The market imperative—that is, the need to institute market mechanisms as solutions for a variety of social problems—seems to dominate current political debate in Latin America. Administrations as diverse as those of Collor de Mello, Fujimori, Menen, and Salinas de Gortari have been implementing economic reforms based on neoconservative principles. Privatization of public enterprises, national economies opened to foreign competition, the freeing of financial markets, and the compliance with International Monetary Fund (IMF) guidelines are now accepted goals among parties and leaders that, just a decade ago, contributed to building interventionist, redistributionist, and developmentalist coalitions. Broad segments of the political class now believe that only the wholesome implementation of free-market principles can lift Latin America from its decade-old crisis. Among the left, this apparent hegemony of market ideology has engendered confusion and pessimism. The heritage of authoritarian regimes, the protracted regional economic crisis, and, more recently, the revolutions of Eastern and Central Europe seem to have defeated the viability of alternative discourses about the crisis and its solutions.

When African-American workers broke labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were acting in opposition to established social norms concerning race, class, community, and the state. Imagine platoons of African-American men who ordinarily lacked protection of their most basic civil rights escorted by police into a hostile European-American community to take the jobs of European-American workers who were expressing their working-class consciousness through a labor union that excluded their fellow African-American workers. Scholars have interpreted African-American strikebreaking as an example of the ethnic stratification characteristic of the American working class (Bonacich 1976; Gutman 1962, 1987; Foner and Lewis 1979, 1980; Spero and Harris 1931). What was its political-economic context? That is the central question of this essay.

One of the hallmarks of the written history of nursing is the idea that the apprenticeship system of nurses’ training, lasting from the 1870s through the 1930s, was characterized by exploitation. “Emergencies and understaffing” dictated the training of nurses, according to Susan Reverby, because “the demands of the hospital for a work force meant that pupils’ education was continually sacrificed to the exigencies of hospital work” (1987: 64–65; also see Kalisch and Kalisch 1986).

Like american historians of the colonial period, historians of New France did not neglect, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, the problem of differentiation between the inhabitants of the New World and the metropolitans from whom they descended. It is thought that with the decline in French immigration after 1675 and the rapid Canadianization of the population, the relative isolation of the colony favored the creation of a particular type of French people, whose originality was reflected in such domains as physique, character, language, military strategy, and so forth. Was demographic behavior one of these particularities, or even oppositions, as the French officer de Bougainville noted in 1756: “It seems that we are a different nation, even an enemy” (Filteau 1978 [1937]: 252)? More specifically, how did reproductive behavior adapt to the living conditions prevalent in the St. Lawrence valley during the first century of European settlement?

The early economic development of regions of recent European settlement such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and Argentina was similar in that each region began by exporting products with a high natural resource content. Yet in each case the pace and character of growth and development has differed depending on the timing of the initial settlement, the nature of institutions, and the type of resource export and its market demand. The economic development of resource abundant, sparsely populated regions has been explained by what has become known as the staples approach or models of export-led development.