Bananaland—United Fruit Company’s operations & plantations—Ernest Baker 1933 map

£110

SKU: P-8-007040

Bananaland [A Map of the Foreign Empire of the United Fruit Company]


Published in Fortune’s March 1933 United Fruit Company investigation, Ernest Hamlin Baker’s brilliantly theatrical map turns corporate logistics into political geography. From New Orleans and Mexico across the Caribbean and Central America to Colombia, it marks banana and sugar plantations, ports, Tropical Radio stations and the routes of United Fruit’s Great White Fleet and British subsidiary Elders & Fyffes. The invented realm of “Bananaland” and the formal companion title “A Map of the Foreign Empire…” deliberately subordinate national borders to the company’s infrastructure and reach. Rich in ships, fruit and caricature, it is both superb 1930s magazine design and a striking contemporary critique of the banana empire—an unusually vivid intersection of persuasive cartography, corporate history and American power in Latin America.

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Size 36 x 29 cm | 14.0 x 11.0 inches

Date Published: Map drawn and dated 1932. Published March 1933

Type: Colour-printed full-page pictorial persuasive and corporate map

Author: Baker, Ernest Hamlin

Ernest Hamlin Baker (1889–1975), artist and cartographer

Publication: Fortune Magazine

Condition: Good |

Good; suitable for framing. Please check the scan for any blemishes prior to making your purchase. There is unrelated magazine content printed on the reverse side.

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Good

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