left in place the colonial practice of favouring of large landholdings created by mammoth land grants to well-placed people, which were usually worked by slaves. In capitalist terms, continuing the policy favoured economies of scale given the limited number of land owners, but at the same time made it difficult for small planters and peasants to obtain the land needed to practice subsistence agriculture and small-scale farming. The consolidation of land ownership into just a few hands had ties to the advent of capitalism in Brazil, and opposition and insurrection in the 19th and early 20th century (for example the Canudos War in the 1890s and the Contestado War in the 1910s) idealized older forms of property and revitalized ideologies centered on a fabled millenarian return to an earlier, pre-bourgeois social order. Advocated by groups led by rogue messianic religious leaders outside the established Catholic hierarchy, these ideologies seemed heretical and revolutionary. Some leftist historians, following the tracks of the groundbreaking 1963 work by journalist (Cangaceiros e Fanáticos), tend to conflate early 20th-century banditry in northeastern Brazil (cangaço) with messianism as a kind of social banditry, a protest against such social inequalities as the uneven distribution of land assets. This theory developed independently in English-speaking academia around Eric Hobsbawn's 1959 work Primitive Rebels. It was criticized for its unspecific definition of "social movement", but also praised for melding political and religious movements, previously separately examined. This blend was later the basis for the MST's emergence. Both messianism and cangaço disappeared in the late 1930s, but in the 1940s and '50s, additional peasant resistance broke out to evictions and land grabbing by powerful ranchers: Teófilo Otoni, Minas Gerais, in 1948 Porecatu, Paraná, in 1951 Southwest Paraná, in 1957 Trombas and Goiás, 1952–1958 These local affairs, however, were repressed or settled locally and did not give rise to an ideology. Policy makers and scholars across the political spectrum believed that it was, objectively, an economic necessity to permit the end of Brazilian rural society through mechanized agrobusiness and forcible urbanization. The left in particular felt that the technologically backward, feudal latifundia impeded both economic modernization and democratization. During the 1960s various groups attempted land reform through the legal system, beginning with the peasant leagues (Ligas Camponesas) in northeastern Brazil, which opposed eviction of tenant farmers land and the transformation of plantations into cattle ranches. These groups questioned the existing distribution of land