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The Ecclesiastical Colonization of Central America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Extract

Dependency theory, which places responsibility for the underdevelopment of the peripheral zones of the world economy upon the North Atlantic core, might well be called a Latin American invention. It goes back, after all, to an article published in 1949 by the Argentine economist Raul Prebisch. Since that time, acceptance of the basic argument — which emphasizes intercontinental trade — has grown, also among historians. Economic dependence with respect to the North Atlantic world began during the colonial era, and forms the principal legacy of that period of Latin American history, according to Stanley and Barbara Stein's The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, first published in 1970 and now in its tenth printing.1 This view has it that economic dependence grew out of Spanish exploitation of American gold and silver, + maritime commerce in tropical plantation products. The entire Spanish colonial world in America would appear to have rested on these two pillars.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1983

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References

Notes

1. New York: Oxford University Press, tenth printing 1977.Google Scholar

2. Parry, J.H., The Spanish SeaborneEmpire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 108, 246247.Google Scholar

3. Oss, A.C. van, Inventoryof 861 Monumentsof Mexican Colonial Architecture (Amsterdam: Center for Latin American Research and Documentation, 1978), pp. 4958;Google ScholarWethey, H.E., Colonial Architecture and SculptureinPeru (Cambridge, Mass., 1949)Google Scholar; Ballesteros, Jorge Bernales, Li-ma: la cuidady sus monumentos (Sevilla: Escuela de Estu-dios Hispano Americanos, 1972)Google Scholar.

4. Markman, Sidney D., Colonial Architecture of Antigua Gua temala (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1966).Google Scholar

5. Moran, Pedro Borges, El envio de misioneros a America du rante la epoca espahola (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia, 1977), pp. 447535.Google Scholar

6. All data on the church in Guatemala, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from my dissertation, Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524–1821 (University of Texas at Austin, 1982).Google Scholar

7. Bataillon, Marcel, Erasmo y Espana, trad. Alatorre, A. (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1966), pp. 123125.Google Scholar See also Phelan, John Leddy, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscansin the New World: A Study of the Writings of Geronimode Mendieta, 1525–1604 (Berkeley: University of California, 1956)Google Scholar.

8. The ideal of pilgrimage among the pagans lives on in the naming of Carmelite monasteries, which are called “deserts”.

9. Hay, Denys, Europe: The Emergenceof an Idea (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1957), p. x.Google Scholar

10. Barraclough, Geoffrey, The Crucibleof Europe: TheNinth and Tenth Centuries in European History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 2253.Google Scholar