One decade into the twenty-first century, and thirty years since the worst economic crisis in Latin America (the debt crisis of the 1980s – ‘the lost decade’), it is time to have another look at the economic history of Latin America and the Caribbean from a long-term perspective. We firmly believe that many of the ideas used to study Latin American backwardness, are twentieth-century rather than twenty-first-century ideas. In this sense, Latin American economic historiography has been marked by a period of pessimism about Latin America's chances of overcoming economic backwardness. The tendency to take a short term perspective or to focus only on a few national cases has meant that research has been heavily influenced by debates centring on the failure of industrialization, the political cost of the military dictatorships, the social and economic impact of the ‘lost decade’ and the limitations of the subsequent recovery. The poor performance of Latin American economies in recent times has also influenced those who study the earlier stages, which helps to understand the success of a book entitled ‘How Latin America Fell Behind’ published in 1997.

This backwardness is apparent in the widening gap between GDP per inhabitant in Latin America and the Caribbean and that of wealthy countries. The ideas most frequently used in an attempt to explain Latin American backwardness point to institutional reasons, on the one hand, and the theory of ‘the curse of natural resources’, on the other, or to both simultaneously.