El Azúcar en América Latina y el Caribe. Cambio tecnológico, trabajo, mercado mundial y economía azucarera. Perspectiva histórica y problemas actuales (review)

Given the importance of sugar in molding Latin American social and natural landscapes, the present collection of articles is a very appropriate effort to cover the entire hemisphere, with original contributions by scholars from various countries. Its publication comes as a reward to its editor's steadfastness, since it springs from two conferences almost 20 years apart (Cuernavaca in 1985 and Mexico City in 2004) and had to overcome many obstacles on its way to the press.

A large volume (586 pages), its 22 articles and one epilogue cover a chronological span that stays mostly within the boundaries of contemporary history, focusing on the second half of the nineteenth century and extending into the twentieth. As for geographical distribution, it distinguishes three areas: the Caribbean (with Cuba and Puerto Rico represented by two articles each, plus one for Jamaica and a more general view on migrations); South America, comprising Brazil, Peru and Venezuela (two articles each) and Argentina (three); and an entire section dedicated to Mexico, with five articles. The epilogue provides an overview of the modern global sugar market. While this distribution accurately reflects the spatial distribution of sugar-producing areas in Latin America, it does not reflect the relative importance of sugar production capacity or environmental and social impact in each region. The distribution of articles is especially generous to Mexico, as host country to the conferences.

Since the few lines of this review cannot possibly do justice to so many very important contributions, they intend only to summarize some of the main questions approached by the authors, who have created a rare balance between specific features and general ones. The volume overall is both comprehensive and precise. Some articles are monographs (Andrés Ramos Mattei, Donna Guy, Delfino Villanueva Hernández); others take a more general perspective. They combine into something of a mosaic, where each piece is unique in its details but contributes with the others to a complex picture of sugar in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most of the articles converge on the management of this important economic sector, as the subtitle indicates. Technical innovations, especially in the industrial processing of sugar, from equipment (Bill Albert, Villanueva, Juan José Santibañez) to the involvement of foreign capital, state policies, and regulations (Oscar Zanetti Lecuona, María Celia Bravo, Adriana Kindgard and Daniel Campi, Horacio Crespo), and market preferences and their consequences on the composition of the elite (unstable equilibrium between processing plant and plantation owners, sugar producers and merchants) are among the main subjects. Other aspects such as seed varieties and agricultural procedures (González) and (more rarely) the relationship with other cultures (Guy Pierre) are also considered. Development of railways, the quintessential modernizing project, is one of the main common aspects (Albert, Michael Gonzales, Francisco Scarano, Catalina Banko).

On the societal side of such changes, the book deals with the labor force: migrations in various geographical scales, from regional within a country or from one area to others across oceans. The Pacific migrations figure significantly here, with Chinese and Indian workers brought to America in order to substitute for slave labor, and a corollary emphasis on the different types of contracts or means of pressuring local workers onto the sugarcane fields (Gonzales and Irving Reynosos Jaime) leads to the very interesting question of these workers' real status. Some articles also touch on various forms of organization in this sector, on both the employers' and employees' sides.

Concentration of property and the incorporation of new lands for sugarcane was a growing feature in various parts of the Americas, more or less at the same time (the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century). Renewed expansion to increase sugar production was hailed as a significant step toward modernity, expressed in...