This article offers a new perspective on the history of the maroon state of Palmares in Northeastern Brazil. It adds information and interpretation to R. K. Kent's ground-breaking article ‘Palmares: An African State in Brazil’ published in 1965. The present essay gives an historical narrative summary with commentary on the historiography, describing Afro—razilian aspects of the history of Palmares. The purpose is to review and expand upon the historical, linguistic, and cultural context of Palmares and on the sources for the emerging epic material of Zumbi of Palmares.

This article examines the Colombian peace process since 1982, arguing that the government must strengthen the state and expand its presence into the remote areas in which the leftist guerrillas have established para-statal organisations. The traditionally weak Colombian state has allowed rebel groups to flourish in isolated areas. However, President Ernesto Samper has announced a new initiative that features an ambitious plan to strengthen the state. The plan includes judicial and social reforms that address many of the guerrilla demands, but also threaten to undermine their para-statal organisations. Massive oil discoveries and tax reforms could provide the necessary funding.

This article challenges the traditional depiction of the late colonial repartimiento de comercio as a system of forced production and consumption. Employing a micro-economic analysis of the repartimiento's operation in Oaxaca, it argues that peasant participation in the alcaldes mayores' repartimientos was voluntary, not coerced, and that the repartimiento should be understood instead as a system of consumer and producer credit designed to operate under colonial conditions of high risk. Repartimiento credit was expensive, but it permitted peasants to participate more extensively in markets as consumers and producers. ‘Indians are capable of requesting the cargo of a flotilla, and [so] it is a vulgarity and a misunderstanding of the repartimiento to say that they are forced.’

Rio's pre-Lenten carnival and its Afro-Brazilian dance, samba, have been symbols of Brazilian identity since the 1930s. This article explores the choreographical antecedents of samba, before the crystallisation of the modern dance genre with that name, highlighting the importance of earlier social dances in the evolution of the twentieth-century symbol. It traces the development of carnival dancing in Rio de Janeiro from the time when few danced, through the long reign of the polka, to the emergence of generalised carnival street dancing around 1889. A modified view of the roots of samba has interesting implications for on-going debates on the social meaning of Brazilian carnival.

Through an analysis of the debates in 1871 on the Law of the ‘Free Womb’ in the Brazilian Empire, this article tries to understand the role of the slave mother and her freed children in the process of abolition. In addition, it discusses the possible obstacles and dangers the ‘Free Womb’ would present for the perpetuation of slaveowners' dominance.

Based on a study of the 1960s generation of Chilean left-wing leaders, this article offers a three-dimensional model of individual political identity to examine how leaders justify their contributions to society and the political programmes of which they are a part. The central dimension of individual political identity is that of cognitive frameworks, that is, individuals' fundamental approaches to politics, rooted in the values they assign to ideas, political organisation and their relationships to fellow political leaders and activists. The article identifies four cognitive ideal-types: political party loyalists, personal loyalists, political thinkers and political entrepreneurs. The article concludes that the conceptualisation of individual political identity is a powerful explanatory framework for understanding the formulation and reformulation of political thinking and action, particularly in periods in which political institutions are in a state of flux or crisis.

Focusing on the last decades before abolition (1888), this study examines slave labour and sugar production in the Bahian Recôncavo in Northeastern Brazil, one of the oldest slaveholding regions in the Americas. It demonstrates the marked contrast between the Recôncavo and the other main sugar-producing areas of Northeastern Brazil. In Bahia, the years 1850–88 did not witness an increase in sugar exports; on the contrary, exports stagnated and then, with abolition, suffered a nearly complete collapse. Furthermore, sugar planters in the Recôncavo, unlike other Northeastern planters, relied overwhelmingly on slave labour until the very eve of abolition. The study suggests that the explanation for the contrast between the Recôncavo and other Northeastern sugar regions lies in alternatives to sugar production for a significant segment of the planter class and in alternatives to work on sugar plantations for a substantial part of the poor free population in the Recôncavo.

This article examines the Brazilian banking system from 1906 to 1930, and analyses two potential constraints to dynamic banking: government economic policy and concepts of ownership, as expressed through property rights. It finds that the banking system was quite dynamic in supporting economic change. The problems of, and constraints to, banking development are typically declared, or assumed, to result from the exigencies of government monetary policy. The results of monetary policy for private-sector development emerge as significantly less than existing historiography would suggest. However, concepts and protection of property rights constrained the ability of banks to expand their activities.

