ABSTRACT
The fundamental changes in industrial production and organization that created Finance Capitalism affected all industrial societies in the last half of the nineteenth century, and they underlay the late-nineteenth-century imperialist impulse–the "New Imperialism"–that transformed the international political economy. The internal logic of Finance Capitalism underlay the burst of European economic and political expansion in the last half of the nineteenth century, and Latin America's role in this global system was substantial. Argentina's export economy illustrates the side of the spectrum opposite from enclave export production. In Brazil, organized along more Mercantilist lines than was Spanish America, sugar planters had been a source of national political stability. Materially successful export economies formed two other groups that had extensive political impact on their social and economic formations. The political content of salaried white-collar employees, the second important social group developing at this time, was distinct from that of the working-class.
