This study examines the history of the sugar economy and the peculiar development of plantation society over a three hundred year period in Bahia, a major sugar plantation zone and an important terminus of the Atlantic slave trade. Drawing on little-used archival sources, plantations accounts, and notarial records, Professor Schwartz has examined through both quantitative and qualitative methods the various groups that made up plantation society. While he devotes much attention to masters and slaves, he views slavery ultimately as part of a larger structure of social and economic relations....

Uruguay was once the most stable democracy in Latin America, but in 1973 the military seized power for the first time. Political parties did not disappear, however, even though they were made illegal. By the 1980s Uruguay's generals were anxious to find a way to withdraw from power. Yet they continued to insist on certain guarantees as the price for holding elections. The issue of whether to make any concessions to the military came to divide the country's three major parties--the Blancos, the Colorados, and the Left. Nevertheless, the latter two parties eventually did agree to a pact in July...

This book examines the relationship between indigenous populations in the north-central highlands of Ecuador and disease, especially those infections introduced by Europeans during the sixteenth century. Disease, of course, existed in the Americas long before 1500. But just as native societies resisted and eventually adapted to European conquest, so too did they adapt to Old World pathogens. Just as the responses of Indian communities to the economic and political demands of Spaniards varied over time, so too did the immunological responses of indigenous populations change over generations....

This book examines the characteristics of political power in the cities of the colonial Spanish Empire between the 1740s and 1780s, based on a detailed study of the mining city of Oruro in Alto Peru (present-day Bolivia), emphasizing the workings of the judicial system and the role of the bureaucracy. Toward the end of this period, the analysis focuses on the Indian uprisings of the 1780s (the rebellions of Tupac Amaru) and the reasons that led to the alliances or confrontations between the actors of the distinct bands, whether white or Indian.

This book is the first to describe the role of business interest groups, also known as pressure groups, in the development of Brazil during the nineteenth century. Business interest groups strongly affected the modernization and prosperity of agriculture, the pace of industrialization, and patterns of communications. The commercial associations, the most important of business interest groups, also may be seen as institutions through which ties of dependency to better-developed nations overseas were maintained.

This book analyzes the relationship between Peronism and the Argentine working class from the foundation of the Peronist movement in the mid 1940s to the overthrow of Peron's widow in 1976. It presents an account of such crucial issues as the role of the Peronist union bureaucracy and the impact of the Peronist ideology on workers. Drawing on a variety of untapped sources, Daniel James confronts many of the dominant myths that have surrounded the movement. He argues that its role in containing working-class militancy cannot be explained solely in terms of manipulation, corruption, or union...

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 of the yearly movement of slave prices and changes in the demographic characteristics of the slave market. Incorporating over 30,000 slave transactions from three separate locations in Cuba--Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos--this work comprises the largest extant database on any slave market in the Americas.

This volume examines the impact of public policy on the long-term socioeconomic development of the Kingdom of Quito (now modern Ecuador) from 1690 to 1830. This study focuses on how state policy contributed to these profound socioeconomic changes in the kingdom from the onset of the demographic and economic crises of the 1690s to the culmination of the independence movements in 1830. This examination of the Kingdom of Quito explores a fundamental but often ignored historical question: how did the colonial and early republican states contribute to shaping the political economy of Spanish...

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...

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...