CHAPTER 20
THE AMERICAS AND SOCIETY
AND CULTURE IN THE WEST
Latin America: 19th & early 20th C
• Q: What role did liberalism and
nationalism play in Latin America Between
1800 and 1870?
• Q: What were the major economic, social
and political trends in Latin American in
the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Challenge to Spanish &
Portuguese Colonialism
• Influence of Enlightenment ideals &
upheavals in the Napoleonic era
– The Wars for Independence
• Creole Elites: descendants of Europeans
• Simon Bolivar of Venezuela
• Jose de San Martin of Argentina
– Principle of Equality of all people under law
– Free trade
– Free press
» Did not apply to everyone
Toussaint L’Ouverture,Haiti,
1804
© North Wind Picture Archives
Nationalistic Revolts
• Mexican Independence, 1810
– Miguel Hidalgo Y Costilla
– Represented a peoples revolution
• September 16, 1910 crushed
• Creoles & Peninsulars united to defeat the
popular revolution
– Augustin de Iturbide, first emperor of Mexico,
1821
• No political or economic changes
“Liberator” of
South America
• Venezuela (1819)
•Colombia
•Ecuador
•Perus
•Simon Bolivar
leading his troops
across the Andes in
1823 to fight in
Peru
© SuperStock
“Liberators” of
South America
•San Jose Martyn
is shown leading
his troops at the
Battle of
Chacabuco,
Chile, 1817.
By1824:
Free
states:
Uruguay,
Paraguay,
Colombia,
Venezuela,
Argentina,
Bolivia
Chile
• Latin America in the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century
Nation Building
• The Difficulties of Nation Building
(1830-187))
– Consequences of Wars for independence
• Loss of population, property and livestock
• Boundary disputes
• Poor transportation and communication
challenged unity and fostered regionalism
• European & American intervention
• Monroe Doctrine, 1823
Political Obstacles
• Different types of leadership
• Caudillos (leaders) of New Republics
– National Caudillos
• Autocrats: Supported elites and controlled
state revenues, favored centralized power and
unity of states
– worked against the majority’s interests
– Sometimes were modernizers in that they build
infrastructure, canal, ports, schools,
Economic Patterns
• Great Britain & America dominated Latin
American economy
– Raw materials & new Markets
• Incredible disparity of wealth
– Landed elite
• Land basis of wealth, social prestige, political
power
• Controlled government, courts
• Maintained system of debt peonage
Foreign Investments
• 1870 – 1913 foreign investments boomed
– British investment:
• Growth from 85 to 757 million pound, 2/3 of all
foreign investments
– Railroads
– Mining
– Public utilities
• Slavery technically abolished in 1888
• Most people remained subservient and
dependent on elite and foreigners
Catholic Church
• Enormous land holdings-Exercised great
power
• Clerics took position in new governments
following independence
– Considerable influence
• Conflict of church & state
– Liberals wanted to curtail powers of church
– Conservatives hoped to maintain privileges
and power of church
Working Class
• Growth of labor unions
– Radical unions advocated use of the general
strike as an instrument for change
• Lack of suffrage
• Political Change after 1870
– Landed Elite
• Controlled government
• produced constitutions similar to those of the US
and Europe
• limited suffrage maintained concentration of power
Dictators
• Some landowners made use of dictators to
maintain the interests of the ruling elite.
– Porfirio Diaz , Mexico, Ruled 1876 – 1910,
• established a conservative, centralized government
– support of the army, foreign capitalists, large
landowners, and the catholic church.
• Consequences of Dictatorship:
– real wages of working class declined,
– 95% of rural population owned no land,
– 1000 families owned the land.
Economy after 1870
• Growth of economy
– Modernization & wealth a veneer
– Enjoyed by the wealthy minority
• Rural elites dominated workers
– Indians impoverished
– Debt servitude
– Dependent on foreigners
Emiliano Zapata
•Liberal landowner
Francisco Madero,
forced Diaz from
power
•Madera’s
ineffectiveness to
carry out sufficient
reform triggered a
demand for agrarian
reform led by Zapata
© Snark/Art Resource, NY
Mexican Revolution, 1910
• He aroused the revolutionary impulse of
landless
– Seized the haciendas (plantations) of the
wealthy
• Impact of revolution
– destroyed the economy
– new constitution in 1917
United States Intervention
• United States emergence as a world power
– interfered into the economies of Latin America
• The Spanish American War 1898
– Platt Amendment (1901) Cuba
– Foraker Act (1900) Puerto Rico
• Between 1898 – 1934
– sent military forces to Cuba, Mexico,
Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama,
Columbia, Haiti, and the Dominica Republic
Imperialists
• Take up the White Man's burden-Send forth the best ye breed-Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child..."
• Rudyard Kipling - McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
Mass Society
• Mass Education
– After 1870 most western states provided free
compulsory primary education
• Mass Leisure
– Confined to boundaries of Industrial System
New Age of Science
• Renewed interest in scientific research
– Louis Pasteur, Germ Theory of disease
• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection, 1859
• Rise of Pseudo-Science
– Social Darwinism
• Herbert Spencer
• Houston Stewart Chamberlain
Zionsim
Palestine in 1900
Romanticism
Attraction to
exotic and
unfamiliar
Non-western
figures such
as Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan
Euge`ne Delacroix, Women of
Algiers
© Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
Fascination
and
misticism of
nature
Caspar David Friedrich, Man
and Woman Gazing at the
Moon
© Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers
•Realism
•Most famous of the realist artists,
portrayed things as they actually appeared
© Oskar Reinhart Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library