ABSTRACT
René Chateaubriand, France’s foreign minister under Louis XVIII, wrote in presumably wellinformed disgust: “In the hour of emancipation the
Spanish colonies turned into some sort of British colonies.” He cited some figures. Between 1822 and 1826, he said, Britain had extended to the liberated Spanish colonies ten loans for a nominal value of around £ 21 million, but after deduction of interest and middlemen’s commissions scarcely
Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, originally published in 1971 in Mexico, remains one of the most articulate discussions of American and European economic imperialism in Latin America. Galeano, an early advocate of dependency theory and a strident critic of U.S. and European imperialism, argued that from the moment of European discovery of the Americas, Europe, and then North America, had imposed an unequal economic relationship upon Latin America. Latin America, he contended, had been deliberately underdeveloped, and it therefore was not, in the sense that people have commonly used the term in recent decades, a developing region.
