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  • General Editors: Kris Lane, Tulane University, Louisiana, Matthew Restall, Pennsylvania State University

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98 results in Cambridge Latin American Studies

Page 4 of 5

Land and Labour in Latin America
  • Essays on the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  • Edited by Kenneth Duncan, Ian Rutledge
  • In collaboration with Colin Harding
  • Published online:
    07 May 2010
    Print publication:
    02 February 1978
  • There has been considerable controversy amongst social and economic historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists and other specialists concerning the nature and structure of Latin American agrarian society. An increasing number of studies have come to challenge the traditionally accepted view that the backwardness of rural Latin America and its resistance to 'modernisation' are due to the persistence of feudal or non-feudal forms of social and economic organisation. Instead attention has shifted to an examination of the social and economic dislocations resulting from attempts to impose capitalist forms of agrarian enterprise on peasant or pre-capitalist societies. This book of essays by an international group of scholars represents a substantial empirical contribution to the ongoing debate. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in the field, but also to anyone wishing to understand the historical processes underlying contemporary Latin America's complex land tenure and rural employment problems.

Miners, Peasants and Entrepreneurs
  • Regional Development in the Central Highlands of Peru
  • Norman Long, Bryan Roberts
  • Published online:
    07 May 2010
    Print publication:
    14 June 1984
  • This volume traces the development of the central highlands, one of Peru's major mining regions. It draws on extensive fieldwork carried out in Peru between 1970 and 1982, spanning a reforming military government, reaction and a return to civilian politics under Belaunde. Through historical material combined with field studies of villages and of the major town of the region, Huancayo, the book examines the economic and cultural processes underlying the 'progressive' reputation of the region in Peru and in the literature on development. Since the major enterprise of the region, the Cerro de Pasco Mining Corporation, was, until the 1970s, foreign owned, a persisting theme is the type of economic growth associated with and the distortions produced by, foreign capitalist economic enclaves on predominantly peasant economies. The political consequences are examined, showing the weakness of regional interest groups and the failure of contemporary regional development policies.

Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society
  • Bahia, 1550–1835
  • Stuart B. Schwartz
  • Published online:
    05 May 2010
    Print publication:
    31 January 1986
  • This study examines the history of the sugar economy and the peculiar development of plantation society over a three hundred year period in Bahia, a major sugar plantation zone and an important terminus of the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on little-used archival sources, plantations accounts, and notarial records, Professor Schwartz has examined through both quantitative and qualitative methods the various groups that made up plantation society. While he devotes much attention to masters and slaves, he views slavery ultimately as part of a larger structure of social and economic relations. The peculiarities of sugar-making and the nature of plantation labour are used throughout the book as keys to an understanding of roles and relationships in plantation society. A comparative perspective is also employed, so that studies of slavery elsewhere in the Americas inform the analysis, while at many points direct comparisons of the Bahian case with other plantation societies are also made.

Foreign Immigrants in Early Bourbon Mexico, 1700–1760
  • Charles F. Nunn
  • Published online:
    04 May 2010
    Print publication:
    16 August 1979
  • The kings of Spain forbade foreigners and other 'undesirables' to immigrate to Spanish America. They saw aliens as threatening imperial, religious and mercantile security, and it might therefore be assumed that the Spaniards were xenophobic and intolerant. Dr Nunn's study shows that statutes tell only part of the story. In the years 1700–60 some 3 per cent of the foreign-born in Mexico were non-Spaniards who had entered the colony illegally. Who were these people, where did they come from, and what were their motives? In answering these questions, Dr Nunn demonstrates how illegal immigrants often escaped official detection and how even those known to the authorities were usually allowed to remain and make new lives for themselves. Neither Protestant nor Jew went to the stake in eighteenth-century Mexico. Harassment was more likely to come from officials seeking funds for an impecunious government than from the Inquisition.

