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.
