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.
Critique of Arnold J. Bauer’s “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression”
Reconsideration of conventional knowledge in the light of new evidence is an essential task of historians and social scientists. Too frequently unsupported claims reiterated by generations of scholars go unchallenged, thereby impeding efforts to better understand the structure and dynamics of human societies. It is Professor Arnold Bauer's contention that just this sort of historical myth has grown up around the extent and character of debt peonage and forced labor in rural Latin America.1 Bauer argues that apart from certain extreme cases (Yucatan, the southeast Mexican lowlands, Putumayo in Peru) the ability of landowners to restrict their workers' mobility and the use of debt peonage were much less clear than previously believed. Drawing selectively upon a recent academic literature that relies upon access to a very small number of hacienda or plantation archives, Bauer concludes that "the closer the new sources enable us to get to social reality, the more there emerges a world of mutual adjustment and accommodation" (p. 38) rather than the harsher master-servant relations depicted by the conventional literature. Bauer also asserts that during the period 1870-1930, landowners and rural entrepreneurs man-
Arab Uprisings and the Outstanding Return to Democracy: Tunisia as a Model
In the wake of the Middle Eastern crises, the Tunisian case in focus has been doted as a unique phenomenon being that it was the Genesis of the revolution that ultimately spread across the Middle East like wild fire, but has eventually heralded a new dawn as democracy has incidentally returned to the Empire. This literature therefore looks closely at the extent to which the ‘DignityRevolution’ has been instrumental in the Middle East uprisings, which have brought an end to dynastic autocracies. The literature zeros in on the Tunisian uprising which has attracted global concerns, sympathy and has sparked interests in the international arena. The literature finds that the people hold colossal prospect in the uprising and its resultant effect, as it paved the way for the revolutionist to generate, gather and disseminate information on the condition of the entire region to the international community. The people in this context were of utmost importance and played a very crucial role in the creation of awareness, mobilization of protesters and utmost determining the direction of the uprising and also ensuring a speedy return to democratic rule. The paper submits that the role of the people in ensuring that the ruins of the uprising is not left littering around and democracy restored is highly commendable and should be a model for all other Arab countries involved in the revolution.