Steve Striffler, In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. 242 pp. $64.95 cloth; $19.95 paper

Abstract

Ecuadorianists have long awaited a book on the country's banana industry, and Steve Striffler has made an excellent beginning with this prize-winning research on the United Fruit (UF) company's Tenguel estate. He wanted his study of the workers' struggle for better wages and land to go beyond previous works that tended to focus on leading capitalistic actors. Casting his work in Marxian terms, Striffler finds that worker power—at Tenguel, at other banana producing regions in Ecuador, and across Latin America—played a decisive role in undermining foreign-owned enclaves. Striffler argues that “class struggle” best explains the emergence of the “contract farming” system that transformed agrarian landscapes. Although Ecuadorian worker efforts did not ultimately improve their lives, Striffler finds that struggles at least provided a base for subsequent popular organizations.