Bananas Before Plantations. Smallholders, Shippers, and Colonial Policy in Jamaica, 1870-1910

Abstract

Recent trade disputes between the European Union and the United States over bananas have served to emphasize the differences between the “dollar zone” commodity system based on Latin American banana exports to the United States and Europe, and the “ACP system,” based on European imports of bananas produced in former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The key difference often identified by analysts is the dominant role played by vertically integrated U.S. banana corporations in Latin America in contrast to the ACP production system in which state-sponsored associations of small-scale growers receive preferential access to European markets (Raynolds 2003: 23-47). There can be little doubt that the reorientation of Caribbean producers toward Europe following the Second World War marked a moment when the banana commodity system in that region diverged from that of Latin America. However, the tendency of researchers to focus on twentieth-century banana trades has had the unintended effect of obscuring the trades’ origins in the late nineteenth century, a period when a sharp divide between Caribbean and Latin American commodity systems did not exist. Indeed, it is easy to forget that the roots of the United Fruit Company (today known as Chiquita Brands International) lie in both the Caribbean and Central America.

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