Dore, Elizabeth (2002) Una historia no modernizadora en la Nicaragua rural: Granada, 1860-1920. In, Ohmstede, Antonio Escobar, Falcón, Romana and Buvé, Raymond (eds.) Pueblos, comunidades y municipios frente a los proyectos modernizadores en América Latina, siglo XIX. (CLAS: CEDLA Latin American Studies Series, 88) Amsterdam: San Luis Potosí: México. Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos, El Colegio de San Luis Potosí, pp. 225-244.
Abstract
The orthodoxy in modern Latin American history is that fundamental social and economic transformations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were all part of the region’s capitalist transition. Drawing on a case study from a municipality in the Department of Granada, one of Nicaragua’s prime coffee-growing zones, the article argues that coffee production unleashed major socioeconomic changes, but these did not hasten the country’s transition to capitalism, defined as a society in which major social interactions are regulated by buying and selling. Based on an analysis of labour contracts and transcripts of court cases between planters and peons, the article examines the nature of labour relations on coffee estates. It concludes that the women, men and children who worked in the region’s coffee sector were debt peons. They were forced by national laws, underpinned by planters’ local power, to pick coffee during the harvest season. Coffee pickers in the Granada region were forced labourers embedded in a non-capitalist society, not free wage labourers within a capitalist economy.
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