Keynote Address at the Annual Meeting South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) New Orleans, 17 April 2009: Crisis and Recovery in Latin America

Keynote Address at the Annual Meeting South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies (SECOLAS) New Orleans, 17 April 2009 CRISIS AND RECOVERY IN LATIN AMERICA Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr. Emeritus Professor of History, Tulane University It is pure delight to be back in New Orleans again and to be reunited with so many friends and colleagues in SECOLAS. It has been a decade since I retired from Tulane, but it is always a joy to return to New Orleans. I am most grateful for your invitation to address you this evening and for the opportunity to share some ideas with you. I experienced personally the devastation that Hurricane Katrina brought to the Gulf Coast, but I also share the happiness of the city’s recovery from that crisis even while lamenting the continued struggle of some segments of the region to come back. The theme of this conference, “Crisis and Recovery in the Americas,” has obvious relevance for this region and was the focus of one of our sessions this morning, but it also brings to mind Arnold Toynbee’s challengeresponse theory of history that he elaborated between 1934 and 1961 in his twelve-volume A Study of History.1 Toynbee evaluated the rise and fall of some twenty-three civilizations over three millennia. Whatever the merits of his broad theories of history – and they have been much criticized by professional historians – his central thesis, that the manner and success with which civilizations meet the inevitable challenges – both external and internal – that they confront determines whether or not that civilization will advance or decline, suggests an interesting way to view crises in many arenas. To some degree refining the earlier cyclical view of history by Oswald Spengler,2 Toynbee rejected the inevitability of cyclical rise and fall of civilizations in favor of his challenge-response theory. If Toynbee had in mind great civilizations, much of what he had to say about cycles of history and challenges and response is applicable to the crises that accompany the rise and fall of national and sub-national units as well. Provinces, cities, institutions, businesses, even families and individuals , all confront crises and their response to these crises influence their destiny. Toynbee argued that in order to respond effectively to external threats, the leader had to reorganize – restructure – his tribe, or group, or C  2009 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 61 The Latin Americanist, June 2009 government if it were to survive. If the leaders made the right decisions and rose to the challenge successfully, the unit would overcome the threat and go on to greater strength. Our own government is faced with exactly such a challenge in the present economic crisis. In the lives of individuals, a traumatic challenge often changes one’s life permanently, forcing it into new directions. My own experience with Hurricane Katrina is one minor example. In the lives of nations, trauma in the same way may alter the course or direction of the history of a nation in irreparable ways. Latin American studies easily offer many crises – minor and major – for examination through the lens of the challenge-response theory. The challenge that pre-Columbian civilizations faced in the Spanish Conquest is an obvious one in which indigenous civilizations were technologically ill-equipped to respond successfully. There are, of course, many others through the five centuries of post-Conquest Latin American history – some of short duration, others of very long term challenge. A recent American Historical Review Forum on “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth-Century” suggests one of the most controversial of those long-term crises among European and Latin American historians.3 As the editor of that forum remarked, “The emergence of capitalism, the development of the modern state, the history of revolts and rebellions, population growth, price history, the question of unequal development – these are just some of the subjects that fell within its purview. In addition, the crisis debate drew upon and stimulated some of the best and most interesting new developments in historical methodology, coming from such disparate quarters as British Marxism, historical sociology, the Annales school, the new social history of the 1960s, modernization theory, historical demography...