FOREIGN investment, mostly from the United States, fueled the rapid growth of the Mexican economy under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. By 1910, foreigners had invested well over a billion dollars in Mexico's railroads, mines, and a variety of other undertakings. At the core of the expansion and development of foreign investment was the connection between foreign entrepreneurs and the native elite. This association, worked out over three decades, greatly affected the economic, political, and social development of the nation.

The relationship between native elite and foreign entrepreneurs was based on three sets of factors. First, the native elite controlled both the government which in Mexico, on all levels, played an important role in the success or failure of any enterprise and, through their ownership of much of the nation's land and mines, the rich natural resources which foreign enterpreneurs sought to develop. Second, the native elite was willing to permit foreigners to develop the nation's resources, to participate in a wide range of economic activities, and to dominate certain sectors of the economy, such as mining. The native elite allowed this, because on one hand, one group within the elite, the cientificos, was ideologically committed to the modernization of the country and saw foreign investment as the quickest and most efficient method to modernize and, on the other hand, the traditional groups within the elite saw foreign investment as a means to increase their own incomes (through bribes, commissions, and the sale of their property) and to preserve their traditional privileges. The only conceivable alternative to the development of the nation's economy through foreign investment would have been through the expansion of direct government participation in the economy, but this would have required (apart from an implausible ideological reorientation towards the discredited conservatism of an earlier era or the exotic doctrines of European socialism) a considerable redistribution of the nation's wealth (through taxation and other means of “forced” savings) to the disadvantage of the elite. The development of Mexico's economy through foreign investment did not disturb the political status quo. Third and finally, foreign entrepreneurs had both the capital and technological know-how to develop the nation's resources, neither of which was present in Mexico.

ONE of the principal reasons for the promulgation of the Constitution of Cádiz was the desire of Spanish liberals to answer the complaints of dissenters in overseas colonies and thereby suppress the budding independence movements. This policy met with more success in Yucatán than in most other Spanish colonies. The Yucatecans took advantage of the constitutional reforms to implement a number of economic changes. As long as these changes were in operation, Yucatán was safe from the fervor of the independence movement. To be sure, Yucatán was not completely immune to the appeal of revolutionary propaganda. There was a hard core minority which agitated to disrupt the constitutional system in order to win independence, but this group never gained much popular support. Events outside Yucatán, coupled with the potential threat of crown interference in the economic structure which the Yucatecans were striving to build, led a group of moderates in the Provincial Deputation, an administrative body provided for by the constitution, to declare Yucatán's independence from Spain. Moreover, the motivation for this declaration foreshadowed the factional strife which beset Mexico throughout the nineteenth century.

WE know little in the United States about the man who, as Spain's Ambassador in 1898, dared to call President McKinley “a low politician catering to the rabble.” The purpose of this article is to shed light on Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, his views, and his hitherto unstudied role as Spain's envoy during the critical period leading up to the Spanish-American War.

The first striking characteristic about our subject is his very name, being French instead of Spanish. The genealogy of the Dupuy de Lôme family originated in France in the sixteenth century. There is record of a Jean Dupuy fighting against the Turks in one of the Crusades. The Spanish branch had, up to the nineteenth century, used only the Dupuy part of the surname. Then, as evidence of his great admiration of his French uncle, the designer of France's first cruiser, Dupuy chose to reestablish the full French surname by adding the de Lôme.

IN the 1840s Chile witnessed the ascendancy of a group of young liberal intellectuals and politicians who were determined to alter their nation politically, economically and socially. They wanted first to curb the conservative-dominated government that had directed the country from 1830 on, and, additionally, they hoped to create the kind of liberal democracy which they believed the wars for independence had promised but conservative governments had refused to implement. They also hoped to strengthen the economy by changing landholding patterns and increasing the wages of both rural and urban workers. Finally, they wanted to eliminate the most glaring social evils of their day, thereby making a better life available for all Chileans.

IF, as has been suggested, a country without a foreign policy is a happy country, then the United States must have reached the peak of its felicity between the Civil War and the turn of the century. Of all the Secretaries of State in that otherwise obscure progression from William Seward to John Hay only one has managed to escape oblivion and capture the imagination of diplomatic historians. That exception is James G. Blaine. Secretary of State on two separate occasions and under three different presidents, Blaine brought to his office not only his personal dynamism but also an apparently well thought-out conception of foreign affairs. Unlike his contemporaries, who seemed content merely to react to events, Blaine appeared to have a policy. The genesis of that policy has been a source of controversy ever since.

THE elite of seventeenth century Caracas manifests characteristics which can be related to the colonial nature of the society. Under conditions of imperialism centers of economic and political power are far removed from the local community. The elite in this situation must serve a dual role—it must face inward to master and develop the economic and political resources of the colony and at the same time it must face outward to exchange these resources with the metropole on which it is dependent. In an examination of the colonial society as a whole it appears that the elite is one monolithic group of men performing both these functions. But a study of the internal operation and structure of colonial elites may produce a schema of multiple character types—patrons, brokers and clients. In an environment which favors the operation of patron-clientelism as described in my previous article, “Patrons, Clients and Kin in Seventeenth Century Caracas,” the dual role of the colonial elite may distinguish patrons and brokers. Patrons may control the resources to which the community gives value while brokers transfer the valued resources which they do not control between the local dependency and the imperial system.