During the eighteenth century the Bajio emerged from its frontier condition to become the pace-maker of the Mexican economy. Silver mining boomed and population increased rapidly. It is the aim of this book to examine the impact of these dramatic changes on the structure of agricultural production and the pattern of rural society. In his Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico 1763–1810 (Cambridge Latin American Studies 10) Dr Grading demonstrated how the local entrepreneurial elite accumulated vast fortunes during the mining bonanza at Guanajuato. In this present work he describes how many of the same men invested their capital in the purchase and improvement of haciendas in the nearby district of Leon. The countryside was transformed as wasteland was cleared for ploughing, or was irrigated.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires was one of the major commercial entrepots of the Spanish American empire. Chief among the beneficiaries of the new prosperity of the area were the wholesale merchants, a group of men who came to control the commerce of the entire Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata. This study, a contribution to the fields of social history and group biography, looks at the formation of the merchant group, and at the social patterns which assured the merchants' primacy in the economic and social life of the colony. Origin, education, recruitment, group perpetuation and social mobility are treated in depth. The role of women and marriage in recruiting individual merchants into mercantile families and clans is a central issue. Professor Socolow also looks at the merchants' roles in commerce and society, lay religious institutions and local government. A biography of one merchant, Gaspar de Santa Coloma, provides a case study of the multiple roles of a porteno merchant.

There has been considerable controversy amongst social and economic historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, political scientists and other specialists concerning the nature and structure of Latin American agrarian society. An increasing number of studies have come to challenge the traditionally accepted view that the backwardness of rural Latin America and its resistance to 'modernisation' are due to the persistence of feudal or non-feudal forms of social and economic organisation. Instead attention has shifted to an examination of the social and economic dislocations resulting from attempts to impose capitalist forms of agrarian enterprise on peasant or pre-capitalist societies. This book of essays by an international group of scholars represents a substantial empirical contribution to the ongoing debate. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in the field, but also to anyone wishing to understand the historical processes underlying contemporary Latin America's complex land tenure and rural employment problems.

This book is an abridgement and translation of Guillermo Lora's five-volume history. It deals with the strengthening and radicalisation of Bolivia's organised labour movement, which culminated in the drastic revolutionary changes of the 1950s. The first half offers a reinterpretation of Bolivian history in the century preceding the revolution, viewed from the perspective of the working class. The second half discusses in more detail the major political events and doctrinal issues of a period in which the author, as secretary of the Trotskyist Partido Obrero Revolucionario, himself frequently played an active part. Despite the radical upheaval that occurred in the fifties and the mobilisation of broad sectors of the population around such radical objectives as direct property seizures, union-nominated ministers and union, military and worker control, the labour movement was unable to maintain its conquests in the 1960s. The concluding chapters describe the period of renewed military repression and the continuing efforts of the labour movement to resist.

Since its first appearance in Brazil in 1949, Victor Nunes Leal's Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto, here entitled Coronelismo: the Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil, has come to be recognized as a classic analysis of the system that emerges from 'the superimposition of structural forms evolved through the representative process on an inadequate social and economic structure'. The text is here published without any substantial change or addition, according to the author's wish. His insights and approach remain as suggestive as when they first appeared; as Barbosa Lima Sobrinho pointed out in the preface to the second Brazilian edition, the work is not only the analysis of a structure, but the record of that structure and of the arguments about it at a certain time, a record important in itself. Its place in the development of political analysis in Brazil is set out in Alberto Venancio Filho's introduction: 'a divide in the history of political science in Brazil... the first landmark of the study of politics in our Universities'. The work is recognized everywhere as an essential text for the student of that country.

This is an introductory survey of the history and recent development of Latin American economy and society from colonial times to the establishment of the military regime in Chile. In the second edition the historical perspective has been enlarged and important events since the Cuban Revolution, such as the agrarian reforms of Peru and Chile, the difficulties of the Central America Common Market and LAFTA, the acceleration of industrialisation in Brazil and the consolidation of the Cuban economy, are discussed. The statistical information has been extended to the early 1970s and the demographic data to 1975.

The Cristero movement is an essential part of the Mexican Revolution. When in 1926 relations between Church and state, old enemies and old partners, eventually broke down, when the churches closed and the liturgy was suspended, Rome, Washington and Mexico, without ever losing their heads, embarked upon a long game of chess. These years were crucial, because they saw the setting up of the contemporary political system. The state established its omnipotence, supported by a bureaucratic apparatus and a strong privileged class. Just at the moment when the state thought that it was finally supreme, at the moment at which it decided to take control of the Church, the Cristero movement arose, a spontaneous mass movement, particularly of peasants, unique in its spread, its duration, and its popular character. For obvious reasons, the existing literature has both denied its reality and slandered it.

This 1976 book consists of the public and private letters of merchants which present a lively panorama of early life in Spanish-American society.

