1 - Post-independence Spanish America: Economy and society

Summary

Roberto Cortés Conde and Stanley J. Stein (eds.), Latin America: A Guide to Economic History (1830–1930) (Berkeley, 1977) is a comprehensive survey of existing secondary literature which concentrates on Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Mexico. Ciro F. S. Cardoso and Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Historia Económica de América Latina, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1979) is a general economic history of Latin America which includes a valuable chapter (vol. 2, ch. 4) on the post-independence period. See also Tulio Halperín Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina (Madrid, 1969; Eng. trans., Durham, N.C., 1993), chaps. 3 and 4 and The Aftermath of Revolution in Latin America (New York, 1973).

On the commercial and financial relations between the new Spanish American states and Britain in the period after independence, besides the classic The Migration of British Capital to 1875, by Leland H. Jenks (New York, 1927; reissued London, 1971) and J. Fred Rippy, British Investment in Latin America, 1822–1949 (Minneapolis, Minn., 1959), see D. C. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806–1914 (London, 1973). Sergio Villalobos R., El comercio y la crisis colonial: Un mito de la independencia (Santiago, Chile, 1968), goes further than Platt in limiting the impact of the opening of trade after independence. The collection of articles edited by Reinhard Liehr, América Latina en la época de Simón Bolívar: Laformación de las economías nacionales y los intereses económicos europeos, 1800–1850 (Berlin, 1989), while taking into account the larger European background, puts most of its emphasis on the national and even local socio-economic transitions during the early nineteenth century.