This volume combines essays by long-established scholars and relatively new researchers who are already making signal contributions in their respective areas of expertise. All chapters are thematic, aspiring to continental coverage; many draw on institutional and cliometric methodologies; several offer new quantitative historical data—presented in a text that is lavishly endowed with high quality artwork; each seeks to provide a concise state-of-the-art survey of the literature while advancing innovative interpretations elaborated from a synthesis of the author's extant and on-going research.

A refreshing feature of the collection, reflecting its institutionalist bias, is the willingness to break with conventional periodization. Too frequently, social scientists (including economic historians) approaching the study of Latin America have slavishly followed a political chronology, for example regarding Independence circa 1810s as a definitive rupture, or been over-exercised by the impact of such external events as the world wars and interwar depression. This is not so say that these moments were unimportant but, rather, that there are more subtle methods of assessing the nature, timing, and content of change. As several authors observe, and as is acknowledged in revisionist writing, modern institutions did not take root until the third quarter of the nineteenth century during the so-called period of national reorganization. Indeed, it was only at this point that fairly defined political boundaries consolidated, the rules of the economic and political game “settled,” and opportunities for modernization squandered at the time of Independence were seized (Dye, p. 174). Hence, though every contribution does not conforms with the whole span of the “long twentieth century,” most offer comparative insights on economic trends, sectoral change, societal developments, and policy and ideology shifts that embrace the Belle Époque of export-led growth, decades of structural transformation around the middle third of the twentieth century, and the post-1980s “second age of globalization.”

Aspects of institution building are addressed across the volume and several chapters illustrate the importance of infrastructure modernization in new or fragile states: railways made the market and the state. Several authors examine how institutions and the communications revolutions were intrinsic to, and instrumental for, cycles of global engagement. Many chapters also connect with the endowments versus institutions debate and related comparisons between Northern America and Latin America, stimulated by Douglass North and Stanley Engerman and the late Kenneth Sokoloff. Clearly, this approach has not yet been exhausted! Alan Dye brings rigor and vigor to an analysis of institution building and long-run growth consequences. The strength of his contribution derives not from the unexceptional statement that foreign institutions introduced into the distinct social environments of Latin America had unintended consequences because those introduced frameworks were constrained by existing norms and social rigidities, but by identifying potential possible outcomes, by charting the link between political institutions and economic performance, and by postulating an alternative assessment of the “commitment problem”. Acknowledging the chronic difficulty of establishing effective constitutional limits on the power of those in control of the state, and the debilitating perpetuation of inequality and unpredictability, he shows that property rights were not everywhere ill-defined and that late-nineteenth-century landowners were usually rational businessmen, and expresses cautious optimism for “. . . the prospect of positive reform” (p. 207). For Luis Bértola and Jeffrey Williamson, missed opportunities for institutional reform, the tyranny of distance—internally and with respect to potential overseas markets—and state fragility similarly constrained growth. Echoing Coatsworth and others, they argue that the immediate post-Independence period constitutes the real “lost decades” in terms growth foregone. Yet they are skeptical about the distribution of the gains from international insertion before 1940: more empirical research is needed to determine who gains and who loses from globalization.

In an analytically robust chapter rich in empirical detail, William Summerhill examines the unprecedented expansion of physical infrastructure that occurred between the 1870s and 1930s. Until the late nineteenth century, in contrast to economies bordering the North Atlantic, most Latin American countries were railway age laggards. The communications revolution forged national economies while serving to connect Latin American with the world market: “Transport investment raised incomes and output by integrating markets and providing new opportunities for specialization in agriculture and manufacturing . . . Sequences of increasing infrastructural development and higher levels of economic activity fed back into each other, accelerating, in several cases quite dramatically the rate of material progress” (pp. 293–94). Richard Salvucci, writing on export-led industrialization, and Stephen Haber, on the political economy of industrialization, concur. Commensurate with a reliance on imported technology and savings, these pieces emphasize positive aspects of forward linkage effects. There is little hint of foreign-financed infrastructure modernization as a mechanism for external penetration, imperialistic exploitation, and dependence here.

Industrial growth and industrialization (export-led and import-substituting) are themes featured in several chapters, including those by Bértola & Williamson, Summerhill and others, though addressed most directly by Salvucci and Haber. The latter have little truck with structuralist and dependista accounts that date industrial growth from the 1930s. Focusing on income growth (“material advance”), monetary regimes and exchange rate policy, demographic expansion, and trade—forces affecting aggregate supply and demand—and accepting that the extent of industrial growth should not be exaggerated, Salvucci advances a trenchant case for substantial industrial growth before twentieth-century exogenous shocks: war and depression intensified processes long underway; they did not trigger a dramatic new departure. Haber complements and extends this view, arguing that there was substantial manufacturing capacity in Latin America well before 1930, that industrial growth was assisted by a favorable policy regime in the late nineteenth century, as in the mid twentieth, and that highly protected or subsidized manufacturing was woefully inefficient, resulting in macroeconomic distortions that had become patently unsustainable by the 1970s. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this thesis is the stress on consciously pro-industry policies during the age of export-led growth: “. . . governments . . . were protectionist not because of vague economic goals, but because there were political benefits to supporting manufacturers” (p. 538).

