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

New Spain's century of depression

The Development of Underdevelopment

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

/pdf/sajcabaja-muerte-y-resurreccion-de-un-pueblo-de-guatemala-azyq8jmvvu.pdf

Sajcabajá, muerte y resurrección de un pueblo de Guatemala

Introduction Among historians—as distinguished from administrators and writers on political arithmetic, both of whom were concerned with the present rather than the past—interest in demographic data was slow in arising. As late as 1764 Voltaire found it necessary to admonish his fellow-historians to pay more attention to questions of population. ‘On exige’, he wrote in his programmatic article ‘Histoire’ ( Dictionnaire philosophique ), ‘des historiens modernes plus de details,…des dates precises,….plus d'attention a la population.’ Few modern historians, presumably, will demur at Voltaire's injunction; but most of us would protest that, in the field of population at least, his demand for ‘ details’ and ‘ dates precises’ is difficult to meet. Indeed, the historian who undertakes to trace the demographic development of Europe in the early modern period has more than once occasion to recall Professor See's emphatic disclaimer, ‘Nous n'en savons rien et nous n'en pouvons rien savoir.’ Even if he does not fully subscribe to this declaration the historian of early modern population cannot fail to recognize that his task is formidable. Admittedly, the period to be covered is no longer innocent of statistical inquisitiveness. What seems to be the oldest reference to a count of ‘hearths’ ( focaticum ) dates from 1092; and Italian cities, no less precocious in this respect than in so many others, are known occasionally to have collected quasi-demographic intelligence as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the eve of the modern era enumerations of one sort or another had long since ceased to be a novel feature of public administration, though it was only in sixteenth-century Italy (in Venice, on the island of Sicily, and a little later in Tuscany) that census-like data would be gathered as a matter of routine.

New Spain's century of depression

Citations

The Development of Underdevelopment

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

Types of Latin American Peasantry: A Preliminary Discussion

Sajcabajá, muerte y resurrección de un pueblo de Guatemala

The Population of Europe from the Black Death to the Eve of the Vital Revolution

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