Henry Finch first came to Uruguay in the late 1960s and personally experienced the acceleration of the long economic decline that would help propel the country into dictatorship. His study of the political economy of Uruguay from 1870 to 1970 was published in 1982 and would prove to be one of the best works written by a foreigner on that subject. The volume under review here is a new edition of that book and includes two new chapters: one on the military regime since 1973, published in the English-language version of the first volume but not included in the Spanish edition published in Uruguay in 1980, and a new final chapter covering the period from 1985 to 2000.
Finch faithfully captures the export-led model of Uruguay’s economic development in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. He crafts a true analysis of political...
