13 - Capitalism and dependency in Latin America

Summary

This chapter describes the historical debate over capitalism and economic development in Latin America. The magnitude of the decline of the indigenous population under European pressure was nearly inconceivable. According to Brooke Larson and other historians of Andean mining, the use of mita or Indian draft labor in the late sixteenth century augmented the Indian labor force by one-third to one-half. The Spanish empire was known as a seaborne empire, and the far-flung commercial links between the Iberian Peninsula, Europe, Asia, and the Americas have long been seen as the epitome of commercial capitalism. Actions in Brazil and by extension, much of the Caribbean were a direct outcome of the disappearance of the population. Postmodernism, increasingly influential in the 1980s, may have had very little effect on economic history in a larger sense, but in the United States, its impact on historians of Latin America was substantial.