Fiscal history has become one of the most active new fields of research on colonial Spanish America. This trend has resulted from a number of recent breakthroughs, most notably the reconstruction of colonial treasury records and the appearance of the first revisionist studies based on the new data. These works are challenging traditional views, particularly the general understanding of the colonial economic experience and the evolution of imperial ties. Indeed, the fiscal series now being made available, if properly supported by qualitative research and regional studies, may affect seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography as notably as the demographic works of the Berkeley school affected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography.

Until now, discussions of theories of media and society or media and the state in the North American literature have been limited. The four theories of the press advanced by Fred Siebert, Wilbur Schramm, and Theodore Peterson cover the main approaches of Western liberal society, the libertarian and social responsibility models, and some aspects of the Eastern bloc in the “totalitarian” model. Under the heading of “authoritarian,” however, a number of very diverse systems are lumped together. One major variation seen in Brazil is the continued vitality of the corporatist model of state and society, which has distinct implications for the role of mass media. In particular, aspects of corporatism seem to be combining with aspects of democracy and mass mobilization politics in ways that shed light on the role of the media in constructing or undercutting ideological hegemony in the heterogeneous, class-divided societies of Latin America.

Unlike many developing countries, Colombia has managed since 1958 to avoid both military rule and chronic political instability while being governed by a civilian political regime, a consociational regime. The purpose of this article is to help explain the Colombian political regime's relative longevity by focusing on the behavior of producer groups in Colombia and the associations that represent them. The article asks how important the support of these groups has been to the political regime established in 1958. It also seeks to identify the major patterns of interaction between the groups and different governments and to determine what implications these patterns have had for continued regime support. The article will find significant support for the regime by producer groups, support that is linked to considerable, but not unlimited, capacity for influence. Such regime support has been conditional, rather than consolidated, and derives from favorable access to the state, the regime's overall policy orientation, and its ability to maintain order.

This essay reviews the following works:

Bandits and Liberals, Rebels and Saints: Latin America since Independence. By Alan Knight. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 423. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781496229786.

Latecomer State Formation: Political Geography and Capacity Failure in Latin America. By Sebastián Mazzuca. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 448. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300248951.

Republics of Knowledge: Nations of the Future in Latin America. By Nicola Miller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. ix + 304. $42.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780691176758.

The Mexican Revolution’s Wake: The Making of a Political System, 1920–1929. By Sarah Osten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 290. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781108401289.

Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile, 1810–2020. By Pablo Ruiz-Tagle. Translated by Ana Luisa Goldsmith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 314. $110.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108835312.

Liberalism as Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Legal Rule in Post-colonial Mexico, 1820–1900. By Timo H. Schaefer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. x + 248. $29.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316640784.

A Woman, a Man, a Nation: Mariquita Sánchez, Juan Manuel de Rosas, and the Beginnings of Argentina. By Jeffrey M. Shumway. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 334. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780826360908.

Los juegos de la política: Las independencias hispanoamericanas frente a la contrarrevolución. By Marcela Ternavasio. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2021. Pp. 264. Arg$1,720 paperback. ISBN: 9789878010809.

A Life Together: Lucas Alamán and Mexico, 1792–1853. By Eric Van Young. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 833. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300233919.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a large favela of Belo Horizonte, this study argues that there are three logics at play when it comes to regulating violence in poor Brazilian urban areas: that of crime, that of the state, and that of religion. These three logics act as normative regimes which, connected by the shared notion of ‘respect’, form symbolical relationships among themselves alternating between dissonance and coordination. This everyday interaction produces a normative triangle that determines which lives are more and which are less valuable and, therefore, the likeliest target of violence.

Studies of futurity typically privilege licit economies and assume that the lines between licit and illicit institutions are largely clear to the actors involved. But what happens to those actors, and their grip on the future, when such lines blur? This article explores the epistemic crossroads of futurity and legality by focusing on ambiguity. From 1986 to 2009, the Stanford Financial Group reaped billions of dollars selling fraudulent investment products to thousands of Venezuelans. During this span, Venezuelans suffered successive governments’ shambolic currency schemes, bureaucratic dysfunction, judicial corruption, political upheaval, and worsening street crime. As crises became routinized, middle-class Venezuelans faced “normative ambiguity,” a loss of familiar legal and moral certainties, undercutting their sense of futurity. Drawing on 54 interviews with defrauded investors and others linked to the case, this article shows how such ambiguity left investors vulnerable to a fraud that promised to restore that threatened futurity.

The March 1976 coup that overthrew a turbulent Peronist government in Argentina also ended one of the few experiments with worker control of industry in Latin American history. For nearly three years, the Buenos Aires local of the country's strong light and power workers' union, the Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza, administered the great public utility SEGBA (Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires), provider of electric power for the capital city and much of the province of Buenos Aires. This experiment with worker control was all the more noteworthy because it was not undertaken by the maverick Cordoban local of Luz y Fuerza, led by Agustín Tosco, principal spokesman within the labor movement for socialism. Rather, the initiative was taken by a bastion of traditional Peronist trade unionism led by Juan José Taccone, the implacable foe of Tosco's clasista positions.

A major question confronting analysts of Latin American labor concerns the relationships among unions, the state, and foreign powers. Some social scientists have argued that the relative autonomy of unions affects the strength of democracy in a given country (see Weffort 1978; Hall and Garcia 1989; Epstein 1989; Cohen 1989; Collier and Collier 1991). They have also asserted that Latin America's ability to control its own destiny has been shaped in part by the influence of foreign powers (particularly the United States) over social institutions like unions (Bergquist 1986; Buchanan 1991; Spalding 1992–1993). An evolving branch of labor studies that now offers a unifying perspective for examining this complex set of relationships is the perspective of labor internationalism.