Leading Scholars of Latin American History
William McGreevey
The Futures Group International
1 January 98
Three decades ago, as a beginning teacher of Latin American history at
the University of California, Berkeley, I asked eleven graduate students
this question, "Who are the outstanding scholars in this field?" Thirty
years later, I canvassed the extensive author index accompanying the
annotated bibliographies of the eleven volumes of the Cambridge History
of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell, with the same question in
mind. At the urging of a colleague, I also looked at winners and
honorable mentions awarded between 1957 and 1996 to check on correlations
between the 1966 selections, the 1995 citations frequency, and
prize-winning authors. This note summarizes the results of theseinquiries and comments on some changes in this field over the intervening
period
The Initial Inquiry, spring 1966: Shoebox 201E.
Over three decades have passed since I taught History 201E to a group of
UC Berkeley history graduate students in spring semester, January through
June of 1966. The informal name conveyed the student's conception of the
tasks of the course: Fill a shoebox with 3x5 note cards derived from
reading primary sources on a selected topic; arrange them
chronologically, and write the article or book emanating from the notes.
Though teaching this course, I had never taken it or anything like it.
I studied economics, as an undergraduate at the Ohio State University,
and as a graduate student at MIT. I had of course filled up a shoebox or
two myself on Colombia's economic history, but I was fresh to the field.
Department of History staff offered 201 courses in many of thespecialties by time period and geographic area, to teach graduate
students bibliographic content and research technique. My strategy was
to use the students' enthusiasm for learning about the historiography of
Latin America to learn with them and from them. I wanted to read the
living masters. I expected to meet many of them myself, at professional
meetings, or as part of the stimulating flow of visitors who came with
great frequency to observe the unfolding student revolution at Berkeley.
The eleven registered students and I agreed to apply a Delphi technique
to sort out our joint selection of masters. We each prepared a preferred
list and then tabulated the results to identify the dozen most-selected
names. By iteration, students picked a favored historian so that each
had one author. (I chose Francois Chevalier, given my interest in
agrarian economic history.) Each student then identified a key book and
article that his/her author had written and that all students should
read. Each student committed to read her/his author's oeuvre, more or
less the whole published product. We scheduled a report and discussion
of each author's contribution to the field as a whole. These discussions
thus became the basis for the weekly meetings through the semester. The
names of the authors, and most of the works discussed, appear in the
accompanying box.
Selected authors and works studied in 1966 historiography seminar
Borah, Woodrow, and Sherburne F. Cook. The population of Mexico in 1548.
Ibero-Americana.
Boxer, Charles R. 1951. English shipping in the Brazil trade,
1640-1665. Mariners mirror 38, 197-230, and The golden age of Brazil.
Buarque de Holanda, Sergio. Raises do Brasil, and Sertanistas e
mareantes. Mon^Çaes, 112-123.
Chevalier, Francois. Les grandes domaines au Mexique; trans., Land and
society in colonial Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cosio Villegas, Daniel. Extremos de America, and The United States
versus Porfirio Diaz.
Friede, Juan. 1946. Migraciones indigenas. Boletin de historia de
America 33, 97-109, and El indio en lucha por la tierra.
Gongora, Mario. 1959. Notas sobre la encomienda chilena. Boletin de la
Academia Chilena de la historia 26, and Origen de los inquilinos de Chile
central.
Miranda, Jose. Espana y Nueva Espana en la epoca de Felipe II.
Morse, Richard M. 1965. The heritage of Latin America. The birth of
new societies, ed. Louis Hartz, and From community to metropolis: A
biography of Sao Paulo. Gainesville FL, 1958.
Stein, Stanley J. 1961. Tasks ahead for Latin American historians.
Hispanic American historical review 12, 3, 424-433, and The Brazilian
cotton manufacture.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Agrarismo, indianismo and aprismo. Hispanic American
historical review and Mexico: The struggle for peace and bread.
Zavala, Silvio. Estudios Indianos, and New viewpoints on Spanish
colonization..
