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ECONOMIC development, REGIONAL disparities, POSTCOLONIAL analysis, REGIONAL disparities in income, REPRESENTATIVE government, POLITICAL autonomy, LATIN American economy, HISTORY, NINETEENTH century
Abstract
Copyright of Journal of Latin American Studies is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
LATIN American economy, 1982-, ECONOMIC development, ECONOMICS, EQUALITY, LATIN American politics & government, 1980-, COLONIES
Abstract
This essay examines three recent historical approaches to the political economy of Latin America's relative economic backwardness. All three locate the origins of contemporary underdevelopment in defective colonial institutions linked to inequality. The contrasting view offered here affirms the significance of institutional constraints, but argues that they did not arise from colonial inequalities, but from the adaptation of Iberian practices to the American colonies under conditions of imperial weakness. Colonial inequality varied across the Americas; while it was not correlated with colonial economic performance, it mattered because it determined the extent of elite resistance to institutional modernisation after independence. The onset of economic growth in the mid to late nineteenth century brought economic elites to political power, but excluding majorities as inequality increased restrained the region's twentieth-century growth rates and prevented convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]