The six decades from 1870 to 1930 witnessed the somewhat late full integration of Central America into the capitalist world market through the expansion of its export economies. They also saw the formation of several relatively viable states and, therefore, the strengthening of the division of the United Provinces of Central America established after independence into five republics, even though there were some attempts to restore the lost union. Central American scholars were, and still are inclined to see the history of the isthmus (with the exception of Panama, which only became an independent state in 1903) as a unity. They preserved a somewhat vague, even romantic aspiration that the five patrias chicas (‘small homelands’) should eventually merge again in a patria grande (that is to say, a united Central America). Up to a point, there are grounds for such an ambition. In this period, for instance, some of the central features of economic life - for example, the production and export of coffee and bananas - were shared by most Central American countries; as, in politics, they shared the upheavals of Liberal reforms and then the hardships of Liberal dictatorships, as well as a common and very strong dependence on the United States. But much more striking in such a small region are the strong differences which existed between the five Republics. In this chapter we shall frequently be contrasting the evolution of Costa Rica with that of the other countries in the isthmus. Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador, from 1870 to 1930, may be seen as more advanced countries economically and politically than Honduras and, to a lesser degree, Nicaragua.

TRADITIONAL URUGUAY: CATTLE AND CAUDILLOS

During the decade of the 1860s Uruguay was a nation of no more than 300,000 inhabitants, of whom more than a quarter lived in the principal port, Montevideo, which was also the political capital. The proportion of foreigners was amongst the highest of any Latin American nation. According to the 1860 census one in three inhabitants (and one in two in Montevideo) was foreign: mainly Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, French, Argentinian or British (probably in that order). Uruguay's one railway line, inaugurated in 1869, was only 20 kilometres long. The nation's transport system in fact consisted of little more than primitive tracks; luckily the society's principal product, cattle, had the virtue of being mobile. For the transport of people, carts were used in the east and centre of the country, whereas in the west the use of sailboats and steamships on the Uruguay river gave this region much better communication with the capital. In spite of the small size of the country – about 180,000 square kilometres – travel in the interior was slow, especially in winter when the swollen rivers and streams blocked land routes. At such times central government, landowners and traders alike seemed more to be living in a medieval backwater rather than in a nation of the modern world, in the second half of the century of the steam engine.

The economy was based on the extensive exploitation of native (criollo) cattle. Their heavy hides were shipped to Europe, while part of their thin flesh, after salting and drying in the saladeros (meat-salting establishments) to become tasajo (jerked beef), was consumed by the slave populations of Cuba and Brazil.

The Mexican Revolution was initiated and directed for the most part by the upper and middle classes of the Porfiriato. There were, however, several revolutions within the Revolution. The revolutionary front line was fluid and revolutionary groups were heterogeneous, with very different, even contradictory, objectives. The mass of the people, upon whom the profound changes of the period 1870–1910 had borne heavily, had only a limited sense of what was at stake in the struggle for political power. From 1913 the Sonorans, the north-west faction within the Carrancista or Constitutionalist movement, sought national political power, and in 1920 they finally seized it. The Sonoran hegemony proved complete and long lasting. In effect it was an ‘invasion’ from the north. The secular habits, the savage pragmatism and the violent struggle for survival of the north-western frontier were totally alien to the Mexican nation at large.

An ex-minister of the period, Luis L. León, has given us a clear picture of how these people of the north-west saw themselves and Mexico, and the programme they wished to impose on the country. He tells us that between 1913 and 1920, the state of Sonora was for the Sonorans their school and their laboratory, both as politicians and as men of business. They described themselves as the Californians of Mexico, who wished to transform their country into another California. Once they took on the gigantic task of controlling national resources of water and land, they were astonished to find that the centre and the south of the country were quite different from their own far north-west.

