Description
This is the story of Cuban tobacco, whose agricultural and industrial development was fashioned as deftly as a Havana cigar around overseas trading interests. It traces the nineteenth-century growth of a strong tobacco oligarchy, peasant grower class and urban salaried work force, alongside slave and indentured labour, and examines how a prestigious manufacturing country was transformed into an exporter of leaf. Visibly poor peasant agriculture concealed foreign and home capital which, while creating some large plantations, used and even propagated a most extreme form of sharecropping. Well into the twentieth century, an increasingly embattled industry catered to dwindling luxury markets and an unstable, fluctuating home market with but a few relatively large, on the whole family, concerns and a proliferation of small sweatshop and outwork production.
Jean Stubbs penetrates the finer socio-political aspects of the radically changing nature and composition of peasantry and proletariat, including the interlacing of race, gender and skill, to take a closer look at areas of class action and national and class consciousness, be it through reformism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary nationalism, socialism or communism.
This new edition expands on the 1985 original with a new Foreword and Preface, and other source material.
Author: Jean Stubbs
Publisher: Amaurea Press
Published: 06/30/2023
Pages: 382
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.29lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.85d
ISBN13: 9781914278051
ISBN10: 1914278054
BISAC Categories:
- History | Latin America | General
- History | Modern | General
- History | Caribbean & West Indies | Cuba