Suchergebnisse

Offering a comprehensive overview of Puerto Rico's history and evolution since the installation of U.S. rule, César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe connect the island's economic, political, cultural, and social past. "Puerto Rico in the American Century" explores Puerto Ricans in the diaspora as well as the island residents, who experience an unusual and daily conundrum: they consider themselves a distinct people but are part of the American political system; they have U.S. citizenship but are not represented in the U.S. Congress; and they live on land that is neither independent nor part of the United States. Highlighting both well-known and forgotten figures from Puerto Rican history, Ayala and Bernabe discuss a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural debates and social and labor struggles that previous histories have neglected. Although the island's political economy remains dependent on the United States, the authors also discuss Puerto Rico's situation in light of world economies. Ayala and Bernabe argue that the inability of Puerto Rico to shake its colonial legacy reveals the limits of free-market capitalism, a break from which would require a renewal of the long tradition of labor and social activism in Puerto Rico in connection with similar currents in the United States.

"Examines patterns of investment and principal groups of investors, interactions between U.S. capitalists and native planters, contrasts between new and old regions of sugar monoculture, the historical formation of the working class on sugar plantations, and patterns of labor migration."--Page 4 of cover

After the slaves were emancipated between 1880 and 1886, the planter class in Cuba underwent a transformation. Successful mill owners modernized their facilities, increased their cane-processing capabilities, and became planter-industrialists. Unsuccessful mill owners who lacked sufficient capital to modernize dismantled their outdated mills and became simply cane farmers. The social structure of the sugar mills was also transformed. Wage labor and tenancy arrangements replaced slave labor, and the industrial process of cane milling became separate from the agricultural processes of planting and harvesting sugarcane. As industrial units became fewer but larger, they could grind more sugarcane than that grown on the land directly under their ownership, and the larger mills therefore entered into arrangements with surrounding mill owners who were unable to make the transition to the new technological phase of sugar milling. Because the new mills centralized the grinding of cane previously carried out by many smaller units, they became known asingenios centralesand eventually as simplycentrales.Planters who gave up their obsolete milling operations and turned exclusively to cane farming were calledcolonos.

This paper examines the Robber Baron, Managerial, and Bank Sphere approaches to the structure of Big Business in the United States. The Robber Baron school argues that Big Business represents a historical regression which feudalized the economy; the Managerial school has several variants, all of which argue that managers rule the economy; the Bank Sphere school argues that banks rule the economy.

"The established historiography on early twentieth-century Puerto Rico is nearly unanimous on one aspect of the impact of U.S. rule in the aftermath of the 1898 invasion: large-scale absentee-owned sugar manufacturing corporations acquired extensive landed estates at the expense of Puerto Rican farmers who lost their land and were gradually converted into a labor force to serve these U.S.-based sugar companies. This narrative has been repeated over and again by nearly every major work on Puerto Rican history and serves as a point of departure for examining a wide range of other themes that have sought to assess the impact of U.S. colonial control over the island. The development of rural landlessness, social stratification, extreme forms of inequality in the countryside and economic dependence were all closely connected to the accumulation of large plantations by U.S.-owned corporations, or so the story has been told."

Introduction: Militarism in Vieques in an epoch of decolonization -- The German naval blockade and the war economy -- Vieques : from frontier to plantation society -- Expropriations and evictions -- Interlude -- Cold War and return of the Navy, 1947-1948 -- Colonial segregation -- Involution, 1950-1953 -- Epilogue: Long-term effects

AbstractThe U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 radically altered patterns of social and economic development. Examination of census and archival data on land tenure reveals that contrary to generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years from 1898 to 1915. Instead, and despite massive agro-industrial investments by U.S. sugar corporations, more small farmers owned land in 1915 than at the end of the Spanish colonial period in 1898. This surprising revelation contradicts the findings of all previous studies, and it prompts us to research further the social and economic impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico in the first decades of the twentieth century.