Several accounts of the Baring crisis, 1890–7, are available.1 Among these is my own, chapter xiv of Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), based upon the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, contemporary periodical literature and secondary works such as the now little-noticed classic, J. H. Williams, Argentine International Trade under Inconvertible Paper Money, 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1920). My first purpose in exploring beyond the sources used forty years ago, in the archives of the Bank of England, Baring Brothers & Co., N. M. Rothschild, W. H. Smith and the Marquis of Salisbury, is to correct at least one error in my original work, and this unfortunately repeated by others. My second is to discover whether or not further study of archival material confirms, modifies or denies any of my first conclusions about the role of the Argentine government in the solution of the Baring crisis.

The principal error corrected concerns the form of Barings' involvement in Argentine affairs in the late 1880s. They did not get into difficulties because they underwrote a large loan to the Argentine government for the purpose of expanding the water supply and sewage system of Buenos Aires. The fact is that they promoted a private enterprise which took over the water and sewage system of Buenos Aires, and this failed for a number of reasons set out below.

As to my original conclusions about the Baring crisis, they have been confirmed by the archival material considered. The solution of the Baring crisis was made possible by the policies devised and enforced by the Argentine government.

The Central America of books, and indeed of our imaginations, does not have very many black actors. That is not because blacks have not been present in the unfolding of Central American history. It is because their participation has been selectively ignored. During the last decade there have been a few welcome exceptions to this trend; however, a lacuna still remains. This article focuses on the role played by the first generation of black British West Indian immigrants in the development of the Costa Rican and Honduran labour movements - an area of history in which blacks have been particularly ignored.

To this day the populations of black British West Indian descent living on the Atlantic Coast of Costa Rica and Honduras have remained outside the mainstream of political and cultural life in these two countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that they have also been neglected historically.

Nowhere is this tendency more glaring than in the literature on labour history – especially that concerned with the important banana exporting sector. With few exceptions, the role of the British West Indian workers in the early period of the banana industry is dismissed. Those that acknowledge their role minimise the workers' importance by arguing that they failed to act collectively in challenging their employers. In brief, this view argues that black West Indian workers are not important to a study of labour politics in Honduras and Costa Rica.

Historical evidence renders this suggestion invalid. The British West Indian workers who came to Honduras and Costa Rica during the last century in search of employment were neither indifferent to, nor totally accepting of, their situation.

As I get older I give more importance to continuities, and try to discover them under the appearances of change and mutation. And I have reached the conclusion that there is only one great continuity: that of blood.

Class structure never entirely displaces other criteria and forms of differentiation and hierarchy (e.g. ethnicity, gender, lineage) in the constitution of social identities and in prompting collective action. Class as a concept and as a point of reference is linked to these other criteria; often it is subsumed in them, thus contributing to the definition of the different groups' forms of expression and of their insertion into the social totality. But class does not eliminate these other criteria nor the identities deriving from them, nor can it preclude the relative autonomy derived from their specificity, as they define loyalties and oppositions which frequently cross over class boundaries. The relevance of these criteria in Latin America is even greater since the society's class profile is less sharply defined because of the lower level of development of market relations and urban industrial capitalism.

Several studies have pointed to the importance of ruling families in shaping the socio-economic structure of Latin American countries, their political institutions and their cultural life. Prominent families have been considered the axis of Latin America's history from the last part of the colonial period until the beginnings of the present century – and until even more recently in some countries. Interestingly enough, these historical studies have contributed to a better understanding of one of the features most frequently discussed in today's sociological studies of Latin America: the weak or inchoate differentiation between public and private life and between collective and individual action.

This article describes the introduction of two social policy programmes aiming to provide adequate nourishment to poor families in Argentina between 1983 and 1990. They were called PAN (Programa Alimentario Nacional), and the Bono Nacional Solidario de Emergencia.

A study of the introduction of social policy measures during these years can help us to understand parts of the value-structure upon which Argentine society is built. Such a study also highlights some of the main social functions that welfare programmes perform in structuring the relationship between the political system and society. Finally, the management of the programmes and the political debate surrounding them illustrate some key features of the Argentine political system and its ability to formulate a coherent social policy project.

The debates concerning the organisation of social welfare schemes, in 1983 as well as in 1989, must be seen in relation to the general structure of the social welfare system in the country. Both by European and Latin American standards, Argentina's first ‘labour laws’ were passed at an early stage.2 However, Argentina never became a ‘Welfare State’ in the sense that all of the population was included. One of the reasons for this is connected with the impotence of the State. Several analysts have underlined the particular weakness of many Latin American States, a consequence of a pronounced corporative logic that dominates the implementation of public policies.3 In fact, the social impact of welfare policies reflects the overall power structure in society in a more clear-cut way than we see in most European Welfare States.4

Cocoa, coca, cotton, and sugar are of great interest. The development of any one of the four crops would bring about great relief to people's present miseries and would not hurt nearby provinces… The development of one province need not occur at the expense of another. (Francisco de Viedma, 1787).2

Cuban scholars are not noted for fashioning consensus, much less unanimity. Yet it is unlikely that a Cubanist could be found who would not agree with the proposition that Cuba in 1992 is in the worst crisis of the revolution. It is perhaps arguable that the material situation on the island in 1969 was as difficult as it is today, but back in 1969 the revolution was young and the Cuban people for the most part were energetic and hopeful. Cuba was then an increasingly accepted and economically integrated member of the large world socialist community.

The proximate cause of Cuba's present predicament is not hard to identify. Cuba has a small and heavily trade-dependent economy. In the presence of the US embargo, Cuba came to depend on the former Soviet trade bloc (CMEA) for over four-fifths of its imports. Without access to the US market, with access to other markets restricted and with imports from the former CMEA countries reduced by roughly two-thirds, Cuba's economy and its people are struggling to survive.

The government's response to the crisis has been deliberate but inadequate. A number of reforms initiated prior to 1989 are being continued,1 others are being accelerated and some new programmes are being put in place. The new emphasis on foreign investment and tourism, structural reforms in the operation of foreign trade, and the impossibility of central planning in the presence of ubiquitous supply uncertainties have combined to transform the nature of Cuba's economic mechanism. Despite the promise of some extension of private enterprise and the market in the service sector, however, the needed and more concerted introduction of a broader market mechanism has not been forthcoming.

Introduction: the genesis of ‘informal empire’

In 1953 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson published an article entitled ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, which has since become a landmark in the study of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Seeking to overturn long-cherished notions of a mid-Victorian ‘indifference’ and a late-Victorian ‘enthusiasm’ for empire, it proposed a basic continuity of policy whereby British industrialisation caused an ever-extending and intensifying development of overseas regions for both strategic and economic purposes. Hence the suggestion of a working definition of imperialism as ‘the sufficient political function of this process of integrating new regions into the expanding economy’. In switching the focus of a definition of imperialism from the way in which Britain was able to assert her superiority over weaker, subordinate nations to the impetus and motivation behind such expansion, traditional conceptions of empire were suddenly shattered. Indeed, as Robinson and Gallagher maintained, ‘The conventional interpretation of the nineteenth century empire continues to rest on the study of formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line’.2

The whole framework of reference for a study of British imperialism was being recast, the revised assumption being that the empire of formal dominion, which can loosely be defined as control through annexation and constitutional subordination, is not comprehensible in isolation. Rather, the assertion of British paramountcy, which for Robinson and Gallagher lies close to the very heart of imperialism, was achieved by informal means if possible, or by formal annexation when this was deemed necessary.