This remarkable statement, issued by the Lima Inquisition, suggests the extent to which Portuguese and their descendants had penetrated the Peruvian commercial system during the six-decade union of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns. Spanish concern over the presence of Portuguese merchants in the viceroyalty extended to the royal bureaucracy and Lima Consulado. For example, one important government functionary writing to the King in 1619 assessed the situation as follows: “These Portuguese … in the Provinces of Peru are many of them rich, powerful, and very intelligent in all aspects of commerce. They maintain communication with many other Portuguese retail and wholesale merchants who reside in the stated realms. …” The Consulado issued numerous complaints against Portuguese merchants and often agitated for their expulsion on the grounds that they increasingly dominated trade to the detriment of Spaniards. By 1639, the majority of Portuguese merchants had been expelled from Lima and from many other parts of the viceroyalty thanks to a rapid and far-reaching expurgation by the Inquisition. Indeed, Spanish merchant monopolists and their government-sanctioned trading association, the Consulado, acted in concert with the Lima Inquisition to harass and eventually to oust their Portuguest competitors. The establishment of Portuguese merchants in Peru and their subsequent purge by the Holy Office comprise a crucial chapter in the business history of imperial Spain.

Two dominant features of agricultural history in the English West Indies are the formation of the plantation system and the importation of large numbers of servile labourers from diverse parts of the world—Africa, Europe and Asia. In Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the backbone of early English colonisation of the New World, large plantations developed within the first decade of settlement. The effective colonisation of these islands, St. Christopher (St. Kitts) in 1624, Barbados 1627, Nevis 1628, Montserrat and Antigua 1632, was possible because of the early emergence of large plantations which were clearly designed for large scale production, and the distribution of commodities upon the world market; they were instrumental in forging an effective and profitable agrarian culture out of the unstable frontier environment of the seventeenth century Caribbean. These plantations, therefore, preceded the emergence of the sugar industry and the general use of African slave labour; they developed during the formative years when the production of tobacco, cotton and indigo dominated land use, and utilised predominatly European indentured labour. The structure of land distribution and the nature of land tenure Systems in the pre-sugar era illustrate this. Most planters who accelerated the pace of economic growth in the late 1640's and early 1650's by the production of sugar and black slave labour, already owned substantial plantations stocked with large numbers of indentured servants.

It is sometimes alleged that “history is written by the victors.” Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that “history is written by the rich.” The wealthy nations of the North Atlantic world, which have tended to dominate scholarship in modern times, have molded events in their own image. Thus, when considering the eighteenth century transformations, scholars with “global” vision such as Peter Gay, Jacques Godechot, and R.R. Palmer have interpreted the “Enlightenment” and the “Age of Democratic Revolutions” broadly, including both the experience of the United States and of select Western European nations. Yet these cosmopolitan scholars find no place for Spain or Latin America in their works. Gay describes Spain as the “other side of the eighteenth century,” while both Godechot and Palmer end the age of revolutions in 1799, thus excluding the Spanish and the Spanish American revolutions which occurred in the early nineteenth century.

Let us set aside the permanent and silent struggle against the Indians” writes Ilmar Rohloff de Mattos in his recent study of political change in early nineteenth-century Brazil that does, indeed, forgo any attempt to locate Indians within Brazilian history. Mattos apparently fails to see any relevance even in asking questions about how “permanent” armed conflict with Indians might have influenced the character and structure of the emerging national state that he studies. All in all, Mattos's remarks typify an historiography that at best romanticizes Indians, but even more often either simply ignores them or relegates them to the margins of Brazil's past. Indians of course appear in works focusing on the very first stages of colonial settlement. They were on hand to greet Pedro Álvares Cabral and other explorers and to provide labor for early colonists. But, then, from most accounts, it would seem that, within the span of a few generations, disease, warfare, and enslavement had completely destroyed the native populations near and along the Brazilian coast. In this way, ongoing processes of contact, accommodation, and conquest have become, in Mattos's words, a “silent struggle,” and Indians have been transformed into a topic of interest only for scholars concerned with the distant Amazon basin or with the early decades of Portuguese settlement in Brazil.

