El café: De la aparcería al capitalismo

Abstract

The second Colombian edition of Absalón Machado’s already classical work on social relations in coffee production is an appropriate recognition of its continuing relevance, despite major contributions since 1977. Furthermore, Machado has added two new chapters. The seventh discusses the fascinating contradictions of modernization during the 1950s in a coffee economy where capitalist and household production interact in very unclassical ways. Chapter eight focuses, for that same decade, on sharecropping in Caldas, a prototypical area of small coffee farming. The author also makes some adjustments to previous chapters, especially regarding the limitations of data on coffee production and landholding in the 1920s and 1930s.