In the early half of the eighteenth century, Minas Gerais became the main focus of colonial activity in Brazil. Gold and diamonds made this an immensely profitable colony at the very time when the sugar economy of the Northeast entered one of its most severe downturns. In response to this combination of circumstances, population and resources deserted the northeastern coastlands (and the Portuguese mainland as well) in favor of the rising Center–South. From that point on, this was to become the dominant area within Brazil – in a pattern unshaken either by independence or by the exhaustion of the gold deposits. The transfer of the viceregal capital from Bahia to Rio de Janeiro (1763) only gave official recognition to a process that demography, economy and society had already made quite unequivocal.

The present study comprises the results of the second stage of a research project into the general question of trade between Spain and its American empire in the period 1778–96. The historiographical context of the project, and the significance of the time scale, were explained in an article published in 1981, which analysed the consequences for Spain's economy, its regions, and its major ports of the greater freedom to export to America provided by the decree of free trade of 1778. Using as its basic source the registers of 3,809 ships which sailed from Spanish ports for America between 1778 and 1796, that work produced the following principal conclusions, (i) Free trade promoted a massive expansion in the value of exports from Spain to America. The rise was uneven, but in the period 1782–96 as a whole their average annual value was 400 % higher than in the base year of 1778. (ii) The share of Spanish products in total exports from Spain to America rose from 38% in 1778 to an average of 52% in 1782–96. (iii) Despite the impossibility of measuring with precision the relative importance of Spanish manufactures and agricultural goods in exports, it seems that agricultural producers were more responsive than industrialists to the wider opportunities in the American market offered by free trade.

After a struggle of eleven years, and the loss, according to the conservative estimate of Carlos María de Bustamante, of 2000,0000 lives, Mexico awoke in September 1821 an independent nation. For months before the culmination of independence there was no doubt who would rule the nation – that is, who was the de facto chief of state, at least for the moment. Agustin de Iturbide, author of the Plan of Iguala, conceiver of the idea of the Three Guarantees that united all factions in favor of independence, chief of the Army of the Three Guarantees, signatory on Mexico's part of the Treaties of Cordoba that granted independence de jure (in Mexico's view), was the undisputed leader. Incorruptible, invincible, wise, Christian, the consummate politician, the salvation of the Church, the Protector of Spaniards in Mexico, the Hero of Iguala, the Liberator, the Father of the Nation, Iturbide had broken the yoke of the Lion of Castile. Mexicans, of all political persuasions, rallied around the demigod in a euphoria of rejoicing and hope that has no equal in the history of the country.

On 3 June 1915 the state legislature of Oaxaca in southern Mexico issued a decree which proclaimed that the ‘free and sovereign state of Oaxaca reassumes its sovereignty until such time as constitutional order is restored in the republic’ (i.e. in accordance with the Constitution of 1857). Governor José Inés Dávila therefore declared that the executive and legislative branches of the state government would assume control and responsibility over the federal agencies and services within the state. The justification for this dramatic course of action, taken at the height of a period of intense civil war in Mexico, was the decree issued by Venustiano Carranza in December 1914, which had suspended the Constitution in favour of a ‘temporary’ period of pre-constitutional government over which he was personally to retain strict executive control as First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army – thus effectively dissolving the constitutional base of the federation. The immediate casus belli was the occupation of the town of Pochutla on Oaxaca's Pacific coast on 1 May by a detachment of Constitutionalist troops, in what Governor Inés Dávila described as ‘a preconceived plan of attack on the sovereignty of the state’.

The outbreak of World War II prompted repeated optimistic forecasts about the future of Argentina's economy in Britain. The South American Journal predicted higher prices for wheat, corn and linseed in world markets while The Times noted that after the 1937–8 crisis Argentina's balance of payments and exchange position were improving. Both publications hinted that this presaged better times ahead for the Argentine.

This study is offered as an initial exploration of the complex subject of cholera in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. As such, one purpose will be simply to describe the course of the three cholera epidemics that invaded the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Another more complicated aim is to attempt to measure the amount of mortality that the disease inflicted on the peoples of those islands for which data are available. A third purpose is to examine the reasons why the black population of the Caribbean proved far more susceptible to the disease than whites. Finally, an attempt will be made of Puerto Rico and especially Cuba, where the institution of slavery still persisted.

From March 1981, when a radical local administration took office, the municipality of Juchitán, Oaxaca, located in the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, has been in the national (and more recently the international) spotlight. The newly elected officials were from the COCEI, the Coalición de Obreros, Campesinos y Estudiantes del Istmo (Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus), a radical local political group which had, for tactical reasons, formed an electoral alliance with the Mexican Communist Party (since August 1981 the leading component of the PSUM or Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, organized to contest the 5982 presidential election). Land reform was one of the major issues — along with municipal corruption and the paucity of educational, health and other services — mobilized substantial proportions of a largely agricultural-based population to support the COCEI against the PRI, the Revolutionary Institutional Party which has ruled Mexico without serious challenge since 1929.

In November 1981 the oldest political party in Mexico, the Mexican Communist Party (partido Comunista Mexicano or PCM) dissolved itself and together with four other left parties established the United Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM). This was the culmination of more than ten years of debate and internal transformation during which the PCM had come to reject many of the traditional assumptions of Latin American communist parties. The most important change within the PCM in the 1970s was a new openness to the broad left seen in the creation of the Left Coalition (Coalición de Izquierda) in 1977 and in the establishment of electoral alliances with Trotskyist parties like the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT).