ABSTRACT
The Colonial Heritage of Latin America, which was widely read in North American universities, argued that economic and to a lesser extent social and political dynamics inherited from the colonial era persisted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the form of “neocolonial structures” that inhibited change. The racial and cultural complexity of contemporary Latin America is a product not only of the fusion of native and European peoples but of the introduction of black Africans into the New World. Colonial government favored the rich, and its administration of justice was partial. Latin America’s wars of independence were triggered by events in Europe. After the French Revolution of 1789, a series of conflicts ensued that weakened links between the colonies and the motherland, and demonstrated Spain’s second-rate military status. Government in the plantation-dominated colony had always been weak, and late-eighteenth-century reforms under the Marquis de Pombal were a faint echo of the Bourbon restructuring in Spanish domains.
