It is axiomatic, but certainly deserving of periodic repetition, that the long-term configuration of political, social and economic institutions in Iberian America has been determined both by the apparatus, operation and rationale of the metropolitan state, as well as by the premises and patterns of colonization. Equally apparent is the premise that the politico-administrative crisis associated with the achievement of independence in early nineteenth-century Latin America must be studied in the light of this ‘set’ of New World institutions, and particularly in relation to what Richard Morse calls the Spanish patrimonial state.

Current work on Bourbon Mexico presents a divided, not to say schizophrenic image of the age. The traditional view, propounded by Lucas Alamán largely on the basis of Alexander von Humboldt's Essai Politique, and subject to certain qualifications, supported by our own work on the export economy, emphasized both the new quality in government and the remarkable pace of economic growth. Crown revenue, silver output, overseas trade, and the ecclesiastical tithes levied on agricultural production, all experienced a substantial and rapid increase in the years following the Gàlvez Visitation, 1765–71.

The official attitude of the Spanish Bourbons towards scientific improvements was not as obscurantist and immutable as was generally supposed in northern Europe. If the enlightened ideas infiltrating Spain and America were normally regarded with fear and suspicion, information concerning the latest discoveries in the field of the ‘useful sciences’ was eagerly received and pondered, and, where it did not lead to undesirable economic emancipation, it was sometimes even applied.

For the past couple of decades the Latin Americans, like their brethren in Africa and Asia, have been hell-bent in search of ‘development’ or ‘modernization’. While the Latin Americans were on the firing line, scholars and policy-makers in both the rich nations and the poor nations were involved in setting out an intellectual framework for analyzing the developmental process. New concepts to explain the meaning of development were devised; innovative measurements to gauge the level of development were proposed; a new vocabulary to capture the nuances of development was put forth.

The five nations of the Central American Common Market (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) have all the characteristics generally associated with less developed countries—largely agrarian economies, great dependence on agricultural exports for foreign exchange earnings, rapid population growth, widespread illiteracy, and low per capita incomes.

Throuhout the first decades of its independent life Mexico lived under the fear of a repetition of the scenes of 1810. The destructive force of Hidalgo's masses was a sobering thought for many, but a temptation to others. How could a political aspirante avoid thinking that those masses might be used to overcome his enemies, and still remain a pliable instrument in his hands? The difficulty lay in the fact that it was necessary to stop before the snowball effect of mass arousal started operating. Admittedly, this effect would not have been at work if political leaders had been able to develop reliable methods of social control over the masses, as happened rather early in many a South American case of caudillismo. In the event, in Mexico this was accomplished by Juárez, probably aided by the pervading militarization brought about by the civil and internaitonal wars, and subsequently taken up by Díaz.

The 1870s were a decade of crisis and change in the Peruvian economy. Guano, the bulk of Peru's exports, no longer dominated the republic's trade and finance as it had for thirty years. Quantity, quality and markets persistently declined from the peaks of the 1850s and 1860s. Two new growth sectors, however, increasingly diversified Peru's commercial pattern. On plantations in the north sugar production quadrupled between 1873 and 1876, overhauling cotton and wool among exports. At the same time, in the southernmost province of Tarapacá nitrate extraction and manufacture steadily increased.

The Mexican Revolution can be seen as an effort to promote the modernization of that nation's society and institutions. Social scientists and historians agree that modernization is a complex process, including social, political, economic, and intellectual factors which evolve in different patterns and at different rates according to the particular circumstances under consideration. In terms of social change, political scientist S. N. Eisenstadt, and historian C. E. Black have isolated at least two trends that are of relevance to Mexican education in the 1930S: (1) an increased interest in urban as opposed to rural matters, and (2) the conflict between the representatives of a traditional elitist culture and the advocates of mass society based on modern technology.

Many studies of Latin American elites are compilations of biographical sketches. These increase understanding of various personalities, but tend to be unsystematic and unrelated. Frequently, no attempt is made to draw the data together into meaningful generalizations about elite background, recruitment, behavior, and the like. Many other studies that take a group approach also concern elites but often this is not explicitly recognized by the author. Much of the literature on the Latin American military falls into this category.2

Charles Darwin once described the Atacama as the world' most desolate desert, and it is hardly surprising that its ownership was not vigorously contested before the 1860s. The discovery, however, first of guano and then of nitrates, made the Atacama the object of a diplomatic dispute between Chile and Bolivia, both of which now coveted this once undesirable land.

Without question, Cuba's most successful ‘export’ from the very beginning of the Castro period has not been revolution, but the physical removal of its domestic enemies. For whatever reason individual Cubans came to reject the new order, the decision to part physically from their homeland was made by enough people to develop into what is probably the greatest mass migration in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Latest estimates provided by the Department of State indicate that approximately 560,000 persons have left Cuba since 1959 to settle in other countries—all but 50,000 in the continental United States or Puerto Rico

A reviewer confronted with fourteen new books on the Latin-American economy inevitably seeks a common theme on which to hang his remarks, in the hope that this will make sense of his labours. Let it be confessed immediately that diligent search has failed to reveal any such unity in these volumes. Indeed, on the safe assumption that they represent a random selection from the rapidly growing literature on the subject, they might almost be taken as evidence of a diversity of approach. An alternative strategy, therefore, is to argue the existence of central doctrines in the literature on Latin- American development in the last twenty-five years, and to relate to them the literature under review.