Power and Violence in the Colonial City
  • Oruro from the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1740–1782)
  • Oscar Cornblit
  • Translated by Elizabeth Ladd Glick
  • Published online:
    30 March 2010
    Print publication:
    28 July 1995
  • This book examines the characteristics of political power in the cities of the colonial Spanish Empire between the 1740s and 1780s, based on a detailed study of the mining city of Oruro in Alto Peru (present-day Bolivia). Special emphasis is given to the specific forms of the exercise of power, assessing in particular the workings of the judicial system and the material opportunities that were open to different bureaucratic officials. Towards the end of this period, the analysis focuses on the Indian uprisings of the 1780s (the rebellions of Tupac Amaru) and the reasons which led to the alliances or confrontations between the actors of the distinct bands, either white or Indian.

The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas
  • The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870
  • Samuel Amaral
  • Published online:
    30 March 2010
    Print publication:
    13 July 1998
  • In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires underwent rapid economic growth, only dwarfed by the even greater prosperity that occurred there at the end of the century. Previous studies have focused on the economy as a whole, or on a particular segment of the population; and most have disregarded how resources were intentionally organized to enable growth. This book focuses on the estancia - livestock firms, the economic organizations that led the growth process. The internal structure, production conditions, and economic impact of the estancia are the central issues which Amaral considers. Economic growth and increased freedom were not inevitable on the pampas, but rather the consequences of human actions, both deliberate and unintentional, in the search for an elusive profit. Why freedom, not privilege, prevailed is the key question underlying this study.

Church Wealth in Mexico
  • A Study of the 'Juzgado de Capellanias' in the Archbishopric of Mexico 1800–1856
  • Michael P. Costeloe
  • Published online:
    27 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 December 1967
  • The Juzgado de Capellanias was the most important fiscal institution within the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. It operated in each diocese as a type of bank, receiving clerical revenues from various sources and investing them by way of loans at interest. The Roman Catholic Church in Mexico was both a cause and a victim of the political and economic chaos of this period. The liberals alleged that the concentration of much of the country's wealth in the hands of the clerical corporations hindered the political and economic progress of the nation. The clergy argued that they utilized much of their property and capital to the direct benefit of both society and the economy. Dr Costeloe examines these different views in relation to the Juzgado in Mexico. He discusses its complex internal administration, skilled employees, sources of revenue and the procedure for obtaining loans from it. Since the borrower was obliged to guarantee repayment of his loan by offering a property as security, the Church, through the Juzgado as creditor, gained control of the mortgaged property. Dr Costeloe analyses the effects of this investment and subsequent control of real estate via the clergy. In the final section, the author discusses the relations between the Juzgado and the State.

Brazil's State-Owned Enterprises
  • A Case Study of the State as Entrepreneur
  • Thomas J. Trebat
  • Published online:
    27 March 2010
    Print publication:
    31 August 1983
  • This book provides a systematic analysis of the performance of Brazil's large state-owned enterprises. The Brazilian economic system encourages private enterprise, but the government itself owns and operates such critical industries as petrochemicals, steel, electricity and telecommunications. The Brazilian state has assumed the role of an entrepreneur not for ideological reasons, but as a pragmatic means of speeding up the process of economic growth. The author examines the economic and financial performance of these state-owned enterprises in terms of their contribution to economic growth. He concludes that in Brazil they have been effective substitutes for private investment in a number of strategic industries and that their ability to assemble large amounts of capital, to attract skilled managers, and to earn reasonable profits permitted the Brazilian economy to grow more rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s than would have been the case in their absence.

The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880
  • Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, María del Carmen Barcia
  • Published online:
    22 March 2010
    Print publication:
    26 May 1995
  • Slavery was in many ways the fundamental institution in colonial Cuba, whose economy was based on the export of sugar from the slave-worked plantations. This volume presents a quantitative study of Cuban slavery from the late eighteenth century until 1880, the year slavery was formally abolished on the island. The core of this study is an examination of the yearly movement of slave prices and changes in the demographic characteristics of the slave market. Based on data from the notarial protocol records of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, this book establishes precise price trends for slaves by age, sex, nationality, and occupation, and considers a number of other variables including the prices of coartados (slaves who had begun the process of buying their freedom) and the patterns of emancipation. Incorporating over 30,000 slave transactions from three separate locations in Cuba - Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos - this work comprises the largest extant database on any slave market in the Americas.

Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888
  • Laird W. Bergad
  • Published online:
    16 February 2010
    Print publication:
    28 October 1999
  • This 2000 book examines the demographic and economic history of slavery in Minas Gerais, the single largest slave-holding region in Brazil, from its settlement in the early eighteenth century until the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888. It utilizes the largest database ever assembled on a slave population in the Americas to reconstruct and analyse the unique history of slave labour in Minas Gerais. This slave population was remarkable in its ability to diversify economically as well as in increasing through natural reproduction, rather than through importation via the trans-atlantic slave trade. Minas Gerais therefore invites comparison with the patterns of slave reproduction found in the United States' South, heretofore considered unique. Extensively researched and finely documented, this book places the history of a unique Brazilian slave community into comparative perspective.

The Political Economy of Central America since 1920
  • Victor Bulmer-Thomas
  • Published online:
    03 February 2010
    Print publication:
    10 December 1987
  • In this book Victor Bulmer-Thomas uses his previously unpublished estimates of the national accounts to explore economic and social development in the five Central American republics from 1920. He examines in detail variations in economic policy between countries which help to account for differences in performance. The major political developments are woven into the analysis and linked to changes in internal and external conditions. Growth under liberal oligarchic rule in the 1920s, heavily dependent on exports of coffee and bananas, was accompanied by modest reform programmes. The 1929 depression, which hit the region hard, undermined most of the reforms and ushered in a period of dictatorial rule in all republics except Costa Rica. The Second World War, particularly after the entry of the United States, at first strengthened the dictatorships, but ultimately produced challenges to rule by authoritarian caudillos. The social upheavals accompanying the post-war export-led boom forced governments in each republic to address the question of economic, social and political reform.

Economic Development of Latin America
  • Historical Background and Contemporary Problems
  • 2nd edition
  • Celso Furtado
  • Translated by Suzette Macedo
  • Published online:
    25 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 April 1977
  • This is an introductory survey of the history and recent development of Latin American economy and society from colonial times to the establishment of the military regime in Chile. In the second edition the historical perspective has been enlarged and important events since the Cuban Revolution, such as the agrarian reforms of Peru and Chile, the difficulties of the Central America Common Market and LAFTA, the acceleration of industrialisation in Brazil and the consolidation of the Cuban economy, are discussed. The statistical information has been extended to the early 1970s and the demographic data to 1975.

Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico, Zacatecas 1546–1700
  • P. J. Bakewell
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    31 October 1971
  • An examination of silver mining and society in Colonial Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating upon Zacatecas, the centre of the principal silver-mining region. In the first half of the book, the author describes the discovery of the mines, the establishment of the town, its role in the northward advance of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, its administration, and the sources of its supplies of essential food and materials. The remainder of the book is devoted to an analysis of the mining industry of the Zacatecas district. The author discusses techniques, labour and raw materials. He also provides statistics for silver production, suggesting reasons for their fluctuation, and explores sources of capital for the industry. Based on detailed study of archives in both Spain and Mexico, Dr Bakewell is able to provide an entirely new chronology for the development of Zacatecas and the Mexican maining industry up to 1700.

Oil and Politics in Latin America
  • Nationalist Movements and State Companies
  • George Philip
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    31 May 1982
  • This book provides a study of the transformation of the Latin American oil system from one in which the international oil companies dominated to one which is dominated by the main state oil companies, and an account of how some of the more important of the state companies have operated. This comprehensive guide to the evolution of the Latin American oil system combines in one volume a synthesis of material from secondary sources and original research and thus provides an invaluable reference for all concerned with the history and economy of Latin America and with the development and functioning of the international oil industry.

Demographic Collapse
  • Indian Peru, 1520–1620
  • Noble David Cook
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    25 February 1982
  • While many scholars have been interested in the size of the Indian population of the Americas at the time of first contact with Europeans, this book, first published in 1982, was the first to make a thorough examination of the question. Focusing on Peru, Professor Cook estimates population size on the basis of archaeology, carrying capacity of the agricultural systems, disease mortality, depopulation ratios, and census projection. He also analyses the catastrophic population decline that resulted from contact with Europeans, and compares this experience with that of the coastal region and the Andean highlands.

