Bound in Twine

Bound in Twine is an ambitious study of a seemingly ordinary commodity: binder twine used in the reaper-binders favored by wheat farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Canadian Prairie Provinces between the 1880s and the 1930s. The book studies the commodity chain that began with the production of henequen in the Yucatán, followed by its transformation into binder twine by the North American cordage industry, and ultimately wheat farmers’ use of twine in their horse-drawn reapers. A deep mutual dependency arose between henequen producers in the Yucatán and North American wheat farmers, constituting a “henequen-wheat complex.” Mediating between henequeneros and wheat farmers was the predominantly U.S.-controlled cordage industry, though prisons also produced cordage in several states. The henequen-wheat complex survived until ecological and technological upheavals in the 1930s and ’40s spelled an end for the reaper and hence the henequen trade.Sterling Evans, whose previous work on the history of conservation in Costa Rica has established him as a pioneering environmental historian of Latin America, opens the book with a history of the reaper-binder and its mass production by the McCormick Company, which transformed wheat farming in the U.S. and Canadian heartlands in the 1880s and ’90s. The binders automatically tied twine around shocks of wheat in preparation for threshing. The cordage industry grew concomitantly, also centered in the United States and dominated by the McCormick Company (International Harvester after 1902). Evans then turns to an overview of the growth of henequen plantations in the Yucatán and their devastating appropriation of Mayan land and labor in the henequen zone. While Mexican historians are familiar with the broad outlines of these events, Evans adds an important new element to the story by dedicating a chapter to the brutal deportation of thousands of Yaqui people to conditions of quasi-enslavement in the Yucatán during the first decade of the twentieth century, an ethnocidal depopulation of the Yaqui Valley that occurred with the full knowledge of North American authorities. Ironically, the mestizo farmers who occupied the Yaqui lands often harvested wheat using McCormick implements, a “clear case,” in Evans’s words, “of protoglobalization based on a North American dependency model that predated NAFTA by a hundred years” (p. 87).Subsequent chapters significantly add to historians’ understanding of various elements of the henequen and cordage trades. For example, one chapter analyzes the tense diplomatic standoff between Mexico and the United States in 1915 when President Venustiano Carranza ordered a naval blockade of Yucatán’s primary port in an effort to keep arms from reaching counterrevolutionaries. Evans shows that the United States misunderstood Carranza’s action as an attempt to wring concessions from the United States and nearly ordered an attack on Mexico to ensure a continued supply of fiber. Another chapter investigates the use of prison labor to manufacture twine, a strategy employed by nine states and one province between 1891 and 1964 in an effort to provide the cheapest possible twine to farmers. The final chapters convincingly trace the demise of Yucatán’s henequen industry to the North American droughts of the late 1930s (which devastated harvests and diminished the demand for cordage at the same time as President Lázaro Cárdenas was breaking up henequen plantations), to competition from other henequen- and sisal-producing regions, and, most fundamentally, to the introduction of the combine for harvesting wheat.The word ecology in the book’s title and its publication in a series on environmental history seem to promise that the environment will have a prominent place in the discussion. Indeed, we do learn of the deforestation in the Yucatán to make way for henequen and about how nonforest species have reclaimed the land since its near disappearance in the 1950s. Likewise, Evans carefully explains how the drought and dust bowl in the latter 1930s helped to bring the henequen-cordage industry to its knees. Overall, however, I wish the book had offered a more sustained discussion of the relationship between the henequen-wheat complex and ecological change in the Yucatán and the North American Midwest.Evans has given us an impressive work demonstrating that the commercial nexus of Yucatecan fibers and Canadian/U.S. wheat production drew in a dizzying array of historical actors, including diplomats, political leaders, Yaqui Indians, farmers, and convicts. In the best traditions of the dependency school, it also raises questions about who benefits from the headlong rush to develop an export monocrop, and what happens once the boom is over. It is not a pretty picture, but Evans paints it with extraordinary care and skill. Historians of the Yucatán henequen industry, Great Plains agriculture, and transnational commodity chains will thank him for thoughtfully tracing out the surprisingly tight political, social, and economic bonds that for half a century were formed by binder twine

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