cover image Bananas! How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

Bananas! How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

Peter Chapman, . . Canongate, $24 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-84195-881-1

With its vast banana plantations and control of railroads and even national treasuries, the Boston-based United Fruit—known as El Pulpo , the Octopus—made the Central American countries whose economies it dominated into archetypical “banana republics.” This jaundiced history briskly recaps the firm's misdeeds, including its bribery and political strong-arming, its calling in of Colombian troops who machine-gunned hundreds of strikers in 1928, its prominent role in overthrowing governments in Honduras in 1911 and Guatemala in 1954, and its fostering of a disease-prone banana monoculture that ravaged tropical landscapes. Financial Times writer Chapman interprets the company—with its monopolies, its union busting, its marketing campaigns to get housewives to approve bananas as between-meals snacks, its treatment of whole nations as disposable assets—as the forerunner of today's rapacious multinationals. But in making the now-defunct United Fruit the wellspring of capitalism's sins, the author insinuates more than he shows. He vaguely ties the company, with tenuous threads of inspiration rather than specific actions, to everything from Watergate to the Iraq War, and toys with the notion that it had a hand in the J.F.K. assassination. When Chapman sticks to United Fruit's real, rather than spiritual, influence, he offers a compelling cautionary tale of the evils of overmighty corporations and untrammeled globalization. (Feb.)