We cannot hope to formulate adequate development theory and policy for the majority of the world's population who suffer from underdevelopment without first learning how their past economic and social history gave rise to their present underdevelopment. Yet most historians study only the developed metropolitan countries and pay scant attention to the colonial and underdeveloped lands. For this reason most of our theoretical categories and guides to development policy have been distilled exclusively from the historical experience of the European and North American advanced capitalist nations.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/download/MR-018-04-1966-08_3/1604

The Development of Underdevelopment

Most work on the relationship between farm size and productivity strongly suggests that farms that rely mostly on family labor are more productive than large farms operated primarily by hired labor. This study began as an inquiry into how rental and sales markets for agricultural land in the developing world affect efficiency and equity. What emerged was the clear sense that great variations in land relations around the world and over time cannot be understood in the common paradigm of property rights and competitive markets. Under that paradigm, land scarcity leads to better definition of rights, which are then traded in sales and rental markets accessible equally to all players. The outcome should be the allocation of land to the most efficient uses and users, yet this rarely happens. Instead, land rights and ownership tend to grow out of power relationships. Landowning groups have used coercion and distortions in land, labor, credit, and commodity markets to extract economic rents from the land, from peasants and workers, and most recently from urban consumer groups or taxpayers. Such rent-seeking activities reduce the efficiency of resource use, retard growth, and increase the poverty of the rural population. The authors examine how these power relations emerged and what legal means enabled relatively few landowners to accumulate and hold on to large landholdings. The authors discuss the successes and failures of reform in market and socialist economies, and the perversions of reforms in both systems, manifested in large commercial farms and collectives. They survey the history of land relations and the legacies that history leaves. They discuss the three analytical controversies surrounding economies of scale, and the efficiency of the land sales and land rental market. They discuss the main policy issues and implications of various distortions and successful and unsuccessful reforms in the developing world, including land registration and titling, land taxation, regulations restricting land sales and rentals, fragmentation and consolidation of land, redistributive land reform, and decollectivization. In an epilogue on methodology, the authors examine how various strands of economic theory have contributed, or failed to contribute, to the explanation of variations in policies, distortions, and land relations over space and time.

Power, distortions, revolt, and reform in agricultural land relations

Much of the debate on cultural memory has been shaped by the view, commonly held if not universal, that remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing. But this assumption is not self-evidently true. This article seeks, therefore, to disentangle the different types of acts that cluster together under the single term `to forget'. I suggest that we can distinguish at least seven types: repressive erasure; prescriptive forgetting; forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity; structural amnesia; forgetting as annulment; forgetting as planned obsolescence; forgetting as humiliated silence.

Seven types of forgetting

This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus's arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America. Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires' processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

A S ANTHROPOLOGY has become increasingly concerned with the study of modern communities, anthropologists have paid increasing attention to the social and cultural characteristics of the peasantry. It will be the purpose of this article to draw up a tentative typology of peasant groups for Latin America, as a basis for further field work and discussion. Such a typology will of necessity raise more questions than can be answered easily at the present time. To date, anthropologists working in Latin America have dealt mainly with groups with "Indian" cultures, and available anthropological literature reflects this major interest. Any projected reorientation of inquiry from typologies based mainly on characteristics of culture content to typologies based on similarities or dissimilarities of structure has implications with which no single writer could expect to cope. This article is therefore provisional in character, and its statements wholly open to discussion. There have been several recent attempts to draw a line between primitives and peasants. Redfield, for example, has discussed the distinction in the following words (1953:31):

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1955.57.3.02a00050

Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion

As Western Europe expanded its empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it came to dominate many peoples, especially in America, whose cultures and legal systems differed dramatically from its own The resulting conflicts of both law and custom posed difficult problems: How could these conflicting laws and customs be adjusted within a common political administration? And, in particular, how could legal remedy be provided for groups of lesser political weight? Woodrow Borah vividly depicts one of the more unusual institutions that arose in response to these problems-the General Indian Court of New Spain In what is today Mexico, the conquering Spaniards had at first attempted to preserve such Indian customs as were deemed not contrary to reason or Christianity However, as interpreted by Spanish judges, so much turned out to be "contrary" to these standards that native customs were soon recast in largely Spanish norms At the same time, the conquered Indians discovered the uses of the Spanish courts, unleashing a flood of litigation The ensuing social and economic upheaval sparked great concern among Spanish administrators and jurists The result was the establishment of the General Indian Court, a remarkably innovative special jurisdiction vested in the viceroy and corps of legal aides Expenses were paid from a small contribution by each Indian family-in effect, legal insurance Woodrow Borah analyzes the kinds of cases that came before this court, the decisions it reached, and the policies underlying these decisions He enriches this study by examining the separate but parallel structures in the Yucatan peninsula and on the seigneurial estate of Hernan Cortes, and by comparing the General Indian Court to the tribunals of Guadalajara, which had no similar special arrangements The development of the General Indian Court and the relation of the legal aides to their Indian clients and to other lawyers form a complicated story of both service and exploitation and contribute an important chapter to the history of colonial Mexico

Woodrow Borah

Papers

Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real

Essays in population history: Mexico and the Caribbean

The aboriginal population of central Mexico on the eve of the Spanish conquest

New Spain's century of depression

Early Colonial Trade and Navigation Between Mexico and Peru