The year 1880 marked a major turning point in Bolivian history. The most dramatic event was the total defeat of Bolivia's army at the hands of the Chilean invaders and the loss of its entire coastal territory in the War of the Pacific. Less dramatic but equally important was the establishment of a new government to replace the previous caudillo regime. Though the replacement of governments by military coups had not been an uncommon feature of political life in the Republic during the half century since its creation, the new regime did in fact mark a fundamental change in national political development. It represented the first viable republican government of a civilian oligarchic nature. Though the loss of its direct access to the sea remained the most intransigent of Bolivia's international problems from 1880 to the present day, the establishment of a modern political party system and a civilian-dominated government led to political, economic and eventually even social and cultural changes which profoundly shaped Bolivia's historical evolution.

The fundamental stabilization and maturation of Bolivian politics after 1880 was not the result of the war with Chile, but rather derived from basic changes within the Bolivian economy that had begun at least 30 years previously. Whereas Bolivia had been a major mineral exporter throughout the period of colonial Spanish domination, it emerged in the republican period as a minor exporter of silver and other minerals. The collapse of the imperial economy in the 1790s, the regional agricultural disasters of 1804 and 1805, the devastation of the civil wars and international conflicts of the independence period (1809–25), the breakup of the imperial customs union, and finally the collapse of the mita system of forced labour after 1825 all contributed to the decline of the silver mining industry.

>An overview

During the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries the patterns of sugar production and the sugar trade in the Caribbean changed very little, and what changes there were were either geographical (shifts in production from one island to another) or determined by limited technological innovation. From the 1860s to the 1890s the centuries-old structure of the sugar industry was shattered, to be replaced by completely new forms of production and commerce and by a new form of the end-product itself, a sugar produced to different standards and even shipped in different packaging. The successive developments that occurred in the sugar world during the thirty years from around 1860 affected sugar producers, merchants and consumers; they modified human and labour relations and they altered age-old habits of consumption. This great transformation was at once the cause and the consequence of other economic, social and political factors, and was at the same time connected by innumerable links to other world events such as the crisis of Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the rapid developments in science and technology, the universal increase in population and new systems of communications. This great transformation was at once the cause and the consequence of other economic, social and political factors, and was at the same time connected by innumerable links to other world events such as the crisis of Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the rapid developments in science and technology, the universal increase in population and new systems of communications.

THE WAR AND POSTWAR ECONOMY

The decade and a half from the outbreak of the first world war to the onset of the world depression witnessed overall a continuation of Argentina's prewar economic prosperity based on the growth of its export sector. In 1929 Argentina was still the world's largest exporter of chilled beef, maize, linseed and oats, and the third largest exporter of wheat and flour. Comparing annual averages for 1910–14 with 1925–9, exports of wheat increased from 2.1 million tons to 4.2 million, maize from 3.1 to 3.5 million, and linseed from 680,000 to 1.6 million. Exports of chilled beef, which averaged only 25,000 tons between 1910 and 1914, increased to more than 400,000 between 1925 and 1929. Exports as a whole, which were valued on average at 4,480 million paper pesos at 1950 prices in 1910–14, increased to 7,914 million between 1925 and 1929. Per capita-income in Argentina still compared favourably with most of Western Europe. Standards of living had risen, while illiteracy rates had again fallen. A substantial part of the population basked in prosperity and well-being. By 1930 there were 435,000 automobiles throughout Argentina, a substantially larger number than in many Western European countries, and a sevenfold increase from eight years before. Assisted once more by immigration, population rose by almost 4 million between 1914 and 1930, from 7.9 million to 11.6 million. In one sector, domestic oil, there was spectacular growth. In 1913 Argentina produced less than 21,000 cubic metres of fuel oil. By 1929 output had risen to 1.4 million.

