The Origins of Capitalist Agriculture in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

It has been well documented that structural changes in the capitalist world system during the second half of the nineteenth century generated profound consequences for peripheral economies such as those in Latin America and Africa. Improvements in transportation and the increasing demand for tropical consumer goods in the industrializing countries caused unprecedented growth in the production of tropical export crops and a consequent international movement of agricultural commodities. This widespread emergence of export agriculture for Western European and North American markets is the one reason why researchers can still employ a broad concept like the Third World to divergent economies and cultures in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Production of such crops as cotton, cocoa, tobacco, and coffee, which had previously been grown in many regions on a limited scale, expanded enormously in the second half of the nineteenth century. The global character of these agrarian changes, however, should not obscure their regional peculiarities. Export agriculture (whether peasant-or plantation-based) arose within existing systems of social and economic relations, which had a decisive influence on the final outcome of this process of change.