During most of the nineteenth century, more than fifty organized African nations existed in Buenos Aires with the official name of African Associations. They were also known by the popular names of tambos, tangos and, later on and more loosely, of candombes. Beginning in 1822, the provincial government chartered ten African Associations with the goal of encouraging the emancipation of slaves by appealing to mutual aid and self-reliance. Along the way, the African Associations were expected to pay for the education of the recently emancipated freemen, delivering them from illiteracy and turning them into self-governing citizens of the new republic. To the dismay of liberal politicians, the African Associations defied government expectations and chose more autonomous directions. The purpose of this article is to analyze the interplay of government officials and candombe leaders in an attempt to reveal the internal organization of such associations. Although Buenos Aires was never a major destination of the African diaspora in the Americas, the rare quality of the records produced by the local police department, in charge of looking after the African nations, sheds light on a phenomenon of hemispheric dimensions.

Before anyone heard of Colombian narcotraficantes, a new class of international cocaine traffickers was born between 1947 and 1964, led by little-known Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Cubans, Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentines. These men—and often daring young women—anxiously pursued by U.S. drug agents, pioneered the business of illicit cocaine, a drug whose small-scale production in the Andes remained legal and above board until the late 1940s. Before 1945, cocaine barely existed as an illicit drug; by 1950, a handful of couriers were smuggling it by the ounce from Peru; by the mid-1960s this hemispheric flow topped hundreds of kilos yearly, linking thousands of coca farmers across the eastern Andes to crude labs, organized trafficking rings, and a bustling retailer diaspora in consuming hot-spots like New York and Miami. The Colombians of the 1970s, the Pablo Escobars who leveraged this network into one of hundreds of tons, worth untold billions, are today notorious. Yet historians have yet to uncover their modest predecessors or the actual start of Colombia's role: cocaine's “pre-Colombian” origins.

In 1791 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave uprising in the history of the New World. As the French Revolution reshaped the political and social institutions of the mother country, Saint-Domingue's free people of color, led by an indigo planter from the island's southern peninsula, began a campaign for civil reform that helped destabilize colonial slave society. Despite their pivotal role in what would become the Haitian Revolution, relatively little is known about this important population. Widely acknowledged to be the largest and wealthiest group of its kind in the New World, this class comprised a remarkable 47 percent of the colony's free inhabitants in 1788. While elsewhere in the eighteenth-century Caribbean free coloreds tended to be urban based, most of Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur dwelt in the countryside and a number were successful planters. By 1790 members of this class owned enough slaves and plantations that they were said to possess one-third of the colony.

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the use of history by social scientists. It is less and less common that studies in anthropology, sociology, and political science evaluate variables without attention to their antecedents. There still survive, however, concepts and theories built originally on synchronic assumptions. One of these theories, ladinization, has been the subject of considerable contention.

“Ladinization” derives from “Ladino,” a term used in Guatemala and adjacent areas of Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras to refer to the non-Indian natives of those countries. I am not sure when “ladinization” entered the social science vocabulary, but it may have been with the work of North American anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s. It described what observers thought of as a process whereby Indians were becoming Ladinos or more Ladino-like. The term was not favored by Guatemalan Ladinos, who generally spoke of “civilizing” the Indians, by which they meant that Indian customs should be discarded in favor of Ladino. In espousing this theme, Guatemalan indigenistas of the “generation of the 20s” often blurred the relation of race to culture; some argued that Indians were capable of being “civilized,” others that such changes could only be secured by introducing Europeans to interbreeding.

It is a well known fact that Brazil today is the greatest producer of iron and steel in all of Latin America. It is less well known that this industry is one of the oldest in the nation. Any effort to trace the development of this iron-working industry from its earliest sources should take into consideration the contributions of the Jesuits. As early as 1554, Father José Anchieta informed his Jesuit superiors and the king of Portugal of the existence of iron ore deposits in the interior of the captaincy of São Vicente (later São Paulo). Even more important in this respect was a forge established by the Jesuit Mateus Nogueira which in 1556 was instrumental in the manufacture of fishhooks, knives, wedges, shovels and other such implements used in the support of his community. These are claimed to be the first implements made from iron in Brazil.

