This Phd project investigates the role of the Brazilian state of Bahia in the global system of cacao production and trade in the first half of the 20th century through the lens of a Swiss-Brazilian company, Wildberger & Cia.
For most of this period, Bahia was the world’s second largest producer of cacao behind present-day Ghana. Wildberger & Cia. was the region’s largest exporter of the crop, later one of the biggest landowners, had excellent connections to Bahia's political elite and acted as a representative of European banks and shipping companies in the region. In this manner, it played a dominant role in the cacao business, impacting deeply the realities of plantation owners and workers. The company was part of a network that chronologically spans the early Brazilian empire’s slave-based economy to modern-day transnational capitalism. By using an actor-centred approach, I will analyse how Wildberger & Cia. structurally integrated Bahia into the capitalist world market of cacao: What kind of networks and connections were necessary for this? How were they shaped by relations of power and inequality? And how did the company survive the political turmoils of the 20th century without state-led imperial support? With the Wildberger Archives, the private archives of a Bahian cacao trading company are opened up to historical research for the first time for this project. This rare opportunity to study global intermediary trade fills an important gap in historiographies of global cacao trade and contributes to a better understanding of the history of global commodity markets in the 20th century. Furthermore, it presents an important chapter of elite formation in a shared Swiss-Brazilian history.
This thesis is being co-supervised by Professor Bernhard Schär (UniDistance Suisse) and Senior Lecturer Pierre Eichenberger (University of Lausanne)
