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

by Lowell Gudmundson

Costa Rica Before Coffee centers on the decade of the 1840s, when the impact of coffee and export agriculture began to revolutionize Costa Rican society. Lowell Gudmundson focuses on the nature of the society prior to the coffee boom, but he also makes observations on the entire 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 author 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 impact on its image abroad and on its citizens' self-image. The rural democratic myth paints a rather 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 relatively 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 as a result of division of labor, rapid population growth, and widespread class antagonism.Gudmundson rejects virtually all of the components of this rural egalitarian model for pre-coffee society and reinterprets the early impact 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, various 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 rather than reflecting the complexities of Costa Rican history, the rural egalitarian model is largely a construct of coffee culture itself, used to support 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.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy read. The tone swings from harsh to convoluted, but it is highly convincing in proving its most important point: that the comfortable image of an egalitarian rural democracy in Costa Rica's late colonial period is simply not supported by the historical record.

[Meg]

Not sure I have the expertise to evaluate this book properly, so foregoing a rating. Overall, the text feels a little dated (especially with its focus on certain kinds of debates internal to particular varieties of Marxist economists) and I ended up skimming quite a bit through the chapters focused on population statistics. However, the arguments offered up are interesting, both as they apply to understanding the history of Costa Rica and as they offer a case study of the way that ideological commitments (both spoken and unspoken, examined or no) can distort analysis of empirical situations on the ground. The author is obviously quite interested in the interplay between cultural mythology (the 'rural democratic myth' of pre-coffee Costa Rica) and contemporary political and economic conditions and policy; one gets the sense that his own academic training and strengths, which clearly include rigorous empirical study, almost get in the way of this interest, which might benefit from some of the methods used in cultural studies and adjacent fields. But he certainly sets up the basis upon which one might springboard into such a project.

General takeaways: economic development may have patterns but can play out in many different ways due to idiosyncratic circumstances on the ground; European or North American forms of economic oppression (in Gudmundson's Marxist framing, proletarianization, but also large estate agriculture) do not apply in all colonial contexts; and classes of people (such as 'the peasants') can be heterogenous in their desires and allegiances and, far from being anti-capitalist, may play a large role in its adaptation to a local context, as with the forms of agrarian capitalism present in Costa Rica.

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the books I read while researching Costa Rica: the Last Country the Gods Made.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's just say Costa Rica wasn't so interesting before coffee. ...maybe if the book came with a dupio....???