This article has its origins in a generalized feeling of dissatisfaction with current theories about political development trends in Latin America. It is an early statement of a series of arguments which will subsequently be developed in a forthcoming book.

The veritable explosion of empirically grounded monographs in the last fifteen or twenty years has made the task of producing a synthetic account of Latin American development simultaneously more pressing and more difficult: more difficult because it has made simple explanatory models harder to sustain, and has opened up the accepted historiography to serious and widespread revisionist attack; more pressing because many, if not most, social scientists accept the need to develop a theory of social change which is historically grounded, capable of explaining large-scale social transformations. My concern in this article is with the methodological issues involved in the formulation of an adequate theory of Latin American development, rather than with establishing new facts. There is considerable historiographical controversy over many of the events discussed in this article, and in these cases I have made my own judgement about where, on balance, the evidence points.

Historians concerned to evaluate the turbulent political history of southern Peru in the late colonial period have, in the main, sought their answers in the voluminous correspondence generated in the wake of the several rebellions, seditions and sundry protests and riots which so scarred the epoch. Several historians have recently explored the wider structural context of such unrest, and we even have a socio-racial analysis of the leading cadres of the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780. Beyond the political and economic or commercial context within which such political conflict took place, however, we still lack an analysis of social stratification in southern Peru which embraces both the divisive and cohesive facets of inter-class relations, with all that the imply fo the potential formation of political alliances in the region. Moreover, apart from the immediate conflicts which precipitated the two major uprisings of 1780 and 1814, little is known of the nature of social relations at local level during the interregnum of some three decades which separated those two revolts, or indeed before 1780.

Exporters of raw materials under Iberian rule, the nations of Latin America continued to perform a similar role in the world economy after Independence. In the nineteenth century, however, a significant shift occurred in the kind of materials exported. Whereas in colonial times the great wealth of Latin America lay in her mineral resources, particularly silver and gold, aster 1850 agricultural production for foreign markets took on larger importance. The export of foodstuffs was not a new phenomenon, but in the nineteenth century the growth in consumer demand in the industrializing nations and the developing revolution in. transport much enhanced the incentives for Latin Americans who would produce coffee, wheat, cattle, or bananas for overseas markets.

The city of Santiago de Querétaro lies about 120 miles north of Mexico City on the edge of the plains of the Bajío. Founded in 1562 by Fernando de Tapia, an Otomí chieftain, it soon attracted Spanish settlements, so that by 1609 it became a villa and in 1656 a city.1 The time when it became famous for its prosperity was the eighteenth century. It was in this period that Querétaro replaced Puebla as the chief centre of the woollen textile industry since it lay closer to the great sheep estancias of Coahuila. The north was also the chief market for its cloth. But according to the Capuchin Friar, Francisco de Ajofrín, the maize and wheat trade of the haciendas of the surrounding district was more important than the textile industry and the workshops specializing in leather goods. As we shall see, the families which owned these estates often lived in Querétaro, so that the city was te residence of a wealthy local élite composed of merchants, obrajeros and landowners.

When Andrés Molina Enríquez wrote his polemical attack on the Mexican hacienda, published on the eve of the Revolution, he was particularly scathing about the cereal estates of the mesa central. According to his arguments, these were the properties most typically ‘feudal’, and thus he characterized them as vast tracts of land, under-used and undercapitalized, serving only to legitimize the seigneurial status of an elite class of rentier landowners. The proprietors were similarly castigated for preferring the low-risk security of irrigated crops, and for their withdrawal from the uncertainties of maize production on the temporal lands. As a result of these policies the routine supply of maize, the food grain of the nation, was, or so he argued, left to the efforts and tenacity of a multitude of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable terrain.

Like any major historical phenomenon, the Mexican Revolution can be viewed from a variety of angles. From one, arguably the most important, it was a rural phenomenon, rightly categorised by Eric Wolf as a ‘peasant war’, hence comparable to the Russian or Chinese Revolutions. Form another it can be seen as a generalised social and political (some might like to call it ‘hegemonic’ crisis, marking the end of the old oligarchic Porfirian order and characterised by mass political mobilisation; as such it bears comparison with the crises experienced in Italy and Germany after the First World War; in Spain in the early 1930s; in Brazil in the 1960s or Chile in the 1970s. But what it emphatically was not was a workers' revolution. No Soviets or workers' party sought — let alone attained — political hegemony. No Soviets or workers' councils were established, as in Petrograd or Berlin. There were no attempts at works' control of industry, as in Turin, Barcelina — or the gran mineria of Bolivia.

The Chilean victory in the war against Perú and Bolivia between 1879 and 1884 demonstrated that the country's institutions had reached a high level of consolidation and maturity. The normal renewal of the legislative bodies and the presidential election of 1881, along with the uninterrupted functioning of these institutions throughout the conflict was proof of this, as was the continuation, without respite, of the customary practice of political confrontation between government and opposition. From every point of view, the national mobilization in Chile occasioned by the war made apparent social cohesion and a deep-rooted sense of nationality.

The origins of the labour movement in Argentina, which date from a period when the country was developing rapidly and had an important place in the world economy, have received little close attention from historians. Generally, the years before 1930 have been neglected in favour of the study of developments associated with Perón and Peronism. Such secondary literature as does exist consists largely of personal memoirs, whose authors were, understandably, parti pris. The more general studies tend to underestimate the extent, variety and sophistication of trade unionism before 1930, and also to contrast the style and ideology of the unions with that of the Peronist labour movement. Most notably, Argentina is widely quoted, along with Spain, as one of the countries where anarchist and/or anarcho-syndicalist ideology and practice dominated the labour movement.

