In The Business of Empire, Jason Colby addresses the century following the first appearance of US filibusterers and warships to Central America, whose attacks paved the way for the United Fruit Company (UFCO) to become “the largest agricultural enterprise in the world” by the 1910s (p. 4). The narrative moves across the greater Caribbean, with more attention paid to Guatemala, where “elites anguished over their nation’s indigenous majority” (p. 10), and Costa Rica, where elites proclaimed that their nation was white. Black workers suffered fewer massacres in Costa Rica than in Guatemala; however, West Indians in Costa Rica faced vicious attacks and, by the 1920s, a state policy of eugenics.
In the opening chapters, Colby offers an overview of the decades when the filibusterer William Walker was causing “deaths from gunfire and disease numbering in the tens of thousands” (p. 29), Abraham Lincoln was trying to convince US blacks...
