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Although Latin America had a substantial merchant fleet by the 1950s, at the end of the century most of the major shipping companies have disappeared from the continent. Continuing to grow through protectionist efforts during the 1960s and 1970s, the industry began to decline when container technology, requiring large capital investments, shifted competition to access capital. This book shows how technology undermined and finally shattered the nationalist efforts to create a significant Latin American merchant shipping industry. Written in a clear and concise style, it provides the first authoritative survey of Latin American shipping during the second half of the century. ... Read more

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The province of Oaxaca in southern Mexico was one of the main sources of Spanish wealth during the colonial period. The largely indigenous population supplied dyes and cotton for the Spanish merchants trading both with Spain and within Mexico itself. Much of the trade was conducted in violation of the Laws of the Indies and the royal decrees. The present study traces the struggles of the Spanish Metropolitan Government and the local episcopal authorities in Oaxaca to secure observation of the law. The effects of the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms and of the Mexican Independence movement of 1810-21 are discussed. Brian Hamnett has based his study on archival sources in Seville and Mexico and provides statistical information in both the text and appendices. In addition the author has supplied detailed information concerning individuals - administrators, merchants, landowners, clerics - involved in politics and commerce. ... Read more

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This title is a study of the export of books from Britain to early-independent Spanish America, which considers all phases of production, distribution, reading and re-writing of British books in the region, and explores the role that these works played in the formation of national identities in the new countries. Analysing in particular the publishing house of Rudolph Ackermann, which dominated the export of British books in Spanish to the former colonies in the 1820s, it discusses the ways in which the printed form of these publications affected the knowledge conveyed by them. After a survey of the peculiar characteristics of print culture in early-independent Spanish America and the trends in the import of European books in the region, the author examines the operation of Ackermann's publishing enterprise. She shows how the collaborative nature of this enterprise, involving a number of Spanish American diplomats as sponsors and Spanish exiles as writers and translators, shaped the characteristics of its publications, and how the notion of "useful knowledge" conveyed by them was deployed in the service of both commercial and educational concerns.The hitherto unexplored mechanisms of book import, distribution, wholesale and retailing in Spanish America in the 1820s are also analysed, as is the way in which the significance of the knowledge transmitted by those books shifted in the course of their production and distribution. The author examines how the question-and answer form of Ackermann's textbooks constrained both publishers and writers and oriented their readers' relation with the texts. She then looks at the various ways in which foreign knowledge was appropriated in the construction of individual, social, national, and continental identities; this is done through the study of a number of individual reading experiences and through the analysis of the editions and adaptations of Ackermann's textbooks during the 19th century. Innovative in subject matter and methodological approaches, this book should be of interest both to book historians and to Latin American scholars, as well as to historians of education, historians of science, and scholars interested in processes of internationalisation, transmission, and appropriation of knowledge. ... Read more

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Publisher: Washington : Govt. Print. Off.Publication date: 1890Subjects: Finance -- AmericaUnited States -- Commerce Latin AmericaLatin America -- Commerce United StatesNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Dictionary of American History, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1922 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Focuses on cultures and countries around the world, specifically what is and is not shared culturally by the people who live in a particular country. Entries contain descriptive summaries of the country in question, including demographic, historical, cultural, economic, religious, and political information. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Business Mexico, published by American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico A.C. on June 1, 2003. The length of the article is 845 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Ties that bind: U.S. trade agenda with Latin America discussed at D.C. summit.
Author: Molly Puglisi
Publication: Business Mexico (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2003
Publisher: American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico A.C.
Volume: 13Issue: 6Page: 40(2)

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On the eastern coast of Brazil, facing westward across a wide magnificent bay, lies Salvador, a major city in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. Those who distributed and sold food, from the poorest street vendors to the most prosperous traders--black and white, male and female, slave and free, Brazilian, Portuguese, and African--were connected in tangled ways to each other and to practically everyone else in the city, and are the subjects of this book.Food traders formed the city's most dynamic social component during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, constantly negotiating their social place. The boatmen who brought food to the city from across the bay decisively influenced the outcome of the war for Brazilian independence from Portugal by supplying the insurgents and not the colonial army. Richard Graham here shows for the first time that, far from being a city sharply and principally divided into two groups--the rich and powerful or the hapless poor or enslaved--Salvador had a population that included a great many who lived in between and moved up and down.

The day-to-day behavior of those engaged in food marketing leads to questions about the government's role in regulating the economy and thus to notions of justice and equity, questions that directly affected both food traders and the wider consuming public. Their voices significantly shaped the debate still going on between those who support economic liberalization and those who resist it.

