John Mayo recently retired as Professor of Latin American History at the University of the West Indies, Barbados. He is now Visiting Research Fellow in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Corresponding Member of the Instituto de Historia, Academia de Chile and received his D. Phil. in Latin American history from Oxford University. Mayo has published widely in historical journals on the history of Mexico and Chile and is the author of British Merchants and Chilean Development, 1851-1886 (1987) and