A History of Latin America

Описание

T HE EIGHTH EDITION of A History of Latin
America has two major objectives.
First, it seeks to make available to
teachers and students of Latin American history a
text based on the best recent scholarship, enriched
with data and con cepts drawn from the sister social sciences of economics, anthropology, and
sociology. Because the book is a history of Latin
American civilization, it devotes considerable space
to the way of life adopted at each period of the region’s history. To enable students to deepen their
knowledge of Latin American history and culture
on their own, it includes an updated online bibliography, “Suggestions for Further Reading,” limited
to titles in English, available at college.hmco.com/
pic/keen8e. (See “Website Resources,” at the end
of the Preface, for a listing of additional tools available for students and instructors.)
The second objective of this edition is to set
Latin American history within a broad interpretive
framework. This framework is the “dependency
theory,” the most infl uential theoretical model
for social scientists concerned with understanding Latin America. Not all followers of the theory
understand it in precisely the same way, but most
probably agree with the defi nition of dependency offered by the Brazilian scholar Theotonio dos Santos: “A situation in which the economy of certain
countries is conditioned by the development and
expansion of another economy to which the former is subject.”
Writers of the dependency school employ some
standard terms that we use in this text: neocolonialism, neoliberalism, center, and periphery. Neocolonialism refers to the dependent condition of countries
that enjoy formal political independence. Neoliberalism refers to the policies of privatization, austerity, and trade liberalization accepted willingly
or unwillingly by the governments of dependent
countries as a condition of approval of investment,
loans, and debt relief by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. (The IMF and the
World Bank prefer to give such policies the innocuous-sounding name of “structural adjustment programs.”) The term center is applied to the dominant
group of developed capitalist countries, and periphery to the underdeveloped or dependent countries.
Periodically, dependency theory has come
under attack from scholars, mostly North American, who proclaim its “collapse.” The most recent
announcements of dependency theory’s “collapse”
have been linked to the seeming triumph of neoliberal ideology and its creation, the so-called global
economy. Claiming that the neoliberal tide can lift
all ships, including the countries of Latin America
and the rest of the Third World, and pointing for
proof in the case of Latin America to such macroeconomic indicators as increased exports (often
based on intense exploitation of fi nite natural resources and subject to sudden changes in price and
demand) and large infl ows of foreign capital (often
speculative and volatile), these critics argue that
dependency theory was basically fl awed and outmoded, that its analysis of Latin America’s problems has lost all meaning in today’s world.
Those who reject the dependency approach
typically favor one of a number of alternative paradigms for explaining Latin America’s historical
struggle for development. Among these scholars,
modernization theory informed and dominated
PREFACE

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