Population

The quality of population census data in nineteenth-century Latin America leaves much to be desired. Enumeration was often incomplete, the indigenous population was occasionally ignored, and the margin of error was substantial. In Guatemala, for example, it was standard practice until the 1950 census for the president to “request” the jefes políticos in the provinces to inflate the results. All estimates of total population must therefore be regarded with caution. However, recent scholarship has done much to remedy the deficiencies of pre-1914 statistics. As a result, figures exist for Latin American countries that can be combined to give estimates for all of Latin America at various intervals. For this Appendix, I chose the years 1850, 1870, 1890, and 1912.

For most of the period before the First World War, Puerto Rico was part of the Latin American community, and Panama did not exist as an independent country. In the interests of consistency, I therefore include figures for Puerto Rico after 1898 (following its annexation by the United States), and I continue to include Panama in the Colombian figures after 1903 (following its declaration of independence from Colombia).