Costa Rica Before Coffee: Occupational Distribution, Wealth Inequality, and Élite Society in the Village Economy of the 1840s

Abstract

Recent research on Costa Rican social and economic history has made notable advances regarding the classic coffee economy of the 1850–1950 period. Major works by Hall and Stone, and essays by Cardoso, Pérez, Vega, and Samper have offered suggestive new materials and perspectives on the basic dynamics of coffee culture and the social antagonisms which developed within it. Nevertheless, the differences in opinion in this literature on the coffee economy, in particular the degree of land concentration and proletarianization within the Central Valley region, tend to obscure an even more basic agreement of the pre-coffee starting point: the predominance of dispersed, self-sufficient smallholders on privately owned plots, with a very weak elite structure and minimal social division of labor in artisanry or agriculture.