Thirteen names appear in the bibliography because the UCBerkeley students
insisted that the team of Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, and
neither alone, should be one subject of study. That selection was far
more than a 'favorite sons' selection of Berkeley faculty. The Borah and
Cook findings on demographic decline proved to be the opening wedge of
work in epidemiology, health sciences, and the population impact of the
arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Their work, and that of Chevalier,
Cosio Villegas, Gongora, Stein, and Tannenbaum, addressed key issues in
the economic history of the region. It presaged one of the key lines of
subsequent research on the evolving economies of Latin America.
Political history of a more traditional kind, though not absent from the
works of Boxer, Buarque de Holanda, Cosio Villegas, or Miranda, was not
much on the minds of the 1966 Berkeley graduate students. If social
history was, as one colleague told me in those days, the history of the
poor, then that approach stimulated students' minds. Certainly the
writings of Chevalier, Friede, Gongora, Tannenbaum, and Zavala fit the
bill because of their search through primary materials that could
elucidate relations between native populations and dominant European
elites.
Berkeley History Department colleagues once jested that the only numbers
they wished to see in a book or article are those numbering the pages.
Among the authors we read in 1966 fewer than half used tabled data, much
less statistical analysis, to present their findings. Most had left
political history outside their purview, but they focused on social and
institutional history without a firm quantitative dimension to their
analytical work. They were 'in transition' to new methods, especially
the application of a scientific method in historical studies.
An obvious question is whether those Berkeley graduate students made the
right selections. One reasonably objective means to answer that question
is to assess whether, thirty years later, those authors stood the test of
time. Were they amply cited in the most serious scholarly assessment of
Latin American history that is likely ever to be published?
The author index to the eleventh volume of The Cambridge History of Latin
America, Bibliographic Essays, appears on pages 975 through 1043,
sixty-nine pages of tightly printed names and references to the 141
bibliographic essays themselves. A random check of single-line and
multi-line entries led to the estimate that there are about 7,600 authors
cited. All thirteen authors included in the 1966 selection also appear
in the 1995 author index. They thus all stood the test of time.
To be cited, however, is perhaps a weak test of durability. Were they
cited frequently, and as frequently as other authors whom we might have
selected? A means to answer that harder test is to note that about 430
of the 7,600 authors required two lines in the index. An additional
fifty needed three lines or more. These 480 persons constitute the upper
6.3 percent (480/7,600=0.063); they are the most-cited scholars in the
field of Latin American history. Of the thirteen authors chosen in 1966,
eleven used two lines or more to cover their citations in the author
index. Only two, Juan Friede and Jose Miranda, were restricted to a
single line, and their works were, nonetheless, cited eight and six
times, respectively.
It may be fair to conclude that the 1966 selections were good ones.
Could they have been better? Could we have selected persons ranking
even higher in the frequency of citations? One way to answer that
question is to look at the list of most-cited authors in Table 1. That
table ranks the fifty authors who used three lines or more for their
citations, with the ranking done by number of citations that appear in
the author index to Volume XI. The table also includes the thirteen
authors selected in 1966, some of whom rank well below the top 50 in
numbers of citations in the 1995 listing, and a few additional authors
frequently cited but in only two lines in the author index.
The top 50 authors in terms of number of citations constitute but 0.7
percent of those cited in the author index, surely an elite group of
influential authors. Of the thirteen authors selected in 1966, five were
included in the elite fifty: Borah, Boxer, Buarque de Holanda, Morse,
and Stein. The names listed above those chosen in 1966 are
overwhelmingly younger scholars who had not yet written major works three
decades ago. For example, David A. Brading's Merchants and Miners in
Colonial Mexico appeared in 1971, and Herbert Klein's Slavery in the
Americas was published in 1967. Even a quick glance at the listing in
the table will confirm for most readers of this note that many top fifty
authors had not yet published their major works by 1966. Authors that
could have substituted for those we chose might include Roberto Cortes
Conde, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Tulio Halperin-Donghi, Dauril Alden, and
Celso Furtado. Many of the others, and perhaps a few of these just
named, were too young in 1966 to yet be considered masters. This
confirming test thus supports the contention that the thirteen chosen in
1966 were a good representation of living masters of Latin American
historiography then.
