The background

In any discussion of the development of the coffee economy in nineteenth-century Latin America, it is quite common to contrast the case of Brazil – with its moving frontier and the transition from slave labour to massive European immigration - with the situation in Spanish America, where land for coffee expansion was generally less abundant, and where a numerically significant immigration process did not occur. Nevertheless, even restricting ourselves to the Spanish American case, it is possible to identify significant variations in land tenure, labour patterns, and so on. Limiting our field still further to Central America alone, striking differences can be easily perceived between the history of coffee cultivation in Costa Rica – with its early origins, and with the absence of any large-scale process of land concentration, and its effects on the organization of the labour market – and the Guatemalan and Salvadorean experiences – in which coffee expansion only really got under way after a fierce struggle that set the new coffee bourgeoisie against the dominant social and economic groups inherited from colonial times, and which exhibited features of land and labour control altogether different from those found in Costa Rica. This essay deals mainly with the peculiarities of the Costa Rican case.

Geographical and ecological factors

The expansion of coffee production in nineteenth-century Costa Rica was restricted almost entirely to one small area, the intermontane valley known as the Meseta Central or Valle Central. Extending for 70 kilometres from west to east, and with an average width of 20 kilometres, the Meseta Central covers a total area of 2,700 square kilometres, at an average altitude of about 1,000 metres.

The establishment of new labour-intensive plantation systems in tropical lowland or piedmont areas, where the supply of local labour was insufficient to meet the increased demand, led to a search for new sources of labour, especially seasonal labour, and in many cases this resulted in the recruitment of Indian or mestizo peasants from the adjacent highland areas. In the case studied by Ian Rutledge, varying degrees of direct coercion were involved in the process of labour mobilization.

Ultimately, the increased susceptibility of the Indian agricultural labourer to a system of material incentives, combined with demographic growth in the highlands, made the early modes of labour organization irrelevant to the needs and conditions of the time. The process of agrarian change (as exemplified by the replacement of debt peonage by a national system of mandamiento) and the reluctance of the planter oligarchy to allow the emergence of free wage labour and a pure plantation proletariat are eloquent indices of the economic and political distortions induced by the dominance of a system of plantation monoculture, developed under conditions of dependent capitalism.

Rutledge's paper also deals with the general theoretical question of the relationship between the expansion of capitalist forms of agricultural production and pre-capitalist modes of labour recruitment, but the particular form of labour coercion described in this paper owed more to a deliberate policy of land monopolization in the highlands than to direct coercion by the state. However, given the immense power of the provincial oligarchy in the region studied by Rutledge, the line between direct and indirect coercion of labour (i.e. the distinction between the use of political and economic measures) is a difficult one to draw.

In so far as its starting point for the analysis of the process of agrarian change is the demise of the slave plantation system, Thomas H. Holloway's essay on labour organization in the Brazilian coffee industry provides certain points of contact with the papers included in Part IV. However, in this particular case the social and economic changes resulting from the large-scale immigration of European labour were so massive and far-reaching that they render any discussion of the changing status of the slaves themselves of minimal interest compared with the examples studied in the final section. Whereas-in the case of northeast Brazil's sugar cane industry an uncertain future for the commodity's markets meant that the decline and abolition of slavery was not accompanied by a relative shortage of labour (see the papers by Peter L. Eisenberg and Jaime Reis in Part IV), in the Sao Paulo region the decline of slavery occurred precisely at the time when great new opportunities were opening up for the cultivation and export of coffee. The coffee planters could never have taken full advantage of these new possibilities if they had tried to rely on local Negro labour; it is doubtful if even inter-regional transfers of ex-slaves would have supplied the quantity of manpower required. Instead, by encouraging the immigration of vast numbers of European labourers (mainly Italians) they totally transformed the social structure of the state of Sao Paulo.