Costa Rica's long-term standing as one of the few countries in Latin America with a stable democracy has prompted many to view its polity as an inevitable outcome of a racially homogeneous and relatively egalitarian society. Without ignoring the importance of sociological factors, this article contends that institutional arrangements played an equally important – if not more central – role in the development of a stable democratic regime in this country. The structure of Costa Rican presidentialism encouraged incumbents to maintain control of the state while it, as a consequence, incited the opposition to rebel against central state authorities. Political competition became more peaceful as parties that failed to hold or to capture the presidency were nevertheless compensated by being allowed to occupy legislative seats.

In much historiography of the colonial Caribbean, British administrators are portrayed as mediators between domestic elites, foreign capital, and the working class. Such scholarship converges with popular belief in Belize, whose institutions are seen as a legacy of ‘impartial’ British rule. This article examines the relationship between the United Fruit Company and the colonial government of British Honduras. Contrary to claims of administrative impartiality, colonial officials facilitated the company's monopoly over the banana industry and acted as company advocates before the Colonial Office, actions that ultimately undermined the colony's independent banana producers.

This article focuses on Brazilian inflation: its causes, consequences and dynamics from 1980 to 1993. We argue that the main economic cause of the Brazilian inflation was the excessive growth of money, in turn caused by too high budget deficits. Oil and exchange rate shocks also played a role, together with the greater dependence of the Central Bank of Brazil on the government. We measure the degree of Central Bank independence by the variable ‘turnover’ of Central Bank governors defined as the number of months in office. The effect of this variable on inflation is found to be highly significant and positive.

The article focuses on the 1910 centennial celebration of Mexico's war of independence in Mexico City in order to examine the notions of modernity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism that were held by the Porfirian elite. The article first maps the celebration and thus identifies an ideal city – of comfort, modernity, style, and patriotism – that the Porfirian elite created from the 1880s to the 1910s within Mexico City. Second, it takes tours around the ideal city in order to examine how ideal views of social order, material and cultural progress, nation-building and cosmopolitanism acquired spatial and graphic expressions in the city.

This article focuses upon the cacicazgo of the Indian leader, Gabriel Barrios Cabrera, who controlled the Sierra de Puebla, Mexico during the 1920s. An analysis is made of the methods employed by Barrios to establish a loyal following, and how his military potential gave him the opportunity to attain regional political dominance and beneficial relationships with his federal military and political superiors. It is argued that Barrios's actions were so strongly influenced by the Sierra's singular history and socio-ethnic characteristics, that previously identified trends in post-revolutionary regional politics cannot easily be applied to this isolated mountainous region.

This study of organised political violence in north-central Nicaragua from 1926 to 1934 focuses on the infamous Conservative gang leader Anastacio Hernández and on Sandino's rebels. The contexts of a weak central state and local-regional caudillismo are outlined. It is shown that after the 1926–27 civil war. Hernández and others produced ritualised spectacular violence in the service of their Chamorrista caudillo patrons. The language, practices, and characteristics of organised violence are examined. It is argued that Sandino's rebels appropriated these tools of political struggle, and that changes and continuities in the organisation of violence in Nicaraguan history merit greater attention.

In August, September and October 1933 Cuban sugar workers seized several dozen mills and estates and, in a number of cases, inaugurated soviets. This major worker uprising coincided with the collapse of the regime of Gerardo Machado and the early stages of the reformist administration of Grau San Martín. An examination of the roots of labour organisation among sugar workers and of the dynamic of the insurgency reveals the strengths and the limitations of the role played by the Cuban Communist Party. The collapse of the institutional and coercive structures of the state apparatus greatly facilitated the worker actions.

This analysis of the historically high level of state-sponsored violence in Central America, typically explained in terms of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘civil-military relations’, argues for according it a more independent research status. Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence – the mechanisms by which caudillo violence was displaced upward in the late 19th century, the level of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state violence as a function of clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military power after 1940 – are proposed. The implications for the utility of political culture theory and for a reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations are developed.

Prospects for democratisation in those Central American countries that experienced revolutionary processes are discussed in the light of recurrent structural constraints – such as incipient structural differentiation, overwhelming poverty, dependence on foreign financial subsidies – and specific sociopolitical variations, i.e. uneven modernisation of traditional rule; tensions between the recent mobilisation of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social actors, and political institutions and actors (such as parties, unions, parliaments, government and multilateral agencies) which in some cases lead to current social demobilisation and electoral apathy and in others prevent the effective uprooting of political violence; persistence of traditional authoritarian culture and its articulation to the new ingredients of the post-war political and socioeconomic setting.