Thirty years later, only two of those selected in 1966 appear among the
ten most-cited authors in 1995. These are Stanley J. Stein and Richard
M. Morse. Both wrote major monographs in their youth on Brazil; Stein on
the cotton industry and a coffee growing municipio, Vassouras, Morse on
the growth of Sao Paulo. The frequency of their citations in the
Cambridge history owes much to their writings after 1966. Stein was
co-editor, with Roberto Cortes Conde, of Latin America: a guide to
economic history, 1830-1930 (1977), one of the most-cited works. Morse
wrote and is cited extensively on urban history for the region as whole,
in a series of papers that began with the first volume of the Latin
American Research Review in 1965. In one of the few exuberant
recommendations that passed the editor's pen, appear these words about
Morse's New world soundings; culture and ideology (1989), "a work of rare
brilliance which ranges far and wide in time and space" (p. 894). Both
Stein and Morse extended their range from classic monographs to
region-wide topics and thus became essential citations for many of the
bibliographers.
Winners of the Bolton Prize
Besides the citation index, there is an alternative measure of quality
that is pertinent to those historians who write in English. How well
correlated are prize winning, frequent citations, and our 1966
selections? Since 1957, the Conference on Latin American History has
annually been awarding the Bolton Prize to an outstanding work in English
on Latin American history. There have been thirty-nine prizewinners and
forty-one honorable mentions, for a total of eighty honorees, some, as we
shall see, honored twice. Of the 1966 group of thirteen selected, only
three are among those eighty (Stein, Borah, and Tannenbaum).
This low number might suggest that we failed to pick the right masters.
Seven of those we chose, however, were essentially disqualified from
eligibility because they did not write, principally, in English. Of the
six who did write in English, three, half the eligibles, were Bolton
prizewinners. Stein won the prize in 1958, Tannenbaum in 1963, and Borah
in 1984. Viewed in this light, the correlation looks considerably
tighter.
When we met in February 1966, ten persons had already won the Bolton
Prize. Winners included, beginning with the earliest, Lanning, Stein, J.
Johnson and Shafer (shared in 1959), Leonard, Quirk, Wood, Tannenbaum,
Pike, and Gibson. Of that group, the regrettable exclusion from our 1966
list, I would now say with hindsight, was Charles Gibson. His book, The
Aztecs under Spanish rule, would have been an ideal complement to the
work of Chevalier, Borah and Cook, and Miranda.
The name of Frederick Pike is the only early Bolton prize winner that we
did not pick yet survived to appear on the most-cited author list in
Table 1. His focus on political and diplomatic history, valuable as it
may be, differed too much from the Berkeley students' interest in social
and economic history. We did not, in any case, think of consulting prize
lists to make our selections, and it was only in preparing for this
article that I learned in detail who had won the prize in each of the
years of its award..
Fourteen of the authors in Table 1 won the prize or honorable mention.
They captured 19 of the 80 prizes and honorable mentions so far given in
the name of Bolton. The Bolton Prize has gone overwhelmingly to
USA-based authors, a regrettable bias, and to historians rather than to
scholars in related disciplines. Of the 59 persons listed in Table 1,
only twenty, by my count, were Bolton prize eligibles, i.e., US-based
historians writing in English. The real incidence of prize-winning among
the prize-eligible Table 1 authors is a remarkable seventy percent. This
finding supports the conclusion of consistency among the quality measures
used here.
Authors Cited in 1995
What factors explain the frequent citations of those authors at the top
of Table 1? There is no single explanation. Some wrote on the colonial
period, some on the past two centuries. There are political and
institutional historians and more than a few who wrote on economic
history. Some focused on specific countries, especially Brazil,
Argentina, and Mexico, the largest. A few wrote on broader,
comprehensive topics like race and class, or urban development. Some
wrote surveys that bibliographers felt must be cited. About half of the
fifty most-cited authors were also among the 119 contributing authors of
the bibliographies.
