Jeremy Adelman

Colonial legacies : the problem of persistence in Latin American history

More than other Atlantic societies, Latin America is shackled to its past. This collection is an exploration of the binding historical legacies--the making of slavery, patrimonial absolutist states, backward agriculture and the imprint of the Enlightenment--with which Latin America continues to grapple. Leading writers and scholars reflect on how this heritage emerged from colonial institutions and how historians have tackled these legacies over the years, suggesting that these deep encumbrances are why the region has failed to live up to liberal-capitalist expectations. They also invite discussion about the political, economic and cultural heritages of Atlantic colonialism through the idea that persistence is a powerful organizing framework for understanding particular kinds of historical processes.

Agricultural Credit in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1890-1914

In 1879, for the first time, Argentina exported more wheat that it imported. A generation later the Republic figured among the top five exporters of wheat in the world, and wheat had become its premier earner of foreign exchange. The expansion was by any account remarkable. With the expulsion of the Amerindians from the Pampa Humeda in the late 1870s, hundreds of thousands of hectares of arable and highly fertile land were suddenly made available to settler farmers. Railways, built largely with British capital, provided the means to ship new agricultural produce out of the region to the newly erected ports. Immigrants flocked from Europe to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the vacant land, either as new property owners, as tenants, or as wage-earners. The surge in the supply of land, labour and capital initiated a period of growth in Argentina, a growth which was shared by other regions of recent European settlement which responded to similar opportunities. The credit system helped differentiate Argentina from them.

Latin American Longues Durees

by Marcello Carmagnani, Alicia Hernandez Chavez, and Ruggiero Romano. (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1999. Pp. 570.

Mimesis and rivalry: European empires and global regimes

139.50 pesos mejicanos paper.) IMAGES AT WAR: MEXICO FROM COLUMBUS TO BLADE RUNNER (14922019). By Serge Gruzinski. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 284.

Prairie Farm Debt and the Financial Crisis of 1914

59.95 cloth,

Between order and liberty : Juan bautista alberdi and the intellectual origins of argentine constitutionalism

19.95 paper.) LA MINERIA MEXICANA DE LA COLONIA AL SIGLO XX. By Ines Herrera Canales, ed. (Mexico: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. Jose Maria Luis Mora, 1998. Pp. 271. ) DEEP MEXICO, SILENT MEXICO: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF NATIONALISM. By Claudio Lomnitz. (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pp. 392.

The Political Economy of Labour in Argentina 1870–1930

63.95 cloth,

Political Economy and the Public Sphere

22.95 paper.) THE SWEAT OF THEIR BROW: A HISTORY OF WORK IN LATIN AMERICA.

In Praise of Small: Albert O. Hirschman and the Question of Scale

This article places empires as interlocking parts of a broader global regime, a term invoked as an alternative to a world system. By focusing on connective processes and political contingencies, it presents a strategy that avoids rendering empires as radial hubs of a European-centred arrangement. Two features lie at the core of the approach: the way in which empires competed with each other, and the way in which they imitated, borrowed, and learned from each other. Instead of looking at the cyclical rise or fall of great powers, the accent here is on the tensions and intervisibilities between the parts that make up a whole. The regime was, therefore, inherently unstable and integrative at the same time. The article looks in particular at European empires embedded in the broader, unstable, yet increasingly integrated global context that shaped them. The period at stake covers the fifteenth century to the nineteenth and concludes by pointing at some longer-term legacies. It suggests an alternative political economy to the familiar models of ‘European world system’.

Hirschman, Albert O. (1915–2012)

THE OUTBREAK OF WAR in August 1914 punctured Canadas golden age of prosperity. It marked a turning point in Canadian history, though there were plenty of portents that an economic crisis was pending. The cracks inthe economic edifice were obvious in one of the most dynamic sectors prairie farming. The crisis of 1914, and the financial stress which accompanied it, seriously aggravated the problem of farm debt. Prairie provinces and the federal government were confronted with a financial crisis which foreshadowed later events in the 195os. It is surprising that this episode should go little noticed by historians. Not only was it the first massive financially induced crisis since 1873, but also it exemplified clearly the prairie and national status in the world economy as major debtors, and the perils of such a status when world financial markets slumped. Canada and the west were, until •9•4, the great beneficiaries of overseas finance, generated largely in London. Huge sums of money found their way from Europe to the hands of prairie farmers. This network proved successful instimulating expansion for two decades prior to the war, albeit with occasional hiccups. But when capital markets froze in late July 19 • 4, the western economy went practically bust in a matter of weeks. Regional expansion of the prairie staple economy required outside investment: local savings were simply insufficient to fuel farm investment. This meant borrowing from capital surplus regions of the country, such as the east, and from abroad. The age of western expansion coincided with a period of considerable innovation and