Latin America in the Middle Period, 1750-1929

Book excerpt: The customary division of Latin American history into colonial and modern periods has come into question recently. This new book demonstrates that there was a middle period in Latin America's historical evolution since the European Conquest-one no longer colonial, but not yet modern-which has left a legacy in its own right for contemporary Latin America. This volume is a narrative text on Latin America's "long nineteenth century," from the period of Imperial Reforms in the late eighteenth century up to the Great Depression. Incorporating local and regional studies from the last three decades which have profoundly broadened and altered customary views about Latin America, the book is a synthesis of this "Middle Period." Latin America in the Middle Period re-evaluates the relation between subsistence and market production in the post-independence economy, stressing regional diversity. It also re-evaluates the mechanics of politics, which customarily have been seen as liberal-conservative, caudillo-oligarchy, region-nation, and merchant-landowner-industrialist. The text discusses the acceleration of the forces of modernization, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the beginnings of a national ordering of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which eroded the fabric of Middle Period society, a process consummated in the aftermath of world depression in the 1930s, ushering in modern Latin America. This new volume is an excellent resource for courses in nineteenth-century Latin American history and the second half of Latin American history survey.