Introduction

The half-century following the wars of independence in Latin America, that is to say, the period from the 1820s to the 1860s or 1870s, had been generally disappointing in terms of economic growth, although here and there, in the niches of a somewhat ramshackle but nevertheless changing structure, modest material and organizational gains were made. Over the region as a whole, the uneven diffusion of commercialization during the colonial period had left a complex mosaic of capitalist and non-capitalist relations of production, ranging from reciprocal labour networks, slavery, other compulsory labour regimes and debt peonage to share-cropping and various forms of tenant farming, wage labour and small-scale commodity production by artisans and smallholders. Communal ownership of land still existed alongside privately held properties both large and small, while other rural holdings were controlled by ecclesiastical and public authorities. Gradually, however, over the course of several decades, relationships more compatible with capitalist modes of interaction gained ground as long established colonial mechanisms for allocating resources fell into disuse and the world capitalist system expanded. A half-century of incremental change had not been enough to transform the economic organization of Latin America, but it did sufficiently alter conditions for the more sweeping institutional and technological developments of 1870–1914 to get under way.

The regulatory systems established during the colonial period were being dismantled at the same time as public administration was breaking down and new, sometimes contested, national boundaries were being drawn. These developments disrupted local commerce and in many instances halted the former inter-regional (but by then inter-country) currents of trade within Latin America, while the strong gravitational pull of the expanding North Atlantic economies reoriented economic life towards a slowly growing participation in global trade no longer determined by Iberian commercial policy.

In Brazil, as in many other Latin American countries, the 1870s and 1880s were a period of reform and commitment to change. Intellectuals, professional men, military officers – urban people though often with rural roots – joined associations for the abolition of slavery and organizations for the promotion of mass European immigration, campaigned in favour of federalism and provincial autonomy, argued for the separation of church and state, participated in campaigns for electoral reform, and supported the Republican party. Nor were representatives of the agrarian and mercantile dominant class, known for its conservatism, completely immune to progressive ideas. In the decade before 1870 staunch members of the Conservative party had broken away from their traditional loyalties and joined the Liberal party, while many devoted Liberals left their party to create the Republican party in 1870. Intellectuals also criticized traditional philosophy, condemned romantic literary conventions, and ridiculed the system of education; they cultivated positivist and evolutionist ideas, adopted new forms of expression, and proposed a new system of education more orientated towards science and technology; they repudiated what they perceived as empty liberal rhetoric, criticized the ruling classes, and made ‘the people’ their subject matter.

By the beginning of the 1890s, reformers could pride themselves on having achieved many of their aims. An electoral reform had been implemented in 1881. Parliament had abolished slavery in 1888. Large numbers of European immigrants had begun to enter the country. And in 1889, a military coup had overthrown the monarchy. The new republican regime adopted a federal system and extended the suffrage.

On the eve of the outbreak of the first world war Argentina had enjoyed since 1880, apart from a quinquennium of depression in the early 1890s, almost 35 years of remarkable economic growth. The main impulse had been exogenous: foreign labour, foreign capital, and favourable foreign markets for its exports. In 1914 around one-third of Argentinas' population of almost eight million, which the third national census showed had increased more than fourfold since the first census in 1869, was foreign-born; at least another quarter was composed of the descendants of immigrants from the past two generations. According to later estimates by the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), in 1914 foreign investments (around 60 per cent of them British), both public and private, accounted for half the country's capital stock, equal to two and a half years of the value of gross domestic production. Since 1900 foreign investment had risen at an annual rate of 11.41 per cent. British investors possessed around 80 per cent of the Argentine railway system, large tracts of its land, most of its tramways and urban utility companies, and some of its meat-packing plants and industries. ECLA again estimated that the annual rate of growth in the rural sector, already 7 per cent between 1895 and 1908, had risen to 9 per cent between 1908 and 1914. In the great compendium it issued on the Republic's affairs in 1911, Lloyd's Bank of London pointed out that whereas until around 1903 the value of foreign trade in Argentina and Brazil was broadly equal, by 1909 Argentina's had grown by half as much again above its leading rival in the subcontinent.

