Throuhout the first decades of its independent life Mexico lived under the fear of a repetition of the scenes of 1810. The destructive force of Hidalgo's masses was a sobering thought for many, but a temptation to others. How could a political aspirante avoid thinking that those masses might be used to overcome his enemies, and still remain a pliable instrument in his hands? The difficulty lay in the fact that it was necessary to stop before the snowball effect of mass arousal started operating. Admittedly, this effect would not have been at work if political leaders had been able to develop reliable methods of social control over the masses, as happened rather early in many a South American case of caudillismo. In the event, in Mexico this was accomplished by Juárez, probably aided by the pervading militarization brought about by the civil and internaitonal wars, and subsequently taken up by Díaz.

Charles Darwin once described the Atacama as the world' most desolate desert, and it is hardly surprising that its ownership was not vigorously contested before the 1860s. The discovery, however, first of guano and then of nitrates, made the Atacama the object of a diplomatic dispute between Chile and Bolivia, both of which now coveted this once undesirable land.

The 1870s were a decade of crisis and change in the Peruvian economy. Guano, the bulk of Peru's exports, no longer dominated the republic's trade and finance as it had for thirty years. Quantity, quality and markets persistently declined from the peaks of the 1850s and 1860s. Two new growth sectors, however, increasingly diversified Peru's commercial pattern. On plantations in the north sugar production quadrupled between 1873 and 1876, overhauling cotton and wool among exports. At the same time, in the southernmost province of Tarapacá nitrate extraction and manufacture steadily increased.

The official attitude of the Spanish Bourbons towards scientific improvements was not as obscurantist and immutable as was generally supposed in northern Europe. If the enlightened ideas infiltrating Spain and America were normally regarded with fear and suspicion, information concerning the latest discoveries in the field of the ‘useful sciences’ was eagerly received and pondered, and, where it did not lead to undesirable economic emancipation, it was sometimes even applied.

From the introduction of the Sáenz Pena Law in 1912 until the September Revolution of 1930, Argentina had its first experience of liberal representative government under an electoral system which accorded compulsory voting rights to the country's native-born male population. In this paper it is proposed to explore certain characteristics of urban politics and patterns of mass political participation during this period, employing as an example the city of Buenos Aires. An attempt is made to describe and define the ‘machine’ character which urban politics acquired during this period at the same time as making some assessment of the relative importance of machine characteristics against those of other kinds. What is meant by the ‘machine character’ of politics are the specific techniques for the political support which is based upon the distribution to individuals of concrete rewards, such as bureaucratic offices, charity donations and petty personal privileges.