Resumen de Short People, Tall Folks and the Revival of Latin American Economic History. A Review of (eds.) Salvatore, Coatsworth & Challú's Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750-2000
I write this review essay under the safe assumption that most readers of A Contracorriente are not versed in the latest trends in economic history. Once upon a time (during the creatively turbulent decades of the 1960s-1970s) economic history was the hot boldly interdisciplinary field at the heart of the rising field of modern Latin American Studies. “Developmental,” neo-marxist, and distributional critiques of mainstream economic growth models—i.e., Modernization Theory—were everywhere. Reformist Latin American “structuralist” economics and more radical “dependency” theory sparked flourishing debates and refreshing research around Latin America’s uncharted economic history. Yet today, in the wake of the overwhelming turn to cultural and political history in the North American academy after 1980, the economic history of Latin America, if more sophisticated in methodological terms, is largely relegated to the more conservative and technocratic margins of the field. Its few active practitioners hold out in (overpaid) economics, political science, or business faculties. That the academic and institutional “right” captured political economy is ironic on many levels, given how central it used to be to both leftist critical and interdisciplinary academic traditions. Yet, most historians I know still run for cover at the mention of economic history, or even socio-economic factors in historical analysis. The flight from historical economics is less pronounced, however, in Latin American universities, where active concerns with macro and material issues never lapsed, given the visible realities of poverty, deprivation, and inequality pressing upon intellectual work.
