This paper originated with Jonathan Brown's invitation to participate in a LARR-sponsored panel at the 2004 LASA Congress, commenting on the lectures offered by John Coatsworth and Joseph Love. The discussants' task was to relate the general ideas presented by these scholars to our own field of specialization, which in my case happens to be the history of foreign trade. Therefore, this article summarizes the evolution of economic ideas with respect to Latin America, with special emphasis on foreign trade and commercial policy. It explains the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools, the shift brought about by the return of neoclassical economics, and the partial departure from orthodoxy made by the New Institutional Economics (NIE). This article concludes with a discussion of how these changes in paradigms were generated and how the evolution in ideas contributes fresh approaches to the historical interpretation of the role of foreign trade in Latin America.

This essay aims to introduce an issue of the RHE-JILAEH dedicated to the reconstruction of historical trade statistics of Latin American countries. It comments on the early perceptions of the quality and utility of historical trade statistics and on the way in which more recent analyses have overcome the distrust that prevailed until the last third of the 20th century. It then summarises the different criteria and methodologies that have been used to assess the accuracy and reliability of trade statistics in order to make them useful for the purpose of reconstructing new, more complete and precise trade series or re-estimating those available. The introduction ends with a brief description of the contents of this volume.

In 1821 Mexico achieved its independence from Spain. What happened in the following 50 years has become a field of dispute for economic historians. The lack of reliable quantitative information in many fields of economic activity has led to contrasting interpretations, none of which has been accepted as definitive. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the yearly values of Mexico’s foreign trade in that period, with the purpose of providing elements to start filling this significant gap in Mexico’s historiography. It relies on official trade statistics and consular reports from Mexico’s main trading partners. It provides new series of imports and (commodity and specie) exports, and a provisional view of the balance of trade for most of the 1821-1870 period.

The purpose of this work is to correct an error contained in the historical record of Mexico’s GDP which has led to underestimate considerably the progress achieved by industrialisation in the Mexican economy before the Great Depression, also distorting its position within the Latin American context. This error consists in the misleading identification of industry with manufacture, ignoring the contribution to Mexican industrial production made by the metallurgical sector. By incorporating the value added from metallurgy to the net output of manufacture the share of industry in GDP grows accordingly, placing Mexico among the most industrialised countries of Latin America by the end of the export era.

This article explores the performance of Mexico's exports in the early twentieth century, and particularly the so-called ‘export boom’ that took place during the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). By compiling the official trade figures from major trading partners, the article overcomes the deficiency of Mexican statistics that previously limited detailed analysis. Armed with more reliable data, this article defines the extent of the export boom and identifies its main contributing factors in terms of price, quantity and structure.

After a long decay, in the last decades of the nineteenth century the Mexican economy experienced a process of accelerated growth mainly associated with the export sector. As the latter developed and diversified, new opportunities for investment opened in agriculture, livestock rising, and mining. Starting in the 1890s, this process was also accompanied by an early phenomenon of import-substitution industrialization, which would continue to unfold until the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. Although industrial growth was “limited in scope and fraught with inefficiencies” (p. 187), it appears as an uncommon experience in an era dominated by export-led growth in Latin America and as one that has attracted less attention than it deserves in the historiography on Mexico. This is the subject of Edward Beatty's work.

This paper provides a reconstruction of the yearly values of Mexico's foreign trade within the period 1870–1929, the era of liberal capitalism. It uses the Mexican official statistics as well as those published by Mexico's main trading partners: the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. The article assesses de quality and consistency of the Mexican sources and applies explicit criteria to rectify the official figures and to fill the gaps in the available information. It also proposes a new breakdown of trade values, which allows distinguishing between commodity trade and specie movements. As a result, the article provides widi complete annual series of commodity trade and specie flows, as well as a yearly estimate of the trade balance throughout the period.