Hobart A. Spalding

Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime and Modernity in Dominican History (review)

conditions, most of the land planted in sugar was either controlled by a small number of large colonos and centralistas or by a large number of smallholders. According to Ayala, Puerto Rico had far more smallholders who worked their lands with the help of family labor (p. 141). Following the model created by Mintz, Ayala begins to describe the colonato in terms of small farms or minifundia. Ayala’s evidence—based on extensive primary and secondary source materials—shows the overwhelming importance and power of the Cuban sugar industry. Documentation of investment levels, size of farms, output of centrales, and so on, supports this claim without rejecting the importance of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic for the industry. This is a splendid book that explores a side of the encounter between the U.S. and the Spanish Caribbean during the twentieth century, making it a valuable reference to those interested in comparative colonialism and empire building.

Peronism without Peron: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina (review)

United States sources for Argentine trade statistics not collected elsewhere. He has researched among probate records and account books for inventories and the financial structure of the estancia. In all, he provides 65 figures, 54 tables, and 3 statistical appendixes. Even so, Amaral’s manipulation of statistics often confounds the reader with paragraph after paragraph of complicated inference. He admits the possible weakness of his own figures by modifying his hypotheses with qualifications such as “maybe,” “perhaps,” “estimated,” and “probable.” In a discussion of profit rates in cattle raising, he writes, “These figures were obtained by rearranging data from models, not from actual accounts and inventories” (p. 227). Finally, Amaral devotes considerable attention to the contentious issue of labor relations on the estancia. He rejects the emphasis on “social relations of production” that Jorge Gelman, Ricardo Salvatore, Carlos Mayo, and this reviewer have given to the subject; he ignores altogether the work of historians of the gaucho like Ricardo Rodríguez Molas and Richard Slatta. Instead, labor relations are treated as a function of the employer’s needs rather than a contested area of negotiation between two parties. Amaral concludes that there was no shortage of workers on the Pampas; in fact, “underemployment” was the general condition. Workers’ preferences played no role in the seasonality of work, and peons did not withhold their labor from owners. “Peons themselves could not pick and choose between working or not working,” according to the author (p. 42). Thus, Amaral subjects free and slave labor on colonial estancias to a 20year amortized formula to prove that owners acted rationally in paying 300 pesos to buy a slave rather than 50 pesos to hire a peon yearround. Despite the book’s impressive collection of numbers, the reader looks in vain for a substantive discussion of wages. Amaral includes no entry for “wages” in the index. If real wages were rising, as some historians contend, that trend might undermine Amaral’s denial of labor scarcity and labor resistance. “The lack of continuous and reliable information on salaries and output,” he responds, “has prevented us from following a different path to analyze the demand for and supply of estancia labor” (p. 181). The debate continues, as it should.