Cundinamarca was the second region of Colombia to export coffee, following Cúcuta and other parts of Santander, which had been exporting since early in the nineteenth century. Cundinamarca was exporting noticeable amounts in the late 1860s, and came to export about 10 per cent of the nation's total just before the First World War, the proportion thereafter declining. In contrast with Caldas-Antioquia, which became and remains the leading coffee-producing area of the country, estates in Cundinamarca were large, some few having over a million trees. There were few coffee-producing homesteads or smallholdings. The potential coffee land of the department was a frontier for enterprise (and was lyrically described as such by Medardo Rivas in his Los trabajadores de la tierra caliente, first published in 1899), but it was not frontier land in the colonizing sense. Most of the land had title, and most of the titleholders were able to make it stick. Here the predominant mode of bringing afinca into production was to give it out in lots to arrendatarios, who would plant out coffee under the owner's or administrator's direction, receiving the young plants from a central nursery. The arrendatario would grow his own food crops, but not coffee, and might be moved to work on a new area of the finca when his original plants came into production. The Santander sharecropping system was not employed. This essay will examine in detail the working of a single finca, Santa Bárbara in the municipio of Sasaima, only one unit in one of the several types of society that coffee has brought into being in Colombia, but one for which a very rich documentation has survived.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Peru – not unlike other Latin American countries – saw a large segment of its economic structure converted into a modern, export-oriented agro-industrial complex, designed to fill the basic raw-material needs of the rapidly industrializing nations of the northern hemisphere. Although Peru did not have a Porfirio Díaz to speed this process along, it nevertheless counted on a ‘científico’ ‘-like Qvilist Party, which steered an economic course rather similar in its broad outlines to the Porfiriato in Mexico. Moreover, Peru, like Mexico, had experienced the economic ravages of a recent foreign occupation, which made it equally vulnerable to the penetration of foreign capital. With its economy languishing in ruins from the Chilean occupation, the nation's entrepreneurial class believed that Peru had little choice but to open its doors and seek out the investment capital that was already accumulating in the north.

And if the time to receive foreign capital in the Latin American periphery seemed right to the ruling class, it was equally propitious from the standpoint of the European and North American metropolis where a second industrial revolution was propelling businessmen abroad in search of markets and raw materials. The upshot for Peru was an ever-increasing flow of foreign investment capital between 1890 and 1930. By 1913 British investments in Peru stood at a high-water mark of $166,000,000 – a figure that was soon surpassed by American capital, which rose from a modest $6,000,000 in 1897 t 0 $63,000,000 in 1914, and again to $200,000,000 in 1930.

The decline and eventual abolition of slavery in northeast Brazil and the subsequent technological changes in the sugar industry are discussed by Jaime Reis and Peter Eisenberg in the first two papers of this section. Both make clear the extent to which almost all the agricultural land in this region was controlled by the planter oligarchy, thereby leaving the ex-slaves and other classes of free labourers few opportunities to escape from work on the plantations, which remained virtually their only source of income and employment. Moreover, ecological conditions discouraged the ex-slaves from migrating in large numbers away from the coastal sugar zone into the interior, for the arid backlands of the sertao already carried a surplus population which, unable to eke out more than bare living from the region's meagre and uncertain resources, was itself actually seeking to migrate (albeit seasonally) towards the sugar cane areas. Eisenberg's paper contains a broad general analysis of the economic factors affecting the Brazilian sugar industry in this period of crisis and change, and some useful comparisons are made with the Cuban sugar cane industry. In contrast, Reis's paper presents a more detailed study of the social relations of production within the changing plantation system, with particular reference to the slow but steady transition from the use of slaves to moradores as the major source of agricultural labour.

Whereas in northeast Brazil the process of agrarian change seems to have been relatively smooth and untraumatic (at least from the point of view of the landowners), Michael Taussig shows that in the Cauca Valley of Colombia the elimination of Negro slavery initially resulted in a very considerable degree of economic and social disruption in the plantation system.

The humid pampa of Argentina displays a series of social and economic characteristics that clearly mark it off from other rural areas of Latin America. Relatively speaking, the pampa farm or ranch (empresa rural) has a very high technical level by the standards of the rest of the continent. Its system of social stratification is notably more flexible and diverse than is to be found in the other Latin American republics. At the same time, the existence of a very favourable relationship between the amount of cultivable land and the size of the population means that the Argentine pampas have some features in common with the temperate grasslands of the western United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

These particular features of the pampa region are certainly not of recent origin - on the contrary, many of them have been present at least since the time Argentina became independent. The causes of this situation were naturally very various. Here I shall confine myself to dealing with three of the most important factors. Firstly, millions of hectares of highly fertile natural pasture land were available in the mid nineteenth century for agricultural development. Secondly, these territories were thinly populated both before and after the Conquest. Moreover, at the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the pampa was practically unexploited, being occupied only by roaming herds of wild cattle and a few tribes of nomadic Indians. The agricultural colonization of this immense frontier of fertile land kept land prices comparatively low throughout most of the nineteenth century, and this enabled various social groups, most of them immigrants, who had grown rich in urban or rural commerce, to acquire a stake in it.

