6 - Population

Summary

Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), traces the general evolution of Latin America’s population: chapters 3 and 4 deal with the changes that occurred during the period of Spanish rule. The work contains an extensive bibliography, and has undergone revision in its second Spanish edition, La población de América latina: Desde los tiempos pre-colombinos al año 2000 (Madrid, 1977). The classic work of Angel Rosenblat, La población indígenay el mestizaje en América, vol. I, La población indígena, 1492–1950, and vo. 2, El mestizajey las castas coloniales (Buenos Aires, 1954), while obviously now out of date, nevertheless contains information that is still useful relating to the native American population.

The sources for population history – tributary counts, parish registers, etc. – are abundant in Spanish America. The types of statistics, their quality, and the techniques their analysis requires have been examined, in general terms, in Woodrow Borah, ‘The historical demography of Latin America: Sources, techniques, controversies, yields‘, in P. Deprez (ed.), Population and Economics (Winnipeg, 1970), 173–205. A preliminary checklisting of sources has been carried out in several countries, under the auspices of the Centro Latinoamericano de Demografía (CELADE), in collaboration with the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), and is entitled Fuentes para la demografía histórica de América latina (Mexico, D.F., 1975). See also C. Arretx et al., Demografía histórica en América Latina: Fuentes y métodos (San José, C.R., 1983). Within the field of the joint Oxford–Syracuse project, see Keith Peachy, ‘The Revillagigedo census of Mexico, 1790–1794: A background study’, Bulletin of the Society for Latin American Studies, 25 (1976), 63–80, David J. Robinson and David G. Browning, ‘The origin and comparability of Peruvian population data, 1776–1815’, JGSWGL, 14 (1977), 199–222, and D. J. Robinson (ed.), Studies in Spanish American Population History (Boulder, Colo., 1981).