The scope, focus, and assumptions of this collection of 14 articles (most of them written in 1982 for the Eighth International Congress on Economic History) are suggested in its title. “Población” refers to the vast and complex subjects of pre-Columbian population levels, the rate and consequences of population decline following European invasion, the timing and speed of population recovery, and the impact of international and internal migration (both forced and voluntary). Essays in the collection thus range over more than four centuries. “Latin America” includes significant parts of Central and South America (Mexico and the Caribbean are “omisiones involuntarias” [p. 9] in this vast scenario). “Mano de obra,” labor, or labor force, encompasses the complicated and variegated topics of evolving labor systems and labor markets over the same broad geographical terrain and chronological space.
Compiler Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz explains the rationale for linking subject matters of such complexity and proportion in his introductory chapter. In preindustrial economies, which are little capitalized, and, until recently, basically agrarian, labor is the most important factor in production. And since demographic trends are intimately linked to questions of labor supply, it follows that study of the economics and demography of such societies is inextricably intertwined.
This conceptualization of the topic is foreign to the way most students of modern Latin America approach the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and economic history of the region. It is a schema perhaps more appropriate to European than American subject matter; more meaningful, within the Latin American field, in dealing with colonial than with national history. The volume’s conceptual framework may help explain why the six chapters on colonial history constitute the most persuasive and cohesive part of the book, and why they concentrate on the central Andean region (the essays by Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Ann Zulawski, and Herbert Klein—Sánchez-Albornoz’s own conference contribution on the Potosí mita was published elsewhere and is not included in the volume). The other chapters in this section deal with colonial Brazil (by Warren Dean and Maria Luisa Marcílio) and Central America (by Murdo J. MacLeod).
Of all these, the most novel is Dean’s imaginative, interdisciplinary effort to reconstruct the demographic catastrophe that befell the Tupinambá of coastal Brazil during the first century of European colonialism. Perhaps the most revisionist is Sempat Assadourian’s argument that in sixteenth-century Peru (or, as he prefers, “Tawantinsuyu”) the “voluntad ejecutiva” of colonial bureaucrats fashioned mercantilist economic success out of the demographic disaster that befell indigenous peoples, a conclusion that directly contradicts the assumption that economic and demographic trends vary directly with one another in preindustrial societies.
The remaining eight chapters deal with the national period. There is one on midnineteenth-century Argentina (by Hilda Sábato), one on Uruguay during the classic era of development “hacia afuera,” 1870-1930 (by Juan Rial), and three each on Brazil and Venezuela. The coverage appears to be fortuitous, rather than a function of explicit theoretical or methodological propositions. Yet, as Sánchez-Albornoz points out, each of these articles reveals the great importance of segmentation in the labor market, a characteristic reinforced, rather than weakened, by international migration.
Moreover, by focusing in some detail on the creation of a free labor force in coffee production in a relatively well-known case (Brazil) and a virtually unstudied one (Venezuela), these essays raise a series of important analytical questions for future research. The first two essays on Brazil, by Chiara Vangelista and José Souza-Martins, reveal that we still do not know precisely why Paulista planters turned to European immigrant labor rather than to the mass of former slaves and subsistence farmers in filling the labor demands of the rapidly expanding coffee economy. The third essay on Brazil, by Maria Coleta F. A. de Oliveira and Felícia R. Madeira, questions the economic rationality of large families in this Italian immigrant labor force. Of the three Venezuelan essays (by Gastón Carvallo and Josefina Ríos de Hernández, Aníbal Arcondo, and Susan Berglund), the most significant is the first. It provides a pioneering historical overview of labor systems in export agriculture based on unpublished information collected by a team of scholars. The volume does not pursue comparative analysis of the evolution of coffee labor systems in these two countries. The information presented reveals that in both, however, former slaves and subsistence farmers successfully resisted work in plantation export agriculture. A comparative perspective thus suggests that the supposed option of mobilizing Brazilians for work in plantation coffee agriculture may not in fact have existed.
Sánchez-Albornoz goes a long way toward ordering his complex and unruly subject matter and connecting the rich and carefully researched contributions that make up the bulk of chapters in this volume. His concluding remarks critique the facile connection between population and labor implied in the title, and cogently summarize what the volume tells us about the interplay of these two factors in the history of Latin America. “Colonización y dependencia fueron en suma motivo de la frecuente discordancia entre ambas variables” (p. 23).
