| Summary: | The present study, based on almost a year's fieldwork, is the first comprehensive investigation of coffee marketing in Haiti. This commerce is shown to illustrate two levels of dependence relationships: one, that of international trade where agricultural products have always been, and continue to be, exchanged on an unequal basis and, two, at the level of the internal marketing system where the habitants (peasants) are tied to a monopoly, support the burden of taxation and experience strong social and political control. === The main marketing agents, the speculateurs (middlemen) and the exportateurs (exporters) are identified and described, marketing mechanisms analysed, and the peasant strategies of resistance evaluated. === Finally, the thesis illustrates how the articulation of marketing arrangements around coffee, the principal export staple of the country, furnishes an explanation of both the historic formation of Haiti and its present social and spatial organization.
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