Um importante estudo de história econômica que desmonta parcialmente aquelas teses "bonitas", mas carentes de comprovação empírica, sobre a não industrialização do Brasil, no século XIX, por causa dos tratados desiguais, da "tarifa inglesa" ou por falta de protecionismo adequado, por parte de um dos melhores historiadores econômicos da atualidade.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Tariffs and the Textile Trade between Brazil and Britain (1808-1860)
Thales A. Zamberlan Pereira
FGV – EESP
thales.pereira@fgv.br
draft: October 2020
Abstract
The commercial treaty with Britain in 1810, along the authorization of foreign trade in ports in 1808, are among the most important institutional changes in nineteenth century Brazil. The 1810 treaty lowered tariffs for British manufactures while maintaining high tariffs in Britain for Brazilian sugar and coffee. These terms are generally viewed as disastrous for the Brazilian economy, although there is still limited quantitative information about how much the tariff affected the demand for British imports. This paper provides new qualitative and quantitative evidence on the operation and effect of Brazil’s imports tariffs in the period. I find that the effect of the tariffs is significantly different from what traditional literature assumes. First, the monetary instability in the 1820s and conflicts over product price assessment often led the de facto tariff to be higher than the 15% es-tablished by the treaty. Second, even with higher rates, quantitative analysis shows they did not have decrease imports of British textiles.
Acesso:
1. Introduction
In 1843, during the final days of the commercial treaty initiated in 1810, an article in the first issue of the newspaper The Economist criticized the preferential treatment given to Britain in exchange for a “liberal” commercial policy from Brazil. Brazil’s main export products paid significantly higher duties compared to the British colonies. Sugar paid duties 150 percent higher and coffee 100 percent higher (The Economist 1843, 4). [The Economist. 1843. “Expiring Commercial Treaty with the Brazils,” September 2, 1843, 1 edition. www.economist.com/node/2002191] Only cotton had a moderate tariff, being similar to the imposed on the United States. The commercial treaty of 1810, which was initially an agreement with Portugal, continued after Brazil’s independence in 1822. Brazilian officials renewed the treaty in 1827. British imports had an official nominal tariff rate of 15 percent between 1810 and 1843, which is considered a low tariff compared to other countries Brazil traded with at the time. Thus, even the British foreign secretary George Canning argued, in 1826, that the commercial treaty was advantageous to Britain and “more onerous to Brazil.”
The obvious imbalance of privileges between Brazil and Britain has led the 1810 treaty to be largely condemned by Brazilian historiography (Manchester 1964, 92; Prado Jr. 1972; Pantaleão 2003, 95; Wilcken 2005, 155). Historians such as Alan Manchester, among others, characterized the lower tariff for British manufactures as a “permanent” source of commercial losses to Brazil (Ricupero 2007, 46). Moreover, the sudden increase in the imports of British textiles during the 1810s led to the view that the treaties prevented the development of local manufactures, blocking Brazil’s path to modern economic growth (Luz 1975, 23; Pryor 1965, 99). Stanley Stein argued that the beginning of the textile industry in Brazil was only possible due to the higher import tariffs after 1844 (Stein 1979, 28). Despite not blaming the commercial treaties for Brazil’s failure to industrialize, Celso Furtado argued that a 15 percent tariff “limited the autonomy of the Brazilian government in the economic sector” (Furtado 2006, 71, 143–44).
Even though there is a longstanding view on the negative consequences of the commercial treaties, there is still limited quantitative information on how tariffs affected Brazilian imports (especially textiles) during the first half of the nineteenth century. The main source of foreign trade in Brazil during the nineteenth century – government statistical yearbooks – provides only aggregate data after 1821. There are no statistics for different countries and products before the 1840s (IBGE 1939; Lago 1982). Even critics of the view that Brazil was an “informal British colony,” such as Stephen Haber and Herbert Klein, based their arguments on the same official sources (Haber and Klein 1997). Some studies that use British sources, on the other hand, do not correct for the well-known problem of outdated prices in the ledgers of imports and exports and overestimate the trade imbalance between Britain and Brazil (Arruda 2008; Imlah 1948).
By using archival evidence from the British Foreign Office, the Board of Trade, and price information from newspapers, this paper provides new information about how tariffs worked in Brazil after 1810 and discusses how imports of cotton textiles responded to changes in taxation. It extends the work of Arthur Pryor (1965) on the evolution of Brazil’s tariff policy, providing evi-dence that the effective tariff rate in Brazil was sometimes higher than that established by the trade treaties with Britain. The higher average tariff occurred in two ways. First, the Brazilian govern-ment sometimes attempted to increase revenue by overvaluing British products at customhouses, which increased the de facto tariff rate. The government overvalued British products by taxing imported products at official prices from a book of rates, which was called pauta. The use of official values for assessing imports is known in the literature, but it has been largely ignored in the debate over the effects of trade treaties (Lima 1908, 399). Second, that the tariff departed from the 15% established by the treaty because of monetary instability that occurred during the late 1820s. As prices on the book of rates were not often adjusted, sudden changes in the exchange rate had a significant impact on the average tariff level.
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