Of human bondage: Campesinos, coffee and capitalism on the peruvian frontier
Robin Shoemaker, The Peasants of El Dorado: Conflict and Contradiction in a Peruvian Frontier Settlement, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Pp. 265; £13.75. This review article considers the way a recent study analyses a colonisation settlement in a coffee growing area located on the Eastern sub‐tropical forest area of Peru during the post‐reform era. It is argued that the study ignores both the presence within this ‘community ‘ of class division and antagonism together with their determinants, the process of capital accumulation. By misunderstanding the nature of debt bondage, it fails to recognise the crucial contribution of this relation to the process of indigenous capital accumulation in a context where labour is scarce.
Some recent East African peasant studies
Torben Bager, Marketing Cooperatives and Peasants in Kenya Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1980, pp. 116. No price. John Carlsen, Economic and Social transformation in Rural Kenya Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1980, pp. 230. No price. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1980, pp. 328, £15.75. The author discusses three recent books on agrarian Kenya: Marketing Cooperatives and Peasants in Kenya by Torben Bager, Economic and Social Transformation in Rural Kenya by John Carlsen, and From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya 1880–1925 by Frederick Cooper. It is argued that the data presented in these books confirm that a middle peasantry preponderates in areas outside the White Highlands, although one of the authors, Carlsen, asserts the contrary. Some fundamental methodological issues with respect to th...
American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People
This is a story of rumour, charity, vengeance, and restraint. "American Insurgents, American Patriots" reminds us that revolutions are violent events. They provoke passion and rage, a willingness to use violence to achieve political ends, a deep sense of betrayal, and a strong religious conviction that God expects an oppressed people to defend their rights. The American Revolution was no exception. A few celebrated figures in the Continental Congress do not make for a revolution. It requires tens of thousands of ordinary men and women willing to sacrifice, kill, and be killed. Breen not only tells the history of these ordinary Americans but, drawing upon a wealth of rarely seen documents, restores their primacy to America's road to independence. Mobilizing two years before the Declaration of Independence, American insurgents in all thirteen colonies concluded that resistance to British oppression required organized violence against the state. They channeled popular rage through elected committees of safety and observation, which before 1776 were the heart of American resistance. "American Insurgents, American Patriots" is the stunning account of their insurgency, without which there would have been no independent republic as we know it.