Based on extensive local archival sources, Ramos Mattei expands the insightful examination of the Puerto Rican sugar industry and the rise of capitalism that he earlier presented in La hacienda azucarera: Su crecimiento y crisis en Puerto Rico (siglo XIX) (1981). Defining capitalism as “a special mode of production that engenders a specific type of social relations based on productive activity” (p. 14), the author uses the rise of capitalism as the crucial measure of historical change in Puerto Rico. Ramos Mattei emphasizes the technological restructuring of the industry and its wider socioeconomic impact after the establishment of the first central by Leonardo Igaravídez at Vega Baja in 1873, Central San Vicente. The post-1899 period represented an intensification of a process already underway, not a radical alteration in direction. The transformation is examined through a meticulous analysis of the development of Central Aguirre: its capital formation, its land acquisition, and the conduct of its operators and laborers. Both workers and managers associated with Central Aguirre operated in a thoroughly capitalist manner. But the establishment of Central Guánica or Central Aguirre under U.S. auspices after 1899, despite their capacity to produce as much as 50,000 tons of sugar each per year, employed basically the same technology as the centrales of smaller capacity, such as San Vicente, Coloso, or Cánovas. Similarly, the twentieth century witnessed the final erosion of the servile and semiservile labor forces and their replacement by an essentially landless, entirely wage-earning rural proletariat working within a profit-maximizing system of openly antagonistic labor relations.
Well written and persuasively documented, this valuable work emphasizes structural transformations. Less well substantiated, however, are the resulting changes on rural workers that the author claims took place. In short, there is not much detail on the society.
