This article tells the story of how an important group of social scientists in Latin America turned away from the problems of underdevelopment to the possibilities for democracy. It focuses on a network of leading Latin American intellectuals and their North American counterparts brought together by material stringencies as well as intellectual and political concerns arising from the sweeping wave of authoritarianism in the region. Brokered by private institutions and mediated by personal encounters, the decade-long endeavors of the network reveal the mechanisms through which social scientific paradigms are undone and refashioned.

This essay explores the intellectual foundings of Argentine constitutionalism from the 1830s to the 1850s. Focusing on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi and some of his critics, it argues that Argentine constitutionalism had liberal roots but invoked arguments that could neither bring unity to the state-building coalition nor resolve some basic tensions within the framework of national sovereignty.

This article places empires as interlocking parts of a broader global regime, a term invoked as an alternative to a world system. By focusing on connective processes and political contingencies, it presents a strategy that avoids rendering empires as radial hubs of a European-centred arrangement. Two features lie at the core of the approach: the way in which empires competed with each other, and the way in which they imitated, borrowed, and learned from each other. Instead of looking at the cyclical rise or fall of great powers, the accent here is on the tensions and intervisibilities between the parts that make up a whole. The regime was, therefore, inherently unstable and integrative at the same time. The article looks in particular at European empires embedded in the broader, unstable, yet increasingly integrated global context that shaped them. The period at stake covers the fifteenth century to the nineteenth and concludes by pointing at some longer-term legacies. It suggests an alternative political economy to the familiar models of ‘European world system’.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Argentina and Canada experienced unprecedented economic growth. In the period stretching from 1890 to 1914, Argentina and Canada played host to millions of migrating Europeans and became the largest borrowers on the world's capital markets. The infusion of foreign labour and capital helped to convert the empty grasslands into bread baskets for the world.

The expansion was propelled by crops in the export sector, mainly cereals cultivated on the Argentine pampas and the Canadian prairies. By the early years of this century, wheat became the premier export for both countries, and eventually ranked among the world's top cereal exporters. After World War I, both countries combined to supply around 60 percent of the world's total wheat export trade.1 Argentina and Canada exemplified what was beneficial about export-led development.

How do organized workers take advantage of political transitions to gain ground for their movements, and conversely, in what ways do these transitions shape workers' tactics and agendas? This essay compares popular responses to political opportunities in three countries in the throes of deep crises. Exploring the routes to divergent outcomes from a common juncture during and after the First World War draws attention to the possibilities of and constraints on working-class imprints on constitutional development.

The nineteenth-century has been something of a vortex for Spanish American historians. From the collapse of the Empire in 1808 to 1810 until the consolidation of conservative agro-export regimes by the century's end, the dominant features of the region's historiographic landscape have been revolution, civil war, personalist “tyrants,” and bouts of ethnic uprising unmatched since the first century of Conquest. When Latin American historians, such as Lucás Alamán in Mexico or Bartolomé Mitre in Argentina, sat down at mid-century to write national narratives for their emerging republics, their histories were veiled stories of incompletion, failed promise, and unfinished aspirations.