Stanley J. Stein

The Colonial Heritage of Latin America

Earlier this year, Oxford University Press published a new book by Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective. This short book weaves together various strands of Latin American development from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as seen from the perspective of Latin Americas colonial and neocolonial relations to Western Europe and the United States. It seemed to us that within this broad sweep, the authors supplied a number of insightful interpretations and potentially pregnant hypotheses. Because of the interest of MR readers in the subject, we asked Professor and Mrs. Stein to prepare the following sketch of some of the major themes of the book. —The Editors.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Principal Currents in the Economic Historiography of Latin America

It will perhaps clarify the remarks that follow if we observe at the outset that the economic history of Latin America is in its infancy. This is not to say that the development of economic institutions, the operation of economic systems, the formation and growth of economic activities and attitudes, and the formulation and execution of economic policy have gone unnoticed in the history of Latin America. It is only to state that the formal discipline of economic history, even the use of economic history as part of a title, are of recent date. As in the historiography of most areas of the world, political developments and personalities in Latin America have constituted the core of historiography, and even today the “new†interdisciplinary history of half a century ago in the United States or the more recent French school of “total†history have drawn few adherents to Latin America. Many factors may be adduced to explain the delayed interest in economic history, but one may hazard the guess that there is a positive correlation between the degree of criticism of the nature and function of an economy and both the quantity and quality of economic historiography. At least in the United States, economic history owes no small debt to a muck-raking tradition. In Latin America, on the contrary, the nature of the literate elite and the limits on education have tended to stifle until recently the development of a body of economic literature of protest and, by extension, of economic history.

The Historiography of Brazil 1808-1889

N REVIEWING the historiography of nineteenth-century Brazil produced in the four decades following the First World War, three factors emerge.1 In the first place, the output was large, compared with that of earlier periods of historiography. Seconidly, not only historians but economists, anthropologists, and sociologists contributed to the writing of history. In the third place, historical publications were more analytical than narrative, reflecting the growing professionalization of the historians craft. In Brazil the search for tradition as well as the hunger for knowledge of the past, both forms of nationalism, help to explain the volume and scope. The emergence of a larger reading public, the product of a growing middle class, was another factor. Yet it is no exaggeration to presume that the turbulent post-war decades, as the rate of Brazilian modernization accelerated, encouraged many to look to the past for insight into the manifold problems of their times. Some looked to the past for apparent order and stability; others, to find out why their predecessors had left so many unresolved problems. The interests, prejudices, and ideals of the post-war generation of Brazilianists were reflected in the historiographical output of those years. In the post-war years, three decades after the proclamation of the republic in 1889, disappointment and cynicism replaced the optimism