For 300 years, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade—the forced migration of Africans to work as slaves on the plantations and in the mines of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch colonies in North and South America and the Caribbean—was carried on legally, and on an everincreasing scale, by the merchants of most Western European countries and their colonial counterparts, aided and abetted by African middlemen. On. 25 March 1807, however, after a lengthy struggle, inside and outside Parliament, it was declared illegal for British subjects (and at this point during the Napoleonic Wars at least half the trade was in British hands) to trade in slaves after 1 May 1808. During the previous twenty years there had been a marked growth of intellectual and moral revulsion against the trade (and, in particular, the horrors of the ‘middle passage’) and changing economic conditions, which to some extent reduced the importance to the British economy of the West Indian colonies for whom the trade was a major lifeline and created new interest groups unconnected with and even hostile to them, facilitated its abolition.

When Dwight Morrow's appointment as Ambassador to Mexico was announced in September 1927, a Mexican newspaper commented: ‘After Morrow come the marines.’ To some contemporary observers this may have seemed to present a logical progression of events, but in reality the Morrow appointment was a distinct move in the opposite direction. Top level Mexican officials knew this since they had been involved for several years in negotiations with Thomas W. Lamont of the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico. Lamont and Morrow were colleagues in J. P. Morgan & Co. and close friends. Lamont regularly supplied Morrow with information about the activities of the International Committee, and during 1926 Morrow began to work closely with Lamont on the Mexican question.

‘The liberation of South America’, wrote Castlereagh in 1807, ‘must be accomplished through the wishes and exertions of the inhabitants; but the change can only be operated…under the protection and with the support of an auxiliary British force’. The argument, familiar in political debate, was rare in official policy. Britain, it is true, had long regarded Spanish America as a source of strength for her rivals and a potential market for her manufactures. After the Peace of 1783 interest became more intense as British observers, impressed by the vulnerability of empires, claimed to see signs of rapid decline in the empire of Spain. Intelligence reports on Spanish America accumulated in government departments; plans for British attacks flowed from official and private sources; and a section of merchant opinion increased its agitation for military intervention in the area. Yet, apart from the conquest of Trinidad in 1797 and the attempted conquest of the Río de la Plata in 1806–7, British policy towards Spanish America was diffident in its approach and vague in its intent. There were, indeed, compelling reasons why Spanish America should remain on the margin of British policy. Britain's existing European and imperial interests necessarily dominated her policy and absorbed her resources. Until 1806, moreover, existing channels of trade in Europe and the rest of the world were sufficient to take the bulk of British industrial production. And military resources were usually insufficient to release troops either from Europe or the West Indies for major operations in a new theatre of war.

The province of La Convención, department of Cuzco, in Peru became familiar to citizens of the outside world in the early 1960s, when it was the scene of the most important peasant movement of that period in Peru, and probably in the whole of South America. This might legitimately attract the attention of the social historian. At the same time La Convención is a special version of a more general phenomenon, which ought also to interest the economic historian. It is ‘frontier territory’ in the American sense of the word, i.e. it belongs to the large zone of undeveloped land on the eastern edge of the Andes (the western edge of the Amazon basin) which has come under settlement and cultivation in recent decades, mainly for the cultivation of cash crops for the world market, but also for other economic purposes. Along the Andean slopes there are a number of such regions, into which, in their different ways, landlords and entrepreneurs penetrate with estates and trade, peasants in search of land and freedom. Mostly they are Indian peasants from the highlands, and the socio-economic background of the sierra and altiplano determines to some extent the forms of the new economy which take shape on the semi-tropical and tropical eastern slopes. These vary considerably, as we can tell by the various available monographs.