With the exception of the Franciscans pledged to poverty, the major religious orders of colonial Brazil, Carmelites, Benedictines, and Jesuits, all maintained their religious activities and establishments by means of bequests, stipends, loans, urban and rural properties. Any analysis of the economic role of the Church in Brazil normally and justifiably begins with the activities of the Society of Jesus whose extensive properties spread throughout Portuguese America. Unquestionably, their operations were the most extensive of any corporate group or institution in the colony. The other orders, however, were often regionally important and were always an integral part of the economic life of the colony, sharing in the good times and bad along with their secular counterparts. The following article is an attempt to examine the operations of the Benedictine sugar engenhos in Brazil by analyzing previously usused records. These materials not only reveal a great deal about the management of ecclesiastical estates, but also provide one of the few opportunities to analyze the expenses and income of a series of plantations over time, thus allowing us to examine some of the general economic trends in the colony's export history.

In June, 1908, Sir Harry Johnston, explorer, historian, diplomat and African colonial administrator, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt expressing a desire to come to the New World. In Johnston’s own words,

What I want to learn is the present condition and possible prospects of the Negro in North America, the West Indies and tropical South America.

This English Lord had written extensively about blacks in Africa, and while his knowledge of racial and historical conditions in the two Americas was hardly profound, his reputation opened doors that might otherwise have been hermetically sealed. Roosevelt’s reply was recognition of this fact:

The System of tithe collection in operation in the Archbishopric of Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the result of a gradual process of change and development throughout the colonial period. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the responsibility for the collection and distribution of the tithes had rested both with the Church and the viceregal authorities. However, as soon as the yield was thought to be sufficient to maintain the diocese without royal subsidy, the Church was left to organize the collection. The territory covered by the see was divided into a number of areas and the right to levy tithes within these was auctioned to the highest bidder. This method was only allowed in respect of the tithes paid by the Spaniards and mestizos, for those of the Indians had to be collected directly. This latter collection was carried out on behalf of the Church by two canons who were given the title of Jueces Hacedores. Soon the Church began to extend the system of direct collection and the areas that were farmed out became fewer and fewer until finally the last one was abolished in 1782. As the revenue increased with the development of the colony, an administrative organization was evolved.

During the eighteenth century, the Rodrigues da Cruz and the Vieira da Costa families rose to relative prominence in the comarca of Rio das Velhas, a judicial district of the captaincy of Minas Gerais (Figure 1). Both families had as their patriarch a wealthy Portuguese man whose fortune was built on the gold-mining industry that dominated the regional economy in the early part of the century. Both families were also the product of relationships between Portuguese gold miners and slave women. The second and third generations of the two families similarly comprised freed or free persons of mixed European and African descent whose own standing in society relied in part on their families' ability to manage the social and legal implications of the circumstances of their birth. The Rodrigues da Cruz and Vieira da Costa families were thus part of a large and rising population of pardos (light-skinned persons) or mulatos (persons of mixed descent) in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais—not of solely Portuguese origin or descent (brancos), solely African origin (preto), nor solely African descent but born in Brazil (crioulo). Their ambiguous social standing could lie somewhere between the elite status of most brancos and the slave status of most pretos or crioulos.

Like metropolitan France, the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue experienced a media revolution during the first four years of the French Revolution. In 1789, there was only one newspaper on the island, the officially licensed Affiches américaines, with two editions, one in the colony's capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other in its commercial center, Cap Français. By the time of the destruction of Cap Français, the colony's major city in June 1793, more than a dozen different newspapers had been founded in the colony, making it the second site in the New World, after Britain's North American colonies, to experience the phenomenon of a revolutionary press. Not only were there more newspapers, but their content and language were radically different from those of the Affiches. Like the newspapers created in France in 1789, those in Saint-Domingue denounced the vestiges of royal power and called on the colony's white citizens to demand the right to govern themselves. By helping to break down traditional authority, the press played an essential if unintentional role in making the revolts against white rule by Saint-Domingue's free people of color and its slave population possible.

In 1545, miners struck silver in what would become one of the richest veins in the entire New World, the near legendary Cerro Rico of Potosí, in the Andean highlands of Peru. This strike prompted swift action on the part of royal authorities. They sought to rearrange existing land and labor systems and to establish new ones to meet the spiraling economic demands. Simultaneously they had to cope with a dramatic, unprecedented drop in the indigenous population which hitherto had supplied needed labor. The crown turned elsewhere, and authorized the exploitation of another, far more distant group of people. Slaves from Africa became an additional, ongoing source of much needed labor in the Andes.

