One Hundred Years of United Fruit Company Letters

Phillippe Bourgeois, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, examines the role of the United Fruit Company in his essay "One Hundred Years of United Fruit Company Letters."

Bourgeois defines the United Fruit Company as "a quintessential model for the institutional form of the multinational corporation that has changed the face of the world during the 20th century." By looking at the "discussions, reports, and directives by managers, lawyers, accountants, undercover informants, and lobbyists [...]" from archival documents (1914-1970) , he examines the company's policy towards the banana plantations on the boarder of Costa Rica and Panama.

To achieve his initial idea, he splits his essay in three parts: In the first part, he concentrates on the relationship between the "host-countries" (Costa Rica and Panama) and the United Fruit Company and how the United Fruit Company managed to influence the host-countries' governments. In the second and in the third part, Bourgeois comes up with examples of how the company tried to keep their workers under control and how the company reacted towards possible unionism and occasional uproar.

But all parts do ultimately contribute to Bourgeois' s central topic, this is to say how the multinational corporation (in this case, the United Fruit Company) "has replaced the international corporate form, which had dominated the colonial era through governmental sponsored international trade monopolies."