| It’s difficult to imagine the banana as the fiendish culprit of a history of greed, uprising and revolution, or consider that the humble fruit could have founded the modern transnational corporation.
Yet this seemingly impossible scenario is revealed by current Financial Times columnist and ex-BBC correspondent Peter Chapman in his second book, Jungle Capitalists. Chapman narrates the story of United Fruit, a Costa Rican company that pioneered the mass exportation and distribution of bananas in the Caribbean. From modest beginnings on disease-ridden plantations, to trade with the United States, United Fruit – or "El Pulpo" (the octopus), as it was known – helped orchestrate an invasion of Honduras, a massacre in Columbia and a bloody coup in Guatemala.
The author’s narration moves with a steady, if occasionally protracted pace, from the jungles of Costa Rica, to international, economic centres such as New York. Despite a potentially bewildering constellation of different business figures and political leaders, Chapman manages to cohesively bind his reportage with patient explanations of trade and global finance.
Jungle Capitalists is at once a compelling insight into one company’s avarice and a skillfully penned exposé about the mad, jungle capitalism of the modern world.
Review originally published in Edition 25 of the University of Sydney Union's Magazine The Bull, 15/10/07 | 