The year 1879 was nothing short of catastrophic for the Peruvian people. It marked the outbreak of the War of the Pacific which would bring untold travail, humiliation and ultimately national defeat. At the same time the widespread destruction engendered by the conflict cleared the path to economic modernization. During the next 50 years Peru, the quintessential ‘fẹudal’ Latin American society, would be pulled into the developing world economy, its modes of production reshaped by the special demands of Western industrial capitalism in the age of imperial expansion.

The half century after 1879 may be characterized as the dawn of modern Peru, a time not only of rapid economic modernization but also of social and political change. New elites emerged along the coast and coalesced to form a powerful oligarchy, whose political expression, the Civilist party, had before the close of the century seized control of the state. Under its paternalistic aegis and guided by the doctrines of liberal, laissez-faire positivism, currently in vogue throughout the continent, what Jorge Basadre, the dean of Peruvian historians, has called the ‘Aristocratic Republic’ (1895–1919) was born. The military was reorganized, professionalized and, at least temporarily, brought under civilian control for the first time since Independence. The machinery of government, although not entirely divorced from the traditional empleomania characteristic of the structures and forms of the colonial past, was overhauled, modernized and expanded to conform better with the demands and growing complexities of the modern export economy. It was, in short, a period marked by economic prosperity, political stability and relative social peace unmatched in the country's post-colonial history.

INTRODUCTION: THE TURKISH BACKGROUND

With the conquest of Baghdad in 656/1258, the Mongols dealt a deathblow to the empire of the caliphate. This event, together with the dramatic circumstances that attended it, is often regarded as a dividing-line between two historical epochs. This view is justified only in so far as the fall of the caliphate destroyed the last tie which, up till that time, had with difficulty been holding together the world of Islam. Yet the historical significance of this event should not be over-estimated. It is true that, apart from the liquidation of the 'Abbasids, it represented the prelude to new historical developments, such as the rise of the Il-Khanid dynasty, which was to be of great importance in the history of Persia. But its total effect on the history of the Islamic world was of a more or less superficial nature. For the political organisation of the caliphate which the Mongols had destroyed was little more than an outer shell, which had long been crumbling away, around heterogeneous structures which as a whole had very little to do with the Islamic empire of the early 'Abbasids, and which indeed actually negated the raison d'être of a common polity.

In spite of the catastrophic effect of the Mongol assault upon the people of that time, and in spite also of the changes which it caused and the traces which, here and there, it left behind it, eighty years later it already belonged to the past. Of distinctly greater historical significance were other developments which had begun long before.

For the purposes of this chapter the period to be covered runs from 907/1501 to 1148/1736, one of the most remarkable ages in Iran's history. The Safavid era witnessed a political, religious and military reorganisation and unification of which Iran as it stands today is in no small degree the legacy. Socially the Safavids gave the Iranian people a sense of integration, and of recognition as an entity of consequence in the affairs of the world, which served signally to distinguish this period from the distractions and discord that had preceded it. For this period terminated the disunity and sufferings which the Mongol invasions had brought about, and which neither the Il-Khanid attempt at resettlement nor Tīmūr's subsequent reign of conquest had done anything to ameliorate; while the events of the interregnum after Tīmūr's death had only exacerbated them.

A factor which perhaps more clearly than any other marks out the Safavid period as a watershed was the establishment, during this dynasty's sway of nearly two and a half centuries, of Shi'ism as the official religion of the state. Thus a sect hitherto of secondary importance was raised to supremacy, affording a vigorous expression of Iran's identity – it might even be said, of Iranian nationalism – in face of the challenge presented by the Sunnī Ottoman empire, the Sunnī Central Asian Turkish states and the Mughal empire of India. A result of this development which must concern the literary historian was that official recognition of Shi'ism, with its active propagation by the Safavid shahs, prompted the popularisation of Shī'ī theology and hence the composition of voluminous works in the Persian, as well as to some extent in the Arabic, language.

