There are few comprehensive works on the economy and society in São Paulo that contemplate long periods. The specific texts existing, for the most part, refer to a region or city, and rarely to the state as a whole. In this book, Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, continue their studies on São Paulo in the colonial and imperial periods, extending until the middle of the twentieth century. If in 1850 the extraordinary dynamism of Sao Paulo was not evident, in 1950 was already the most important economic and populational center of the country.