A book of this kind is eloquent testimony to the continuing power of the self-serving dogma on development constructed in the North Atlantic over the course of the last three centuries. Whether under the rubric of the Black Legend, the White Man's Burden, Manifest Destiny, or the pseudoscientific abstractions of post-World War II “modernization theory,” the assumptions of that dogma have been the same. Development in what is today called the Third World has been thwarted by a premodern cultural and institutional legacy that impedes receptiveness to, acquisition of, and propagation of the modern values that would foster a process of change recapitulating the developmental success story of the capitalist nations of the North Atlantic Basin. Safford confronts this dogma on what would seem to be its strongest ground. His case study focuses on Colombia—that most traditional and Catholic of the major Latin American nations—during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period of economic malaise and political chaos. The result is an important and richly detailed study that largely succeeds in demonstrating, in Safford's cautious words, that “value attachments in Latin American society have been more ambiguous than they are generally represented to be” (p. 11). Put more forcefully and positively, Safford makes a strong case for the proposition that economic, geographic, and social structures themselves help to mold the values often attributed solely to institutional and cultural legacies in Latin America, and that it is these structural conditions that exercise the strongest influence on the success or failure of elite efforts to foster technological progress.

I am grateful to Charles Bergquist for his consideration in sending me a draft of his review essay, thus giving me an opportunity to reply in the same issue of LARR. It is in many respects a perceptive commentary that raises some useful questions about the book. Nevertheless, some of the comments suggest an imperfect grasp of my intended message, perhaps because of a failure on my part to make it sufficiently clear. On some important points he reads things into the book that are not there; and other points that are in the book seem to be missed in Bergquist's reading of it. I therefore would like to clarify some of these matters, both for those who may read the book as Bergquist has and for those who may choose to rely upon his commentary for their knowledge of the book's contents. I also will attempt to say something about some of the general issues he raises.

The title of D. Neil Snarr and E. Leonard Brown's “An Analysis of Ph.D. Dissertations on Central America: 1960–1974” (LARR 12, no. 2 [1977]) suggests a comprehensive compilation and analysis of dissertation research on Central America between 1960 and 1974. While one might have hoped for coverage of a broader period, particularly since the 1950s produced several significant doctoral dissertations on Central America, such a title promises at least a handy bibliographic reference tool for Central Americanists. A close reading of the article unfortunatley makes it clear that it offers much less than that and in fact represents a distortion of the reality of doctoral research on Central America in the 1960s and early 1970s.