Brazil and the Atlantic leather market

This chapter analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption chains of bovine hides in Brazil between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, the captaincy of Pernambuco, located in the north of Brazil, was one of the main exporters of this commodity, producing various types of tanned and processed hides that required capital investment and specialized labor. However, over the course of the nineteenth century, Rio Grande do Sul, located at the southernmost tip of Brazil (on the border of the Río de la Plata Basin), became the leading exporter, with a much greater production capacity than the earlier producing regions. One of the chapter’s central arguments is that the emergence of Rio Grande as a major producer of hides was linked to a new phase of global capitalism, in which demand for this commodity had significantly increased - both due to the need to clothe and equip armies during the Napoleonic Wars and as a result of the Industrial Revolution, which required large quantities of raw materials to manufacture leather goods. Producing only raw hides and benefiting from the border wars and the vast grasslands of the Pampa biome, the Rio Grande production helped make hides the third most important export commodity of Brazil by the mid-nineteenth century.