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.

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.

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.