Such themes as factor flows and markets, the functioning of credit systems, and the “quality of human capital” are also well represented. Alan Taylor reprises and synthesizes much of his earlier innovative research in a detailed study of foreign capital flows, maintaining that Latin America today is still much less globalized than it was a century ago with respect to connections with international capital markets. Principally concerned to highlight price distortions deriving from policies advanced after the 1930s that made the continent unattractive to foreign investors, and the resultant costs to growth, while vaunting the gains from early globalization, he also offers evidence that suggests that nineteenth-century foreign investors should have been considerably more cautious than they were. Complementing Taylor, and other chapters that touch on monetary policy and currency regimes, Cortés Conde provides a succinct, accessible narrative of fiscal and monetary systems from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth.

Blanca Sánchez-Alonso similarly reprises her original research on international migration, combining it with new contributions on demographic history and labor. Historians of migration will especially appreciate the comprehensive survey of immigration and migration policies, and discussion about the type of immigrants received by Latin America and its impact—was there a demographic gift or a demographic burden? The discussion about the quality of human capital is extended by Fernando Reimers who provides a closely researched chapter on education policy and social progress. His story about the quality of education and the delivery of the education system at all levels is hardly sanguine. “During the twentieth century, education systems in Latin America changed much and changed little . . . They changed much because they expanded . . . They changed little because they relied on a dominant model of schooling that did not help many children learn and because internal and external educational gaps remained unchanged” (p. 480). Educational attainment and human capital also feature in the study of poverty and inequality by Miguel Székley and Andrés Montes, a similarly cautionary tale that synthesizes new comparative research and locates Latin America within a global context. Challenging the Kuznets thesis, they present a growth-inequality-poverty nexus that draws on income, asset, and endowment data for the 1970–2000 period, and present the continent as a region that enjoys the advantage neither of abundant low cost labor nor highly skilled human capital. In a global market, government action has failed to create in Latin America the comparative advantage enjoyed by India, China, or the insular and peninsular East Asian economies.

While several chapters explore aspects of primary commodity production, and there is much about manufacturing, agriculture and the rural sector are somewhat obliquely covered. Otto Solberg has two interconnected chapters that examine economic growth and environmental change, and performance and policy in agriculture, mainly over the second half of the twentieth century. The latter is a neglected subject, no doubt as for much of this period manufacturing was the principal focus of government policy. The study of land use, attempts at land reform, and specific regions and commodities points to the sluggish intensification of production and uneven shifts from the extensive model that dominated for so long. This dovetails with the ambitious piece on the environment, which features narratives on the spread of commodities in the colonial period and analyses of resource extraction in the late twentieth century.

From comments above, it will be obvious that discussions of globalization and the global context are strongly represented. In addition to the opening chapter by Bértola and Williamson, these terms appear in the titles of contributions by Bulmer-Thomas and Marcelo de Paiva Abreu. Abreu addresses the period between the two great modern debt crises, namely those that began with the Wall Street boom of 1928 and the Mexican crisis of 1982, focusing mainly on domestic policy and institutional impacts. One of the main contributions of this chapter is to point to differences among the Latin American economies, something that is inadequately addressed in many over-homogenized accounts. Looking mainly at the post-1980 period, Bulmer-Thomas revisits his work on Latin American responses to the debt crisis, the emergent Washington Consensus and associated New Economic Model. Echoing other contributors, he questions both the extent of globalization and it benefits.

Readers coming to this book expecting to be engaged, challenged, and provoked will not be disappointed. While it would be simplistic to describe the collection as a riposte by historians and economists associated with the now not-so-new economic history, largely trained in the United States, many chapters provide the reader with a survey of pioneering new research that explicitly challenges cepalista (the structuralist paradigm associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, popularly known by the Portuguese and Spanish acronym CEPAL), dependency, and heterodox interpretations that long dominated the history and social science historiography of Latin America. Although some might question the approach, all will acknowledge the zeal with which several authors advance their case. And by no means all authors are card-carrying globalistas, quite the contrary. Students of the economic history of Latin America, and scholars interested in the history of development, will also welcome the comparative dimension of many chapters, as well as bibliographical essays at the end of the volume, several of which are excellent and are to be commended for their comparative outreach.