Historia Agraria de América Latina 5:2
Vol 5No 02November 2024

‘The best lands have been taken’: The United Fruit Company's land accumulation process along the banana frontier in the Greater Caribbean, 1900-1940

DOI: https://doi.org/10.53077/haal.v5i02.217
Vol 5No 02November 2024pp. 29-55
Keywords: 
  • Commodity Frontiers,
  • Banana enclaves,
  • Agrarian History of the Caribbean,
  • Plantation systems,
  • Corporate imperialism

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Abstract

Based on the Annual Reports of the United Fruit Company to its shareholders, this article reconstructs and quantifies the processes of land acquisition by the company in the countries of the Greater Caribbean where it operated during the first half of the twentieth century. The data allow tracing the movement of an important part of the banana commodity frontier from the historical core of Limón-Bocas del Toro to the North Central American countries and the Colombian Caribbean. In addition, the article discusses the socioeconomic and environmental causes of the accumulation of a large land reserve, much larger than the area actually exploited. We understand this strategy on the part of the company as a response to the counter-movement of nature in the face of the process of ecological simplification implicit in the formation of plantations.

How to Cite

Colmenares Guerra, S. (2024). ‘The best lands have been taken’: The United Fruit Company’s land accumulation process along the banana frontier in the Greater Caribbean, 1900-1940. Historia Agraria De América Latina, 5(02), 29–55. https://doi.org/10.53077/haal.v5i02.217

Copyright (c) 2024 Santiago Colmenares Guerra

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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