History of Latin America
Week 1: Colonial Legacies: God and Gold
Lecture outline
Readings: **Galeano, "Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver"
from Duncan Green, Faces of Latin America (London: Latin America Bureau, 1991)
Here is a biographical link for Eduardo Galeano that may be helpful as you read Chapter One of his book The Open Veins of Latin America.
Many historians and economists in the 1960s and '70s found the roots of modern Latin America's economic woes in the colonial-era development of single export commodities like sugar and silver. They traced Latin American underdevelopment and dependence from the colonial era of Potosí through to the garampeiros of today's Amazon. Known as dependency or world systems theory, this notion remains compelling to many analysts today. Do you agree with it?
Examples from both the colonial and modern eras:
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