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This volume recounts the little-known history of Hispano merchants in the Santa Fe trade during the nineteenth century. Contrary to ethnic stereotypes, Hispanos were ambitious, savvy businessmen who practised the most modern methods of international finance. Their complex transactions linked Santa Fe with Chihuahua City, St. Louis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York, London, and Paris. New Mexican merchants like millionaire Felipe Chavez were major figures in the Santa Fe trade until the coming of the railroad in 1880. The practices of Chavez and his competitors convincingly demonstrate why they referred to themselves as 'los capitalistas'. In addition to maps illustrating the international network of the Santa Fe trade, five appendices present data of interest to historians and genealogists, including Mexican merchants who received commercial passports from the Santa Fe customs house, and census data from 1860 and 1870 on Hispano and non-Hispano merchants and freighters. ... Read more

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This acclaimed history of Portuguese and Brazilian slaving in the southern Atlantic is now available in paperback. With extraordinary skill, Joseph C. Miller explores the complex relationships among the separate economies of Africa, Europe, and the South Atlantic that collectively supported the slave trade. He places the grim history of the trade itself within the context of the rise of merchant capitalism in the eighteenth century. Throughout, Miller illuminates the experiences of the slaves themselves, reconstructing what can be known of their sufferings at the hands of their buyers and sellers.A landmark study in the history of the Atlantic slave trade.It will be an essential reference for anyone who writes on the trade, from whatever perspective, for years to come. . . . This book is full of rich data, especially concerning the passage from the interior to the coast, the role of Luso-Africans and Europeans in Angolan port cities, and conditions on the floating tombs that carried their deathly cargoes across the Atlantic.Phyllis M. Martin, African Economic HistoryWay of Death . . . [opens] up in profuse detail and at considerable length the history of the Portuguese South Atlantic empire. . . . We meet African traders dependent on credit extended by Portuguese merchants supplying slaves to Brazilian shippers who were trying to become merchants on their own. And in the background is the shadowy . . . presence of English capital.Stuart B. Schwartz, New York Times Book ReviewOther scholars have attempted studies of this type, but no one approaches Miller in depth.John K. Thornton, International Journal of African Historical Studies

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Customer Reviews (1)

Title not hyperbole
Joseph Miller's Way of Death is an exhaustingly long volume for a non-academic reader, but a rich and rewarding one, if you like your history deeply rooted in archival sources.The title (and headings such as "Floating Tombs" and "Merchants of Death") make the book sound like popularization, though they actually are more a reflection of Miller's penchant for metaphor, which gives the book an almost Tolstoyan quality.Indeed, the division of the book into discrete sections that view the Angolan slaving economy as it affected those involved (native African individuals and polities, mixed-race "Luso-African" traders, Brazilian ship and plantation owners, Lisbon-based merchants, Portuguese governors) lets you see his subject with a depth and complexity reminiscent of good fiction.But it doesn't make Way of Death easy to read-the section most like a narrative account, which ties together a number of the previous threads, doesn't come till well after the 500th page.Miller feels no need to summarize political history, so I recommend as background an earlier short work such as David Birmingham's Trade and Conflict in Angola (though its economic history needs correction in the light of Miller's research).

Trained as an Africanist, Miller is particularly sensitive to the Central African sense of wealth as people rather than as goods or specie, and the different political economies leading from one kind of wealth to the other-a linkage that passes from the traditional elders and lineage systems, in which control of land and women's fertility was power, to the monarchs and warlords who used material goods to acquire dependents, to the merchant princes who stockpiled goods and slaves rather than dependents, to Luso-African traders who provided the link between textiles, muskets, and rum from Europe, Asia, and Brazil and the slaves given up by Africans.The boundaries were not stable, and the "slaving frontier" moved east from Luanda and the coast in jumps, partly in response to periodic war and drought.After three and a half centuries, this "catchment zone" for captives spread across a vast expanse of Central Africa from the Congo to the upper Zambezi and the edges of the Kalahari.

From the perspective of Atlantic economies, the financial basis of 18th-century Luso-Brazilian slaving was very rickety.Exchange of precious metals for slaves was rare.Those most immediately concerned on the African end took European goods to sell on credit and only saw reimbursement after the surviving slaves were sold-at more or less fixed prices-in Brazil.The chronic undercapitalization of Angolan slaving and the dependence of both the Angolan and Brazilian side on credit extended by Portuguese and (indirectly) British merchants is a major theme of the book.The appalling death rate among captives between point of capture and delivery in Brazil made slaves a highly perishable commodity and considerable financial risk.Those seeking to wrest a profit engaged in "tight-packing" on slave ships, which meant cheating on official capacity and reducing space for water and food in order to fit more slaves on board-which raised the death rate on ships even higher.Miller's title is no hyperbole-between the long trip from the hinterland, the dreadful conditions in Luanda barracoons, and the middle passage, a minority of those who began the "way of death" reached Brazil.

A must-read for anyone seriously interested in Central Africa or the Atlantic slave trade. ... Read more