From the origins of industrial capitalism in Puerto Rico to its subordination to the U. S. tobacco trust: Rucabado and Company, 1865-1901

Resumen

This paper examines the development of capitalism in the Caribbean through a case study of tobacco merchants that ventured into manufacturing the leaf. It surveys a Puerto Rican house of commerce that in time produced handmade cigars and, at the end of the nineteenth century, participated in a large, machine-run cigarette factory. Rucabado and Company embarked on a process of vertical integration into three areas, namely agriculture, manufacture, and export of tobacco, in an attempt to control more facets of the trade. However, vertical integration into manufacture was not a linear phenomenon; expansion into cigars and cigarettes occurred when the trading side of the business faltered. These merchants sought manufacture to compensate for the weakness of trade. In the end, the very same flexibility that carried them to manufacture led them to sell and become junior partners to the U.S. tobacco trust as a consequence of the American invasion in 1898.