Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860

Chapter Eleven: "The People Do Not Live by Theories"

Putting economic liberalism into practice after independence proved more difficult than the theoreticians could have imagined . As Salvador authorities dealt with the trade in foodstuffs from the 1820s to the 1860s, they veered back and forth from laissez faire policies to those on behalf of protecting consumers, changing direction more than once. Food traders and reformers argued that unfettered individual initiative would lead to competition, abundance, and lower prices, while many Salvadoreans saw the removal of price controls on food and the end of restrictions on traders as opening the way for profiteering by a few and hunger for the many. These people looked back with longing on a regime that, although not perfect, had provided certain predictable protections for urban residents. Policy makers were caught in the middle. They could not simultaneously guarantee the individual freedom of sellers and still obey the older imperative to maintain a protective stance toward buyers. Governing agencies, like elites generally, were often at loggerheads. Even when liberals won victories, they confronted challenging local conditions that forced them to back down. Salvador proved a crucible within which competing ideologies clashed, and food sellers and the food trade were the objects of discord. debating ideology Policy debates were heated, with individual freedom and economic liberalism on one side and the paternalistic-hierarchic impulse on the other. The new Brazilian constitution specifically guaranteed the right of property and said no type of industry or commerce could be forbidden.1 But what did that mean? The argument, as it played out Chapter 11 “the people do not live by theories” Graham-final.indb 191 Graham-final.indb 191 6/30/10 10:33:16 AM 6/30/10 10:33:16 AM 192 changed rules: reform and resistance in the elaboration of concrete measures, revealed abundant reasons for hostility toward economic liberalism. Three issues provoked particularly heated dispute: the number and, especially, the locations of butcher shops; the place of middlemen in the food trade generally; and, most important, price controls. The constant tension between the two competing policy prescriptions can be perceived in a debate over the seemingly trivial question of where butcher shops should be located. Already in 1821 a city council spokesman alleged that it was difficult to inspect the quality of meat sold and the weights used or to avoid a black market because too many shops had been authorized by the colonial government, and they were scattered all about town. Butcher shops should be “reconcentrated ” on the ground floor of the council chambers, “where they once existed.” In 1824, a year after driving the Portuguese forces out of Salvador, the city council enacted a broadly liberal reform of the meat business, allowing butcher shops to be set up by anyone and placed anywhere. The councillors then proudly pointed to the “multiplicity of butcher shops” that had sprung up “where buyers may choose meat and buy at the price they like.” But, then, two years later, they thought again, noting that the new policies, far from producing the expected results, had “facilitated abuses by . . . a multiplicity of visibly unnecessary butcher shops scattered at some distance and, consequently, by the insuperable difficulty of [carrying out] the necessary inspections in this most important branch of municipal government .” Reversing course, council members decreed that butcher shops must now be located in just four places, in addition to one shop in each of five outlying parishes, and that no meat could be sold outside these butcher shops. Subsequent councils adopted a decidedly liberal stance in 1828 and 1829, but reversed course again in 1833. They reinforced their conservative position in 1839 when they condemned the “traffickers in meat who . . . sacrifice . . . the health of their fellow citizens [by] selling them rotten meat in butcher shops that open sometimes here, sometimes there, to escape police vigilance.”2 These zigzagging policy moves demonstrate the difficulties of reconciling freedom of commerce with the desire to protect consumers. This argument ostensibly centered on the difficulty of enforcing sanitary measures, but one can sense an underlying doubt as to any butcher’s motives. “Badly intentioned people” put “meat up for sale from cattle that have died from sickness, opening a shop only to close it immediately after having committed this act of scandalous immorality.”3 Graham-final.indb 192 Graham-final.indb 192 6/30/10 10:33:17 AM 6/30/10 10:33:17 AM “the people do not...