Anthologies are all too often a mixed bag, but this one has been gathered with thought and direction. It is built around the major emphases in the prolific work of the Swedish historian Magnus Mörner. Its four parts, “Peasants and Peasant Societies,” “Control of Land and Labor,” “Culture and Resistance,” and “Continuity and Change,” contain 16 essays plus a general introduction to the field of agrarian history by the two editors. Seven of the essays have Latin American themes, but historians of the area should not ignore the introduction or the quirky, inconclusive, but immensely informative review by Nils Steensgard, “Before the World Grew Small: The Quest for Patterns in Early Modem World History.”
In the first of the Latin American essays, Sidney Mintz wonders if the endless attempts to define the peasant should not now yield to “the processes by means of which peasantries come into being or disappear,” and avers that in the Caribbean this would mean “a return to the history of the plantation system” (p. 35). Two main features of that system, Mintz says, were dependence on external forces and slave accommodation and resistance.
In a continuation of his work on the postindependence haciendas of the Bolivian altiplano, Herbert S. Klein finds that in the department of La Paz, Indian cohesiveness and a weak nation-state left much land and labor in Indian hands until the late 1870s. Then the attack began, and by the second decade of this century, most good lands were in haciendas and would so remain until the land reform of 1953.
Arnold J. Bauer’s essay on Jesuit slave management is refreshingly revisionist. He assigns a leading role to a Jesuit brand of “Christian servitude,” rather than to previously stressed economic and ecological factors, in evaluating the success of colonial Jesuit slavery. Roland Anrup, using modern Colombian haciendas as evidence, asserts that too much emphasis has been placed on “the form of labor remuneration” (p. 121) when looking at work and culture, and turns instead to a whole network of interrelationships that he calls “relations of disposition.” Manuel Moreno Fraginals seeks to explain the apparent paradox whereby Cuba was the most modern processor of sugar and the most backward in labor forms and production technology. By contrast, beet sugar produced in metropolitan countries, which fostered experimentation and technological change, defeated a colonial system subject to legislation made elsewhere.
Luis Miguel Glave asserts (if I understand a meandering essay) that internal conflict in Andean peasant communities does not prevent integrative mechanisms from working and in itself can lead to collectivist “cooperation and redistribution” (p. 146). In the last of the Latin American contributions, Mats Lundahl and Jan Lundius explore Olivorismo, a messianic movement in the Dominican Republic that began about 1908 and has refused to die, in spite of U. S. occupation campaigns, the murder of its leader in 1922, Trujillo’s repression, and an army massacre of adherents in 1962. All in all, this book is a stimulating collection, interesting in itself and apposite to the main directions of Magnus Mörner’s work.
