“As UROCAL (a regional rural organization) became the vehicle through which individual peasants petitioned development offices for credit and other resources,” Steve Striffler writes (p. 191) in his nearly flawless book, “the peasantry’s collective capacity for political mobilization was diminished.” Tracing distinct phases of rural production in southern coastal Ecuador, Striffler again and again makes the point that increased access to resources—whether credit, land, markets, or political clout—among Ecuadorian peasants and agricultural workers often came at the price of collective action and influence with the state. This occurred despite peasants and workers, through popular struggle, having played central roles in transformations of the state and capital as capitalists moved from enclave banana production to contract farming and the state moved successively toward and away from agrarian reform.

Unevenly incorporated into the state and capital, peasants were able to marshal successful land invasions against not only United Fruit but other powerful multinational, capitalist concerns as well, forming viable peasant communities on lands that technically belonged to United Fruit. These successes were due in part to the lack of coordination among the different divisions of government as its various representatives attempted to extend state control over Ecuador’s rural regions and people. Striffler’s detailed historical analysis of Hacienda Tenquel, a large United Fruit banana plantation on Ecuador’s southern coast, illustrates the contradictions that large multinationals perpetuated and faced while establishing enclave production regimes that were destined to be short-lived because of the susceptibility of bananas to disease. During the 1940s and 1950s, United Fruit provided excellent jobs, schools, health care, social spaces, and other benefits for workers and their families, viewing family-oriented workers as particularly well suited to their operations. It was a kind of total institution: Company representatives were able to enforce their ideas about family, worker, and community not only by providing good jobs and wages but also through the isolation of the plantation, the use of their own private police force, and their ability to stem unfriendly union activity through the management of leisure time with social clubs. Workers Striffler interviewed in the 1940s and 50s remembered this time with nostalgia. As Panama disease cut into production and forced reductions in the labor force, labor relations grew less friendly. By this time, moreover, peasants had been colonizing idle lands along the edges of the enclave, at times even cultivating idle Hacienda Tenguel lands, engaging United Fruit in property disputes and forming communes with the assistance of the state. Striffler’s characterizations of the land invasions—emphasizing the changing roles of women in the formation of the communes, the ways peasants appealed to local officials, increasingly aligning their discourse and strategies with the growing popular support for agrarian reform and growing into skillful political actors that eventually forced United Fruit to abandon enclave production—are among the most enlightening of the book, rich in their insistence that “we place human actors at the center of abstract categories such as capital, the state, the church, the ‘popular’” (p. 208).

Although many might celebrate these peasant and worker successes, one of Striffler’s strengths is his insistence that capitalists and state actors, far from merely representing structures that peasants and workers deal with, are themselves highly active agents in the transformations taking place, marshaling their own political and economic forces to undermine how far reaching such peasant–worker successes might become. Increasing state assistance led to loan and other programs that indebted peasants without significantly improving their material conditions. Foreign-owned enclave production gave way to locally owned production in which local capitalists and state officials became more intertwined even as foreign capital retreated to a position where it could maintain control over production without incurring the risks of peasant land invasions or worker unrest. What emerged was contract farming, with local capitalists producing bananas on contract for foreign firms with temporary workers who no longer identify themselves as workers, and who thereby have lost yet another basis for collective action.

About halfway through the book, after chronicling the success of a popular peasant struggle against United Fruit, Griffith writes, “To stop the narrative at just the moment when subordinate groups have achieved some long-sought-after goal is not only populist, and dangerously so, but bad history. It is to replace processes with events” (p. 110). His account, by contrast, is history that, highlighting process, is enlightening.