Simon Collier examines the formative period of the Chilean republic's history. He combines an analysis of the ideas and assumptions of the Chilean political class with a narrative of the political pro
Much of the so-called Age of Santa Anna in the history of independent Mexico remains a mystery and no decade is less well understood than the years from 1835 to 1846. In 1834, the ruling elite of midd
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires underwent rapid economic growth. Previous studies have focused on the economy as a whole, or on a particular segment of the population; and
Buenos Aires is Argentina's national capital and largest city. This book describes the development of the city during the period from 1910 to the early 1940s. It focuses on the role of politics and
Founded in 1891, the Unión Cívica Radical, generally known as the Radical Party, is the oldest national political party in Argentina. As the strongest opposition party during the 1890s, a pivotal deca
This volume presents a quantitative study of Cuban slavery from the late eighteenth century until 1880, the year slavery was formally abolished on the island. The core of this study is an examination
In 1823 and 1824, the newly independent government of Mexico entered the international capital market, raising two loans in London totaling £6.4 million. Intended to cover a variety of expenses, the loans fell into default by 1827 and remained in default until 1887. This case study explores how the loan process worked in Mexico in the early nineteenth century, when foreign lending was still a novelty, and the unexpected ways in which international debt could influence politics and policy. The history of the loans, the efforts of successive governments in Mexico to resume repayment, and the efforts of the foreign lenders to recover their investment became one of the most significant, persistent, and contentious, if largely misunderstood, issues in the political and financial history of nineteenth-century Mexico. The loans themselves became entangled in partisan politics in Mexico and abroad, especially in Great Britain and France, and were a fertile source of speculation for a wide rang
Islanders and Empire examines the role smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. With a rare focus on local peoples and communities, the book analyzes how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. By co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island, residents could take advantage of, and even dominate, the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they altered the course of the European inter-imperial struggles in the Caribbean by limiting, redirecting, or suppressing the Spanish crown's policies, thus taking control of their destinies and that of their neighbors in Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish empire in the region.
The great many shrines of New Spain have become long-lived sites of shared devotion and contestation across social groups. They have provided a lasting sense of enchantment, of divine immanence in the present, and a hunger for epiphanies in daily life. This is a story of consolidation and growth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than one of rise and decline in the face of early stages of modernization. Based on research in a wide array of manuscript and printed primary sources, and informed by recent scholarship in art history, religious studies, anthropology, and history, this is the first comprehensive study of shrines and miraculous images in any part of early modern Latin America.
This book surveys Argentina's development from the establishment of the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata within the Spanish-American empire to the building of the first railways in the independent nation. Two aspects of Argentina's development receive special attention. First, the author examines the international markets for Argentina's products, taking into account the industrial revolution then under way in Europe and the United States. Second, he discusses the influence of traditional native technology on Argentine production and transport. In addition to describing commercial development at the port of Buenos Aires, the study discusses the expansion of ranching and farming onto the virgin pampas. Although the prosperity of Buenos Aires was not duplicated in the interior provinces, the export trade did permit commercial recovery from depression and civil war throughout Argentina. The author concludes that the conventional dependent or neo-colonial theory of Latin American
This is both a specific study of conversion in a corner of the Spanish Empire, and a work with implications for the understanding of European domination and native resistance throughout the colonial world. Dr Clendinnen explores the intensifying conflict between competing and increasingly divergent Spanish visions of Yucatan and its destructive outcomes. She seeks to penetrate the ways of thinking and feeling of the Mayan Indians in a detailed reconstruction of their assessment of the intruders.
Originally published in 1985, this book is concerned with the housing and service needs of the poor in Latin America and how they are articulated and satisfied. It examines the aims and implementation of government policies towards low-income housing dwellers and tries to relate those policies to the wider interests of the state. It discusses how the poor perceive the constraints on barrio servicing and improvement, their involvement in community organisations and the role the community and its leaders play in influencing state action. Since housing and servicing issues directly impinge on the interests of politicians, bureaucrats, landowners and real-estate developers, as well as on those of the poor, patterns of provision mirror closely the nature of the relationships between the poor and the wider urban society. The main theme of this book is thus the allocation of resources within urban society and the operation of political and administrative power at city level. The book will
From 1958 to 1986, Colombian politics were characterised by a series of coalition governments. This book analyses the historical antecedents, establishment and subsequent evolution of the political regime created in 1958. For most of this period, the country was governed by a National Front power-sharing system between the Conservatives and the Liberals, the country's two major parties. This system was initially established to prevent a return to the intense violence between the parties that had earlier led to a political breakdown and military rule. In crucial respects, the Colombian governing arrangement was similar to a number of other cases of coalition governments (termed consociational democracies), to which it is compared in the book.
