Of human bondage: Campesinos, coffee and capitalism on the peruvian frontier

Abstract

Robin Shoemaker, The Peasants of El Dorado: Conflict and Contradiction in a Peruvian Frontier Settlement, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Pp. 265; £13.75. This review article considers the way a recent study analyses a colonisation settlement in a coffee growing area located on the Eastern sub‐tropical forest area of Peru during the post‐reform era. It is argued that the study ignores both the presence within this ‘community ‘ of class division and antagonism together with their determinants, the process of capital accumulation. By misunderstanding the nature of debt bondage, it fails to recognise the crucial contribution of this relation to the process of indigenous capital accumulation in a context where labour is scarce.