Property Rights and the Commercialization of Land in the Dominican Sugar Zone, 1880-1924

The modern Dominican sugar industry seems an excellent case study of how foreign investors and markets induce capitalist social relations in subsistence-oriented rural societies. Within decades of the industry's beginnings in the late nineteenth century, entrepreneurs and finance companies from the United States led among the investors who carved out or consolidated vast sugarcane fields. They built up mills using the most advanced machinery, laid down miles of railroad tracks to transport cane and bring their refined product to harbors for export, and employed more wage workers than any other sector of the Dominican economy. By the mid-1920s, sugar accounted for some 60 percent of export receipts and as much as 65 percent of the Dominican government's revenue (Castillo, 1985; Baud, 1987; Calder, 1984: 92). Many scholars have portrayed the sugar region in the eastern extreme of the Republic as an early-twentieth-century enclave economy, dominated by the interlocking boards of U.S. banks and corporations (Lozano, 1975; Knight, 1928). The U.S. Marines oversaw the industry's consolidation during their occupation and government of the country from 1916 to 1924, underscoring the connection between U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean and sugar's primacy in the Dominican economy.