Between a Rock and a Softer Place: Reflections on Some Recent Economic History of Latin America

Business History In Latin America: The Experience Of Seven Countries. Edited by Carlos Dávila and Rory Miller. (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Pp. 241. $19.95 paper.)

Historia Del Banco De Mexico: Vol. II, 1940-1946. By Eduardo Turrent Díaz. (Mexico, D.F.: Banco de México, 2000. Pp. 419. $35.00 paper.)

La Industria Textil En Mexico. By Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato, coordinador. (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Mora, Colegio de Michoácan; Colegio de México; Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999, Pp. 269.)

Institutions And Investment: The Political Basis Of Industrialism In Mexico Before 1911. By Edward Beatty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 296. $ 55.00 cloth.)

The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes In Central America. By James Mahoney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. 396. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Prebisch Y Furtado: El Estructuralismo Latinoamericano. Edited by Jorge Lora and Carlos Mallorquín. (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1999. Pp. 307.)

Once upon a time, economic history was the Queen of Latin American studies. The age of economic history was the 1970s to mid-1980s, a two-decade idyll when practically all the budding Latin Americanist social science disciplines came together around interdisciplinary and historically based economics as a core research program. Economic history bridged the space between the "hard" and "soft" social sciences, girded by an intellectual alliance between social and economic historians. Economic history raised a big tent, methodologically and politically speaking, almost as broad as the project of Latin American studies itself.

Among academic historians, the rising social-history model was then in vogue, with its methods and topics informed by "underlying" economic structures and motives, building upon French and English styles of history writing. Class formation, labor history, land tenure, demography, production cycles, and relations of social groups were major arenas of research. Typical dissertations from the era sported Weberian titles like "Economy and Society in Río de las Pulgas." Marxism, at its 1970s heyday, virtually hegemonic in Latin American universities, and thriving abroad, provided its followers a serious (if sometimes too serious) commitment to historical materialism. Newer currents of neo-Marxism allowed historians and other social scientists to combine economic, social, and political analyses, in sophisticated ways that befit Latin America's socially embedded economies. Debates around the historical nature of Latin American capitalism, its ruling classes, and modes of production and reproduction stirred a wave of innovative research. Starting in the late 1960s, a small group of U.S. historians were tooling up on the "New Economic History," which used quantifiable and/or theoretical constructs from neoclassical economics for analyzing economic change. Some problems (such as the historical impact of railways) were applied successfully to Latin American contexts; its early enthusiasts added this to the eclectic toolbox of fellow economic historians. Grand sociology cast an eye towards the determinants of Latin American industrialism and authoritarianism and to shifting urban or rural social structures, problematics with long tap roots in history and economics. Political scientists toyed with a variety of macro and comparative approaches, often drawing upon or dissenting from the "modernization" paradigm, which was itself extracted from interpretations of European economic history. Anthropology, moving from ethnographic foundations, welcomed the holistic "political economy" approach to forgotten peoples of Latin Americanist pioneers like Eric Wolfe and Sidney Mintz, or joined neo-Marxist debates on peasant economies, like peers in rural sociology.

Economics was a broader and more historicized field than defined by today's North American university model. Development was a primary concern, and many American and European economists (or both, as in the formidable case of Albert O. Hirschman) worked in dialogue with the thriving Latin American "structuralists." Indeed, the general fascination with Latin American economic history in the 1960s...