In the sixty years from 1930 to 1990 the population of Latin America more than quadrupled – from approximately 110 million to almost 450 million. Population growth was higher in Latin America than in any other region of the world except, marginally, Africa (see Table 1.1). Though average population density in Latin America remained low in comparison with other areas, this was misleading because of the way in which population was distributed. The bulk of population increase after 1930 occurred in cities. While export-led economic growth in the period 1870–1930 had stimulated the growth of a few cities, principally ports and administrative centres, Latin America was still in 1930 predominantly rural. About 17 per cent of the population resided in cities with 20,000 or more people. During the following half century city populations increased more than tenfold, accounting for two-thirds of total population growth. Internal migration (fed by a high natural increase in the population of rural areas) was responsible for most of the difference between rural and urban population growth and was a major demographic feature of the inward reorientation of the region's economy, which experienced a decline in the share of agriculture and an increase in the share of urban based manufacturing and service activities in total production and employment.

Population trends after 1930 contrasted in several important respects with those of the period before 1930. Immigration had had a significant impact on population increase between 1870 and 1930, although it was concentrated in a few areas: Argentina, southern Brazil, Chile, Cuba and Uruguay. Population growth rates elsewhere were generally lower.

By the time Frederic Henry Hedge had published his review of Coleridge's career in the Christian Examiner another writer had already begun to take Coleridge's place as supplier of excitations to the New World, a writer who was less interested in metaphysics than he was in the conduct of life. In the 1820s a remarkable series of review essays about German literature began to appear in the British quarterlies and attract the attention of the young Boston liberals. The style of these reviews – passionate, urgent, full of humor and outrage – marked them off immediately from the urbane acidities surrounding them. The reviews were written by Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who had been translating German literary works and writing essays about German literature in the 1820s and early 1830s. Carlyle's essay on the German writer known as Jean Paul (Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763–1825) appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1827, followed in the same year by an essay on “The State of German Literature.” In 1828 Carlyle published two essays in the Foreign Review: an analysis of the “Helena” episode from the second part of Goethe's Faust and a later essay on Goethe's whole career. In 1828 and 1829 the Edinburgh Review published Carlyle's long biographical essays on the German classical scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) and on the German poet and novelist Novalis (1772–1801). A London magazine, Eraser's, published Carlyle's review of the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller in 1831. In December 1831, Carlyle published in the Edinburgh Review his long and important essay “Characteristics,” occasioned by the posthumous publication of Friedrich von Schlegel's Philosophische Vorlesungen.

The Depression of 1929 has usually been portrayed as a turning-point in Latin America's transition from outward-looking (export-led) economic growth to inward-looking development based on import substituting industrialization (ISI). This analysis has been shared equally by the ‘structuralists’, who generally view the shift favourably, and by ‘neo-conservatives’, who regard the 1930s as the decade in which Latin America ‘lost its way’. There is no doubt that the decade saw the emergence in many countries of new economic, social and political forces, which would ultimately provide a very different shape to the Latin American model of economic development. However, although traditional export-led growth became very difficult in the 1930s, a residual commitment to primary products and outward-looking development survived throughout the region and foreign trade played an important role in the recovery from depression. It was not until the 1940s and 1950s that a number of Latin American countries explicitly rejected export-led growth and even then there were many (smaller) countries that remained committed to a version of outward-looking development.

From the First World War to the 1929 depression

The export-led growth model had been changing long before 1929. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the stimulus from export growth given to non-export sectors, such as manufacturing, had already reached the point where a group of countries (in particular Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) could meet a relatively high proportion of domestic demand with local rather than imported goods. This virtuous circle, under which productivity gains in the export sector were transferred to the non-export economy, did not always work smoothly (e.g., Peru) and in some cases hardly at all (e.g., Cuba), but the rudiments of a more sophisticated, and more balanced, export-led growth model were clearly apparent by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Of the american writers from the mid-nineteenth century whose names are still recognized today, the majority are writers of prose narrative, such as Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe. Beyond these better-known writers, others will also appear in these pages, for the canon changes, and some writers who have never before, or not recently, played a significant part in American literary histories now seem important, such as the historians George Bancroft and Francis Parkman and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. From the 1820s through the 1860s American prose narrative was produced and distributed within an increasingly established, yet conflict-ridden, publishing business, as Michael Bell shows in this volume. Narratives arose from, responded to, and contributed to continental and overseas expansion, racial struggles, and political debates, and elsewhere in this volume Eric Sundquist has detailed this complex process. But the production of narratives in a culture may be seen not only as a function of other institutions and structures but also as an institution that has a history and structure of its own, relatively independent of these others. Such a relatively internal history, in which the fundamental organizing terms are drawn from literary analysis rather than from economic or social analysis, is the work of this section. For in this period writers of prose narratives helped to form a definition of literature that still exerts power now.

