The Cambridge History of Latin America is a large-scale, collaborative, multi-volume history of Latin America during the five centuries from the first contacts between Europeans and the native peoples of the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the present.

Latin America: Economy and Society Since 1930 brings together seven chapters from The Cambridge History of Latin America Volume VI, Parts 1 and 2, to provide in a single ‘student edition’ a comprehensive survey of economic and social change in Latin America since 1930. The authors trace the histories of: demographic change (Latin America's population increased fourfold, from n o million to 450 million, between 1930 and 1990); the Latin American economies – from the aftermath of the 1929 Depression, to the Second World War, to the ‘Golden Age’ of economic growth (1950 to 1980), largely driven by import substitution industrialization (ISI), followed by a decline in the so-called ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s; rapid urbanization (less than 20 percent of Latin America's population was classified as urban in 1930, and almost 70 percent in 1990) and urban social change; the transformation of agrarian structures; and the development of state organization and the social and economic roles of the state. Each chapter is accompanied by a bibliographical essay.