Most immediately striking in Coffee and Peasants is the richness of its primary material on the impacts of export agriculture on late nineteenth-century rural Guatemala. Much of the book takes the form of direct quotes, chiefly from the records of Guatemala’s Ministries of Gobernación and Fomento or from the observations of German diplomats. What comes through clearly is a fierce but reasoned, and not entirely unsuccessful, popular resistance to elite land grabbing and to demands for forced labor, as well as an impatience among those in power (particularly after the 1871 Liberal takeover) with any impediment to “progress.” There is new information on the role of foreign and local merchant capital in the coffee revolution, on intraelite conflict, on the changing role of the state, and, in general, on the process of the commodification of land and labor (i.e., the recently much-debated “primitive accumulation” of capital). The Oriente and Verapaz receive overdue attention. The material is fresh and exciting, and reflects years of hard work in half a dozen archives in several countries.
Gambranes’s efforts to interpret the data suffer, however, from an imprecise use of concepts and terms. “Peasant,” for example, appears in the title and throughout the text but is never examined or defined (for a sample of the confusion which results, see pp. 52-54). Too, the author appears to be unfamiliar with the Marxist and non-Marxist debate of the last two decades on the nature of peasantries and rural populations; perhaps it can be rejected but it cannot be ignored with impunity! Terms such as “feudal,” “capitalist” and “capitalism,” “class,” and “slavery” are bandied about as if there existed no serious disagreements about their meaning. To contrast, for example, an “endemically feudal” colonial Guatemala with an “inherently capitalist” (p. 88) late nineteenth-century Liberal regime, particularly when the latter is subsequently said to have rested on a labor system “more or less of extra-economic coaction [sic] precapitalist in nature” (p. 168), is not enlightening. Clearly, some of this is the result of inadequate translation and editing, but the translator cannot be made to take the rap for fuzzy thinking.
Coffee and Peasants is a major contribution to Guatemalan historiography based on solid new research, and two additional volumes bringing the study up to the present are promised. But readers will wish to carefully examine and test each of the arguments advanced before deciding on their validity and utility.