“Unlike some Latin American mainland societies which still contain large numbers of indigenous peoples,” Jorge Duany observed, “Caribbean societies are immigrant societies almost from the moment of their conception.” Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint- Méry likened the latter to “shapeless mixtures subject to diverse influences.” Their population, Dawn I. Marshall reminds us, “is to a large extent the result of immigration—from initial settlement, forced immigration during slavery, indentured immigration, to the present outward movement to metropolitan countries.” Throughout their history, David Lowenthal noted, limited resources and opportunities kept West Indian societies in a constant state of flux, impelling continuous transfers of people, technology, and institutions within the area. Despite the frequency and importance of these population movements, the bulk of scholarship on American migration history has traditionally concentrated on areas favored by European settlement. Moreover, the overwhelming quantity of research on immigration to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil has tended to overshadow the study of similar processes in other American regions. Due to its historical association with the arrival of involuntary settlers, migratory currents in the Caribbean have been too narrowly identified with bondage, penal labor and indentured workers. Nowhere is the imbalance more conspicuous than in the study of trans-Caribbean migratory streams during slavery. Discussions on pre-1838 population shifts have centered largely on inter-island slave trading and the exodus prompted by Franco-Haitian revolutionary activity in the Caribbean. The parallel legacy of motion hinted by Neville N.A.T. Hall's “maritime” maroons and Julius S. Scott's “masterless” migrants has attracted noticeably less attention.

The period 1939–1945 saw an unprecedented expansion of Latin American studies in the United States. This was partly due to the wartime activities of such government agencies as the Department of State and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, and to the rising interest in the area approach to academic studies. This development would not have been possible, however, without the continuous concern of the foundations, which had helped to organize scholars in the field on a national basis, had stimulated research in relatively neglected fields, and had provided funds for the compilation and publication of certain basic bibliographical tools. Nor would this expansion have been more than a wartime boom had not the scholars and universities of the country been attracted to Hispanic studies since George Ticknor and William H. Prescott first disclosed their importance over a century ago, and to the Latin American field more particularly since 1900. The expansion was based upon solid elements.

It has traditionally been argued that Free Trade and its principal oracle, Jean Courcelle Seneuil have adversely affected Chile’s economic development. Such diverse individuals as Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz, Julio César Jobet, Andre Gunder Frank, and Francisco Encina have asserted that the introduction of Economic Liberalism destroyed Chile. Before Courcelle Seneuil, they claimed, Chile enjoyed the possibility of becoming an industrial nation. The advent of Free Trade, however, knocked down the barriers behind which the nascent industries had prospered. Chile’s factories, unable to compete, withered away, reducing the nation to a raw material producer; an economic colony for the industrial powers of Europe and the United States.

The Papal Donation of 1493 has been the subject of propaganda, diplomatic negotiations, and scholarly debate since at least 1512. Recent studies have been more concerned with the doctrine of freedom of the seas than with detailed examinations of the diplomatic events of the 16th century which pitted the Spanish interpretations of the Donation against the desires and ideas of her European rivals. As a consequence, the nuances of the various mid-sixteenth century diplomatic settlements have passed unnoticed.

The first Afro-Brazilian to be awarded a knighthood in the Portuguese Order of Santiago seems to have been the light-skinned mulatto, Manuel Gonçalves Doria. In 1628 he was rewarded by King Philip IV with the habit and knighthood, as well as an annual pension of 20$ or 20 milreis, for his eight years of service as a soldier and captain (through 1627) and, especially for his bravery in Bahia in 1624 and 1625, fighting against the Dutch when they captured and occupied Salvador, the capital of Brazil. A letter from the crown praised him as “the prime mover behind the attacks and ambushes” which the Portuguese made as the Dutch occupiers tried to expand their military presence beyond the city limits. So great were his exploits during the Dutch invasion that the Portuguese-born Jesuit priest Bartolomeu Guerreiro, in his Jornada dos Vassalos da Coroa de Portugal, published in Lisbon in 1625, highlighted several examples of his derringdo. Not to be outdone, the Bahian-born Franciscan Frei Vicente do Salvador gave Gonçalves Doria's actions against the Dutch at least eleven mentions in his História do Brasil. But as Manuel and many of his contemporaries would discover, it was one thing to be awarded a knighthood and another to receive the authorization for the ceremonies to be performed.

Long before the Spanish conquest, mines in south-central Michoacán were worked to provide native people with copper for tools and ornaments. (See map.) After the Conquest Spaniards went after gold and silver but left copper mining to the Indians. However, Indians were eventually divested of control of this resource as they were of so many others. Evolution of the pattern of copper mine ownership and the securing of a labor force are the topics of this paper, particularly as they are illustrated in the case of the Crown's mine, San Bartolomé Inguarán.

Students of the hemispheric system have generally neglected the era of World War I, probably because no major inter-American conferences were held between 1910 and 1923. Yet the disparate reactions to the European conflict represented a crisis of “continental solidarity”; World War I gave rise to a potentially important challenge to United States leadership and helped shape future patterns of hemispheric relations. The war called forth two rival blocs—United States-Brazil and Mexico-Argentina. These blocs differed over more than war policy. Their rivalry reflected an inter-American power struggle, each side invoking “continental solidarity” to gain support from other American nations. The impact of World War I upon the inter-American system and, in particular, the Argentine attempt to convene a Latin American congress need fuller examination.

