American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934

Engaging conventional arguments that the persistence of plantations is the cause of economic underdevelopment in the Caribbean, this book focuses on the discontinuities in the development of plantation economies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. César Ayala analyzes and compares the explosive growth of sugar production in the three nations following the War of 1898 — when the U.S. acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico — to show how closely the developm...