2 - Post-independence Spanish America: Society and politics

Summary

In addition to works treating political themes for Spanish America as a whole, this bibliographical essay touches on some works on individual countries that have wider significance, either because their conclusions are broadly applicable or because they may be taken as models for study in other places.

David Bushnell and Neill Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America (New York, 1988) is a general survey of Latin America in the nineteenth century full of interesting detail and gracefully written. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York, 1970), as its title suggests, interprets Latin American history from the vantage point of dependency analysis. Its exposition includes political as well as economic features of the nineteenth century, both sketched rather schematically. Tulio Halperín Donghi deals with the society and politics of the post-independence period era in a perspicacious and sophisticated way in two texts: chaps. 3 and 4 of his Historia contemporánea de América Latina (Madrid, 1969; Eng. trans., 1993) and The Aftermath of Revolution in Latin America (New York, 1973). Finally, E. Bradford Burns, in The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1980), offers another general interpretation much influenced by the perspective of dependency analysis, which stresses the conflict between an exploitative Europe-oriented dominant class and a resistant ‘folk.’ Burns’s observations about the dominant class generally are more persuasive than his account of the ‘folk,’ about whose attitudes there is still rather little solid information.