"Winner 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...

"Winner 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...

Over the past century, the banana industry has radically transformed Latin America and the Caribbean and become a major site of United States-Latin American interaction. "Banana Wars" is a history of the Americas told through the cultural, political, economic, and agricultural processes that brought bananas from the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean to the breakfast tables of the United States and Europe. The first book to examine these processes in all the western hemisphere regions where bananas are grown for sale abroad, "Banana Wars" advances the growing body of scholarship...

Encompassing Amazonian rainforests, Andean peaks, coastal lowlands, and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador s geography is notably diverse. So too are its history, culture, and politics, all of which are examined from many perspectives in "The Ecuador Reader." Spanning the years before the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s to the present, this rich anthology addresses colonialism, independence, the nation s integration into the world economy, and its tumultuous twentieth century. Interspersed among forty-eight written selections are more than three dozen images.

The voices and creations...

This special issue challenges historians to think about food and labor by considering how not only producing but acquiring, preparing, eating, and enjoying food are central to working-class life and capitalist transformation. Its essays bring labor history into closer conversation with the interdisciplinary perspectives of food studies to explore how broadly and deeply food experiences and working lives shape one another. Contributors trace this relationship through a series of case studies from across the Americas, including discussions of Native American life during the seventeenth and...