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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Laura Randall
Laura Randall*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, CUNY
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This section on Historical Statistics is designed as one of the first steps in a process that would make it possible to assemble, for Latin America, a reference work comparable to the Historical Statistics of the United States. This volume assumed that its readers would be composed of those with some knowledge of how statistics were compiled and used. It saw itself as fulfilling two functions, collecting and referring. “The collecting function consists of assembling, selecting, and arranging data from hundreds of sources and making them available within a single source. The referring function consists of text annotations to the data which act as a guide to sources of greater detail. The annotations also define terms used in the tables and include essential qualifying statements.” The volume contains abundant statistics on economic, political, and social aspects of the United States, divided into twenty-six categories of data, and makes it easy to test many hypotheses about American historical development. Similarly, a Historical Statistics of Latin America would provide the statistical basis for the evaluation of many hypotheses about Latin American history, the evaluation of which currently rests upon qualitative evidence.

Type
Special Section: Historical Statistics
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , 1978 , pp. 70 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), p. x.

2. The relationship between population movements and church construction is established in George Kubier, “Population Movements in Mexico, 1520–1600,” Hispanic American Historical Review 22 (1942): 636, 642; also see François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico, The Great Hacienda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 68. On the competition between men and livestock, see Lesley Byrd Simpson, Exploitation of Land in Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), IberoAmericana Monograph Series, 36. A discussion of the hypotheses is in Laura Randall, A Comparative Economic History of Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, 1500–1914. 1: Mexico (University Microfilms International, 1977), chapter 4.

3. “Chilean Social and Demographic History: Sources, Issues and Methods,” LARR 13, no. 2, pp. 104–126.

4. Laura Randall, An Economic History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

5. Randall, An Economic History.

6. Abel Beltran del Rio and Lawrence R. Klein, Macroeconometric Model Building in Latin America: The Mexican Case (Philadelphia, Pa.: Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, 1971).

7. Beltran del Rio and Klein, Macroeconometric.

8. Correspondence, 11 February 1977, and James W. Wilkie, Statistics and National Policy, Supplement 3 (1974), UCLA Statistical Abstract of Latin America.

9. Richard Graham and Peter H. Smith, New Approaches to Latin American History, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); Robert S. Byars and Joseph L. Love, Quantitative Social Science Research on Latin America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).