"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...

The history of banana cultivation and its huge impact on Latin American, history, politics, and culture.

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...