How Latin America fell behind : essays on the economic histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914

In 1800, the per capita income of the United States was twice that of Mexico and roughly the same as Brazil s.

By 1913, it was four times greater than Mexico s and seven times greater than Brazil s.

This volume seeks to explain the nineteenth-century lag in Latin American economic development.

The essays break with longstanding dependency traditions in Latin American historiography that focus on foreign influences to explain Latin American underdevelopment.

Instead, they apply the approaches and methods of the New Economic History which encompasses a wide arsenal of analytic tools and quantitative techniques informed by neo-classical economic theory arguing that the causes for Latin America's laggard economic growth in the nineteenth century had far more to do with internal political and legal structures than putative external dependency.