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POLITICS | UNITED STATES | BANANA REPUBLIC
The U.S. Is Not A Banana Republic — Yet!
Donald Trump and others are mistakenly calling the United States a Banana Republic
By Definition
According to , a Banana Republic is “a country that is exploited by foreign interests for profit and whose economy typically depends on a single major export (such as bananas); also a country ruled by a despot usually backed by the military.”
First Use
American author (William S. Porter) coined the term “Banana Republic” in his book Cabbages and Kings (1904), about the fictional country of Anchuria. It was based of his experiences in Honduras in 1890, where he lived for several months while on the lam for embezzling money from the bank where he worked to pay the medical treatment for his wife. While in Honduras, O. Henry witnessed the exploitation of small Central American nations by U.S. corporations, most notably the United Fruit Company.
Common and Correct Use
Historically, the term was used to describe Central American and Caribbean countries with single-crop (monoculture) economies that were dominated by the United States in the late 19th and…
