Introduction

Summary

The established historiography on early twentieth-century Puerto Rico is nearly unanimous on one aspect of the impact of US rule in the aftermath of the 1898 invasion: large-scale, absentee-owned sugar-manufacturing corporations acquired extensive landed estates at the expense of Puerto Rican farmers who lost their land and were gradually converted into a labor force to serve these US-based sugar companies. This narrative has been repeated over and again in nearly every major work on Puerto Rican history and serves as a point of departure for examining a wide range of other themes that have sought to assess the impact of US colonial control over the island. The development of rural landlessness, social stratification, extreme forms of inequality in the countryside, and economic dependence were all closely connected to the accumulation of large plantations by US-owned corporations, or so the story goes.