In Italy Margaret Fuller had discovered what it felt like to be caught up in historical processes larger than those any individual could control – to be unable to refuse participation, to be forced to watch helplessly the outcome of events. In the winter and spring of 1850 events in the United States Congress would give the other Transcendentalists a similar experience. By the terms of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo in 1848 Mexico had ceded huge tracts of western land to the United States. The question immediately arose: would slavery be permitted in the new territory? Mexico had abolished slavery, but settlers from the southern United States were determined to reintroduce it, less because they thought slavery likely to flourish there (the arid climate was unsuitable for the crops that needed slave labor) than because they feared they would be encircled by new free states formed from the Mexican Cession, which would upset the balance of power they had up to then maintained in the Senate.

Two years earlier, a freshman Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot had startled his colleagues in the House of Representatives, which was then debating the possibility of purchasing territory from Mexico, by offering an amendment to the appropriations bill that made it “an express and fundamental condition” to the acquisition of territory from Mexico that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” This famous Wilmot Proviso was never adopted, but under its threat Congress quickly divided — not along party lines (Whig against Democrat) but along sectional ones (North against South) — in a way that seemed ominous for the future of the Union.

This multivolume History marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. Our History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field and redefined the terms of its development. Trained in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature everywhere, nationally and internationally, and at every level – in high schools and colleges, in graduate programs, in publications, conferences, and public events. It is expressed in the sheer scope of scholarly activity and in the polemical intensity of debate. Virtually every recent school of criticism has found not just its followers here but many of its leading exponents. And increasingly over the past three decades, American texts have provided the focus for inter-and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but their single largest base is American literature.

THE POPULATION OF LATIN AMERICA, I93O-I99O

Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America. A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Cal., 1974) provides a general overview of population in Latin America; chapters 6—8 cover trends in the twentieth century. A second Spanish edition, La población de America latina. Desde los tiempos precolombinos al año 2000 (Madrid, 1977) includes revisions and an extensive bibliography. Another, more recent overview is in Carmen A. Miró, 'America Latina: transición demografica y crisis economica, social y politica', in Memorias del Congresso Latinoamericano de Poblacidn y Desarrollo, Vol. 1 (Mexico D.F., 1984), 65-114. In preparation for the 1974 World Population Conference, the Comite Internacional de Coordination de Investigaciones Nacionales en Demografia (CICR.ED) sponsored a series of national monographs in collaboration with Latin American demographic research centres. This series includes La poblacidn de Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1975); La population du Bresil (Paris, 1974); La poblacidn de Chile (Paris, 1974); La poblacidn de Colombia (Bogota, 1974); La poblacidn de Costa Rica (San Jose, 1976); La poblacidn de Cuba (La Habana, 1976); La poblacidn de Guatemala (Guatemala City, 1976); La poblacidn de Mexico (Mexico, D.F., 1976); La poblacidn del Peru (Lima, 1974); and La poblacidn de Venezuela (Caracas, n.d.).

This chapter examines trends in Latin American economic performance and Latin American economic policy during and immediately after the Second World War. The emphasis is principally on the interaction of the Latin American economies with the international economy. In the 1930s, as the previous chapter has shown, Latin American economic performance as a whole was still driven by the export of primary products, although in most countries industry grew faster than real gross domestic product (GDP). Economic policy achieved the unusual feat of stimulating primary exports and industrial development at the same time. This was an important achievement, since primary exports were the main source of foreign exchange for the import of intermediate and capital goods. By the 1950s, however, Latin America was deeply entrenched in import-substituting industrialization (ISI). Its key characteristics were a strong discrimination against exports combined with an increased need for foreign exchange. Thus it discriminated against the sector which was crucial to its functioning. We need to understand, therefore, how and why policy evolved from the relative consistency of the 1930s to the contradictions of the 1950s. This chapter will explore first, the impact of the Second World War on the Latin American economies, and second, the evolution of economic policies — and economic performance — in the immediate aftermath of the war. The analysis will necessarily have to touch on the 1950s, since our conclusion is that the explicit rejection of the old export-led growth model and the consolidation of the new inward-looking ISI model of economic growth and development occurred, in the larger countries at least, between the late forties and the middle of the following decade.

Looking back on the years following the U.S. conquest of the territories of northern Mexico in 1848, the former Mexican military commander Mariano Vallejo concluded his five-volume Recuerdos históricos y personates tocante a la Alta California, completed in 1875, with an illuminating but unusual critique. Despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, he wrote,

Vallejo's assessment, marked as it is by his consent to the ideology of American empire, has to be read in the context of his own highly nationalistic narrative, and his views were by no means representative of the newly colonized Mexican people of the Southwest and California. Yet his memoir sums up the important paradoxes generated during nineteenth-century American expansion by the clash between the liberating ideals of democracy and the contrary drive to territorial acquisition, just as his own life symbolically reflected the ambiguities of national allegiance and power in the contested lands of the American continent.

