At the time of the Spanish conquest Nicaragua was inhabited by tribes and chiefdoms whose total population ran into hundreds of thousands: today only 4 per cent of the population is classified as Indian. With the exception of a short period in the eighteenth century, the Indian population has declined continuously since the sixteenth century, with the greatest losses being sustained during the first few decades of Spanish rule. Reconstructing the demographic history of Nicaragua is not an easy task since much of the documentary record has been lost as the result of natural disasters and political upheavals.

The assertion that a country is rich, or a government is powerful, is usually followed by some description of what that entails. Conversely, poverty and weakness are not so often explored in all their detail, though they too are complicated matters. Public finance is one point of entry.1 According to Joseph Schumpeter, it is ‘one of the best starting points for an investigation of society, especially though not exclusively of its political life. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare – all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases’.

During the first four decades of this century a profound change took place in eastern Cuba, especially in the province of Oriente. Its most obvious indicators are demographic: at the turn of the century, Oriente was only the third- largest of the six provinces in population, yet by 1919 it already occupied the number one position. Between 1899 and 1943 the province grew 313.9 per cent, much faster than either the national population (203.8) or the population of the province in which the capital city is located (Havana, 190.9).

Nineteenth-century Peru is customarily taken as a hyperbolic example of how the triumph of economic liberalism in Latin America hindered prospects for sustained economic development. While historians now agree that guano-age liberalism triggered adverse economic and social consequences, the roots of Peruvian free trade policy remain shrouded in mystery. Most recently, dependency writers elevated free trade into a major component of their posited transition to ‘neocolonialism’ after Independence. However, this new periodization is not convincing for it fails to explain how liberal policies actually took hold, symptomatic of the insufficient attention given to internal dynamics of change.

Few thinly populated regions of the world represent genuine frontiers of settlement. The tendency to describe almost any area of sparse population as a settlement ‘frontier’ is not uncommon, especially in studies of Latin America. What matters, however, is what is going on within such sparsely populated zones, or indeed within more densely populated zones which are in an active frontier stage.

Despite the recent development of a broad literature on urbanization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, the topics of public order and crime have eluded careful study.1 The historiography of Argentine urbanization evokes questions about social control, but we know little more about changing patterns of crime and policing than did contemporary observers. Immigration, labor organization, class struggle, and political violence have all been the subjects of scholarly inquiries that suggest both high levels of disorder and the necessity of official responses.2