This study is concerned with the forty-year period before 1930, when Argentina experienced rapid economic and social growth broken only by the First World War. The Radical Civic Union appeared in the 1912 elections and in 1916 its leader, Hipolito Yrigoyen, became President. Dr Rock discusses the origins and course of this experiment in representative government, and the distribution of power and political benefits under the new system in the light of the society created by the growth of the primary export economy: how it came about that the established political elite ceded control to the Radicals; whom they represented and towards which groups they directed their attentions. The work also deals with the methods of organization and mobilization used by them in a complex urban environment to develop and uphold their political support. It examines in some detail the class conflicts of the wartime period, the strikes whereby the workers sought to guard against the erosion of their wages by inflation, and the counter-mobilization of elite and middle-class groups, most notably in the bloody 'Tragic Week' of 1919.

An analysis of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Cuba, a society with a large black population the majority of which was held in slavery but which also included considerable numbers of freedmen. Dr Martinez-Alier uses as her main source of evidence the records in Havana of administrative and judicial proceedings of cases in which parents opposed a marriage, of cases involving elopement, and of cases of interracial marriage. Dr Martinez-Alier develops a model of the relation between sexual values and social inequality. She considers the importance of the value of virginity in supporting the hierarchy of Cuban society, based on ascription rather than achievement. As a consequence of the high evaluation of virginity, elopement was often a successful means of overcoming parental dissent to an unequal marriage. However, in cases of interracial elopement, the seduced coloured woman had little chance of redress through marriage. In this battle of the sexes and the races, the free coloured women and men played roles and acquired values which explain why matrifocality became characteristic of black free families.

An examination of silver mining and society in Colonial Mexico in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating upon Zacatecas, the centre of the principal silver-mining region. In the first half of the book, the author describes the discovery of the mines, the establishment of the town, its role in the northward advance of the Spanish occupation of Mexico, its administration, and the sources of its supplies of essential food and materials. The remainder of the book is devoted to an analysis of the mining industry of the Zacatecas district. The author discusses techniques, labour and raw materials. He also provides statistics for silver production, suggesting reasons for their fluctuation, and explores sources of capital for the industry. Based on detailed study of archives in both Spain and Mexico, Dr Bakewell is able to provide an entirely new chronology for the development of Zacatecas and the Mexican maining industry up to 1700.

The province of Oaxaca in southern Mexico was one of the main sources of Spanish wealth during the colonial period. The largely indigenous population supplied dyes and cotton for the Spanish merchants trading both with Spain and within Mexico itself. Much of the trade was conducted in violation of the Laws of the Indies and the royal decrees. The present study traces the struggles of the Spanish Metropolitan Government and the local episcopal authorities in Oaxaca to secure observation of the law. The effects of the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms and of the Mexican Independence movement of 1810–21 are discussed. Brian Hamnett has based his study on archival sources in Seville and Mexico and provides statistical information in both the text and appendices. In addition the author has supplied detailed information concerning individuals - administrators, merchants, landowners, clerics - involved in politics and commerce.

When at the beginning of the nineteenth century Britain launched her crusade against the transatlantic slave trade, Brazil was one of the greatest importers of African slaves in the New World. Negro slavery had been the cornerstone of the Brazilian economy and of Brazilian society for over 200 years and the slave population of Brazil required regular replenishment through the trade. In this detailed study Dr Bethell explains how during the period of Brazilian independence from Portugal, Britain forced the Brazilian slave trade to be declared illegal, why it proved impossible to suppress it for twenty years afterwards and how it was finally abolished. He covers a major aspect of the history of the international abolition of the slave trade and slavery and makes an important contribution to the study of Anglo-Brazilian relations which were dominated - and damaged - by the slave trade question for more than half a century.

This is a detailed study of British influence in Brazil as a theme within the larger story of modernization. The British were involved at key points in the initial stages of modernization. Their hold upon the import–export economy tended to slow down industrialization, and there were other areas in which their presence acted as a brake upon Brazilian modernization. But the British also fostered change. British railways provided primary stimulus to the growth of coffee exports, and since the British did not monopolize coffee production, a large proportion of the profits remained in Brazilian hands for other uses. Furthermore, the burgeoning coffee economy shattered traditional economic, social and political relationships, opening up the way for other areas of growth. The British role was not confined to economic development. They also contributed to the growth of 'a modern world-view'. Spencerianism and the idea of progress, for instance, were not exotic and meaningless imports, but an integral part of the transformation Brazil was experiencing.

The Juzgado de Capellanias was the most important fiscal institution within the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. It operated in each diocese as a type of bank, receiving clerical revenues from various sources and investing them by way of loans at interest. The Roman Catholic Church in Mexico was both a cause and a victim of the political and economic chaos of this period. The liberals alleged that the concentration of much of the country's wealth in the hands of the clerical corporations hindered the political and economic progress of the nation. The clergy argued that they utilized much of their property and capital to the direct benefit of both society and the economy. Dr Costeloe examines these different views in relation to the Juzgado in Mexico. He discusses its complex internal administration, skilled employees, sources of revenue and the procedure for obtaining loans from it. Since the borrower was obliged to guarantee repayment of his loan by offering a property as security, the Church, through the Juzgado as creditor, gained control of the mortgaged property. Dr Costeloe analyses the effects of this investment and subsequent control of real estate via the clergy. In the final section, the author discusses the relations between the Juzgado and the State.