The years 1910 to 1932 represent a key period for the study of military politics in a country which has prided itself on its armed forces for their professional, constitutional and non-interventionist tradition. Existing studies of the subject, while providing much detail on the background, development and outcome of the 1924 military intervention which is the central landmark of the period, have concentrated predominantly on army affairs and events in the capital, taking the metropolitan view. The substance and contention of this article is that the navy, and events outside the capital, exerted a significant influence on developments. The contention calls for an examination of the anatomy of the navy, the evolution of its influence, and the sources of conflict which it harboured.

The country is so well-favoured that if it were rightly cultivated it would yield everything. (Letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, 1 May 1500.)

It is a vast region with favoured terrain. On its soil grow all fruits; On its subsoil exist all treasures… Its fields give the most useful food; its mines the finest gold… It is an admirable country, rich in every respect, where prodigiously profuse nature sacrifices herself in fertile produce for the opulence of the monarchy and the benefit of the world. (J. da Rocha Pitta, 1724.)

The New International Economic Order is an ill-defined concept which is nonetheless of considerable political importance. Non-existing in present-day international reality, it represents a vision, especially on the part of developing countries, of a future in which the latter will be an integral part of the world economy, instead of existing at its margins. As an idea, the New International Economic Order was given formal expression in 1974, though its historical roots go back to at least 1960.

The political economy of Bolivia has been dominated by the extraction and export of mineral wealth; in the nineteenth century by silver, in the twentieth by tin. The decline of silver in the 1890s neatly coincides with the rise of tin so that there has been little consideration of the origins of the latter. Casual references suggest that they are to be found in the decision of silver miners to turn their attention to tin deposits once the decline in the price of silver destroyed the profitability of working the nobler metal. This shift in attention from one mineral to another was facilitated by the completion of the railway from the Pacific coast to Oruro, the centre of the tin-mining district, in 1892 which reduced the cost of exporting to European markets. The apparent innocence of the birth of the industry contrasts sharply with the negative images that have been inextricably associated with it in its period of maturity. Then it became ‘dominated’ by the figures of Patiñio, Hochschild and Aramayo, and few who have commented on the industry have been able to avoid referring to them as ‘tin barons’.

In a recent article in this journal, Dr Bergad argues that the production of coffee for the export economy in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico was accompanied by the emergence of a rural proletariat, and suggests that the latter process in fact predated the development of a sugar plantation economy in the twentieth century, with which capitalist free wage labour is commonly associated. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises definitional problems on which I would like to comment. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises definitional problems on which I would like to comment. Illustrating with examples from coffee-producing areas in Latin America and sugar-producing areas in the Caribbean, I shall argue that the increased demand for labour-power arising from the expansion of an export-oriented yet labour-intensive capitalist agriculture in a location where labour is scarce is met not by free wage labour but rather by recourse to unfree labour. In these circumstances, competition for labour-power results paradoxically in the attempt by capitalists to restrict the free movement of labour and the consequent formation of a free labour market.

Interest in geopolitics in England, the United States, and many other countries became dormant following World War II in reaction to the expansionistic geopolitik of Hitlerian strategists. Its re-awakening is only recently apparent. However, this approach has maintained its influence and vitality in South America's Southern Cone, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil, where military governments predominate, the United States is more distant, and particular national problems encourage traditional geopolitical solutions. Among these Latin American countries, Brazil's geopolitics is the most developed and extensive.

In his comment on my article ‘Coffee and Rural Proletarianization in Puerto Rico, 1840–1898’ (Journal of Latin American Studies, XV, no. 1, May 1983, pp. 83–100), Tom Brass is to be lauded for the comparative observations used to contest my conclusions on proletarianization in the coffee-producing regions of 19th-century Puerto Rico. By examining some of the literature on coffee expansion in Brazill and Colombia, and comparing these cases with Puerto Rico, Dr Brass concludes that the development of capitalist agriculture, when accompanied by labour scarcity, results in ‘unfree labour’ rather than the development of free wage labour as I have indicated to be the case for Puerto Rico' coffee sector.

A survey of the relevant literature indicates rather graphically that little scholarly attention has been given to an assessment of the independence of supreme courts in the developing areas. A familiar theme in the scant research which has been reported is not only the relative decline of these courts, but their political weakness and general dependence in Third World countries in the first place. Although the constitutions of most developing countries provide for independent, sometimes even coequal judicial branches of government, with clearly defined and significant powers, and with constitutional guarantees to protect their independence, the evidence suggests that no more than a mere handful of national courts in these countries are truly independent: that is, few courts are free to decide cases on the basis of the established law and the ‘merits of the case’, without substantial interference from other political or governmental agents. Gamer has concluded that usually the ‘highest power rests with a Prime Minister (or President) and a small inner circle of the cabinet, whose policy decisions are seldom challenged by courts, legislatures˜’ and ‘there are few constitutional/legal traditions to restrain this central power’. Almond has written that ‘central executives and bureaucracy tend to monopolize the “rule” functions at the expense of courts and legislature’.