This paper examines lease contracts established in Brazil's Southern frontier (Campanha rio-grandense) in the second half of the nineteenth century by linking them to the process of land commoditization that started to intensify by then in the Brazilian rural environment. It discusses how the evolution of duration and price of contracts in the long term, as well as the perception of such contracts as agrarian enterprises, express the nuances of such process. The article concludes that this practice of agrarian leases responded to different logics, from options confined to the domain of traditional extensive cattle farming to more modernizing economic motivations.
land leases; commoditization of land; land market; agrarian contracts; agrarian history.