Whether as engine or fuel, the mid-to-late-nineteenth-century boom in Central American coffee production coincided with significant shifts in regional political and economic structures. After decades of Conservative rule, Liberal regimes took power throughout the isthmus, communal landholding receded before expanded private landholding, and the region's economic fate became more fully enmeshed in the machinery of international trade. How these changes altered local class, political and social relations remains hotly debated. Against scholars who see in these changes the emergence of a modern capitalist economy, Dore's elegantly written micro-history of the town of Diriomo, near Granada, argues that Nicaragua experienced a profound peasantisation characterised by fundamentally gendered relations of coercion and patron-client bonds.

The deeply local and detailed analysis that represents the bulk of Dore's research is book-ended by richly theoretical and comparative chapters. The introduction and first chapter establish the importance of Diriomo's case for the understanding of wider changes in Central America and frames the debates on capitalist transitions, gender and ethnicity. This is followed by a chapter that sets the stage for the coming revolution in private property by analysing social stratification within Diriomo's indigenous community and the relationship between communal landholding and indigenous self-identification. The third chapter presents post-independence political struggles as an expression of patriarchal power that reinforced colonial ethnic and gender distinctions. If these relations initially remained stable, the fourth chapter details the radical change in land tenure that shifted communal lands into a mix of coffee estates and small private peasant holdings. The fifth chapter explores the complicated affects of liberalism on marital and property relations. While liberalism weakened some of the protections of colonial patriarchy it also permitted women access to newly privatised common lands. The last two chapters analyse the shift in labour and social relations in the context of newly dominant relations of private property. Dore argues that debt peonage, marked by a mix of coercion and patron-client relations, came to define rural plantation labour, a regime reinforced by patriarchal values shared by male peasants and planters. The subordination of women and children justified planters' class domination while softening its consequences for male peasants. The book ends with a brief epilogue that places the rise and fall of the Sandinista Revolution within the context of Diriomo's history of land tenure and class relations. Dore titles this section ‘History matters’ (p. 172), because – to quote the Marx who floats throughout this book – people ‘make their own history’. The Sandinistas thought that in rewriting history – claiming a highly proletarianised society – they would remake the people. The people, many of whom supported the Revolution, proved them wrong.

Dore's study deploys an impressive mix of archival sources from Nicaragua (most importantly, the municipal archive of Dioromo), Guatemala and Spain and oral histories. Civil and criminal court cases, land titles, labour contracts, official complaints and disputes, municipal acts and correspondence, among others, provide the foundation for this formidable local history. Moreover, Dore's work in the municipal archive should encourage others to explore the byways of Central America, as the particularities of Diriomo's case beg further comparison. It should be noted, however, that work such as this is the production of painstaking research in a less than ideal archival environment. The book contains a map of Nicaragua and a number of photographs that give a feel for the people at the heart of Dore's study.

This readable and engaging monograph adds to a series of important new studies of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Nicaragua, particularly for the Granada and Carazo regions of the country. It is a delight to see the multiplicity of historical experiences emerging from these rather than repetitious uniformity. While Julie Charlip's recent work on Carazo would point Nicaragua toward parallels with Costa Rica's economic and political history, for example, Dore's points toward Guatemala. Understanding these differences may help us come to understand why Nicaragua went from being one of the most politically stable and democratic countries in the nineteenth-century to one of the least-so thereafter. While some will balk at the overtly Marxist orientation of Dore's analysis, its directness is both bracing and refreshing. Given how at odds some of her analysis is with a number of other historians of Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin America, however, it is surprising how little she hypothesises about these differences. This, however, should not detract from the overall strength and quality of this study. Dore's contributions to the gendered history of Latin America and to the relations between gender, ethnicity and class, are spectacular and merit emulation.