Since the late 1960s, a growing number of studies have drawn on local manuscript censuses, also known as household or nominal lists, to reshape the historiography of late colonial and early nineteenth-century Brazil. While many of those studies focus on family or household composition, manuscript censuses have also been used to explore topics ranging from proto-industrialization and demographic trends to patterns of slaveholding and the status of women. In working with this documentation, scholars have generally restricted themselves to quantitative analyses; they have seldom devoted much explicit attention to the format of censuses and to the categories found in them. As a result, the ideological assumptions and political concerns that census-takers in late colonial and early nineteenthcentury Brazil brought to bear in enumerating, classifying, and ordering the population have remained largely unexplored topics. To detect those assumptions and concerns, we need to go beyond quantification and to read Brazilian manuscript censuses for the qualitative information they contain. At the very least, reading censuses qualitatively holds out the possibility of raising questions that complement and enhance the findings from the more familiar quantitative studies.

Frequently, commentators on political developments in various small Central American nations describe the political participation of the military as if it were an unchanging and ineluctable force that had conditioned public life from time immemorial. Unfortunately, such a perspective not only distorts historical reality but makes it extremely difficult to offer accurate interpretations of current events. While it seems fundamentally correct to assert that Latin American military institutions differ from such organizations in other less developed areas in that they were forged in the crucible of 19th rather than 20th century events, such a generalization cannot apply to every Hispanic nation. A more adequate representation of reality might be that there are essentially two types of Latin American military establishments which relate in quite different ways to their respective political systems. First, there is that class of military organization where institutional identities were fairly well established by the early 20th century and, secondly, there are those which bear a closer affinity to military establishments in the new nations. Here, there has been a very late process of institutional consolidation which makes the behavioral patterns of these institutions particularly volatile.

After peace was restored in Mexico following the Revolution of 1910, the country's rulers, like their Porfirian forebears, continued to believe in the need to attract foreign immigrants. However, this view began to shift in die mid-1930s in the face of fears about the arrival of foreigners that were considered undesirable. On matters of immigration, the country did not stray far from the restrictive practices that extended across the Americas from Canada to Argentina, yet in Mexico, unlike anywhere else on the continent, the authorities were forced to confront a dual problem posed by migration in the nation they sought to govern.

During the seventeenth century in Spain's colonial empire, there were two “Great Conspiracies” and the arrests resulting from the discovery of each of these conspiracies in the vice-royalties of Peru and New Spain culminated in an auto de fé. Only these two autos, out of almost 250 held in Spain's colonies, bore the title “El Auto Grande.” The first with this title was held in Lima, Peru, on January 23, 1639, and the second in Mexico City on April 11, 1649. Practically all those penanced in both autos were Jews. Of the sixty-one Jews in the Lima auto, one deceased went to the stake in effigy with ten living prisoners. Many of those whose lives were spared and who were “reconciled” were sentenced to serve as oarsmen without pay on the Spanish galleys plying between Spain and the New World. Their periods of servitude varied between three and ten years. There is no record of any galley oarsman ever being released alive at the termination of his sentence.

In December 1969, former President Lázaro Cárdenas sent a letter to political prisoners in the Lecumberri federal penitentiary in Mexico City, assuring them that he would continue to lobby for their release. In October 1973, Michoacán university students marching in front of the state government building in Morelia held up placards demanding the release of political prisoners. On June 29, 1974, Lucio Cabañas, guerrilla leader of the Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor) in the mountains of Guerrero, released a communiqué in which the group's first demand was the release of political prisoners. In its founding document from March 1973, the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (LC-23S), an urban-based guerrilla group responsible for more than 60 direct-action operations, made it clear that political prisoners were one of the costs of carrying out a revolution and, as such, would not distract from its broader mission. These are just some of the references to the imprisonment of activists during the height of what is considered Mexico's dirty war. Taken together, the many references to political prisoners suggest that being held captive by the state was a common threat and, in some cases, a reality in the lives of those challenging the authoritarian government in the 1960s and 1970s.

