Turits, Richard Lee — Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (2003) Source Information

Turits, Richard Lee — Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (2003) Source Information Author: Richard Lee Turits Full Title: Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History Publisher: Stanford University Press, Stanford, California Year: 2003 ISBN: 0-8047-4353-3 Type: Secondary Source — Dominican history, Haiti-DR relations, political history, agrarian history Location in Vault: research/secondary-sources/ Status Text extracted: Yes Review pass: Audited and integrated (2026-03-31) Chapter notes: turits foundations of despotism ch notes Overview Foundations of Despotism offers a revisionist account of the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961) built on a counterintuitive premise: that one of the twentieth century's most brutal Caribbean regimes achieved genuine and enduring popular support among Dominican peasants by enacting a large-scale agrarian reform. Turits argues that Trujillo's power did not rest solely on terror but on a "peasant-state compromise" — the regime distributed land, protected squatter rights, provided tools and seeds, built roads and schools, and styled Trujillo as the "best friend of the man of work." In exchange, peasants accepted surveillance, sedentarization, vagrancy laws, and subordination to the national state. The Trujillo regime effectively brought a centuries-old autonomous, footloose peasantry — descendants of freed slaves and runaway cimarrones who had lived beyond the state's reach in el monte — under central authority for the first time.