The city of Santiago de Querétaro lies about 120 miles north of Mexico City on the edge of the plains of the Bajío. Founded in 1562 by Fernando de Tapia, an Otomí chieftain, it soon attracted Spanish settlements, so that by 1609 it became a villa and in 1656 a city.1 The time when it became famous for its prosperity was the eighteenth century. It was in this period that Querétaro replaced Puebla as the chief centre of the woollen textile industry since it lay closer to the great sheep estancias of Coahuila. The north was also the chief market for its cloth. But according to the Capuchin Friar, Francisco de Ajofrín, the maize and wheat trade of the haciendas of the surrounding district was more important than the textile industry and the workshops specializing in leather goods. As we shall see, the families which owned these estates often lived in Querétaro, so that the city was te residence of a wealthy local élite composed of merchants, obrajeros and landowners.

Historians concerned to evaluate the turbulent political history of southern Peru in the late colonial period have, in the main, sought their answers in the voluminous correspondence generated in the wake of the several rebellions, seditions and sundry protests and riots which so scarred the epoch. Several historians have recently explored the wider structural context of such unrest, and we even have a socio-racial analysis of the leading cadres of the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780. Beyond the political and economic or commercial context within which such political conflict took place, however, we still lack an analysis of social stratification in southern Peru which embraces both the divisive and cohesive facets of inter-class relations, with all that the imply fo the potential formation of political alliances in the region. Moreover, apart from the immediate conflicts which precipitated the two major uprisings of 1780 and 1814, little is known of the nature of social relations at local level during the interregnum of some three decades which separated those two revolts, or indeed before 1780.

Interest in geopolitics in England, the United States, and many other countries became dormant following World War II in reaction to the expansionistic geopolitik of Hitlerian strategists. Its re-awakening is only recently apparent. However, this approach has maintained its influence and vitality in South America's Southern Cone, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, where military governments predominate, the United States is more distant, and particular national problems encourage traditional geopolitical solutions. Among these Latin American countries, Brazil's geopolitics is the most developed and extensive.

The Chilean victory in the war against Perú and Bolivia between 1879 and 1884 demonstrated that the country's institutions had reached a high level of consolidation and maturity. The normal renewal of the legislative bodies and the presidential election of 1881, along with the uninterrupted functioning of these institutions throughout the conflict was proof of this, as was the continuation, without respite, of the customary practice of political confrontation between government and opposition. From every point of view, the national mobilization in Chile occasioned by the war made apparent social cohesion and a deep-rooted sense of nationality.

The political economy of Bolivia has been dominated by the extraction and export of mineral wealth; in the nineteenth century by silver, in the twentieth by tin. The decline of silver in the 1890s neatly coincides with the rise of tin so that there has been little consideration of the origins of the latter. Casual references suggest that they are to be found in the decision of silver miners to turn their attention to tin deposits once the decline in the price of silver destroyed the profitability of working the nobler metal. This shift in attention from one mineral to another was facilitated by the completion of the railway from the Pacific coast to Oruro, the centre of the tin-mining district, in 1892 which reduced the cost of exporting to European markets. The apparent innocence of the birth of the industry contrasts sharply with the negative images that have been inextricably associated with it in its period of maturity. Then it became ‘dominated’ by the figures of Patiñio, Hochschild and Aramayo, and few who have commented on the industry have been able to avoid referring to them as ‘tin barons’.