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The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century
From the Preface by Bradford Burns:If this essay succeeds, it will open an interpretive window providing a different perspective of Latin America's recent past. At first glance, the view might seem to be of the conventional landscape of modernization, but I hope a steady gaze will reveal it to be far vaster and more complex. For one thing, rather than enumerating the benefits accruing to Latin America as modernization became a dominant feature of the social, economic, and political life of the region, this essay regards the imposition of modernization as the catalyst of a devastating cultural struggle and as a barrier to Latin America's development. Clearly if a window to the past is opened by this essay, then so too is a new door to controversy. After most of the nations of Latin America gained political independence, their leaders rapidly accelerated trends more leisurely under way since the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the importation of technology and ideas with their accompanying values from Western Europe north of the Pyrenees and the full entrance into the world's capitalistic marketplace. Such trends shaped those new nations more profoundly than their advocates probably had realized possible. Their promoters moved forward steadfastly within the legacy of some basic institutions bequeathed by centuries of Iberian rule. That combination of hoary institutions with newer, non-Iberian technology, values, and ideas forged contemporary Latin America with its enigma of overwhelming poverty amid potential plenty. This essay emphasizes that the victory of the European oriented ruling elites over the Latin American folk with their community values resulted only after a long and violent struggle, which characterized most of the nineteenth century. Whatever advantages might have resulted from the success of the elites, the victory also fastened two dominant and interrelated characteristics on contemporary Latin America: a deepening dependency and the declining quality of life for the majority.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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February 22, 2026
Progress is the God of Western civilization, and with the triumph of neoliberalism from Buenos Aires to Ulan Bator, of global civilization, at least for the moment. Liberals, Positivists, Marxists, and modernization theorists worship at His shrine. The description of the bourgeoisie by Marx and Engels in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, "it has created a world in its own image" and is responsible for "marvels that far surpass the pyramid" could have been written by Gladstone, Spencer or any champion of imperialism. But, what if progress is a lie, and actually produces poverty and inequality? That is the bold thesis of E.Bradford Burns in this book-length essay, guaranteed to rattle the minds of progressives of the left and right. Latin American elites, liberal by political identity, following independence in the nineteenth century foisted upon their largely Indian and Black populations a model of capitalist progress designed to make themselves and their overseas partners in London, Paris and New York rich at the expense of the rural poor. This toxic legacy, Burns asserts, is responsible for the underdevelopment of Latin America. The heroes of this sordid tale are the few conservative caudillos (populist charismatic leaders) who defended the rural folk against the urban elites, usually at the cost of their political, and sometimes personal, lives.
Regardless of whether they called themselves Liberals, Progressives, Juaristas in Mexico or Unitarians (no, not the church kind) in Argentina, the Latin American elites had a program for modernization, borrowed uncritically from Europe. The city must prevail over the countryside. Rural America was a stagnant swamp of idleness, religiosity, fanaticism, and worst of all, filled with Indians. The city offered literacy, medicine, secular schooling, planning and plenty of white folk. From Spencer and the Positivists the elites took the belief in quantitative progress, and nothing said "progress" like the railroads. Modern nations exercised sovereignty literally by the railroad yard. Development meant a healthy trade balance, plenty of foreign investment and filling government coffers through tariffs. In time, the city would subvert, the code word was "national integration", the countryside, immigration from Europe turn dark-skinned nations white while the Indians and Afro-Latins disappeared, and the Latin American nations would take their place as junior members of a new capitalist global order. If all this sounds like twenty-first century neoliberalism, you're right. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. Burns documents persistent food shortages in Latin America which had not existed under colonialism, a drop in the daily calorie count, overcrowded housing in the large cities---this is the origin of Latin American slums---a break-up of the family while men went to work in the urban areas, and the decline of native textile looms, collective village property, such as the ejidos of Mexico, and a growing racism directed at all things associated with the rural poor. Latin America in the nineteenth century experienced, in the words of Peter Eisenberg in his study of sugar factories in Pernambuco, Brazil, "modernization without change". The elites introduced new technologies and privatization of land without changing, in fact strengthening, the old ties that bound rural labor to capital, including slavery in Brazil and Cuba and debt peonage in Mexico.
