Colonialism and Postcolonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective (review)

It has always been difficult to bridge the methodological gap between history and the "harder" social sciences, yet often the most stimulating and innovative perspectives in our analysis of human society have emerged at the boundaries between fields. James Mahoney's book is a good example of both the difficulties and the potential innovation of this epistemological encounter. By offering a historically grounded analysis of how two forms of colonialism, which he calls "mercantilist" and "liberal," interacted across space and time with specific host societies to generate distinct and enduring levels of postcolonial economic and social development, he speaks to scholars on both sides of the methodological divide. At the same time, because he assigns different roles in his analysis to the work of historians vs. sociologists, economists and political theorists, the dialogue is not as successful as it might have been.

As a professor of Modern Latin American history, who has regularly taught the modern surveys, I have often puzzled over the question with which Mahoney begins his analysis: why is it that the regions considered peripheral to the Spanish empire emerge so often, after Independence, as the most dynamic? The answer he provides, which combines the timing and characteristics of the colonial presence with an analysis of the preexisting societies and resource possibilities in each subregion, is stimulating. As an early mercantilist empire, Spain was attracted to regions that held the promise of rapid accumulation and profit. These regions combined easily accessible resources with a settled indigenous population that could be readily transformed into a labor force. The social and political structures that emerged in such areas were hierarchical and monopoly-oriented. By contrast, peripheral areas did not have the necessary combination of resources and indigenous labor and thus remained lightly incorporated into Spain's mercantilistic system. Thus, when conditions changed in the second half of the 18^th century and liberalism became ever more dominant throughout Europe, including Spain, the tables were turned and the regions earlier overlooked became more dynamic, most notably because they did not have the embedded mercantilist institutions that impeded entrepreneurial activity.

Though initially intriguing, the contrast between mercantilistic and liberal colonialisms is, to my taste, too rigidly drawn and applied. Despite the complication of the framework through the addition of notions of periphery and semiperiphery, as well as the care taken to analyze different case studies, the very exercise of building a model that is both quantifiable and broadly applicable tends to oversimplify the nature of the phenomena being described. One potential drawback is that the categories themselves have the tendency to become explanations. As a result, one gets the impression that liberalism simply emerges as a progressive form in Europe that is inherently more conducive to economic and social development, and that the areas in the colonial world that get a more direct exposure to its ideas and institutions have a better chance of developing economically and perhaps socially as well.

Can we draw the arrow of causation so clearly and unequivocally? This is, of course, a historian's question, but for that very reason I think it is relevant here. For several decades now historians have been asking it in a variety of forms. Perhaps best known among these are the members of the Subaltern Studies School, most recently Dipesh Chakravarty in Provincializing Europe. But similar questions have been dogging historical debate for quite some time: in our comparative assessments of world-systems factors and local conditions for an understanding of economic underdevelopment, in our debates about the nature and meaning of nation-state formation. In relation to Spain itself, historians have also wondered if mercantilism was not, in many ways, a creation of colonialism itself, rather than the other way around. By resuscitating the binary between mercantilism and liberalism, and by identifying liberal economics so closely with entrepreneurial activity and economic development, Mahoney takes us back toward a historicist and linear understanding of "first in Europe, then elsewhere" that...