Transcendentalism was from the beginning a literary movement as well as a religious and philosophical one. The Transcendentalists kept journals and wrote poetry; they wrote long letters about literature to one another; they tried their hand at prose sketches and Oriental fables; they delivered lyceum lectures and commencement speeches; they held “conversations” on topics like Beauty and Mythology; they reviewed books for the Christian Examiner and the North American Review. But few of the Transcendentalist texts that managed to find their way into print before the 1840s could be classified strictly as belles lettres. Perhaps only Emerson's Nature could really qualify as polite literature, a “prose poem” – though its review by Francis Bowen in the Christian Examiner in 1837 suggests that even Nature in its home territory was read more as a part of the philosophical skirmishing going on between the Lockeans and the spiritualists than as a work of the imagination.

There were many reasons for this state of affairs. The strong New England prejudice against fiction made writing novels or short stories out of the question for most of the Trancendentalists, even supposing that they had any talent for plot or dialogue or any interest in the social complexities novelists thrive on. Emerson ridiculed Jane Austen for her “vulgar boardinghouse imagination,” and Thoreau devoted a good part of the chapter “Reading” in Walden to abusing those readers who read with saucer eyes and digest with unwearied gizzards the latest romance about the Middle Ages. Poetry was considered more respectable, but the kind of Wordsworthian Romanticism practiced by William Cullen Bryant and the senior Richard Henry Dana seemed too derivative to appeal to the fiercely independent Transcendentalists, and the vogue for Byronic imitations that had marked the 1820s in America had died away without leaving much in its wake.

On the first anniversary of the founding of his famous anti-slavery magazine, the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison invoked the “Spirit of Liberty” that was “thundering at castle-gates and prison-doors” throughout the world. Rather than celebrate the fires of democratic revolution that had spread from America in 1776 to revolutions in a number of European countries by the early 1830s, however, Garrison dwelt on the significant failure of the American Revolution – the problem of slavery. When liberty “gets the mastery over its enemy,” Garrison inquired rhetorically, “will not its retaliation be terrible?” Only “timely repentance” could save the American nation's “blind, unrelenting, haughty, cruel, heaven-daring oppressors” from the fate of foreign despots and aristocracies. Because repentance on a national scale did not seem likely in the 1830s, Garrison put forth a paradoxical proposition: in order to avoid having to join in defending the South against slave insurrection, the North ought to dissolve the Union. Were this threat to “break the chain which binds [the South] to the Union” carried out, however, Garrison predicted that “the scenes of St. Domingo would be witnessed throughout her borders.”

Garrison was no doubt thinking of Nat Turner's slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, the previous year. The most successful slave uprising in American history, Turner's rebellion caused alarm in the South about a repetition of the massive democratic rebellion of slaves in San Domingo (Haiti) at the end of the eighteenth century and quickly became a touchstone of both antislavery and proslavery sentiment. But Garrison may also have had in mind the black abolitionist David Walker's fiery pamphlet, Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which had appeared in 1828 and which some had held responsible for Turner's rebellion.

The 1840s witnessed the slow fragmentation of the Transcendentalist movement and the departure of its members upon paths of their own. The last meeting of the Transcendental Club was probably the meeting held in September 1840. The Dial ceased publication in 1844. The members of the group continued to meet and talk with one another, to write letters to one another, to attend one another's lectures, and to read one another's books; but they had begun to break into smaller groups defined by interest, personal affection, or ideology and to regard one another with friendly curiosity rather than with feelings of solidarity. Some of them returned to the Boston area after years of exile; others departed from it on long journeys. Some remained within the Unitarian church (two even become professors at the Harvard Divinity School); some left it for other religions or for a “church of the future” they hoped would materialize. Most found themselves being drawn into one of the practical reform movements of the day – association, prison reform, opposition to the Mexican War, antislavery. Two witnessed the European revolutions of 1848, for Emerson crossed the channel from England to witness the celebrations on the Champ de Mars during the French uprising, and Margaret Fuller ran a hospital during the siege of Rome.

Convers Francis slid gently from his position as the elder statesman among the Transcendentalists (he was five years older than Alcott, eight years older than Emerson) to a Harvard professorship. Francis had been ordained as minister to a congregation at Watertown in 1819 and remained in that post until he was invited to become professor of pulpit eloquence and pastoral care at the Divinity School in 1842.