The dynamics of family enrichment: from the origins to the diversifying of Lacerda Franco's family wealth (1803-1897)

Abstract

The text aims to seize the formation and diversification of São Paulo’s wealth during the
nineteenth century. The analysis rests on the Lacerda Franco, important family whose
members started economically in activities of internal market (farm supplies, animal
farming and trade, production of brandy) at lands near the village of São Paulo and
later migrated to the Oeste Paulista, becoming planters and farmers. This enrichment
process shows the formation of agricultural societies, commissioner and exporter firms,
industry, banking, diversifying the forms of wealth within the coffee exporter complex
in the second half of the XIX. The focus of the study is to apprehend the dynamic
(movement) of this process, materialized through the documentation of the family 

and its businesses – what differentiates the work of the current analyzes supported
unequivocally in inventories – the economic strategies, in different economic activities
that they have enriched and the diffuse forms to invest their earnings.