“A most engaging and persuasive study of corporate imperialism’s complexity. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice
“[Banana Cowboys] is richly detailed with elegant prose and makes an innovative, important contribution to scholarship on transnational and business histories and US encounters with Latin America.”—The Journal of Arizona History
“James W. Martin provides a remarkably fresh take on what is arguably the most studied corporation in the history of Latin America—the United Fruit Company.”—The Historian
“Martin’s study offers a number of intriguing anecdotes and observations. Its focus on white employees stands out as a distinctive contribution to the literature on the United Fruit Company.”—The Americas
“A complex portrait of the company and its brand of corporate colonialism, its successes, failures, and inherent contradictions.”—Diplomatic History
“Martin’s readable and well-documented study reveals that the United Fruit Company was a major actor in the process of internationalization a century ago. . . . A special variant of cowboy mythology and the reassertion of the frontier mentality are prominent in the author’s explanation of this crucial phase in United States expansion in Central America and the Caribbean.”—John Britton, author of Cables, Crises, and the Press: The Geopolitics of the New International Information System in the Americas, 1866–1903