In northern Mexico, where population was sparse and land plentiful, large estates predominated; their size, roughly speaking, increased with aridity and distance from Mexico City. In the state of San Luis Potosi, situated in what might be called the middle north, haciendas covered an average area of about fifteen square leagues; that is, between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares each. The few Indian villages that existed – there had been no sedentary population in northern Mexico before the Conquest – were also well endowed with land, some of them originally having been granted some thirty-six square leagues each by the colonial government. Estates naturally made frequent inroads into these communal holdings, thereby expanding at the expense of the Indian villages. The opposite process also took place occasionally, at least after Mexico became independent in 1821.

The population of the old-established Indian villages was not very large, and it would seem that in the early nineteenth century they did not supply the haciendas with much of the required seasonal labour; instead the estates had to rely almost entirely on their own permanent labourers. Another source of seasonal labour arose in time, eventually replacing the old villages. The estates were enormous, and in the beginning only the land around the casco – the farm buildings – was cultivated, and the rest was given over to extensive cattle-grazing. The peones or farm labourers lived in the casco, leaving the rest of the estate virtually uninhabited, except for a few small, scattered ranches where the cattle herds were kept and where the herders lived.

Plantations, peasants, and proletariat in the West Indies: an essay on agrarian capitalism and alienation

GEORGE BECKFORD

This paper explores the origins of rural poverty in the West Indies. Beckford's discussion of the transition from slavery to free labour illustrates many of the points brought out in Part IV of this book. In particular the author distinguishes between, on the one hand, the Leeward Islands – where the shortage of cultivable land threw the ex-slaves back onto the plantation system for subsistence – and, on the other hand, the larger territories, such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana, where the greater availability of land outside the plantation system provided the basis for the emergence of a peasant-farmer group from among the ranks of the ex-slaves.

The emancipation of the slaves in 1838 generally forced up the cost of labour in the West Indies, and together with certain other economic difficulties this change in the relations of production gave a strong impetus to the search for more efficient forms of production and an improved technology in the sugar industry. This development of a modern sugar industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century can be compared with the changes which were taking place simultaneously in other sugar-producing areas such as northeast Brazil and coastal Peru.

However, the condition of the rural sugar proletariat and the small farmer class remained extremely depressed, and major agrarian unrest occurred in 1865 (Jamaica), 1935 (St Kitts), and 1938 (Jamaica). Beckford argues that the peasant-farmer group played a key role in these rural revolts.

The problems of the transition from one social formation (or mode of production) to another have not yet been seriously tackled. A few attempts have been made to give them some systematic formulation, but they are on too high a level of abstraction to be of much use as guides to empirical research. As far as the concrete evidence available on the passage of traditional societies to capitalism is concerned, for example, it often comes from analyses carried out from a perspective which is too narrowly evolutionist to make generalizations possible. The authors responsible for these studies seem to agree, for the most part, that, as capitalism is a higher social formation, traditional societies are inevitably condemned to break up on contact with it and fall in a passive and mechanistic way, into the moulds established by it. Hence, no doubt, the importance given to the phenomena of destruction and deculturation which arise from these relations, which are certainly real enough, but which cannot be taken as a general rule.

Latin America is a particularly rich field for the study of the many responses which traditional societies of a colonial and seigneurial nature can make to capitalism, which has historically been built up on a broadly agrarian base. These responses from time to time result in some sort of provisional compromise, but they sometimes also result in long-lasting adjustments by which the two social formations come to articulate and consolidate themselves over a period of time, without consequently having to modify their structures.

The final chapter sets the preceding papers in the wider context of the general social and economic history of Latin America in the independence period, and in this way it provides a useful framework within which to place each of the individual essays. After a consideration of some of the theoretical problems underpinning any definition of the peasantry, Magnus Mörner poses some major questions concerning the nature of Latin American economic development and the attempts at diversification in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. His analysis of the differing characteristics of each of the major crops or crop/livestock combinations considered in this volume highlights some of the general theoretical issues raised in the Introduction. He stresses, for example, how the ecological and demographic variables associated with coffee production have allowed the development of a great variety of forms of social and economic organization and modes of production. This contrasts markedly with the case of sugar cultivation, where the technological imperative has been so much more compelling, and where a more uniform system of production and labour relations has been evolved. Clearly ecology and demography are two major explanatory variables to be considered in any analysis of the process of agrarian change. Their importance is emphasized in the final part of the discussion, on the evolution of the traditional hacienda, when Mörner considers the nature of the relations between ‘landlords’ and the internal and external peasantry.