Contact Zones: Heterogeneity and Boundaries in Caribbean Central America at the Start of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Large-scale U.S. investment on the Central American isthmus began with the building of the Panama Railroad between 1850 and 1855, paused during the years of the U.S. Civil War, and then expanded rapidly from the 1870s onward, as Central American governments subsidized the building of railroads to Caribbean ports by giving away land concessions that Northern investors parlayed into a multi-million-dollar banana export industry.