The economic history of Latin America has become more voluminous, complex, and fascinating in the past decade. The new work has already provoked noteworthy commentaries; one could even write an historiography of the historiography. The purpose of this essay is to comment on (and applaud) the re-emergence of political economy in the economic history of the region. By this I mean the renewal of interest in the Big Questions that inspired the structuralists, “cepalinos,” Marxists, dependentistas, and modernizationists of the post-World War II generations. Economic historians are again worrying about the long, long run, about the connections between social stratification, political power, and economic strategy, and about the relative impact of structures, endowments, and institutions on economic growth and development.

This paper originated with Jonathan Brown's invitation to participate in a LARR-sponsored panel at the 2004 LASA Congress, commenting on the lectures offered by John Coatsworth and Joseph Love. The discussants' task was to relate the general ideas presented by these scholars to our own field of specialization, which in my case happens to be the history of foreign trade. Therefore, this article summarizes the evolution of economic ideas with respect to Latin America, with special emphasis on foreign trade and commercial policy. It explains the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools, the shift brought about by the return of neoclassical economics, and the partial departure from orthodoxy made by the New Institutional Economics (NIE). This article concludes with a discussion of how these changes in paradigms were generated and how the evolution in ideas contributes fresh approaches to the historical interpretation of the role of foreign trade in Latin America.