Labour, Ecology and History in a Puerto Rican Plantation Region: “Classic” Rural Proletarians Revisited

The sugar workers of large-scale capitalist plantations in the Caribbean are familiar figures in social history. As portrayed in Sidney Mintz's landmark research in southern Puerto Rico, sugar workers are manifest rural proletarians: landless wage labourers exploited by “land-and-factory combines”. In Mintz's studies, Puerto Rican sugar workers became the classic case of modern rural proletarians. Such rural proletarians are the dichotomous opposite of peasants: hence given rural populations are either peasants or rural proletarians.