The counter-hegemonic wave to this lugubrious trend was dictatorship by traditionalist strongmen born of the countryside, usually, though not always, of mixed-race. Burns begins his survey of conservative caudillos with the exception, Dr. Francia of Paraguay, an urban-born intellectual and Creole. Usually taken for a monster by historians, and immortalized in fictional form by Roa Bastos in his novel YO, El SUPREMO (I, THE SUPREME) Dr. Francia was, according to Burns, in fact an South American Enlightment despot who, unlike the liberal elites, protected his nation from foreign conquest and the local hacendado (landed oligarchy) class. He sealed off Paraguay from the rest of the world by closing its borders to the giant neighbors next door, Brazil and Argentina, leaving poor Bolivia alone. He dealt with landowners by confiscating their estates and turning them into national property. His greatest feat was in rescuing the Paraguayan Indian majority population, the Guarani, from the clutches of the Catholic Church and the hacendados at once. Dr. Francia secularized education and made Indians wards of the state who could not be contracted for wage labor. Instead, the Indians worked on the "misiones", or Church, now government-owned, estates created by the Jesuits in Paraguay in the previous century. (The film, THE MISSION, with Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro gives an excellent portrait of Jesuit Paraguay.) This was his unique definition of progress; raising the standard of living of the poor and putting national independence first by keeping his country safe from South American and British colonialism. Other caudillos who shared the same dream of autonomy for their people proved less worthy of the calling. Belzu of Bolivia ruled briefly before being hanged following a military coup. Paez of Venezuela succeeded Bolivar yet could not stop his country's slide into anarchy. Carrera of Guatemala (political motto: "Death to the whites! Death to the Liberals!") seized but could not break the liberal state and floundered on the dream of uniting Central America by force. But, however flawed, the caudillos put their respective nations on notice that the Indian was a citizen too, and the race question would not disappear no matter how much progress progressed one.
Burns' fetishization of the caudillos is a major flaw of this work; his Achille's heel. He purports that "the political tradition of Latin America is not democratic" and attempts by post-independence Liberals to mold their nations in the image of the United States and republican France were bound to fail. Isn't that a Hobson's choice? (I had a friend and colleague who wondered how Burns would have treated Hitler. "A little bit wrong on the Jewish Question".) The Indians had local leaders at the village level, why did they need rescuers and saviors from above? On the flip side, how would problems such as rural illiteracy, malnutrition and health care have been solved without modern industry and city services extended to the countryside? Would the indigenous really have been better off if, in the words of one nineteenth-century writer, the whites "had never crossed the great ocean that separates us"? This essay is an exercise in excessive nostalgia for a magical past that should have stayed frozen. Burns has given us an X-Ray of the cancer that plagued Latin America, and still does, modernization at the expense of the majority. He has not suggested a reasonable cure.
Regardless of whether they called themselves Liberals, Progressives, Juaristas in Mexico or Unitarians (no, not the church kind) in Argentina, the Latin American elites had a program for modernization, borrowed uncritically from Europe. The city must prevail over the countryside. Rural America was a stagnant swamp of idleness, religiosity, fanaticism, and worst of all, filled with Indians. The city offered literacy, medicine, secular schooling, planning and plenty of white folk. From Spencer and the Positivists the elites took the belief in quantitative progress, and nothing said "progress" like the railroads. Modern nations exercised sovereignty literally by the railroad yard. Development meant a healthy trade balance, plenty of foreign investment and filling government coffers through tariffs. In time, the city would subvert, the code word was "national integration", the countryside, immigration from Europe turn dark-skinned nations white while the Indians and Afro-Latins disappeared, and the Latin American nations would take their place as junior members of a new capitalist global order. If all this sounds like twenty-first century neoliberalism, you're right. What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything. Burns documents persistent food shortages in Latin America which had not existed under colonialism, a drop in the daily calorie count, overcrowded housing in the large cities---this is the origin of Latin American slums---a break-up of the family while men went to work in the urban areas, and the decline of native textile looms, collective village property, such as the ejidos of Mexico, and a growing racism directed at all things associated with the rural poor. Latin America in the nineteenth century experienced, in the words of Peter Eisenberg in his study of sugar factories in Pernambuco, Brazil, "modernization without change". The elites introduced new technologies and privatization of land without changing, in fact strengthening, the old ties that bound rural labor to capital, including slavery in Brazil and Cuba and debt peonage in Mexico.
The counter-hegemonic wave to this lugubrious trend was dictatorship by traditionalist strongmen born of the countryside, usually, though not always, of mixed-race. Burns begins his survey of conservative caudillos with the exception, Dr. Francia of Paraguay, an urban-born intellectual and Creole. Usually taken for a monster by historians, and immortalized in fictional form by Roa Bastos in his novel YO, El SUPREMO (I, THE SUPREME) Dr. Francia was, according to Burns, in fact an South American Enlightment despot who, unlike the liberal elites, protected his nation from foreign conquest and the local hacendado (landed oligarchy) class. He sealed off Paraguay from the rest of the world by closing its borders to the giant neighbors next door, Brazil and Argentina, leaving poor Bolivia alone. He dealt with landowners by confiscating their estates and turning them into national property. His greatest feat was in rescuing the Paraguayan Indian majority population, the Guarani, from the clutches of the Catholic Church and the hacendados at once. Dr. Francia secularized education and made Indians wards of the state who could not be contracted for wage labor. Instead, the Indians worked on the "misiones", or Church, now government-owned, estates created by the Jesuits in Paraguay in the previous century. (The film, THE MISSION, with Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro gives an excellent portrait of Jesuit Paraguay.) This was his unique definition of progress; raising the standard of living of the poor and putting national independence first by keeping his country safe from South American and British colonialism. Other caudillos who shared the same dream of autonomy for their people proved less worthy of the calling. Belzu of Bolivia ruled briefly before being hanged following a military coup. Paez of Venezuela succeeded Bolivar yet could not stop his country's slide into anarchy. Carrera of Guatemala (political motto: "Death to the whites! Death to the Liberals!") seized but could not break the liberal state and floundered on the dream of uniting Central America by force. But, however flawed, the caudillos put their respective nations on notice that the Indian was a citizen too, and the race question would not disappear no matter how much progress progressed one.
