Agrarian Puerto Rico : Reconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899–1940

Fundamental tenets of colonial historiography are challenged by showing that US capital investment into this colony did not lead to the disappearance of the small farmer. Contrary to well-established narratives, quantitative data show that the increasing integration of rural producers within the US market led to differential outcomes, depending on pre-existing land tenure structures, capital requirements to initiate production, and demographics. These new data suggest that the colonial economy was not polarized into landless Puerto Rican rural workers on one side and corporate US capitalists on the other. The persistence of Puerto Rican small farmers in some regions and the expansion of local property ownership and production disprove this socioeconomic model. Other aspects of extant Puerto Rican historiography are confronted in order to make room for thorough analyses and new conclusions on the economy of colonial Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century. "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"-- Provided by publisher Cover Half-title page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Maps Introduction 1 The Myth of the Disappeared Legion of Proprietors 2 The Coffee Economy 3 The Sugar Industry 4 The Tobacco Industry 5 Economic Transformation and Demographic Change 6 Land Concentration/Fragmentation Using Land Tax Records 7 Rates of Landownership in Rural Puerto Rico 8 Land Tenure Patterns Using Census Data 9 Land Use Conclusion Bibliography Index An examination of the evolution of land tenure and social structure in various economic zones of Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century. Archival data show that the integration of Puerto Rico into the US economy led to overwhelmingly diverse outcomes in different socioeconomic regions of the island.