For my research essay, I wanted to choose a topic that was related to my major, economics. I wanted to analyze, specifically, an impactful economic aspect of Brazil’s society that still has a crucial role today. Coffee, historically, has always been a highly demanded commodity around the world. Therefore, a product with such a rich history like coffee, presented itself as an interesting topic to research and to analyze the economic contributions coffee had on both the Brazilian economy. I wanted to learn more about how the coffee business became one of the most profitable commodity industries for Brazil during their industrialization period. Before beginning research, I knew that coffee is such a crucial part of Brazil’s economic structure …show more content…
As I began my research, I discovered that coffee not only contributed to the economic structure of Brazil, but also the changing social and political structures as well, which took place shortly after the abolition of slavery in 1888. I refined my topic to discuss these three areas, in which coffee contributed to the industrialization process of creating a modernized Brazil. I decided to do research surrounding the social, political, and economic areas because there were no other commodities in the history of Brazil to have made as big of an impact as coffee did, beginning in 1770 until present day. Furthermore, I was also interested in analyzing the two-sided argument for both the positive and negative contributions coffee had on Brazilian modernization. For some scholars, they believe that coffee is interconnected with Brazil’s colonial period and is merely an extension of colonial traditions, such as the justification for slavery, inequality, power greedy leaders. On the other hand, many other scholars argue for coffee’s many positive contributions to