Commemorating the expulsion of Portuguese troops from Salvador, Bahia, on 2 July 1823, the Dois de Julho festival represented Bahian society collectively and marked differences of national origin, class, and race. It challenged the Brazilian state's official patriotism by articulating a regional identity, and through its commemoration of the independence-era popular mobilisation, presented a story of Brazil's origins that contradicted the official patriotism which celebrated Emperor Pedro I as Brazil's founder. Dois de Julho's popularity and durability, moreover, suggest a significant and socially-broad engagement with the imperial state, which cannot be considered a remote and alien entity to the urban population.

The social and economic history of North-Eastern Brazil has largely been written as the story of slave-holding plantations. In contrast, this article focuses on the peasant agriculture of tobacco in the state of Bahia. It shows how the small-scale cultivation of tobacco for the European (mainly German) export market had already started well before the end of slavery. Tobacco cultivation gradually expanded to become the most important export product in the first decade of the twentieth century. Apart from its economic significance, the history of Bahian tobacco agriculture throws an interesting light on the social and political relations in the region. Land ownership among the tobacco farmers expanded, but most of them remained locked into ties of dependency to commercial intermediaries and large landowners. On the other hand, the latter's dominant position did not lead to a strong position for tobacco interests in the regional political arena. Finally, the tobacco producers originated in the black (ex-)slave community. This article argues that this specific ethnic make-up played an important role in the organisation of the tobacco sector and its relative neglect by regional and national politicians.

Banks in Porfirian Mexico widely engaged in the practice of making long-term loans to their own directors, a practice known as ‘auto-prestamo’. This was neither pernicious nor fraudulent. Rather, Porfirian banks behaved as the financial arms of extended kinship and personal business groups. These groups used banks to raise impersonal capital for their diversified enterprises and give their partnerships a more permanent institutional base. Investors in these banks knew full well that they were investing in the businesses of a particular group and developed sophisticated techniques to monitor bank directors. However, because entry into banking was severely restricted under Porfirian law, the system concentrated economic power in a few hands and contributed to Mexico's oligopolistic industrial structure.

With the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement); the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), and political crisis/reform all posing questions both old and new about Mexican nationalism, this article reconsiders the dimensions of the subject, the issues, and the empirical evidence. After setting out an analytical and theoretical framework for the study of nationalism, it concentrates on the many components of Mexican nationalism, the historic and on-going nationalist debates over the Indian, the American and the state, and the nature of nationalist policies over the years. It then reviews research related to such theoretical issues as the linkages between nationalist sentiments, ideas and policies, the social bases of nationalist ideas and perceptions, and the changes in nationalism. The article aims to place longstanding discussions of Mexican nationalism in a theoretical context and to derive conclusions which indicate appropriate directions for future research.

This article analyses the surprising emergence of a comprehensive and coherent neo-liberal developmental model during the period of military rule in Chile. Rather than reflecting a clear and definitive choice, the political process that produced this model was characterised by hesitation, policy contradiction, shifting priorities, and incremental choices. This was a result of the military's efforts to deal with two, often conflicting, overarching goals – economic and political stabilisation – as they evolved and were redefined over time. The focus on incremental, iterated decision-making weaves the insights of other explanations based in underlying institutional, coalitional, or ideational factors into a micro-political explanation that is consistent with the substantial variations in policy outcome across different phases of military rule.

This article argues that the training and employment policies of Chile's transition governments since 1990 have failed significantly to promote the development of human resources and occupational citizenship, and identifies key structural and political causes. In particular, the weak development of the property rights of labour and of markets in skill are seen as enduring economic and institutional legacies of the period of dictatorship which continue to constrain key areas of economic development as well as social citizenship rights. The article advocates an analysis of citizenship and skill development that identifies the problem of institutional coordination between a range of different services in labour markets. It suggests that the social organisation of skill markets in Chile systematically discriminates against long-term investments in workers. Hence, even in Chile where economic reformers have sought to maximise markets, decisions on skill investments are, to an important degree, conditioned by power relations and organisational inertia inside individual firms and, at the aggregate level, by the selective channelling of information and the (unplanned) institutional structuring of training supply.

Even before Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998, the past hung heavily over Chile's distinctive transition to democracy. This was apparent during the previous year in the attention given to its conflictive recent history in television and radio talk shows and in newspaper and magazine articles. Since the return to elected rule in 1990, volumes on the dictatorship and the Popular Unity government were staples in Santiago bookstores. With the approach of the 25th anniversary of the 1973 military coup, what had been a steady stream of publication turned into a torrent of personal and political memoirs, extended essays, political journalism, and scholarly studies evoking the country's divided historical memory.