Class, Politics, and Sugar in Colonial Cuba

A treatise in historical sociology which traces the socioeconomic and political processes that accompanied the development of capitalism in Cuba, providing a backdrop against which Cuba's republican era (1898-1959) can be understood. The first single study to discuss the various factions of the planter class, their competing ideological orientations, and the destructive consequences of their intra-class conflicts. Identifies the principle social actors of the colonial period - the Spanish state officials, the peninsula merchants, the creole sugar planters, the slaves, and the indentured workers - to show how the specific economic and political interest of these groups defined them as distinct and antagonistic social classes.