Pre-Revolutionary Caracas
  • Politics, Economy, and Society 1777–1811
  • P. Michael McKinley
  • Published online:
    30 October 2009
    Print publication:
    18 September 1986
  • Almost invariably, late-colonial Caracas has been described as a society full of tensions and a colony at odds with the imperial order. This study, in contrast, portrays a colony, which grew, prospered and matured within the confines of Empire. It depicts the late 1700s as the golden age of caraqueño colonial society and suggests that it was no accident that this late renaissance created an environment which bred the self-confident men who led much of Spanish America to independence. The causes of the independence struggle, and the violence, which accompanied it, are considered in the context of the imperial crisis provoked by Napoleon's invasion of Spain. The findings of this study are based on an exceptionally varied array of new data on the economy and society of late eighteenth-century Caracas, of which a collection of 800 wills is the most impressive.

The Struggle for Land
  • A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazil from 1930 to the Present Day
  • J. Foweraker
  • Published online:
    29 October 2009
    Print publication:
    31 July 1981
  • Widespread violence, legal chicanery and ruthless profiteering have come to characterise the expansion of the agricultural frontier in Brazil. With the advance of this frontier, the pioneering peasants, on the one hand, and large landowners and large economic enterprise, on the other, have become locked in an increasingly bitter struggle for land. In his book, Joe Foweraker draws on extensive empirical research to demonstrate the dimensions and dynamics of the struggle. It is his contention that the process can only be understood in relation to the patterns of economic accumulation in the national society and to the typical forms of political intervention on the frontier. In this way the argument moves beyond descriptive, moral or realpolitik explanations of the political violence and bureaucratic malpractice on the frontier, and integrates these elements into a theoretical account of accumulation and class struggle on the frontier, and of the characteristic mediations of this struggle.

Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth-Century Brazil
  • Eugene Ridings
  • Published online:
    27 October 2009
    Print publication:
    29 July 1994
  • This book is the first to describe the role of business interest groups, also known as pressure groups, in the development of Brazil during the nineteenth century. Business interest groups strongly affected the modernization and prosperity of agriculture, the pace of industrialisation, and patterns of communications. Although they sometimes initiated enterprises themselves, they most affected development by influencing the scope and direction of government aid. The most important of business interest groups, the commercial associations, also may be seen as institutions through which ties of dependency to better-developed nations overseas were maintained.

The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835–1846
  • 'Hombres de Bien' in the Age of Santa Anna
  • Michael P. Costeloe
  • Published online:
    23 October 2009
    Print publication:
    30 April 1993
  • Much of the so-called Age of Santa Anna in the history of independent Mexico remains a mystery and no decade is less well understood than the years from 1835 to 1846. In 1834, the ruling elite of middle class hombres de bien concluded that a highly centralised republican government was the only solution to the turmoil and factionalism that had characterised the new nation since its emancipation from Spain in 1821. The central republic was thus set up in 1835, but once again civil strife, economic stagnation, and military coups prevailed until 1846, when a disastrous war with the United States began in which Mexico was to lose half of its national territory. This study explains the course of events and analyses why centralism failed, the issues and personalities involved, and the underlying pressures of economic and social change.

South America and the First World War
  • The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile
  • Bill Albert
  • Assisted by Paul Henderson
  • Published online:
    22 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 February 1988
  • The collapse of this economy in August 1914 and its subsequent restructuring, therefore, created extremely testing conditions for peripheral countries. These conditions and the way in which they were dealt with help to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the variants of the primary-export-based capitalist development which had taken root here. Also, as had happened in Europe, the war witnessed far-reaching political and social changes in the region, associated in the main with the emergence of a more vocal urban middle class and a more combative working class. By considering within a fully comparative perspective some of the main elements of both economic and socio-political change in four major Latin American countries during the war years, this study provides many important new insights into the nature and limitations of pre-war growth as well as the significance of the many changes brought by the war.

Page 4 of 5