Most economic historians are probably familiar with Ernest Labrousse's model of the “Crisis of the Old Regime,” although it remains largely unknown to economists, sociologists, and other specialists in the social sciences. Yet Pierre Vilar feels that it is one of Labrousse's most important contributions to the “development of a science of history,” and considers that as an “instrument of analysis,” it can shed light not only on the “old style” crises of Western Europe but also on many essential aspects of the agrarian history of “underdeveloped” countries. We do not mean that contemporary “underdevelopment” and the “economy of the old regime” are one and the same. Rather, our intent is only to emphasize with Vilar that the “historical roles played in most of the world by meteorological abnormalities and agricultural cycles in the recent past have not been subjected to sufficiently methodological and reasoned study.”

The Brazilian film director Jorge Furtado's O homem que copiava centers on two plots, both based on accepted social discourses: how to escape lower-middle-class poverty; and the perennial question of the obstacles to love. These two plots are intertwined when the love quest is made to depend on the former, that is, when success in love is predicated on success in social mobility. However, in making the film's protagonist black, Furtado inserts the question of race into these two discourses and highlights the discursive absence of race in dealing with the problems of poverty and race relations. The film underscores the role of education and the discursive implications of social representation in excluding marginalized groups from social mobility while exploring the underside of the mestiçagem myth, the role of race in the question of national identity.

Mauricio Font's “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil,” raises a number of central issues about the nature of the polity and economy in São Paulo during the critical transition from export-oriented agriculture to domestic-oriented manufacturing. Was the coffee economy fully capitalist? What was the relation between coffee and industrialization? Was there a “sectoral clash” between planters and manufacturers? To what degree did planters control the political parties and the state? In particular, was the state relatively autonomous of the most important economic group?

Prior to the nineteenth century, the book of kings, or dynastic history, was the dominant mode of historiography in Europe and the Americas. This article explores the as-if or in-theory dimension of colonial dynastic history by way of a reading of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's early-eighteenth-century histories of Spain and Peru. Peralta's histories have been read as sycophantic, premodern texts that not only do not live up to the modern standards of historiography but moreover are in bad taste, that is, rhetorically prone to the excesses of Lima's colonial court culture. In contrast, I argue that Peralta's poetics of history reveal the subtle and ingenious rhetorical means by which history came to occupy, via imitating the figure of the prince, a sovereign and prognostic position of critique as the prince's simulacrum, that is, as a copy that has no original other than itself. In the case of Peralta's histories, this position of critique was colonial and postcolonial.

A general assumption of the modernization literature is that urbanized nations constitute more socially mobilized and therefore potentially demanding political environments (Thompson, p. 477; Deutsch, p. 498). The expansion of urban centers indicates the breakdown of traditional peasant society and the natural static political order that it represents. Consequently, Huntington (pp. 53–55) and others argue that nations undergoing the process of urbanization will tend to become more violent and politically unstable unless the new demands ultimately created by rural to urban migration are satisfied in the socioeconomic sphere or managed by capable political institutions.

During the past decade—more precisely during the last five to seven years—the increased use of urban guerrilla warfare and terrorism have characterized the activities of many revolutionary groups in the less developed world. High-lighted by the olympic assassinations of 1972, this phenomenon has also been evident in various African and Asian states. It is in Latin America, however, that the change from the traditional rural base for guerrilla operations to an urban environment has been most pronounced. The years from 1962 to 1967 saw many Latin American insurgents copying the Cuban revolutionary model, with its emphasis on rural guerrilla operations and the peasantry as the ultimate motive force, but recent years have seen an equally strong pull toward either purely urban insurgency or a more balanced strategy according equal importance to both rural and urban activities. In either case, the identifiable shift away from a totally rural guerrilla strategy for most Latin American revolutionary groups seems an established fact.

They say it is impossible to re-create a poem in another language, and perhaps it is. It is also irresistible.

Translators may attempt the impossible because they want to share their enjoyment or because they need versions for teaching or because they like word games-translation is as much fun as DoubleCrostics. My own reason is the challenge of the irresistible; I am like the mountain climber who says, “Because it's there.” And in fact, mountain climbing and poetic translation have some points in common. The translator and the climber may find smooth stretches on their rough paths, and they both struggle upward, but at the goal the similarity disappears, for the climber may succeed absolutely. There are no absolute successes in translation, which John Ciardi calls the art of failure. On the other hand, the translator will never find himself in the anticlimactic position of having climbed Mount Everest. He always has more worlds to attempt to conquer, and his old worlds to improve.

Distinguimos entre a perspectiva instrumental do indivíduo sobre sua rede de relações sociais (capital social minimalista) e a perspectiva da resolução dos dilemas da ação coletiva (capital social maximalista) (Ostrom e Ahn 2003). Seguindo esta última, estudamos os mecanismos sociais que operavam dentro de um arranjo produtivo que visava substituir cultivos ilícitos de coca na Colômbia. Reconstruímos os efeitos da estrutura de incentivos sustentada por um ator externo — situação third party— e das estruturas emergentes de circulação da informação, de colaboração e de controle social lateral. Ao contrário da visada associação de agricultores, criou-se um aparelho de regulação com baixa capacidade coercitiva e sob os critérios do agente externo. A politização do processo e a disposição espacial da produção geraram um perfil dual nas redes intra organizacionais: centralização burocrática e descentralização técnica da informação, de baixa e alta densidade de colaboração, e de autoridade vertical e horizontal para o controle social lateral.