This issue features an HAHR forum on colonial political economy and an essay on the Peruvian historian Jorge Basadre. In different ways and from different vantage points, each text considers the applicability to Latin American history of analytical models and schools of thought developed in Europe and the United States.
Alejandra Irigoin and Regina Grafe take aim at economic historian Doug-lass North’s criticism of the Spanish empire’s excessive political and fiscal centralization, which allegedly stifled local initiative and opportunities for economic development. Drawing on their own research and that of other historians of Spanish imperialism, Irigoin and Grafe argue that the Spanish empire was far from being a unitary, absolutist state. Partly for constitutional reasons, partly because of practical limits on the monarchy’s power, regional and local jurisdictions retained a good deal of autonomy and used a number of mechanisms — lawsuits, petitions, passive resistance, corruption — to bargain and...
