“…Nevertheless, natural limits were slowly but surely rationalized in terms of trees per hectare, produce per tree per year, capitalist determinations defining (i) the calculation of differential rents in terms of regional productivity, terroir and the unique characteristics imparted to cacao seeds (Chiriboga, 2013;Norero, 1910) and (ii) the incorporation of an ever-greater area under production via the extension of the cacao frontier (including all necessary infrastructural accoutrements for shipping product from Point A to B) as a form of capitalist accumulation. Such factors remained vital for the expanded reproduction of agrarian capitalism centred in and around the city of Guayaquil and its banking institutions, particularly after 1870 (Chiriboga, 2013;Redacted;Miño Grijalva, 2008;Pineo, 1996). Yet these two dimensions, pertaining to the production of both commercial and fixed capital, that is of commodities and means of production, has hardly received the attention it deserves in the Ecuadorian literature on the subject, and much less so in the general literature on agrarian capitalism.…”