Varnhagen had already spoken about this issue in the text entitled Memorial Orgânico of 1849. In that text, he focuses on the use of indigenous labour and of strategies for immigration. He knew the limitations of the 1850 Land Law, thus he presented a “Project of an additional law to public lands”. In this project, he was in favour of charging the forum for the state and boosting sales of public lands. Varnhagen’s project was innovative in the form and “de-bureaucratization” of the application of the Law, but it did not succeed in exceeding the limits of conservative policy regarding the restriction of access to land: the “old wine” of liberalism (the sale of land at high prices) fit the “new barrels” of a more dynamic implementation of the law.