Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom

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Description

Costa Rica Before Coffee centers on the decade of the 1840s, when the affect of coffee and export agriculture began to revolutionize Costa Rican society. Lowell Gudmundson specializes in the nature of the society prior to the coffee boom, but he also makes observations on all the sweep of Costa Rican history, from earliest colonial times to the present, and in his final chapter compares the country’s development and agrarian structures with those of other Latin American nations. These wide-ranging applications follow inevitably, since the writer convincingly portrays the 1840s as they key decade in any interpretation of Costa Rican history.Gudmundson synthesizes and questions the existing historical literature on Costa Rica, relegating much of it to the realm of myth. He attacks what he calls the rural democratic myth (or rural egalitarian model) of Costa Rica’s past, a myth that he argues has pervaded the country’s historiography and politics and has had a huge affect on its image in a foreign country and on its citizens’ self-image. The rural democratic myth paints a quite idyllic picture of the country’s past. It holds that prior to the coffee boom, the vast majority of Costa Rica’s population was made up of peasants who owned small farms and were largely self-sufficient. These peasants enjoyed a high degree of social and economic quality; there were no important social distinctions and little division of labor. According to the myth, the primary source of this slightly egalitarian social order was the period of colonial rule, which ended in 1821. The new developments wrought by coffee and agrarian capitalism are seen as destructive of this rural democracy and as leading directly to unprecedented social problems that arose because of division of labor, rapid population growth, and widespread class antagonism.Gudmundson rejects virtually all the components of this rural egalitarian model for pre-coffee society and reinterprets the early affect of coffee. He uses an array of sources, including census records, notary archives, and probate inventories, many of them previously unknown or unused, to analyze the country’s social hierarchy, the division of labor, the distribution of wealth, more than a few forms of private and communal land tenure, differentiation between cities and villages, household and family structure, and the elite before and after the rise of coffee. His powerful conclusion is that quite than reflecting the complexities of Costa Rican history, the rural egalitarian model is largely a construct of coffee culture itself, used to make stronger the order that supplanted the colonial regime. Gudmundson ultimately reveals that the conceptual framework of the rural democratic myth has been limiting both to is supporters and to its opponents. Costa Rica Before Coffee proposes an alternative to the myth, on that emphasizes the complexity of agrarian history and breaks important new ground.

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