| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880–1950. By Sterling Evans. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. xxvi, 314 pp. $42.00, ISBN 978-1-58544-596-7.)
Sterling Evans's Bound in Twine is a model transnational history focusing on a commodity of which most historians are, at best, dimly aware—henequen and sisal fiber from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, which was used to manufacture twine to bundle wheat and other small grains into sheaves at harvest.	1
The demand for and supply of Yucatecan fiber came together in a serendipitous way in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Wheat farmers expanding onto the Great Plains of North America needed dependable twine to bind their grain prior to threshing, and Yucatecan planters—the henequeneros—produced henequen, sisal, and little else on their unpromising land. For a time, both sides benefitted. Henequeneros grew rich as ever-greater supply—reaching 1.6 million bales in 1916—was matched by ever-growing demand. Unfortunately, not much trickled down to their laborers who were sometimes held in debt peonage or, in the case of Yaqui Indians captured in Sonora, actual slavery. Nor did the fiber sales create the backward and forward linkages or the capital investments that might have diversified the Yucatan economy.	. . .

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