It is axiomatic, but certainly deserving of periodic repetition, that the long-term configuration of political, social and economic institutions in Iberian America has been determined both by the apparatus, operation and rationale of the metropolitan state, as well as by the premises and patterns of colonization. Equally apparent is the premise that the politico-administrative crisis associated with the achievement of independence in early nineteenth-century Latin America must be studied in the light of this ‘set’ of New World institutions, and particularly in relation to what Richard Morse calls the Spanish patrimonial state.

For the past couple of decades the Latin Americans, like their brethren in Africa and Asia, have been hell-bent in search of ‘development’ or ‘modernization’. While the Latin Americans were on the firing line, scholars and policy-makers in both the rich nations and the poor nations were involved in setting out an intellectual framework for analyzing the developmental process. New concepts to explain the meaning of development were devised; innovative measurements to gauge the level of development were proposed; a new vocabulary to capture the nuances of development was put forth.

The five nations of the Central American Common Market (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) have all the characteristics generally associated with less developed countries—largely agrarian economies, great dependence on agricultural exports for foreign exchange earnings, rapid population growth, widespread illiteracy, and low per capita incomes.

The Mexican Revolution can be seen as an effort to promote the modernization of that nation's society and institutions. Social scientists and historians agree that modernization is a complex process, including social, political, economic, and intellectual factors which evolve in different patterns and at different rates according to the particular circumstances under consideration. In terms of social change, political scientist S. N. Eisenstadt, and historian C. E. Black have isolated at least two trends that are of relevance to Mexican education in the 1930S: (1) an increased interest in urban as opposed to rural matters, and (2) the conflict between the representatives of a traditional elitist culture and the advocates of mass society based on modern technology.

Many studies of Latin American elites are compilations of biographical sketches. These increase understanding of various personalities, but tend to be unsystematic and unrelated. Frequently, no attempt is made to draw the data together into meaningful generalizations about elite background, recruitment, behavior, and the like. Many other studies that take a group approach also concern elites but often this is not explicitly recognized by the author. Much of the literature on the Latin American military falls into this category.2

Without question, Cuba's most successful ‘export’ from the very beginning of the Castro period has not been revolution, but the physical removal of its domestic enemies. For whatever reason individual Cubans came to reject the new order, the decision to part physically from their homeland was made by enough people to develop into what is probably the greatest mass migration in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Latest estimates provided by the Department of State indicate that approximately 560,000 persons have left Cuba since 1959 to settle in other countries—all but 50,000 in the continental United States or Puerto Rico

A reviewer confronted with fourteen new books on the Latin-American economy inevitably seeks a common theme on which to hang his remarks, in the hope that this will make sense of his labours. Let it be confessed immediately that diligent search has failed to reveal any such unity in these volumes. Indeed, on the safe assumption that they represent a random selection from the rapidly growing literature on the subject, they might almost be taken as evidence of a diversity of approach. An alternative strategy, therefore, is to argue the existence of central doctrines in the literature on Latin- American development in the last twenty-five years, and to relate to them the literature under review.