Contemporary Crises 6 (1982) 315-331 315 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands SOCIAL CONTROL FOR LABOR IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PERNAMBUCO, BRAZIL MARTHA HUGGINS Between 1850 and 1880, Pernambuco's [1] slave population was in decline, while the sugar economy expanded. The intersection of those events made it inevitable that planters would have to find a new work force. Most students of the transition [2] claim that the shift from slave to free labor was relatively easy, because of the presence of large numbers of free rural poor in a region where the absence of "free soil left [squatters] with nowhere else to go and [where] they consequently found themselves in a position of complete dependence and submission vis-fi-vis the sugar planters who monopolized the land" [3]. Jaime Reis adds that, owing to those con- ditions, employers did not have to resort to anything but voluntary methods of recruitment, and "harsh rnethods were ill-advised" [4]. Reis and others have correctly noted that there was a large surplus of potential workers in the sugar zone on the eve of the abolition of slavery; they incorrectly assumed that workers who had been underutilized in the export sector could be freely substituted for slaves. Herbert Gutman [5] and E.P. Thompson [6] have shown in their studies of the North American and English working classes that sheer numbers of workers do not make labor transitions easy. The lesson of Gutman and Thompson is that men and women bring more to the job than their physical presence. Laborers bring relevant skills acquired in the process of working, a useful attitude toward work, and a concept of time commensurate with the form of work organization [7] - all attributes Marx called labor power (i.e., the capacity to labor). Another problematic assumption is that the powerlessness of the rural poor made it easy to incorporate them into the work force. While it is true that the squatters' individual power was both much less and far more vulnerable than that of the landowners, the troublemaking potential of the rural free lay in many of them retaining squatting rights while landowners were trying to mold such free workers into a rural proletariat. Workers with land had a survival alternative to wages and were slow to become the kind of labor force planters demanded. Union College, Schenectady, New York 12308, USA 0378-1100/82/0000-0000/$02.75 © 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company