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The United States and Canada

Maracaibo, the Andean coffee economy remained largely under local control. Production and marketing of "coffee were fairly decentralized, and little vertical or, for that matter, horizontal integration existed. Local merchants seem to have established control over credit, but they in turn were dependent on the import/export sector of the ports. What is most surprising, and never explained to my satisfaction, is why a class of large-scale coffee planters did not emerge. This seems to have occurred in every other coffee export sector in nineteenth-century Latin America. The main point of the study is that coffee was accompanied by the extensive proliferation of small-scale yeoman farmers. Differentiation existed and capitalism was developing, but these small farmers, according to Roseberry, were neither peasants nor proletarians in their relations with capital. They were not dependent on landed elites, yet their dependence on the credit supplied by local merchants was extreme. The dominance of petroleum in the twentieth century meant the demise of coffee as a leading Venezuelan resource—except in the Andes, where local coffee growers were able to weather various crises, including the price slump at the beginning of this century and the Great Depression. Local socioeconomic life naturally underwent drastic changes. The rise of middle sectors linked to the national government and petrorevenues was one characteristic. New investors with no prior links to coffee agriculture became prosperous planters, while the offspring of former smallholders were converted into proletarians with few remaining connections to landownership. Finally, of course, the capitalist formation reached a certain level of maturity. The entire process makes a great deal of sense and is logically and clearly written. I found the long theoretical discussions, which occupy about one-third of the text, to be extremely dense, but ultimately useful enough to justify them. The major findings are acceptable. To put it succinctly, I liked the book. There are problems, however, and they revolve around who is doing the reading. Historians are trained to stick close to primary sources. With the exception of the twentieth-century material, the book relies on little beyond secondary studies. There is scanty empirical evidence introduced to support the generalizations about large-scale port merchants, local merchants, or even the coffee farmers themselves. The land tenure situation, of critical importance to any rural study, is swept aside with references to differentiation within uniformity. Labor force organization, a major indicator of capitalist development, remains vague. The functional mechanisms linking merchant groups with coffee farmers are mysterious at best. Interest rates, profit margins, transportation costs, infrastructure, wage rates, and above all people do not find their way into this book. International market conditions, on which the whole structure of coffee agriculture rested, are not discussed. It is ironic that in one section about recent theoretical literature on modes, of production the author states that "classes were deduced from theoretical concepts" (p. 63). Although the book is probably right on target, the evidence presented (pre-twentieth-century) leads me to conclude that it has conformed more closely to theoretical constructs than to historical documentation.