4 - Rural Spanish America

Summary

The study of Spanish American rural history, virtually ignored after a short burst of work in the 1930s, expanded impressively from the 1960s. This was due, in the first instance, to an enthusiasm for the process of modernization and later to laying bare the roots and mechanisms of dependency. Then, as money for field research dried up, there was a certain lull in foreign scholarship, while at the same time a new generation of Latin Americans, many of them trained abroad, brought renewed energy and subtlety to the field. The colonial epoch, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, has attracted the most attention and frequently the best scholars. The post–Second World War period became the scene of intense work by anthropologists, economists and sociologists as well as historians inspired in part by the interest in agrarian reform and peasant movements. In between, the understanding of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rural history improves but remains relatively undeveloped; it is, however, now on a sufficiently firm footing to permit discussion.

Very few scholars, undoubtedly humbled by the formidable variety and discontinuity of Latin America, have attempted broad, comparative analyses of rural history. Although not of course limited to rural history, Roberto Cortes Conde and Stanley Stein (eds.), Latin America: A Guide to Economic History 1830–1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977) has excellent annotated bibliographies on several countries together with invariably perceptive interpretative essays by a series of distinguished academics. Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York, 1975) includes discussion of Latin America; David Goodman and Michael Redclift, From Peasant to Proletarian: Capitalist Development and Agrarian Transitions (New York, 1982) has case studies of Mexico and Brazil within a broad discussion of theory; and Alain de Janvry, The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America (Baltimore, 1981) focusses on recent years but raises wide-ranging historical questions.