Preface

Summary

The aim of this book is to describe and explain the conditions under which Colombia, by becoming an important mono-exporting country of a product characteristic of tropical agriculture, coffee, managed to link its economy solidly with the world market. At the same time the book attempts to show the full effects of such an integration on the structure of contemporary Colombia.

My purpose is a study of the changes which the diffusion of coffee cultivation in Colombia and its hegemonic role in Colombian exports brought about in production, and in the class structure, in the balance of regional forces and in parts of the machinery of state.

In undertaking this task I have found particularly appropriate the advice of Karl Marx to those seeking to understand the situation in Spain during the middle of the last century: reject the fallacious belief that national life can be followed in the ‘almanacs of the Court’, in ‘the activities of that which we are accustomed to call the state’ instead ‘discover the resources and the strength of such countries in their provincial and local organization’.

Great importance is given in this book to the links between the world market and the rhythm and direction of regional and local changes. It is argued that such links were maintained and even strengthened without the presence and involvement of the central state. The first five chapters show how coffee renewed the vitality of the regional picture, with its demographic and ethnic idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, with the blessings and curses inflicted on the inhabitants by the particular environment.