Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism, is a term used to signify the late-20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent factor in the rise of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them, it is generally associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. The neoliberal project is also focused on designing institutions and has a political dimension. The defining features of neoliberalism in both thought and practice have been the subject of substantial scholarly debate.
The Viceroyalty of Peru, officially known as the Kingdom of Peru, was a Spanish imperial provincial administrative district, created in 1542, that originally contained modern-day Peru and most of the Spanish Empire in South America, governed from the capital of Lima. Peru was one of the two Spanish viceroyalties in the Americas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
A hacienda is an estate, similar to a Roman latifundium, in Spain and the former Spanish Empire. With origins in Andalusia, haciendas were variously plantations, mines or factories, with many haciendas combining these activities. The word is derived from Spanish hacer and haciendo (making), referring to productive business enterprises.
The term Latin America primarily refers to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the New World.
Liberalism in Mexico was part of a broader nineteenth-century political trend affecting Western Europe and the Americas, including the United States, that challenged entrenched power. In Mexico, liberalism sought to make fundamental the equality of individuals before the law, rather than their benefiting from special privileges of corporate entities, especially the Roman Catholic Church, the military, and indigenous communities. Liberalism viewed universal, free, secular education as the means to transform Mexico's citizenry. Early nineteenth-century liberals promoted the idea of economic development in the overwhelmingly rural country where much land was owned by the Catholic Church and held in common by indigenous communities to create a large class of yeoman farmers. Liberals passed a series of individual Reform laws and then wrote a new constitution in 1857 to give full force to the changes. Liberalism in Mexico "was not only a political philosophy of republicanism but a package including democratic social values, free enterprise, a legal bundle of civil rights to protect individualism, and a group consciousness of nationalism." Mexican liberalism is most closely associated with anticlericalism. Mexican liberals looked to the U.S. as their model for development and actively sought the support of the U.S., while Mexican conservatives looked to Europe.
The Bourbon Reforms consisted of political and economic changes promulgated by the Spanish Crown under various kings of the House of Bourbon, since 1700, mainly in the 18th century. The beginning of the new Crown's power with clear lines of authority to officials contrasted to the complex system of government that evolved under the Habsburg monarchs. For example, the crown pursued state predominance over the Catholic Church, pushed economic reforms, and placed power solely into the hands of civil officials.
Since the colonial era, Mexico's economic history has been characterized by resource extraction, agriculture, and a relatively underdeveloped industrial sector. Economic elites in the colonial period were predominantly Spanish-born, active as transatlantic merchants and mine owners, and diversifying their investments with the landed estates. The largest population sector was indigenous subsistence farmers, which predominantly inhabited the center and south.
John Henry Coatsworth is an American historian of Latin America and the former provost of Columbia University. From 2012 until June 30, 2019, Coatsworth served as Columbia provost. From 2007 until February 2012 Coatsworth was the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and served concurrently as interim provost beginning in 2011. Coatsworth is a scholar of Latin American economic, social and international history, with an emphasis on Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
Historically, a major issue for the Bolivian nationality movement has been citizenship for indigenous peoples. Over time, the rights for the indigenous peoples in Bolivia have increased, including giving political voice and property rights. Presently, the indigenous peoples are denied full citizenship.
The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II was an uprising by cacique-led Aymara, Quechua, and mestizo rebels aimed at overthrowing Spanish colonial rule in Peru. The causes of the rebellion included opposition to the Bourbon Reforms, an economic downturn in colonial Peru and a grassroots revival of Inca cultural identity led by Túpac Amaru II, an indigenous cacique and the leader of the rebellion. While Amaru II was captured and executed by the Spanish in 1781, the rebellion continued for at least another year under other rebel leaders.
The history of Bolivia involves thousands of years of human habitation.
The Spanish American wars of independence were numerous civil wars in Spanish America with the aim of political independence from Spanish rule during the early 19th century. These began shortly after the start of the French invasion of Spain, during the Napoleonic Wars, as a struggle for sovereignty in both hemispheres, between those who wanted a unitary monarchy (royalist) rather than plural monarchies or republics (patriots). Thus, the strict period of military campaigns would go from the battle of Chacaltaya (1809), in present-day Bolivia, to the Battle of Tampico (1829), in Mexico.
The Andean orogeny is an ongoing process of orogeny that began in the Early Jurassic and is responsible for the rise of the Andes mountains. The orogeny is driven by a reactivation of a long-lived subduction system along the western margin of South America. On a continental scale the Cretaceous and Oligocene were periods of re-arrangements in the orogeny. The details of the orogeny vary depending on the segment and the geological period considered.
Paul Eliot Gootenberg is a historian of Latin America who specializes in the history of the Andean drug trade, the fields of Peruvian and Mexican history, as well as historical sociology. He earned an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford (1981) and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985), and is currently a professor of history and co-director of Latin American Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been both a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow. Along with the historian Herman Lebovics and the sociologist Daniel Levy, he is a coordinator of the Stony Brook Initiative for Historical Social Sciences.
David Anthony Brading FRHistS, FBA, is a British historian and Professor Emeritus of Mexican History at the University of Cambridge, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Bolton Prize in 1972, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Medalla 1808—both of which were awarded by the Mexican government—and the Medal of Congress from the Peruvian government in 2011.
Eric Van Young, Distinguished Professor of History at University of California, San Diego, is an American historian of Mexico who has published extensively on socioeconomic and political history of the colonial era and the nineteenth century. He is particularly well known for his 2001 book, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Struggle for Mexican Independence, 1810-1821, which won a major prize awarded by the Conference on Latin American History. His article "The Islands in the Storm: Quiet Cities and Violent Countrysides in the Mexican Independence Era," published in Past and Present won the Conference on Latin American History Award in 1989. He has also contributed to the study of haciendas and the historiography of rural history.
Conference on Latin American History, (CLAH), founded in 1926, is the professional organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association. It publishes the journal The Hispanic American Historical Review.
The historiography of Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire, and people of Spanish descent born in the Americas (criollos) search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of the Aztec Empire and the Inca Empire, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton. At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation of college courses dealing with the region, the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, Hispanic American Historical Review. For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The Conference on Latin American History, the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association, awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented. The Latin American Studies Association has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.
The environmental history of Latin America has become the focus of a number of scholars, starting in the later years of the twentieth century. But historians earlier than that recognized that the environment played a major role in the region's history. Environmental history more generally has developed as a specialized, yet broad and diverse field. According to one assessment of the field, scholars have mainly been concerned with "three categories of research: colonialism, capitalism, and conservation" and the analysis focuses on narratives of environmental decline. There are several currents within the field. One examines humans within particular ecosystems; another concerns humans’ cultural relationship with nature; and environmental politics and policy. General topics that scholars examine are forestry and deforestation; rural landscapes, especially agro-export industries and ranching; conservation of the environment through protected zones, such as parks and preserves; water issues including irrigation, drought, flooding and its control through dams, urban water supply, use, and waste water. The field often classifies research by geographically, temporally, and thematically. Much of the environmental history of Latin America focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but there is a growing body of research on the first three centuries (1500-1800) of European impact. As the field established itself as a more defined academic pursuit, the journal Environmental History was founded in 1996, as a joint venture of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH). The Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA) formed in 2004. Standard reference works for Latin American now include a section on environmental history.
The economic history of Latin America covers the development of the Latin American economy from 2500 BCE to the start of the 21st century.