For Some students of Luso-Brazilian history mention of the Order of Christ brings to mind its headquarters, the magnificent Portuguese monastery at Tomar, graced by Diogo de Arruda’s great window, a masterpiece praised by Robert C. Smith as “probably the best-known single motif in Portuguese art” and “the outstanding example of Manueline preoccupation with exotic naturalism.” Others would think of the Order's successes under the aegis of the Infante Henrique, “the Navigator,” when it underwent reform, received a new rule, and obtained countless spiritual and temporal favors from the popes at Rome. Lesser known is that the Order of Christ was also a clerico-military order whose members pledged to live a more spiritual life while being ready to serve militarily their God and their King. Since a considerable number of those holding important offices in Portuguese America wore the habit of the Order it might be well to examine closely exactly what this membership entailed.

In mid-November of 1889, elements of the armed forces stationed in Rio de Janeiro formally overthrew the Brazilian monarchy. Analyses of these events always include the discontent of the army as one of the major factors in the downfall of the empire, along with the disillusionment of the planters following the abolition of slavery without compensation, the gradual acceptance of the inevitability of a republic by Brazil's political elite, and the “religious question,” that is, the conflict between secularism and ultramontanism in the 1870's. Many of the older studies of these events, such as Oliveira Vianna's, stress the armed forces as the major factor in the downfall of the empire; however, several more recent works, for example, that of José Maria Bello, relegate the officers to a far less important role. In this article, both these views will be considered, and then the composition and activities of the Brazilian armed forces will be examined in greater detail.

In the 1837-1839 rebellion in Guatemala Rafael Carrera, an illiterate mestizo swineherd, led his impromptu army of indigenous peasants to victory over Liberal government forces of Mariano Galvez. The rebellion was a popular insurrection in some respects, with Carrera and his followers fighting to restore religious and social customs that were being threatened by Liberal legislation. Encouraged by his parish priestadvisors and adored by his followers, Carrera had reached a stage of selfimportance which made him feel personally responsible for delivering the Guatemalan people from the Galvez regime. After three years of fighting, the rebels ousted the Liberals from office, and established a government administered by the clero-aristocratic oligarchy, but dominated by Carrera.

The man of the Revolution disputed the very nature of Mexico with the Roman Catholic. The revolutionary, whether Callista or Cardenista, believed that the church had had a pernicious influence on the history of Mexico. He claimed that Mexico could not become a modern nation until the government had eradicated all the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic, on the other hand, was convinced that his religion was the basis of Mexico's nationality. Above all, the Catholic believed that Mexico needed a system of order. He was convinced that his faith had brought order and peace to Mexico in the colonial period, and as the faith declined, Mexico degenerated into anarchy.

The nineteenth century witnessed the first major change in astronomy since the birth of the science in antiquity. With the exception, in the eighteenth century, of William Herschel's great work in the course of which he speculated on the origin, composition and shape of the universe itself, man's concern with the heavens had been limited to plotting and cataloguing the positions and the movements of the stars and planets. The entire history of astronomy had consisted of more and more accurate observations of the solar system and the stars within our own galaxy, although only the haziest notions of the shape and size of that “island universe” were entertained by thoughtful astronomers.

On the morning of November 19, 1659, the Inquisitors of the Tribunal of the Holy Office in the City of Mexico celebrated Mass. Then, the prisoners were fed and lined up for the procession of the auto de fe that was to be celebrated that day. The procession of the familiares (officers of the Inquisition) and those to be reconciled or relaxed went by some streets, and the Tribunal of the Inquisition by others. The parade of gentlemen, including more than 500 individuals on horseback, was comprised of the nobility, the knights of the military orders, the Consulate, the University, the Cathedral Chapter, the municipal authorities, the Audiencia, and, finally, the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition with the viceroy riding in their midst.