Burns' fetishization of the caudillos is a major flaw of this work; his Achille's heel. He purports that "the political tradition of Latin America is not democratic" and attempts by post-independence Liberals to mold their nations in the image of the United States and republican France were bound to fail. Isn't that a Hobson's choice? (I had a friend and colleague who wondered how Burns would have treated Hitler. "A little bit wrong on the Jewish Question".) The Indians had local leaders at the village level, why did they need rescuers and saviors from above? On the flip side, how would problems such as rural illiteracy, malnutrition and health care have been solved without modern industry and city services extended to the countryside? Would the indigenous really have been better off if, in the words of one nineteenth-century writer, the whites "had never crossed the great ocean that separates us"? This essay is an exercise in excessive nostalgia for a magical past that should have stayed frozen. Burns has given us an X-Ray of the cancer that plagued Latin America, and still does, modernization at the expense of the majority. He has not suggested a reasonable cure.
March 15, 2022
This essay questions the constant eagerness of the elites to promote "progress","modernization", "urbanization" and "industrialisation" in the LATAM region. Was "europeanization" of the culture was really the best formula for a land in which the different cultures had already their own government, economy and ideologies? Who defined "progress" as railroads, connectivity and capitalism? Why did every society in LATAM region was encouraged to follow a "PARIS" look-like modernization? This eagerness did not consider the violence that such an imposition would cause in indigenous and rural spaces and rather stereotyped people, divided society into socio-economic classes and widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Maybe, if the concept of "progress" would have been readapted for each country in LATAM considering the differences between cultures and resources, there would be less poverty in the region and an alternative economic model that administrated better the resources of each country.
January 11, 2022
This book explores a persistent problem of Latin America in the 19th century and beyond - the persistence of widespread poverty in a wealthy region. The author's thesis is that "for the majority, the heritage of modernization was proving to be increased concentration of land in the hands of ever fewer owners, falling per capita food production with the corollary rising food imports, greater impoverishment, less to eat, more vulnerability to the whims of an impersonal international market, uneven growth, increased unemployment and underemployment, social, economic, and political marginalization, and greater power in the hands of the privileged few" (pg. 150). Contrary to many histories that highlight 19th-century economic growth, the author argues that the 19th century actually marked a decline in the fortunes of the people of Latin America and the Latin nations as a whole. Not only were the masses better off under the colonial systems, but "modern" economic growth actually showed a decline in wages, food production, land ownership, and food consumption even over the course of the 19th century.
The author makes convincing use of statistical data and numerous primary sources to explore multiple facets of progress. The issues of what progress meant to 19th century Latin Americans is examined from the perspectives of Western-oriented elites, dissident intellectuals, the rural patriarchal landowners, and the popular resistance and adaptation to "modernization" efforts. I think this is a brilliant book, and I have only 2 possible reservations: first, this book is almost 40 years old, and second, I wish the author made more use of non-elite primary sources. There is an irony in a chapter called "The Folk Speak" where the primary sources are almost exclusively drawn from politicians, journalists, and foreign observers talking about the "folk".
The author makes convincing use of statistical data and numerous primary sources to explore multiple facets of progress. The issues of what progress meant to 19th century Latin Americans is examined from the perspectives of Western-oriented elites, dissident intellectuals, the rural patriarchal landowners, and the popular resistance and adaptation to "modernization" efforts. I think this is a brilliant book, and I have only 2 possible reservations: first, this book is almost 40 years old, and second, I wish the author made more use of non-elite primary sources. There is an irony in a chapter called "The Folk Speak" where the primary sources are almost exclusively drawn from politicians, journalists, and foreign observers talking about the "folk".
September 30, 2008
Presents the thesis that the struggle between modernization and tradition shaped 19th century Latin American history. Interesting polemic that feels a bit limited.
July 24, 2014
His thesis was fine but the book was repetitive. If it had been better organized, I think it could have been half as long.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews