Initialed notices were written by Richard N. Adams, Adán Benavides, Jr., Duncan K. Blair, Clark C. Gill, Richard Graham, Roger A. Griffin, Guy J. Manaster, James McLeod, Thomas F. McGann, María Morris, Richard Smith, Mark Szuchman, and John Tutino, all of the University of Texas, Austin.
The first of these five unrelated essays, “Society and Mass Rebellion in Eighteenth-Century Peru and Bolivia,” by Oscar Cornblit, asserts the thesis that the increasing efficiency of the bureaucracy was producing an ever higher degree of tension in the social body . . . [and that] all the upheavals . . . in 1780 . . . were triggered by these attempts to strengthen the central administration.” The deep antagonism of the Indians thus was catalyzed by the Spanish effort to mobilize the lower sectors of the population” in a rebellion that got quite out of hand. Verdict: thesis not proven in 36 pages, but deserves further treatment.
Ezequiel Gallo’s paper, “Agrarian Expansion and Industrial Development in Argentina, 1880-1930,” is a neat revisionist critique of Argentine economists and economic historians who have tended to lay the blame for Argentina's alleged lack of industrialization up to 1930 on the large landowners and on the industrializes’ lack of political clout. Gallo shows that in fact Argentine industrialization made great strides precisely during periods of high exports, and that “disprotection” was not a negative factor to industrialization.
Peter Flynn, in “The Revolutionary Legion and the Brazilian Revolution of 1930,” argues that historians have neglected the attempts of some revolutionaries in 1930 “to formulate political, social, and economic aims" and to replace the power of the states with “a genuinely supra-state, national party of reform.” The short-lived effort is examined in useful detail.
“Labour and Politics in Chile” is a considerably dated description of unions and their linkages with the political parties, as of the mid-1960s, showing the numerical importance but fragmentation of organized labor, which is characterized by “radicalism, isolationism, and independence.”
The essay by Juan Martínez-Alier, “The Peasantry and the Cuban Revolution from the Spring of 1959 to the end of 1960,” based on research in the correspondence between the Agrarian Reform Institute and Provincial Delegations, shows that Cuban agricultural laborers saw the landowners and colonos as their enemies, and radicalized Castro’s agrarian reforms far more than was the intent of original revolutionary doctrine.
