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Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas. Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, eds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.364 pp.
Like sugar and coffee earlier, bananas emerged in the 20th century as one of the principal export commodities linking the economies of the New World and to varying degrees transforming both North and Latin American societies. This fine and remarkably coherent collection of essays explores the political, economic, and cultural impact of banana production on Latin American societies during the period in question. The essays fall within the important tradition of anthropologically attuned political economy pioneered by Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, and William Roseberry, among others. The hallmark of this tradition is an insistence on combining the usual concerns of political economy-relations of production and property, class analysis, circuits of commodity exchange, state action, et cetera-with an ethnographic sensitivity to local level cultural processes. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a compelling proof (as if such were needed) that the marriage of anthropology, history, and political economy remains a fruitful one.
The importance of banana production in the history and political economy of the hemisphere can hardly be overstated. As the editors suggest, in many respects export banana production served as a principle impetus for "modernizing" (though in different ways in the North and the South) the economies and societies of the Americas. The advent of banana production saw profound transformations in property and labor relations, the operation of state power, patterns of trade, technology and infrastructure in large zones of Central and South America as well the Caribbean. The banana enclaves-regions or even entire nations (thus "banana republics") devoted to the production of a single export commodity and dominated socially and politically by giant banana exporting firms-came to serve in the popular imagination as a kind of emblem for Latin American societies generally. This picture was always misleading, of course, if only because only certain regions and countries engaged in this kind of production.
But, as the authors of these papers are at pains to point out, the image of the banana republic is...