The development of capitalist agriculture has had a wide variety of effects upon pre-existing agrarian societies in Latin America. The forms it has assumed have in part been determined by variations in such factors as climate, ecology, demographic structure and history, ethnic patterns, and land tenure. The central theme of this volume is that such variations, whilst important in explaining localized phenomena, should essentially be seen as aspects of a basic process of change from one mode of production to another in the rural sector.

This is not of course a new idea, and indeed a number of writers, especially in the fields of economic history and social anthropology, have already dealt with many of the questions of particular relevance to the theme of this volume. Broadly speaking, their various approaches can be divided into three different levels of generalization. First, there are those works principally concerned with identifying the general mode of production in contemporary Latin American agriculture, in which the argument has centred around the question of whether the social organization of agriculture is essentially feudal or capitalist. Secondly, there is a more limited amount of theoretical discussion relating to the different types of agricultural enterprise to be found in Latin America, in which the principal distinction is drawn between the hacienda and the plantation. Finally, there is a very considerable body of literature dealing with types of peasantry and rural labour, where discussion concentrates upon the role-structure of rural economic life.

David Brading's paper constitutes the essential introduction to Part I, since it provides a useful point of departure for examining the development of the hacienda system. The haciendas of the Bajio of Mexico exemplify the economic and social difficulties encountered by pre-capitalist cereal agriculture – low profitability, unstable market conditions, and above all an underlying tension between the demands of demesne cultivation and the encroachments of tenant fanning. Indeed, in the particular case studied by Brading it seems that the landowning class had practically lost this struggle even before the great Mexican agrarian revolution of 1910–17. Jan Bazant's paper takes a similar starting point, showing the conflict between large landowners and the various categories of tenant labour settled on the periphery of their estates. However, in the haciendas of San Luis Potosí, unlike the Bajío, during the latter part of the nineteenth century the landowners were relatively successful in gradually restricting the rights of their tenants and successfully converting their peones into an increasingly impoverished class of day-wage labourers, stripped of the meagre privileges and security of the pre-capitalist agrarian society.

Arnold Bauer and Ann Hagerman Johnson deal in considerable detail with the changes in land tenure and land use during the period of expanding cereal agriculture in Chile. They show that the extension of cultivation took place mainly within the boundaries of existing estates through the conversion of previously unused land, and that there was in fact little or no change in the actual pattern of land ownership. (A similar point is made by Juan Martinez Alier in his paper on the Peruvian highlands.)

The establishment of new labour-intensive plantation systems in tropical lowland or piedmont areas, where the supply of local labour was insufficient to meet the increased demand, led to a search for new sources of labour, especially seasonal labour, and in many cases this resulted in the recruitment of Indian or mestizo peasants from the adjacent highland areas. In the case studied by Ian Rutledge, varying degrees of direct coercion were involved in the process of labour mobilization.

Ultimately, the increased susceptibility of the Indian agricultural labourer to a system of material incentives, combined with demographic growth in the highlands, made the early modes of labour organization irrelevant to the needs and conditions of the time. The process of agrarian change (as exemplified by the replacement of debt peonage by a national system of mandamiento) and the reluctance of the planter oligarchy to allow the emergence of free wage labour and a pure plantation proletariat are eloquent indices of the economic and political distortions induced by the dominance of a system of plantation monoculture, developed under conditions of dependent capitalism.

Rutledge's paper also deals with the general theoretical question of the relationship between the expansion of capitalist forms of agricultural production and pre-capitalist modes of labour recruitment, but the particular form of labour coercion described in this paper owed more to a deliberate policy of land monopolization in the highlands than to direct coercion by the state. However, given the immense power of the provincial oligarchy in the region studied by Rutledge, the line between direct and indirect coercion of labour (i.e. the distinction between the use of political and economic measures) is a difficult one to draw.

In so far as its starting point for the analysis of the process of agrarian change is the demise of the slave plantation system, Thomas H. Holloway's essay on labour organization in the Brazilian coffee industry provides certain points of contact with the papers included in Part IV. However, in this particular case the social and economic changes resulting from the large-scale immigration of European labour were so massive and far-reaching that they render any discussion of the changing status of the slaves themselves of minimal interest compared with the examples studied in the final section. Whereas-in the case of northeast Brazil's sugar cane industry an uncertain future for the commodity's markets meant that the decline and abolition of slavery was not accompanied by a relative shortage of labour (see the papers by Peter L. Eisenberg and Jaime Reis in Part IV), in the Sao Paulo region the decline of slavery occurred precisely at the time when great new opportunities were opening up for the cultivation and export of coffee. The coffee planters could never have taken full advantage of these new possibilities if they had tried to rely on local Negro labour; it is doubtful if even inter-regional transfers of ex-slaves would have supplied the quantity of manpower required. Instead, by encouraging the immigration of vast numbers of European labourers (mainly Italians) they totally transformed the social structure of the state of Sao Paulo.