Long overdue and very welcome, this is the first appearance in English of a recognized modern classic of Central American social science. First published in Chile in 1969 and given wider distribution through inexpensive Costa Rican editions in the 1970s, Edelberto Torres-Rivas’ Interpretación del desarrollo social centroamericano: procesos y estructuras de una sociedad dependiente has influenced two generations of isthmian and foreign scholars. Even so, outside the small community of Central American specialists, it has been little known in the United States, and none of the Spanish editions has ever been reviewed in the HAHR.
A sociologist by training, Torres-Rivas was the first scholar to attempt a conceptually informed synthesis of the socioeconomic history of modern Central America. Applying the insights of dependency theory but avoiding dogmatism, the author surveyed the period from independence from Spain (1821) to the late 1960s, with emphasis on export agriculture and its consequences. Torres-Rivas placed Central America in the broader context of Latin America as a whole, but he recognized and sought to explain both regional peculiarities and the different experiences of the individual republics.
According to Torres-Rivas, the worldwide depression of the 1930s revealed the limitations of liberal development schemes based on exports. After World War II, newly emerged, modernizing elites sought a nationalist alternative based on import substitution and regional economic integration, but this approach proved ineffective as well. At the time he wrote, Torres-Rivas did not share the sanguine outlook of many of his contemporaries regarding the potential of the Central American Common Market to promote sustained economic development. Instead, he accurately called attention to the integrationist model’s weaknesses, especially the persistence of massive rural poverty. The events of subsequent decades have fully justified his pessimism.
The English version retains the extensive tables, notes, and other scholarly apparatus found in the original. Valuable additions are Victor Bulmer-Thomas’ excellent foreword, which places the book in its historiographical context, and a new final chapter in which Torres-Rivas himself brings the story down to 1991. Unfortunately, the translation does little to make the author’s rather dense prose accessible to the undergraduate student or general reader. Too literal a rendering of the Spanish original in general, the English text could be more fluent and idiomatic. It also contains a number of errors that occasionally obscure or even subvert meaning, as when the verb amortiguar is mistranslated, causing the presence of the subsistence sector to “mortgage” rather than mitigate the effects of economic depressions (p. 44).
