The genealogy of the wealth, capitals, and poverty of São Paulo, New York, and New England and its resonances on the current inequalities.

• Grant number: 24/10981-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: September 01, 2024
• End date: August 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Urban Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Maura Pardini Bicudo Véras
• Grantee: Moisés de Freitas Cunha
• Supervisor: Sven Beckert
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Harvard University, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/15100-7 - The historic rescue of the processes of production and accumulation of wealth/riches, based on coffee, cotton and slavery in Brazil and the US, and the sociospatial repercussions of exclusion and poverty in a comparative analysis between their cities., BP.PD

Abstract

This research seeks to connect colonial and slavery past to the present urban inequalities with focus to Brazil/Portugal 'relations' + USA/England relations. The production and accumulation of wealth and capitals (financial-economic, political, cultural, social) are analyzed based on the global commodities coffee and cotton that resulted in the birth of São Paulo and New York, considering as main growth vectors the European immigration, urbanization, and the industrialization. The black enslaved workforce was used to transform natural resources into wealth, as per HOLLOWAY (1975; 1980), in Brazil and the US, two plantation societies where slavery was considered a total institution (PARRON, 2015), giving birth to the present modern cities, among other institutions, with their contradictions and inequalities, still visible in neighborhoods of São Paulo, New York, Boston etc., mostly inhabited by people of African descent and/or people of color, and our research also aims to understand 1) how wealth and poverty are conveyed along the time, from generation to generation, thus contributing with local and/or global (in)equalities, (in)justices, paraphrasing BERNSTEIN (2019: 4), and 2) "identify the specific mechanisms which make and/or show slavery and racism as important factors for the development of specific neighborhoods in the postslavery periods", as per BRODYN FISCHER (2020: MIMEO). For such, it is proposed the creation of metrics, measures, indicators, algorithms for a better description of how such processes took place.