Much of the agricultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America has been dominated by studies of export products and economies. Yet just as important for national development were domestic markets supplied by small-scale farmers. Using Guatemala as a case study for Latin America, this article examines the challenges faced by farmers producing for local, regional and national markets. Over the course of the national period, state authorities’ sporadic concern for domestic agriculture provided indigenous small-scale farmers with opportunities to advance their agendas, which ranged from resisting forced labour to maintaining their traditional agricultural practices. By the 1930s, domestic foodstuff production had increased markedly because in the early twentieth century state authorities had joined small-scale farmers to actively promote domestic-use agriculture.

Although partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.

The growth of a transportation system in Minas Gerais, especially the construction of a rail network in the province's booming coffee region, the Zona da Mata (the Forest Zone) in the late Empire, is an important chapter in the state's history. A close look at railroads in the Mata and in Minas tells us much about politics and the power and influence of certain groups, particularly planters and planter-politicians. Conflicts over railroad concessions provoked much rivalry within the Mata, but all mineiros agreed that transportation was the most important issue of the day. Meanwhile, flumimnses and paulistas were more preoccupied with the labour crisis. Hindsight permits us to say that transportation is not the key to understanding the development of Minas, at least not to the extent that contemporaries thought it was. Ecological factors, labour conditions and the onset of the national overproduction crisis in 1896 had more to do with the rise and fall of coffee exports than did railroads. However, coffee planters from the wealthy Mata and other mineiros from the province's less prosperous regions always credited railroads with the good things that went with economic development.