The history of Cuba from the 1860s to 1898 has been written largely from the revolutionary, independentista perspective. It is a perspective that has been appealing to U.S. and Cuban historians alike, but it may well be a perspective that has distorted the Cuban political experience and made it more difficult to understand the Cuban reality. That this perspective is alive and well can be seen in recent publications which give short shrift to the Cuban Autonomist movement, a movement that was essentially Cuban and whose leadership came from the largely urban, professional elite that rejected both annexation and independence.

Agriculture was at the center of the Poblano indigenous communal economy, and therefore, successful harvests were the motor of the community's survival. The struggle to retain land by Indians was a fundamental part of their quest to retain a viable community, but for some, an equally important task was to maintain control of water rights. The central place of sufficient water resources for the well-being of the collectivity was often expressed when village elders complained that its loss led to migration of substantial numbers to more vital economic regions. As such, the defense of water resources had a more important place in the survival mechanisms of indigenous groups than usually accorded it by scholars.

The transition from slave to free labor in the Americas involved many and varied forms of internal labor and land adjustments which affected slaves, landless farmers, and large scale producers in rural areas. Unlike Haiti and the United States South, the Brazilian process of emancipation was gradual and did not involve violent structural ruptures with the past. The Land Law of 1850, the Law of the Free Womb of 1871 and the 1885 Sexagenarian Law marked fundamental phases in an ongoing process of state participation in the organization of the free labor market, which culminated in Abolition on 13 May 1888, and the onset of the Republic on 15 November of the following year. Current analyses of the late nineteenth century emphasize continuity and define the state as its own agent, embarking on a course of conservative modernization which unfolded during the process of transition from the liberalism of a nineteenth-century empire to the interventionist Republic which was ushered in, in 1889. The planter class, joined with emerging but weak Brazilian industrial and financial sectors and upheld by the military, contributed to an Estado Oligárquico, in Marcelo Carmagnani's terminology, linked by coffee production into the world economy as a flourishing dependent peripheral economy. But the process, which until recently was associated with the coffee export sector and its relation to urbanization and industrialization, has now taken on broader dimensions. A developed domestic economy, composed of a complex and sophisticated internal food supply network, operated alongside the export economy throughout the nineteenth century. Although unstudied from the political perspective of small-scale food producers who were displaced by the coffee economy, the broader issue of food provision could not be dissociated from conservative modernization, the basic issues of which would be carried forth during the course of the First Republic in the form of “Ruralismo.”