| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899–2000. By Marcelo Bucheli. (New York: New York University Press, 2005. xii, 241 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8147-9934-5.)

In this superb monograph, Marcelo Bucheli combines business and political history to craft a comprehensive account of the operations of the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in twentieth-century Colombia. Bucheli acknowledges that other scholars have thoroughly explored the acrimonious relationships of the UFCO with its Colombian workers in the 1920s that culminated in the bloody strike of 1928, but he argues that their studies have four shortcomings. First, they fail to analyze the company as a business enterprise; second, they underestimate the dramatic transformation Colombia underwent after the 1930s, which necessarily affected the government's relationship with the company; third, they overlook how the consumer market outside Latin America affected company decisions; and fourth, they ignore vital primary resources that include UFCO's archives in Colombia and unpublished government reports. To fill in these lacunae, Bucheli gathered data from untapped documents, and he also conducted interviews with former UFCO employees, local export company officials, union leaders, banana entrepreneurs, and former members of the Colombian guerrillas (pp. 5–7). The result is a clearly written analysis that takes into account the international context in which the company operated, its characteristics as a business enterprise, and its relationship with banana workers, local entrepreneurs, and regional governments in two key banana zones, Magdalena and Urabá.

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