JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs.Ieveloping a line of thought from an earlier essay (Morse, 1973: II, 11-55), this paper examines some points of departure for a comparative analysis of urbanization in Latin America and the United States during the nineteenth century. Two assumptions guide the inquiry: first, that the "external dependency" thesis so frequently invoked to explain Latin American urban development easily leads to dogmatism; second, that geoeconomic factors must be perceived as interacting with those of the sociopolitical order.To set broad guidelines for our effort we might construe the economic and institutional development of the United States and Latin America along the lines of two tensions or counterpoints. United States. Here the North and West with their commercial agriculture, trading energies, and industrialization faced the commercially and financially dependent South, its socioeconomic organization conditioned by the plantation system, slavery, and export agriculture. Dowd (1956), who succinctly sets forth the case, points out that the West, while "exploited" by the East, never became its "colony"; it was developed as a "physical extension" of the East and in response to needs of the rest of the nation. In contrast, the South, with its prior institutional and economic commitments, "was not an extension, or, in an important sense, even a part of an industrializing America. The South was one of America's colonies."
Morse / DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN SYSTEMS [5]Latin America. In similarly schematic terms the counterpoint might here be identified with a transition from old-style, "hacienda"-based agriculture for local consumption to technified, profit-oriented, "plantation"-based agriculture for export. (One could elaborate a parallel shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive mining activities.) Although plantation agriculture cut its widest swath along the Atlantic coast of South America and through the Spanish Caribbean sugar islands, causing eastward dislocation of the continental economic axis (in contrast to the "westward" movement of the United States), it made inroads throughout Latin America. Here the plantation was the leading edge of economic development and not, as in the United States, its trailing edge.1 Moreover, many circumstances militated against the internal colonial relations that Dowd describes for the United States. These included: widespread coexistence of traditional and modern agriculture; the relatively easy transition from one type to another when conditions were ripe; the coalescence of...