Several were managers of historical research; they put together teams of
authors for edited collections. Reading from the top of Table 1,
Brading, Thorp, Klein, Stein, Stepan, Cortes Conde, and Hardoy are
scholars who managed collections that many bibliographers could not
resist citing.
An interesting sub-set of the fifty most-cited authors is the
non-historians. Thorp, Stepan, Diaz-Alejandro, Hardoy, Di Tella,
Lowenthal, Ocampo, Furtado, Fishlow, Gallo, and O'Donnell work or worked
in other disciplines. Most are economists; several are political
scientists, one, Hardoy, is an architect and city planner. Thus a fifth
of the most-cited authors came to historical studies from other
disciplines. Their work is accessible to historians, but it is also part
of a widening stream of scientific work that brings new analytical
methods to history.
Authors working on the colonial period are, perhaps unsurprisingly, more
likely to have been trained as historians. Brading, at the top of the
list, is exceptional in three respects. First, his work is cited more
frequently than that of any other writer on Latin American history.
Second, he won the Bolton Prize in 1972, and he received honorable
mention for it in 1980, an accomplishment shared with only three other
historians, Lockhart, Dean, and Schwartz, all of whom also appear among
the leading authors in Table 1.
Third, Brading wrote on but one country, Mexico, and mostly on the
eighteenth century. The exceptions are a much-cited edited volume on the
Mexican Revolution and a 'magisterial' (to quote one bibliographer)
review of emerging national consciousness over several centuries. In
sum, Brading's productive career sets him apart from his colleagues. His
standing, at the top of Table 1 is no fluke. His position there supports
the contention that citation frequency is a legitimate measure of
quality.
Shifts of Method
Both the methods and the subject matter Latin American history shifted
over the past quarter century. The directions of those shifts were in
part foretold by the student selections in 1966. Their selections of
masters focused on precursors of quantitative methods and writers
concerned with social and economic, not political, history. Still, over
half that early selection, namely, Boxer, Buarque de Holanda, Cosio
Villegas, Friede, Miranda, Morse, Tannenbaum, and Zavala, were essayists.
In contrast, many of the most-cited writers in Table 1 eschewed
narrative, descriptive essays in favor of more rigorous exploration of
cause and consequence. The surviving essayists, like Morse, Pike, or
Halperin-Donghi, substituted a deeper and richer analytical approach that
attracted the bibliographers. Florescano and Lockhart, two colonial
historians, also worked within relatively narrow geographical and
temporal boundaries to analyze compelling economic and social issues.
Analytical approaches, in my view, and not narrative skills, brought
these several authors' work to the fore among the bibliographers.
A large share of the authors listed in Table 1 wrote pieces that serve as
building blocks for further study. Their books and papers often support
and encourage further work, including writing that could refute their own
findings. This variant on scientific method may well be among the
distinctive features of a field of research that is changing its methods
to suit the requilrements of effective economic and social history.
Finally, there may be but one factor common to all these most-cited
authors. They wrote pieces of analysis that illuminate cause and
consequence. Their works help tell how events unfold and what caused
them to happen in Latin America's history.
Back to Berkeley
It may not be amiss at this point to attempt another assertion about the
leading scholars identified in Table 1. Many of them were associated
with the University of California, Berkeley, during some part of their
productive years.
The Bolton Prize is of course named for the long-time chairman of
Berkeley's History Department, Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870-1953). He
urged and taught a comprehensive view of the history of the Americas.
The last column of Table 1 records the letter B, for Berkeley, in 17 of
50 cases, about one-third of the total. Five were long-time faculty
(Brading, Cook, Halperin-Donghi, Borah, Fishlow). Eight were visiting
faculty or fellows, usually for one year (Thorp, Klein, Florescano,
Cortes Conde, Hardoy, Alden, Sanchez-Albornoz, Schwartz). Four were
graduate students (Lockhart, Alden again, and Wilkie), and one an
undergraduate (Conniff). There may be others I have missed.
Of those eighteen prizes, seven belong to authors associated in that
table with Berkeley.
