The phrase “banana republic” has long encapsulated Latin America's experience with American corporations. From Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to political cartoons representing the United Fruit Company as an octopus to Chiquita executives facing human rights claims over payments made to paramilitaries, the banana trade serves as a stand-in for the violence and excesses of export agriculture in Latin America. With their book Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs: How One Banana-Exporting Country Achieved Worldwide Reach, Douglas Southgate and Lois Roberts seek to unseat this monolithic narrative. Southgate and Roberts use the growth of the banana industry in Ecuador to demonstrate how export agriculture does not necessarily equate to exploitation. Focusing particularly on the role of Ecuadorian entrepreneurs in the emergence and spread of the country's globally oriented banana economy, the authors posit this small country as an important corrective to the historiography of export agriculture.

Timing is key to Southgate and Roberts's argument. As they illustrate, Ecuador was a late entrant to the global banana market. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, companies like United Fruit capitalized on the accessibility of Caribbean and Central American producers to vertically integrate supply and marketing chains and move fruit from farm to table as quickly as possible. Ecuador's Pacific coast was perfect for growing bananas, but without easy access to American ports, the country proved unattractive to foreign interests. Its participation in the nineteenth-century export boom as a producer of cacao established commercial networks and traditions, but its geographic situation helped the country evade the intrusive interest of multinational corporations.

The opening of the Panama Canal changed this calculus. Yet, as Southgate and Roberts demonstrate, World War I and the subsequent slow reorientation of shipping capacity slowed attempts to take advantage of the new waterway. Ecuadorian entrepreneurs seized this opportunity to shape their own entrance into the global banana market. In the following decades, antitrust suits, the geopolitics of the Cold War, and the delayed arrival of destructive pathogens facilitated the ongoing success of Ecuadorian banana entrepreneurs.

These entrepreneurs and their partnerships with both other Ecuadorian businessmen and foreign interests are at the heart of Southgate and Roberts's story. The life of Luís Noboa, the founder of Ecuador's preeminent banana exporting house, serves as a connective thread throughout the book. From his origins as a juvenile street vendor who caught the eye of one of Guayaquil's leading businessmen to his partnerships with importers from New York to Tokyo, Noboa epitomizes the entrepreneurial innovation the authors seek to emphasize. Drawing on the work of Joseph Schumpeter and others, Southgate and Roberts use Ecuador's banana industry to illustrate how competitive, open-market production structures facilitate diversification and opportunity for savvy businessmen.

Southgate and Roberts juggle a number of storylines and arguments as they trace the growth and endurance of this competitive, diversified industry. Vacillating between local, national, and international scales and interweaving theories of development and entrepreneurship, the authors sometimes lose the reader in their attempt to capture the entirety of an industry. The vagaries of Ecuadorian politics compete with the story of United Fruit's rise and fall via antitrust lawsuits, all against the background of local commercial traditions in the banana-producing coast. Each of these threads matters in the rise of Ecuador's banana industry. Yet without a clear authorial intervention illustrating how they tie together, it is not easy to see which set of actors, policies, or ecological forces the reader is supposed to focus on at any given time.

Some of the confusion emerges from sometimes competing arguments about how the diversified economy endured. On the one hand is the innovative entrepreneurial thread, represented by Noboa and those like him who outmaneuvered large multinationals such as United Fruit by seeking out new markets for bananas among underserved American, European, Asian, and Soviet consumers. On the other is a determined attempt to redeem United Fruit's interventions in Ecuador from the blanket condemnation of previous scholars. While acknowledging the exploitation the company enacted in other countries, Southgate and Roberts here primarily focus on the technology transfers the company facilitated and the ways in which it attempted to peaceably negotiate Ecuador's rocky political landscape. In their telling, United Fruit and other multinationals never sought out the dominant position they held elsewhere, instead acquiescing to competition with local interests. The authors' constant explicit judgment of public policy directed at economic development only further complicates the reader's understanding of how entrepreneurs like Noboa emerged and succeeded.

The central argument of the book is a strong and necessary one: the expansion of export agriculture in Latin America involved a variety of actors, both foreign and national. Local producers and commercial actors played a vital role in building and expanding production and marketing capacity for tropical goods. Yet because Southgate and Roberts constantly redirect the reader's attention toward assessments of Ecuador's experiments with import substitution industrialization, Colombian workers' battles with United Fruit, or the complexities of the European Union's negotiations with other banana-producing nations, it is easy to lose track of this central argument. The effort to situate the rise of Ecuador's banana entrepreneurs in the complex world of twentieth-century globalization is an admirable one and the book offers an important contribution to our understanding of how Latin American actors shaped the integration of world markets. It is too bad that the overabundance of authorial arguments and interests makes the narrative they weave such a tangled one.