Morelos, Mexico, was home to a bloody agrarian revolution that saw government troops burn villages, cities and abandoned, and two of every five people either flee the fighting or die in it. The conflict came in response to an intense economic transformation that changed the region's peasant economy into the hub of the Mexican sugar industry during the nineteenth century. By focusing on the creation of the rural working class in Morelos, 'Bitter Harvest' argues that developments there reflected a broader pattern shared with other parts of Mexico that erupted in revolution.