The year 1976 is correctly taken to be the bicentennial year of United States independence, which officially began on July 4, 1776. In a broader sense, however, the year 1776 was also pivotal year in the “Age of the Democratic Revolution” that swept through the entire Atlantic Community of nations during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.

This year, 1976, therefore, may also be properly considered the bicentennial of the opening year of the “age of revolutions” in the whole of America. Professor Robert R. Palmer, in his distinguished work on the subject, convincingly shows that, as he says,

Attempts to understand the nature of colonial Latin American cities have tended to focus on the role of urban centers in the process of empire building. The Spanish cities of the New World served initially as spearheads of conquest, and later as centers for the exercise of Imperial control. A particularly important aspect of this control was the effort by the Crown to limit the power of encomenderos, men whose royally granted right to use Indian labor threatened to create a local ruling class independent of Imperial power. Richard Morse has recently asserted that the patrimonial nature of many of these urban centers resulted from the efforts of the mother country to retain them in the Imperial structure against the counter-claims of the encomenderos. As for those poorer settlements on the outskirts of empire. Morse believes that the appeal of landed wealth drew many of their most prominent citizens into the countryside, leaving the cities to stagnate.

The issues involved in the topic of Jesuit wealth have excited observers and investigators since the sixteenth century. Their contemporaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries commonly believed that financial shrewdness and a deep involvement in commerce made the Order fabulously wealthy. From the time of the celebrated disputes with Bishop Cárdenas in Paraguay and Bishop Palaf ox in Mexico in the 1640’s, their detractors have considered the fact of their apparent wealth and rumored activities primafacie evidence of scandalous behavior, and so published many unsubstantiated allegations in their attacks on the Order. Even their admirers held the same views of Jesuit wealth and financial ability although they drew different conclusions concerning the effect of involvement with Mammon on Jesuit morals.

For Spain the Succession War (1702-1713) capped a century of stagnation and decline with a decade of civil war, invasion, and anarchy. Together with many other issues at stake in the conflict, commercial ambitions—particularly those relating to the Indies—lurked behind the facades of Habsburg and Bourbon dynastic claims. Both before and during the war foreign penetration, especially by the English and the Dutch, challenged Spain’s claims to exclusive trading rights in the New World, a challenge which neither the Spanish Navy nor Spanish imperial strategy was able to thwart.

General Cipriano Castro came to power in Venezuela in 1899. During his nine year regime he destroyed all internal political opposition, imposed a tight, one-party dictatorship, and undermined the national economy by creating federal monopolies, implementing arbitrary trade policies, and antagonizing foreign nations. His relations with outside powers were poor in particular. Not only did General Castro’s refusal—or inability—to pay international debts result in the December 1902 naval blockade of Venezuela by Great Britain, Germany, and Italy, but his undiplomatic treatment of foreign representatives, harassment of foreign companies, and policy of trade warfare prompted the severance of official ties with Colombia (1901), France (1906), the United States (1908), and the Netherlands (1908) and strained relations with Great Britain and Italy. In fact, in late 1908 the Dutch fleet began to conduct a belligerent naval demonstration against the Venezuelan coast and the United States was debating, among stronger measures, whether or not to boycott Venezuelan coffee and cacao. Clearly most Venezuelans and most foreigners favored General Castro’s removal from office. Their wishes were fulfilled in late 1908 when the dictator’s health—he had been bordering on death for four years due to a kidney ailment—again collapsed and he opted for surgery in Germany. First Vice President Juan Vicente Gómez was named Acting Chief Executive until General Castro returned from Europe.

Venustiano Carranza occupied a place of conspicuous importance in Mexican history. He achieved ascendancy in the crusade against Victoriano Huerta in 1913 and maintained it against all challengers until the spring of 1920. During this time he also resisted efforts by the United States to influence the course of events and undertook to reconstruct Mexico after years of devastation and turmoil. Yet in spite of his prominence, surprisingly few scholars have attempted a sustained or systematic examination of his role in the Mexican Revolution. No altogether satisfactory biography exists. He has appeared as a principal protagonist in several studies of factional disputes and diplomatic controversies during the Constitutionalist period, but often such accounts have projected an opaque, contradictory image of him. He has seemed either larger than life or lifeless and has been portrayed alternatively as a selfness champion of progressive reform or as a self-serving traditionalist who stood against the forces of meaningful change.

It has traditionally been argued that Free Trade and its principal oracle, Jean Courcelle Seneuil have adversely affected Chile’s economic development. Such diverse individuals as Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz, Julio César Jobet, Andre Gunder Frank, and Francisco Encina have asserted that the introduction of Economic Liberalism destroyed Chile. Before Courcelle Seneuil, they claimed, Chile enjoyed the possibility of becoming an industrial nation. The advent of Free Trade, however, knocked down the barriers behind which the nascent industries had prospered. Chile’s factories, unable to compete, withered away, reducing the nation to a raw material producer; an economic colony for the industrial powers of Europe and the United States.

The urban orientation of Spanish immigrants into the New World has been a well-argued thesis among historians of colonial Latin America. Reinforcing the settlers’ proclivities toward urban life was a concerted policy of the Spanish crown which encouraged the founding of towns and cities as part of the conquest and subsequent settlement. For the conquerors of the fifteenth century and for the settlers who followed them throughout the era of Spanish imperial domination, the cosmopolitan qualities of the Renaissance instilled the attitude that urbanidad (city life) meant organized living under established political, social and religious institutions. Towns and cities were centers of order and direction for civilized life in contrast to the presumed disorder and lack of style offered by rural life.