Many other Berkeley faculty and students appear among the authors cited
in the author index. These include E. Arriaga, R. Barman, A. J. Bauer,
J. Blake, F. Bowser, O. A. Collver, H. Cross, K. Davis, G. Foster, A. de
Janvry, D. C. Johnson, D. Keremitsis, J. F. King, R. Katzman, E.
Kuznesof, W. McGreevey, L. North, E. S. Pang, J. J. Parsons, R. Potash,
J. Rowe, C. O. Sauer, S. Schwartzman, J. Scobie, R. Tyrer, E. Van Young,
and T. Wright. Differences in periods, approaches, and subject matter
about which these authors wrote, made little difference to one common
feature. Descriptive and narrative approaches were little encouraged;
analysis and understanding, especially the search for warranted
conclusions based on hard evidence, were the rule of work among all these
analysts.
Work at Berkeley on Latin American history was by no means a monopoly of
the History Department. Departments of Anthropology, Agricultural
Economics, Biology, City and Regional Planning, Demography, Economics,
Geography, Political Science, and Sociology employed staff represented
among authors cited. Broadly, these scholars worked on what H. Stuart
Hughes called theories of the middle range, avoiding the minutiae of
descriptive history and the grandiose but indefensible generalizations
that cannot stand the scrutiny of empirical verification. At Berkeley,
science had come to historical studies of Latin America.
Conclusion
At the heart of the scientific method is hypothesis testing. Applied to
Latin American history, this method requires a disciplined,
question-driven search through available primary data. A more
traditional narrative could proceed by filling shoe boxes, as mentioned
at the beginning of this note. Such methods rarely extend knowledge;
they can at best reorganize it. As an example of the scientific method,
consider the work of Diaz-Alejandro. He looks into factors that affected
Argentine economic growth, rejecting unlikely causes, lending support to
correlates that may tell credible stories about causal relationships.
The methods of the colonial historians, of which Brading, Florescano,
and Lockhart constitute good examples drawn from Table 1, are necessarily
less quantitative though no less analytically rigorous than those of
Klein, Dean, Cortes Conde, and others who focused on the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
An 'extreme' form of hypothesis testing, one that contributed to Robert
Fogel's Nobel Laureate status, is the attempt to formulate and test
counterfactual conditional propositions against real courses of events.
Fogel addressed the question, What would United States economic
development have been like without the railroads? His answer suggested
that the railroads made little difference to the pace and level of income
growth. This rigorously-tested response came as a surprise to many.
Fogel's book on railroads was the first step in establishing the new
economic history, or Cliometrics, as it is now often called, as a
vigorous and lively discipline with powerful methods available to address
critically important issues.
Some evidence of Latin American historians' reluctance to accept this
'with versus without' approach to historical research appears in a
bibliographer team's comment on a book on Colombian economic history,
"which aroused much adverse criticism owing to its heavy reliance on
counterfactual statements" (p. 820). It is not the statements that were
counterfactual but the effort to formulate credible alternative scenarios
that enable one to identify the impact of particular factors, such as the
construction of railways, or development of the coffee export industry,
on the economy and society as a whole. Economists now understand the
important distinction between an economy's development with and without
some specific factor (free trade, an oil discovery) and the observed
state of the economy before and after that factor's introduction. Causal
linkages can only be inferred from the counterfactual because too many
other factors affect the observed course of events when the historian
examines states at two points in time.
Economic historians, or cliometricians face the uncompleted task of
convincing many Latin American historians of the utility of analyzing the
counterfactual conditional. The presence of so many economic historians
in the author index under review here suggests that like Moliere's
character who spoke prose without knowing it, many Latin American
historians have learned in these thirty years to shape their research
agenda to formulate hypotheses in a more informative way than did their
own teachers and predecessors.
Concluding Comments
There is unlikely ever to be a printed collection to match the Cambridge
History of Latin America. With hypertext links and CD-Rom formats
already available, encyclopedic works of this kinds will be much cheaper
to produce electronically. They will be far easier to use as well.
