In Brazil, after the abolition of slavery and the organization of a republican government in the late nineteenth century, European workers were imported to provide the social base for industrialization, partly as a response to the failure of Blacks to appreciate the advantages of exchanging freedom for proletarianization. The liberal Brazilian sociologist, Florestan Fernandes, has lamented: “Seeing and feeling themselves free, the Negroes wanted to be treated like men or, as they saw it, like those who were masters of their own lives. A fatal lack of adaptation on the part of the Negroes and mulattos resulted. The attitude and behavior of the ex-slaves, who conceived of their freedom as being absolute, irritated white employers. The Negroes assumed that since they were ‘free,’ they could work when and where they pleased. They tended not to show up for work whenever they had money enough on hand to live for a while without working; they especially did not like to be remonstrated with, warned, or reprimanded.”

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 2158