The growth within the capitalist world-economy of the industrial sector of production, the so-called ‘industrial revolution’, was accompanied by a very strong current of thought which denned this change as both a process of organic development and of progress. There were those who considered these economic developments and the concomitant changes in social organization to be some penultimate stage of world development whose final working-out was but a matter of time. These included such diverse thinkers as Saint-Simon, Comte, Hegel, Weber, Durkheim. And then there were the critics, most notably Marx, who argued, if you will, that the nineteenth-century present was only an antepenultimate stage of development, that the capitalist world was to know a cataclysmic political revolution which would then lead in the fullness of time to a final societal form, in this case the classless society.

This paper finds its point of departure in population figures for 8 Latin American countries and 61 cities during the period 1750 to 1920 (Tables 2–9, pp. 435–43). This span is a convenient one for the study of Latin American urban development. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, population statistics, at least those available from printed sources, become sparse and unreliable, and one begins to get totals of householders rather than head counts. Moreover, the wide swings in current estimates of regional populations for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make relative urbanization rates problematical even when one has good data for towns. For the time being, the functional scale for urban places proposed by Hardoy and Aranovich (1969; 1970) seems a more appropriate index for the Hapsburg and early Bourbon periods than a purely quantitative one. After 1920, when more frequent and modern national censuses facilitate data collection, a new era in Latin American urban development commences, marked by economic nationalism, broadened political participation, centralized economic planning, import substitution, the politicoeconomic ascendancy of the United States, and massive internal migrations.

During the past twenty years the major thrust of Indian historiography has expanded from its earlier concerns with imperial politics and sought to uncover the full range of actors within Indian political life and to identify the arenas in which they were active: local, regional, and national. One group of scholars has called particular attention to the diversity of elite groups, their interactions, and often their struggles for power. Their studies usually call explicitly for a broader understanding of ‘political’ activity outside the official levels of administration.

The city of Lima resembles other Latin American capitals in having drawn very heavily in recent decades on rural migration, but is peculiar in the extraordinarily large number, running perhaps into the thousands, of associations formed by migrants on the basis of common regional origin. These associations have been the subject of investigation by the American anthropologists Mangin and Doughty, and also by a number of Peruvian scholars. These studies are based on the familiar theory of a rural-urban continuum with close integration at the rural pole and a syndrome of anomie at the urban pole. They postulate that the regional associations create solidarity among rural migrants in the city and enable them to foster modernization in the regions from which they came. In this article it will be argued that these postulates cannot survive the test of empirical criticism.

Social and ethnic groups in many different societies have often created socio-religious movements to express their malaise, dissatisfaction with present living conditions, and desire for regeneration. These movements, which still arise today, normally result from social, economic, cultural and psychological pressures produced by internal and/or external factors. They reflect the anxieties and hopes of the groups that participate in them for a sudden and total transformation of their physical, social and psychological environment.

Revitalization movements have been viewed, when found within a culture contact situation, as a retrogression, a backward step in acculturation of a subordinate society to the customs and values of another. The return to celebration of differences between themselves and the people of the dominant group has been viewed as just another hurdle to be overcome before integration of the subordinate group could be brought about.