1 Of Latifundia and Coronéis: Agrarian Structure and Educational Inequalities in Brazil

The present paper explores the relationship between agrarian structure and human capital formation between and within Brazil’s federal units. It is argued that whether states’ agriculture is plantation-style, based on cheap coerced labor, or organized around family farming matters for the formulation of educational policies. According to the main claim, landlords were not interested in paying higher taxes to educate the masses and curtailed schooling expansion in order to keep a cheap workforce and maintain their monopoly over the decision-making process. Describing several episodes in Brazil’s history of public instruction, the article stresses the distributional conflicts over education as well as rural aristocracy’s resistance towards broadly-targeted, citizenship-enhancing educational policies. The descriptive evidence is complemented by statistical analyses employing historical as well as more recent data. It is shown that states characterized by a more egalitarian land distribution that are not under the dominance of powerful landlords exhibit better educational coverage and enhanced instruction quality. Also, they spend more on schooling