No aspect of Brazilian history has received so stereotyped a treatment as the position of the female and her contribution to the society and economy of the colony. The white donzela and the lady of the ‘big house’ have been depicted as leading a secluded existence, be it in the innermost recesses of their homes or in conventual cells, immune to harsh realities and safe from brash overtures by pretenders. Of the white woman, it was said, during her lifetime she left her home on only three occasions: to be baptized, to be married, and to be buried. The role of the white woman was seen as essentially passive, victim of the demands of an over-bearing and frequently unfaithful older husband to whom she would bear children, or of a martinet of a father. As for the Amerindian woman, whose beauty led the discoverers to initial raptures of platonic appreciation and then sexual overindulgence, she has rarely been depicted in any role other than that of concubine or lover. The black and mulatto woman, slave or free, became a symbol of sensual arousal and sexual fulfillment.

This paper sets out to examine the way in which guano was dug and removed from the Chincha islands in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Peruvian trade was in its most buoyant phase. We shall, in fact, be looking at the physical operation of an entire export sector, up to the point at which the commodity left the shores of Peru for the farms of Western Europe and North America.

The hypothesis of Andre Gunder Frank that Latin America's underdevelopment is partly attributable to unequal exchange in economic relations with the advanced world includes the obverse proposition that Latin America's growth has been most substantial in periods such as wartime when links with the metropolitan countries were weakened. The most explicit statement of this view occurs in the book, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: … the satellites experience their greatest economic development and especially their most classically capitalist industrial development if and when their ties to their metropolis are weakest. This hypothesis is almost diametrically opposed to the generally accepted thesis that development in the underdeveloped countries follows from the greatest degree of contact with and diffusion from the metropolitan developed countries.

During most of 1942 the United States Department of State attempted to cajole, flatter, or force the Government of Chile to break diplomatic relations with the Axis powers. The reluctance of both Chile and Argentina to join the other Latin American countries in severing relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan soon reached the level of a major foreign policy controversy, and United States officials became incensed at Chile's ‘timidity’ in joining the crusade against fascism. The misunderstanding between them, this analysis will argue, stemmed from the nature of the situation and of the parties involved.

The decade of the 1970s has brought a number of changes to Latin America and in particular to the Latin American political scene. The extensive proliferation of harsh, military-run governments, the increasingly strident cries of nationalism and anti-Americanism, the violent demise of the Marxist- oriented regime of Chile's Salvador Allende and the disappointing performance of the Alliance for Progress programs and its modernizing ideology are now all familiar characteristics of Latin America in the modern era.