For forty years much of the research on Britain's relationship with Latin America has been dominated by a rather narrow agenda, the boundaries of which were established by radical and conservative writers in the middle third of the twentieth century, just when Britain's role in Latin America was rapidly declining. Essentially this was a debate about power, that of British governments and businessmen on the one hand and Latin American governments and elites on the other. More recently, however, younger historians have begun to break free of the confines established by those writing in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result there is some hope that new research on this topic may offer more of interest to non-specialists and contribute to other historical debates, both in British and Latin American history. The purpose of this historiographical essay, which is based primarily, but not entirely, on the research undertaken in Britain during the last twenty years, is to review the recent literature on British investment in Latin America, and to investigate some of the implications of what we now know about the subject for our understanding of the evolution of Latin American societies.

Almost everyone living in the Dutch Republic or its territories in the East in the eighteenth century, who did not belong to a patrician family or to the upper middle class, could be considered ‘poor’ according to modern standards. In these societies, however, there was one group of people who could be singled out as extremely poor. These people, representing the lowest stratum of society, were the clientele of the poorhouses and poor relief.

As the first European printed image of the Aztec capital, the first European map of the Gulf of Mexico, and the first map to use the names Florida and Yucatan, the 1524 map of Tenochtitlan from Cortes’ second and third letter earned a place in the history of cartography (Figure I). This map, published in Nuremberg to accompany the Latin edition, is commonly mentioned in histories of cartography, but scholarship about this map is relatively general, with the exception of a few historians’ efforts. The prevailing scholarship revolves around its possible authorship, while issues of the map's function and cultural meaning within visual culture are largely missing. In fact, J. Brian Harley notes that the latter type of analysis is rather scarce in most cartographic histories:

What is missing in the history of cartographic literature are studies of the theoretical frameworks which might be appropriate for the reconstruction of such meaning in maps.

According to traditional scholarship, Sakoku or the national seclusion of Japan in the early seventeenth century was primarily carried out with the intention of prohibiting Christianity. It is generally agreed that the seclusion ofJapan was completed through a series of edicts, the socalled Sakokurei (which were issued between 1633 and 1639 by the Bakufu (the Tokugawa Shogunal government). Through these edicts the Christian religion was forbidden in Japan. Japanese trading activities abroad were also prohibited through the issue of Kai-kin or maritime prohibitions. Finally the Portuguese trade from Macao was terminated. It is generally believed that the seclusion ofJapan was brought about as a means to gain better control of theJapanese people. In the final analysis the closure of Japan had a double meaning: the political meaning, the prohibition of Christianity, and an economic meaning, the restriction of trade.