In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995Winner of the 2001 President’s Award of the Social Science History Association In the Shadows of State and Capital tells the story of how Ecuadorian peasants gained, and then lost, control of the banana industry. Providing an ethnographic history of the emergence of subcontracting within Latin American agriculture and of the central role played by class conflict in this process, Steve Striffler looks at the quintessential form of twentieth-century U.S. imperialism in the region—the banana industry and, in particular, the United Fruit Company (Chiquita). He argues that, even within this highly stratified industry, popular struggle has contributed greatly to processes of capitalist transformation and historical change. |
Contents
Capitalist Transformations | 1 |
Introduction to Part One | 21 |
The Banana Boys Come to Ecuador | 29 |
The Birth of an Enclave Labor Control and Worker Resistance | 40 |
On the Margins of an Enclave The Formation of State Capital and Community | 61 |
Imagining New Worlds | 83 |
The End of an Enclave | 94 |
Introduction to Part Two | 115 |
From Workers to Peasants and Back Again Agrarian Reform at the Core of an Enclave | 129 |