In 1968, in an article prepared for the American Historical Association Ad Hoc Committee on Quantitative Data (but not published until 1972), I discussed materials, opportunities, problems, and priorities for quantitative research in Latin American colonial history. Specifically, that article included a discussion of the evolution of quantitative studies on colonial Hispanic America, a description of the data available, possible topics for research, opinions on the future of quantification in the field, and an extensive bibliography. The present article is intended to complement that earlier piece—to discuss new factors giving impetus to quantitative history, to list some of the major contributions since 1968 in Latin American colonial history, to revise some old views, and to offer some new suggestions.

This report on the special sessions of Latin American historical demography, at the XLI International Congress of Americanists in Mexico City (2-7 September 1974), was prepared to present some current trends and research methods in the field. The sessions, held at the National Museum of Anthropology on 5-6 September, were preceded by an informal meeting of the participants at which the presentation and discussion of papers was organized. Elsa Malvido, coordinator of the special sessions, opened it with a few brief words of welcome.

War and revolution are the cataclysmic events of our age which affect man and society more profoundly than any other human phenomenon. In Russia and China war brought revolution. Today, in an age of competitive ideologies and competitive nuclear armament, men fear that revolution will lead to war.

The global conflicts that have wracked Eurasia in this century have not touched Latin America directly. The only international conflict of roughly comparable intensity was the Chaco War (1932–1936) in which hostilities were confined to two small powers, Bolivia and Paraguay. Bolivia's defeat was part of a train of events that lead directly to the Revolution of 1952.

The extensive post-1973 literature analyzing and comparing national energy policies across countries has generally excluded Cuba, purportedly because of the unavailability of appropriate data. As a result, very little serious work has been carried out assessing Cuba's current energy balances and the efficacy of its policies in adjusting to the new global energy situation. While it is incontrovertible that available official Cuban energy data are weak, it can be argued that, when supplemented with data from other sources and with reasonable estimates, they can serve as the basis for tentative analysis of energy policies. This note attempts to lay the groundwork for such future analyses by bringing together and evaluating energy supply and consumption data covering the first two decades of revolutionary government. While the emphasis is on the period 1959–78, pre-1959 data are introduced when appropriate in an effort to put recent trends in historical perspective. The first section focuses on primary energy production and considers the contribution of commercial and noncommercial sources to domestic energy supply. In the second section, imports of primary energy products are considered and their role in total energy supply evaluated. The last section examines tentatively some aspects of Cuban energy consumption and attempts to relate consumption patterns to policies that were in effect during the period.

The military coup that put an end to the government of Salvador Allende terminated a socialist experiment that drew considerable world attention. It also marked the demise of one of the most durable liberal democracies. Deviating sharply from the prevalent Third World pattern of political instability, Chile was able to establish a viable constitutional system by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the dominant feature of Chilean politics became its political system composed of strong party organizations spanning the ideological spectrum. This was unique in Latin America. Though parties have been banned by the ruling military junta, and the parties of the left have been subject to violent repression, there is little doubt that Chilean party politics will continue to draw the attention of political analysts. The study of the evolution of political patterns in a Third World country, which are strikingly similar to those of France and Italy, should contribute to our understanding of phenomena such as political participation, the historicity of party alternatives, and the social bases of party politics in polarized societies. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the Chilean party system before the coup will help to clarify the conditions that led to the breakdown, and, more importantly, the prospects for party politics in the future.

Note: I presented the original version of this work at the “Seminar on History and Human Sciences,” held at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, May 1975. In August 1975 it appeared as Document No. 1 of the series CEDES publishes for the “Working Group on the State” of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). The version presented herein was prepared in December 1976. Despite all that has happened since, I have restricted myself to corrections of style and to doing away with some unnecessary paragraphs, following the useful suggestions of LARR'S reviewers. In other words, I have overcome the temptation to rewrite this work, which I might have done, above all, to emphasize even more the attempts to stabilize economic variables (including but not limited to inflation) of the period I call the “orthodoxy” and expressly to admit the possibility that cases such as Chile and Uruguay may turn, in a socially even more oppressive sense than the “deepening” that I deal with here, towards a “re-agrarianization” or a “re-primarization” of their productive structure. I would also like to think that today I could present a more sophisticated approach to the theoretical problems surrounding the concept of state. But it is not a question of extemporaneously introducing these considerations here-considerations that owe much to criticisms received on the original version of this article–but, instead, of making timely presentation of them in future works. One explanation is necessary on a point that has led to some misunderstanding: when I speak of “mutual indispensability” I am referring to the relationship that exists between the bureaucratic-authoritarian state (once implanted) and international capital. In contrast, when in other works (above all, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism) I have dealt with the factors that tend to provoke the emergence of this type of state, I have speculated on its “elective affinity” with a certain type of capitalism and its crises. The difference is subtle but important, because it not only refers to two temporally different moments but also because it indicates the distance separating what is mutually indispensable (once the state has been implanted) from a strong but undetermined likelihood (before implanting it) that still leaves room for purposeful political action.

In this decade, sociological and anthropological studies of formal education in Latin America show signs of vigorous growth and promise of substantial future developments. The leitmotiv running through most of the social scientific research on education is education and social change or, more specifically, education and economic development and social progress. There is still no strong evidence of a concerted, cumulative development in this area despite heightened research activity and the fact that scholars are more regularly communicating and integrating their efforts. To the contrary, it is more common of researchers to appear oblivious of the prior or related work of other scholars in other centers of research. However, the common cause of a relatively narrow range of concern has produced a concentration of effort and many-faceted attack by scholars from many disciplines on these problems that promise potent developments in theory, understanding and discovery.

For too many years, women have been missing from or misrepresented in Latin American history. Like women elsewhere, they have not received proper credit for the role they played in their nations' development. Even with the increasingly scholarly attention now focused on women in Latin America, historical research lags far behind that on their counterparts in the United States or Western Europe. Many questions of approach, methodology, and sources, among others, remain to be answered and much labor must be expended before we can know the history of women in Latin America. But if we wish to have the necessary monographs and accumulated data before attempting to write syntheses, we must explore diverse aspects of women's lives, roles, and experiences, often concentrating on women in a single country or time frame.