INTRODUCTION

The architectural achievements surveyed in this chapter range over four hundred years of Persian history. The first half of our period was one of constant shifts in political power accompanied by changing frontiers. Only in the second half did Persia obtain some measure of security under a single political authority. The story opens with the architectural style associated with the Īl-Khāns and its development in western and southern Persia under the successor dynasties. It was this style which was transferred to Transoxiana in the last quarter of the 8th/14th century. The part played by Timur and his house is crucial to the story in as much as theirs was the principal building effort, first in Transoxiana and then in eastern Persia – centres of Timurid power. With the political decline of the Timurids in the middle of the 9th/15 th century, the initiative in architecture returned to western Persia under the patronage of the Türkmen dynasties. Thanks to Shah Ismā'īl and his successors, the strands were drawn together and a homogeneous style was created and disseminated throughout the Safavid kingdom.

Initiative in public works was with members of the royal house and the high officers of state: many civic undertakings were due to the enterprise of local dignitaries. The religious was the most powerful of motives: for at least in the first half of our period it is only the religious foundations which survive. Apart from the public and private mosque, the madrasa and kbāngāh, the principal effort was concentrated on the embellishment of the great shrines – above all, those of the Imām Ridā at Mashhad and of Shaikh Safī at Ardabīl.

CARPETS

The finest Persian carpets are considered to be those of the Safavid period. There are two possible reasons for this. Either this particular branch of the arts in Iran reached its zenith later than any other, or else the judgment may be explained by the fact that none of the Timurid textiles have been preserved and that their evaluation is therefore based entirely on miniatures, whereas we still possess a wealth of Safavid carpets and fabrics which attest their advanced stage of technical and aesthetic development. The miniatures leave us in no doubt as to the existence of carpets in the Timurid era. Moreover, the finest surviving knotted carpets date back to the early years of the Safavid dynasty and could not have originated spontaneously. References to precious carpets are found as early as the Sasanian period. These, however, will not be dealt with in the present survey, since the evidence does not provide any clear impression of their design or technique.

Timurid carpets

Two types of carpet can be seen in Timurid miniatures, those with geometrical and those with arabesque designs. For an excellent study of these rugs we are indebted to Amy Briggs. The geometrical type is the earlier and forms by far the larger group. The geometrical carpets were replaced towards the end of the 9th/15th century by those with arabesque and floral patterns, the best examples of which are found in miniatures by Bihzād and his school. Bihzād, who lived approximately from 1455 to 1535–6, belonged to the Herat school and in 1522 he was appointed librarian to Shah Ismā'īl I in Tabrīz.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TIMURID ERA

At the time of Tīmūr's death and under his immediate successors the religious situation in Iran was characterised by two complementary processes, which were the primary determinant of – or, minimally, ultimately resulted in - that particular form of religious reality known as Safavid Shi'ism.

The first factor is the great flexibility, bordering on prevarication, displayed by the religious world in fulfilling its cementing function between the political rulers and their subjects in the most disparate alliances between successive sovereigns and the local religious (and administrative) aristocracy, even when the diversity of madhhab professed by the two protagonists would lead one to expect an at least dual missionary activity rather than a day-to-day cooperation. It is true that there was a diversity of madhhab in a slightly broader and more equivocal sense, rather than in that usual connotation of the word which restricts it simply to the canonical schools. But it is indisputable that there was a rapprochement on the concrete plane which occurred at a time when, as all scholars admit, there was a “return” to the myth of the ideal sovereign, a “true Caliph”, and consequently to a renewal of the hope in the advent of a leader in spiritual affairs and so too in religious affairs. This eagerly awaited leader was the Mahdī, a figure who was variously delineated and characterised in the different areas and madhāhib proclaiming and anticipating his coming.

The other decisive factor is a gradual trend towards Shi'ism among the “aberrant” currents of orthodoxy, including sufism, allied with the presence of strong “Twelver” elements in the movements consciously aiming at a centralist outlook, which transcended the traditional divisions of Muslim religious society.