The Colonial Heritage of Latin America

Earlier this year, Oxford University Press published a new book by Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective. This short book weaves together various strands of Latin American development from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as seen from the perspective of Latin America's colonial and neocolonial relations to Western Europe and the United States. It seemed to us that within this broad sweep, the authors supplied a number of insightful interpretations and potentially pregnant hypotheses. Because of the interest of MR readers in the subject, we asked Professor and Mrs. Stein to prepare the following sketch of some of the major themes of the book. —The Editors.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.