The Roman Catholic Church in Chile first acknowledged its inability to pastor its flock in the 1920s because of an acute shortage of priests. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, SJ addressed the clerical crisis in a 1936 article, La Crisis Sacerdotal en Chile. When critics found his analysis “exaggerated,” he conducted a survey of Chilean religious practices and published the findings in a controversial essay entitled Es Chile un país católico? which is said to have earned him the wrath of the hierarchy because it called attention to the woeful neglect of pastoral duties especially among the rural and working class populations. This empirical data demonstrated that the Catholic Church in Chile had 1615 priests, of whom 780 were secular and 835 regular clergy; of the same 1615 priests 915 were Chilean and 700 were foreigners. There were 451 parishes, some of which contained several towns and villages scattered over a thousand square kilometers with 10,000 parishioners to be ministered to by a single priest. Hurtado's solution—a larger and better-educated clergy—was a long-term solution to an urgent problem that would never be achieved. Something had to be done immediately to keep the faith alive. In the gendered world of Chilean Catholicism, the task of preserving the faith fell to young laywomen.

Although liberation theology may still be considered a “current event,” nevertheless, given its very evident and widespread impact on Latin American Christianity and elsewhere, it seems fairly safe to state that it is the most important theological movement which has emerged in Latin America in the four centuries since evangelization. Many authors would further contend that liberation theology symbolizes the coming of age of the Latin American church: from a peripheral, somewhat dormant and intellectually dependent church to one which actively contributes to Catholic and Protestant thought throughout the world. For this reason alone, without mentioning the many political ramifications of liberation theology, it merits attention as one of the key themes in Latin American church history. The aim of this article is threefold: to briefly outline the origins and development of liberation theology; to examine the different ecclesial, social and political factors which influenced its development, and finally, to indicate what direction liberation theology seems to be taking currently.

In the Andes, the pastoral visitation of Indian parishes usually evokes the idea of a strongly oppositional relationship between the Church and local society. This vision, lacking in nuance, has been widely disseminated both within the academy and outside it. Although it derives from a serious academic interest in discovering and analyzing the common thread of the Church's evangelization policy in Peru, this stance, centered on the problem of the “extirpation of idolatry,” has been progressively emptied of content and today tends to serve as the standard means of filling gaps in the understanding of the history of Andean peoples during the colonial period.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the economic position of the church in New Spain appeared to be secure and prosperous. Although the crown had restricted many of the financial and legal prerogatives of the church in the second half of this century, it had not restricted the basic right of the church to hold property or invest its money in mortgages or loans to lay citizens or to the government. On the contrary, in order to solve its own financial problems, the crown had increasingly relied upon loans from corporations such as the Tribunales de Minería, Consulado, and the church itself. The Minería and Consulado had provided the bulk of such loans after 1780, but these corporations had, in turn, sought loans from ecclesiastical institutions in order to fulfill their promises to the crown. Nunneries in New Spain had made considerable contributions to these loans which appeared as safe investments for these communities. Otherwise, the increasing political and financial entanglements of the mother country in Europe at the end of the century did not mean much for the nunneries. Professions continued to take place, a few new convents were founded prior to 1810, and up to 1805 loans and pious funds continued to be raised and invested in the traditional manner.

The administration of Warren G. Harding found itself facing the issue of Central American Union when it assumed office in March, 1921. Central Americans had debated combination since independence, and the question came to the fore periodically, resulting in numerous attempts to reunite the isthmus. But the previous proposals had all faltered when governments favoring confederation were overthrown. The issue was periodically revived whenever renewed coups returned pro-union regimes to power in several of the countries. In this way the debate continued throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ebbing and flowing with the frequent revolutions, coups, and counter coups that constituted Central American politics.

On August 31 1832, when news arrived of the death of the English utilitarian philosopher and jurisconsult, Jeremy Bentham, the Guatemalan Statesman José del Valle introduced a resolution to the congress of the Central American Republic requesting all its members to wear mourning as a mark of respect. He also took the opportunity to bestow fulsome praise on Bentham, not only as the sage who had taught the art of legislation and government, but also as the defender of Spanish-American independence.

Few would dispute the first claim. Bentham’s work on the science of legislation, Traités de législation, had been translated into Spanish and was widely read throughout Spanish America. Francisco Santander was said to have always had a copy open on his desk and it was adopted as a basic text for study at University level in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Many of Bentham’s other works enjoyed similar esteem and his opinions on what constituted good government were constantly cited and debated in the assemblies of the new republics.

When you look at these picture postcards, you sense how they felt — these invading U.S. sailors and marines at war with Mexican soldiers and civilians defending their territory. These photos are not the work of professionals, although a number of salaried photojournalists in 1914 recorded the American landing at Veracruz for their respective publications. Instead, these are, by and large, simple snapshots, unplanned, some unfocused, taken at a moment's opportunity by the participants themselves. They picture the way in which common combatants hoped to remember the event, and how they wanted others to view it. All the more so, because these are not simply photographs, but also postcards, the images reinforced with handwritten messages and mailed elsewhere to share the experience of Veracruz and to indicate how they felt about it. Americans full of bombast and arrogance in their display of Old Glory, disdain the enemy. Mexicans, returning the fight (some of it in posed pictures), eager to display the destruction caused by the foreign intervention and to mourn their dead. Picture postcards such as these beg analysis, yield insights, raise questions; they are a new and fascinating piece to be fitted into the puzzle of history.