December 20, 1778 - Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro
Vergueiro occupies an ambiguous place in Brazilian labor history: celebrated in his time as a reformer for replacing enslaved workers with European immigrants, he nonetheless built his fortune on slave trading and coffee production sustained by coerced labor. The sharecropping system he introduced at Fazenda Ibicaba proved exploitative enough to spark a major immigrant worker uprising in 1856, exposing how the transition away from slavery could be engineered to preserve the economic subordination of laborers rather than end it.
From Wikipedia
Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro, better known as Senator Vergueiro (Portuguese: Senador Vergueiro; 20 December 1778 – 17 September 1859), was a Portuguese-born Brazilian coffee farmer and politician and slave trader. He was a pioneer in the implementation of a free workforce, as opposed to slavery, in Brazil by bringing the first European immigrants to work in the Ibicaba farm, which he owned. The contract was prepared by Vergueiro himself, establishing ownership of the production and other measures, mostly of an exploitive nature. Faced with this, the immigrants working in Vergueiro's main property, the Ibicaba farm, revolted under the guidance of Thomas Davatz, a Swiss immigrant and religious leader, who instigated the immigrant workers to grow their ambition to become small or medium-sized landowners, as they imagined they would be when they had left Europe.
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