Imagine how a student in the late 1990s could so much more easily
complete the tasks we set for ourselves in 1966, given the volumes put
together by Leslie Bethell. Then imagine how much easier it will be in
the future when hypertext links can lead a reader from an author index to
bibliographers' comments, and thence to the Library of Congress
collection of all printed works at its Web site. It may even prove
feasible to access many original primary documents electronically,
obviating travel to Seville or the Bancroft Library. These changes will
only increase the premium on analysis and thoughtful formulation and
testing of hypotheses.
Scholars owe Leslie Bethell an enormous debt of gratitude for having
brought this story together. We are lucky to have these works now
because such a published Summa could prove to be entirely uneconomical
for some future prospective publisher. These volumes will not be
displaced as the indispensable starting point for Latin America's
historiography..
Table 1. Authors Cited in 1995 Author Index, in order of number of
citations. authors included in 1966 selection (*), those (B) who spent a
year or more at University of California, Berkeley, and year of award of
Bolton Prize or honorable mention (H)
Name Lines Cites *, B, yr.
Brading, David A. 5 35 B, 72, 80H
Thorp, Rosemary 4 27 B
Klein, Herbert S 4 26 B
Florescano, Enrique 3 25 B
Stein, Stanley J. 4 25 *, 58
Stepan, Alfred C. 4 25
Lockhart, James 3 24 69H, 93
Morse, Richard M. 3 24 *
Dean, Warren 3 23 77H, 96
Diaz-Alejandro, Carlos F. 4 23
Cortes Conde, Roberto 3 22 B
Pike, Frederick B. 3 22 64
Buarque de Holanda, Sergio 4 21 *
Morner, Magnus 3 21
Flores Galindo, Alberto 3 20
Gonzalez Casanova, Pablo 3 20
Halperin-Donghi, Tulio 3 20 B
Hardoy, Jorge Enrique 3 20 B
Alden, Dauril 3 19 B, 69H
Di Tella, Guido 3 19
Graham, Richard 3 19 69
Whitehead, Laurence 3 19
Wirth, John D. 3 19 71, 78H
Borah, Woodrow 3 18 *B, 84
Drake, Paul W. 3 18 79
Lowenthal, Abraham F. 3 18
Abreu, Marcelo de Paiva 3 17
Bonilla, Heraclio 3 17
Costa, Emilia Viotti da 3 17
Lavrin, Asuncion 3 17
Name Lines Cites *, B
Love, Joseph L. 3 17 72H
Ocampo, Jose Antonio 3 17
Bethell, Leslie 3 16
Boxer, Charles R. 3 16 *
Cardoso, Ciro Flamarion S. 3 16
Furtado, Celso 3 16
Gongora, Mario 2 16 *
Meyer, Lorenzo 3 16
Fishlow, Albert 3 15 B
Gallo, Ezequiel 2 15
Miller, Rory 3 15
Platt, D. C. M. 3 15
Sanchez-Albornoz, Nicolas 3 15 B
Schwartz, Stuart B. 2 15 B, 74H, 86
Wilkie, James W. 3 15 B, 68
Conniff, Michael L. 3 14 B
O'Donnell, Guillermo 3 14
Gonzalez y Gonzalez, Luis 3 13
Moya Pons, Frank 3 13
Taunay, Affonso d'Escragnolle 3 13
Carvalho, Jose Murilo de 3 12
Gomes, Angela Maria de Castro 3 12
Chevalier, Francois 2 11 *
Zavala, Silvio A. 2 11 *
Cook, Sherburne F. 2 9 *B
Cosio Villegas, Daniel 2 9 *
Friede, Juan 1 8 *
Miranda, Jose 1 6 *
Tannenbaum, Frank 2 6 *. 63
Source: Author's calculations based on Bethell, ed., The Cambridge
history of Latin America, vol. XI, 1995, pp. 975-1043.
*Authors selected for review in 1966.
B = Authors who spent one year or more as student, visitor, or faculty at
UC Berkeley.
Date: Year awarded Bolton Prize or (H) honorable mention.