Cultivating Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880-1930 / Edition 1

by Julie A. Charlip

Overview

Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.

Alongside these small commercial farmers was a group of subsistence farmers, created by the state’s commitment to supplying municipal lands to communities. These subsistence growers became the workforce for their coffee-growing neighbors, providing harvest labor three months a year. Mostly illiterate, perhaps largely indigenous, they nonetheless learned the functioning of the new political and economic systems and used them to acquire individual plots of land.

Julie Charlip’s Cultivating Coffee joins the growing scholarship on rural Latin America that demonstrates the complexity of the processes of transition to expanded export agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing the agency of actors at all levels of society. It also sheds new light on the controversy surrounding landholding in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780896802278
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2003
Series:	Ohio RIS Latin America Series , #39
Edition description:	1
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Julie A. Charlip is an associate professor of history at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She is co-author of the seventh edition of Latin America: A Concise Interpretive History, originally written by the late E. Bradford Burns.

Table of Contents

	List of Tables	ix
	Acknowledgments	xi
1.	Introduction	1
2.	Setting the Stage	16
3.	Public Land for Private Use	38
4.	The Land Market	66
5.	Cultivating Coffee	87
6.	Capital Concerns	122
7.	Lamenting about Labor	146
8.	Social Structures	170
9.	Politics and Public Works	192
10.	Conclusions	216
	Notes	229
	Bibliography	269
	Index	283

Editorial Reviews

"This is a model monograph of effective argument and impressive research. It takes its place in an emerging interpretation of pre-Somoza rural Nicaragua that sees much of the countryside as, if not a utopia, at least a world of modest possibilities and prosperities for small farmers, an interpretation at odds with an imagined past driven both by class politics and twentieth-century realities."—David McCreery, American Historical Review

From the Publisher