The Great Depression in Latin America

Although Latin America weathered the Great Depression better than the United States and Europe, the global economic collapse of the 1930s had a deep and lasting impact on the region. The contributors to this book examine the consequences of the Depression in terms of the role of the state, party-political competition, and the formation of working-class and other social and political movements. Going beyond economic history, they chart the repercussions and policy responses in different countries, while noting common cross-regional trends, in particular, a mounting critique of economic orthodoxy and greater state intervention in the economic, social and cultural spheres, both trends crucial to the region's subsequent development. The book also examines how regional transformations interacted with and differed from global processes. Taken together, these essays deepen our understanding of the Great Depression as a formative experience in Latin America and provide a timely comparative perspective on the recent global economic crisis.

Contributors. Marcelo Bucheli, Carlos Contreras, Paulo Drinot, Jeffrey L. Gould, Roy Hora, Alan Knight, Gillian McGillivray, Luis Felipe Saenz, Angela Vergara, Joel Wolfe, Doug Yarrington

Paulo Drinot is Senior Lecturer in Latin American History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is the author of The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State and editor of Che's Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America, both also published by Duke University Press.

Alan Knight is Professor of the History of Latin America at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Mexico: The Colonial Era; Mexico: From the Beginning to the Spanish Conquest; and The Mexican Revolution (two volumes).