Land and Labour in Latin America Essays on the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This book of essays by an international group of scholars represents a substantial empirical contribution to the ongoing debate.

There has been considerable controversy amongst social and economic historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists and other specialists concerning the nature and structure of Latin American agrarian society. An increasing number of studies have come to challenge the traditionally accepted view that the backwardness of rural Latin America and its resistance to 'modernisation' are due to the persistence of feudal or non-feudal forms of social and economic organisation. Instead attention has shifted to an examination of the social and economic dislocations resulting from attempts to impose capitalist forms of agrarian enterprise on peasant or pre-capitalist societies. This book of essays by an international group of scholars represents a substantial empirical contribution to the ongoing debate. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in the field, but also to anyone wishing to understand the historical processes underlying contemporary Latin America's complex land tenure and rural employment problems.

List of tables; List of figures; List of maps; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: patterns of agrarian capitalism in Latin America; Part I. The transition from traditional hacienda to capitalist estate; 2. Hacienda profits and tenant farming in the Mexican Bajio, 1700–1860; 3. Landlord, labourer and tenant in San Luis Potosi, northern Mexico, 1822–1910; 4. Land and labour in rural Chile, 1850–1935; 5. The development of the Chilean hacienda system, 1850–1973; 6. Relations of production in Andean haciendas: Peru; 7. The formation of the coffee estate in nineteenth-century Costa Rica; Part II: The development of a plantation economy with labour recruitment from highland peasant communities; 8. The integration of the highland peasantry into the sugar cane economy of northern Argentina, 1930–43; 9. The social and economic consequences of modernisation in the Peruvian sugar industry, 1870–1930; 10. The dynamics of Indian peasant society and migration to coastal plantations in central Peru; 11. A Colombian coffee estate: Santa Barbara, Cundinamarca, 1870–1912; Part III. The development of commercial agriculture using European immigrant labour; 12. The coffee colono of Sao Paulo, Brazil: migration and mobility, 1880–1930; 13. The cereal boom and changes in the social and political structure of Santa Fe, Argentina, 1870–95; Part IV. The transition from slave plantation to capitalist plantation; 14. The consequences of modernisation fro Brazil's sugar plantations in the nineteenth century; 15. From bangue to usina: social aspects of growth and modernisation in the sugar industry of Pernambuco, Brazil, 1850–1920; 16. The evolution of rural wage labour in the Cauca Valley of Colombia, 1700–1970; 17. The post-emancipation origins of the relationships between the estates and the peasantry in Trinidad; Part V. Postscript; 18. Latin American 'landlords' and 'peasants' and the outer world during the national period; 19. Abstracts of other papers; Glossary; Weights and measures; Notes on contributors; Indexes.

There has been considerable controversy amongst social and economic historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists and other specialists concerning the nature and structure of Latin American agrarian society. This book of essays by an international group of scholars represents a substantial empirical contribution to the ongoing debate.