While many scholars have been interested in the size of the Indian population of the Americas at the time of first contact with Europeans, this book, first published in 1982, was the first to make a thorough examination of the question. Focusing on Peru, Professor Cook estimates population size on the basis of archaeology, carrying capacity of the agricultural systems, disease mortality, depopulation ratios, and census projection. He also analyses the catastrophic population decline that resulted from contact with Europeans, and compares this experience with that of the coastal region and the...

In this case study of the structure of power and ruling class domination, the author analyzes the political economy of Juazeiro, Bahia, and Petrolina, Pernambuco while focusing on the history of patriarchal families, ruling class, and patrimonial governments. He shows that the ruling classes benefited from the outside capital of the State and corporations, but that the State is an all pervasive force that facilitates the reproduction of advanced forms of capital. An essential issue is how the local ruling class relates to the State and national and multinational capital, for it is clear that...

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 most have disregarded how resources were intentionally organized to enable growth. This book focuses on the economic organizations that led the growth process--the estancias. Economic growth and increased freedom were not inevitable on the pampas, but rather the consequences of human actions in the search for profit. Why freedom, not privilege, prevailed is the key question underlying this...

Michael Snodgrass explores how workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped determine the outcome of Mexico's revolution over a sixty-year period. His study begins with Monterrey's emergence as one of Latin-America's preeminent industrial cities and home to Mexico's most powerful business group. Snodgrass explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. This book offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico overshadowed...

In this work, Roberto Cortes Conde describes and explains the decline of the Argentine economy in the 20th century, its evolution, and its consequences. At the beginning of the century, the economy grew at a sustained rate, a modern transport system united the country, a massive influx of immigrants populated the land and education expanded, leading to a dramatic fall in illiteracy. However, by the second half of the century, growth not only stalled, but a dramatic reversal occurred, and the perspectives in the median and long term turned negative, and growth eventually collapsed. This work...

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...

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...

Postcolonial histories have long emphasized the darker side of narratives of historical progress, especially their role in underwriting global and racial hierarchies. Concepts like primitiveness, backwardness, and underdevelopment not only racialized and gendered peoples and regions, but also ranked them on a seemingly naturalized timeline - their 'present' is our 'past' - and reframed the politics of capitalist expansion and colonization as an orderly, natural process of evolution towards modernity. Our Time is Now reveals that modernity particularly appealed to those excluded from power,...

This book provides the first detailed analysis of the evolving concept of corruption in colonial Mexico. Drawing on fresh archival material from historical, legal, religious, and political documents, Christoph Rosenmuller explores the enigma of corruption, its meanings, and its temporal differences.

In the sixty years following the Spanish conquest, indigenous communities in central Mexico suffered the equivalent of three Black Deaths, a demographic catastrophe that prompted them to rebuild under the aegis of Spanish missions. Where previous histories have framed this process as an epochal spiritual conversion, The Mexican Mission widens the lens to examine its political and economic history, revealing a worldly enterprise that both remade and colonized Mesoamerica. The mission exerted immense temporal power in struggles over indigenous jurisdictions, resources, and people. Competing...