ABSTRACT
Our focus is on the agricultural occupation process and the economic development of São Paulo localities of Bragança, Mogi das Cruzes and Jacareí, in the first three decades of the 19th century. Using primary documentation, especially manuscript censuses, the text emphasizes the economic activities and the produced goods, linking them to the possibilities of trade, to characterize the local productive structure and its development, and describes land structure, that is to say: the way land was divided in size ranges according to occupation historical process, observed from the ways of acquiring properties. The land structure found has two main characteristics: on the one side, there were mostly small properties, formed by the succession process from one generation to the next, leading to the concentration of land ownership; on the other side, there was an important land trade. The localities studied were mainly agricultural, producing subsistence goods for self-consumption, and benefiting from trade with other areas, important for income generation and based on some specialization and differences in production between localities.
Keywords:
Production and trade; Land ownership; São Paulo in the 19th century